Separating Quentin Tarantino from the great directors of earlier generations isn’t lack of talent but lack of vision. The auteur of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill is apparently free of ideology, with no religion to wrestle with, no battlefield experience, no meaningful community to embrace or flee, no life whatsoever outside of the movies. Some critics have called his limited engagement with life a minus. In Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes (Praeger), Aaron Barlow disagrees.
A lecturer at City University of New York, the author argues that Tarantino has something to say, although what that might be mostly comes down to an elaborate commentary on the mechanism of filmmaking and, perhaps, the relationship between movies and their audience. In Death Proof as in his earlier movies, the director plays with the conventions of despised or marginalized genres, the slasher flick and its ‘70s drive-in cousins. Barlow is correct in stressing that Tarantino is masterful at using familiar genres as steppingstones to something else altogether.
But the author sometimes overreaches in his quest for meaning. Barlow claims that slasher flicks, which often boast an avenging female who gives the killer his comeuppance, contain coded feminist messages and have been a subliminal influence on the slow growth of genuine female heroes in Hollywood, beginning with Sigourney Weaver in Alien. He forgets that sometimes the obvious is the meaning. More likely, the avenging female is an additional sexual kick for the mostly male audience, and Alien’s Ripley was a response to the continental shift in gender attitudes that occurred in the wake of the social upheavals of the ‘60s.
And yet, there is value in Barlow’s theory if only in the effort of dismissing it in the end. Likewise, much of Life at the Extremes is thought provoking if not entirely convincing. Barlow scatters reasonable-sounding points in good debating strategy. Would a literary critic chastise a novelist for writing meta-fiction the way some film critics have attacked Tarantino? After all, Barlow asks, doesn’t Pynchon “indulge” in “self-reflexivity” just like Tarantino? Putting Pynchon aside, some contemporary novelists have been challenged by critics and ignored by readers because their meta-fiction says little about the world beyond their own writer’s desk.
Working in a popular medium, Tarantino has not been ignored. He was seen as the characteristic director to emerge from the ‘90s indie scene, even if his imitators have generally been less talented or commercially successful. His movies clicked because they expanded the expectations of an audience eager for brash irony and clever angles on familiar material while appealing to a core group that “got” many of his arcane references to film history. Barlow claims that Tarantino “is perhaps the first director to speak ‘film’ natively and fluently in his discussion of the world.” It’s a presumptuous assertion that undermines the cinematic literacy of many great filmmakers preceding Tarantino, and ignores that one can discuss he world fluently in any language, from Albanian to Ukrainian, without having much to say.
And yet, many of Barlow’s ideas are invigorating, including his attack on the pervasive cult of “originality,” whose more militant adherents find Tarantino “derivative” (they would have said the same of Shakespeare had they lived in Elizabethan England). But the biographical details he includes in his study only lend credence to the idea that the director escaped the unpleasant reality of his turbulent upbringing by going to the movies, and constructed a subjective reality as well as a career through immersion in film.
