Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. The Tarantinian Ethics. London: Sage Publications Ltd; Theory, Culture & Society, 2001, £45.00. 192pp., ISBN: 0-76196-837-7 Hbk
1> This review article was first scheduled to appear in Intensities (ISSN 1471-5031), a ‘journal of cult media’ which subsequently suspended publication. Writing in early 2003, my flippant, slightly younger self said “Cast your mind back a decade to a time when it appeared that Quentin Tarantino was set to revolutionise film with pop culture namedropping, ‘the new brutalism’ and a life-affirming story of how the geekish video rentals clerk became the hottest director in Hollywood. Now fast-forward to the present and wonder, Kill Bill trailer aside, what ever happened to the banana-chinned motormouth. Reservoir Dogs (1992) prompted hundreds of spoofs of its own iconography and saw its violent visuals – themselves derived from the Hong Kong studio system - incorporated into mainstream Hollywood fare. In response, some film teachers and critics spent part of the 1990s resisting treating Pulp Fiction (1994) as the last word in cinema and suggesting that it wouldn’t stand the test of time.”
<2> Later that year the Kill Bill circus came to town, making redundant my tone of “Quentin Tarantino: remember him?” I certainly do, having penned at least one response to each ‘volume’ of the epic-length genre homage. (See “Killing Kill Bill” at Spiked and a subsequent follow-up review. By the time he was guest-directing a segment of Sin City and a CSI season finale, Tarantino was looking like someone in need of a costume drama to direct, the better to escape his generic confines. In a witty spoof, the penultimate issue of Intensities even showed QT reviving his career with The Vega Brothers – wait for it – a prequel to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (see Will Brooker, ‘Brothers in Arms: Re-evaluating Tarantino’s Vega Trilogy’, Intensities Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn/Winter 2001). In this article, the boy from Knoxville cuts short his self-imposed exile with more of the same in 2004: a fairly accurate prognosis. Perhaps those who doubted the genius of the early Tarantino movies were right to stick to their guns.
<3> Sticking to one’s guns is precisely what interests and amuses Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. That a cliché can signify both violence and high principles is the kind of wordplay to which their volume draws our attention. The authors take a different tack to the various Tarantino hagiographies in circulation (and often now in charity shops and thrift stores). Seldom is he treated as primarily a director, hence the inclusion of the scripts for True Romance, Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn in the analysis. Tarantino the writer interests Botting and Wilson, who also avoid linking him to Hollywood’s film noir tradition or to the emergence of a neo-noir sub-genre (e.g. Red Rock West, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead) in the 1990s, when crime capers became hot acquisitions once again. Instead the authors suggest that, based on his screenplays up to and including Jackie Brown (1997), an accidental system of ethics is discernable. They call this the Tarantinian Ethics.
<4> The authors note that this use of Tarantino may raise an eyebrow or two, given that he spent part of the 1990s being blamed for the real violence which supposedly materialised from his lurid on-screen fictions. How can screenplays peppered with the word ‘nigger’ serve as the basis for any contemporary ethical system? Explaining their method, the duo claim that ‘the violent yoking of heterogeneous topics, overriding their apparent incommensurability, begins to disclose the heterogeneity and strangeness at the core of ethical and psychoanalytical questioning. Both discourses address the Other, just as both turn on an encounter that is simultaneously disruptive and constitutive, an encounter experienced as traumatic in the form of an unexpected accident or calamity which shatters even as it founds subjectivity in relation to something intimate yet inexplicable and in excess of the subject’ (pp.3-4) Tarantino the ethicist can thrive on account of the moral insights he inadvertently generates.
<5> Such ethics have a dual role in the world. Their qualities can be identified and articulated by the likes of Zygmunt Bauman, Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek yet also ventriloquised through Tarantino’s cast of characters. In turn Botting and Wilson show us how personality, professionalism, romance, consumption and horror are all theorised from a standpoint based on a dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalysis and, less explicitly, with Georges Bataille’s theories of excess. Chapters tend to start on a theoretical note before emphasising the way that snatches of dialogue penned by Tarantino might correspond to these theories. Thus a ‘holy shit’ from Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction prompts a consideration of how the excremental and the divine converge, while a Tarantino-penned threat to ‘pop a cap in his ass’ confirms that selfhood and personality reside somewhere near the anus. Makes a change from the conventional anatomy underlying such notions as ‘winning hearts and minds’, I suppose.
<6> Like Tarantino himself, this is all good fun even (or especially) if prompting the occasional request that Botting and Wilson wash their mouths out with soap. What’s more troubling is that their take-it-or-leave-it methodology has an in-built immunity to criticism. Thus one could complain that the approach consists of lashing together essentially dissimilar things i.e. carefully considered ethical perspectives tied to snatches of movie dialogue. The book’s quirky charm goes some way to helping it sidestep the issue of whether its entire edifice is built upon little more than a series of descriptive coincidences. Either we object by suggesting that Botting and Wilson are not comparing like with like or we accept their analytical technique and stick with the work to its conclusion, following the postmodern logic unfolding therein.
<7> Working within the framework set by the authors allows several key observations to emerge. Historically, conventional ethical debates have hinged upon what was universally good for society (‘thou shall not kill’) or what was the right decision in a particular context (e.g. the notion of community values). Because Tarantinian ethics are fragmentary and accidental, they tend towards the latter. Like the materialist critique of professional ethics formulated by US sociologist Michael Schudson, Tarantinian ethics can also play a constitutive role. Thus rather than the professionals – here mainly thieves and hitmen – defining their own ethics, the system of ethics can be used to differentiate their chosen, illegal line of work from other occupations. Hence the rigid hierarchy of Reservoir Dogs is maintained by the sharp-tongued father figure Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), instantly recognisable to fans of Lacan and film noir alike. The law of the father provides a reference point against which self-identity can be take shape. Likewise Jackie Brown’s Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) reveals a corpse in his car to be evidence that good business practice was applied (pp.168-169). In these and other instances the verbal exchanges cementing the various relationships portrayed in the screenplays perform a symbolic role by mapping out what the basis for appropriate forms of conduct should be in an age of excess.
<8> Often witty and at one with 1990s attitudes, The Tarantinian Ethics could serve as something of a primer in Lacan and Bataille for the post-Pulp Fiction generation, although its ponderous style and the post-Kill Bill trajectory of Tarantino, the book’s chief ethicist, may well militate against such a project gaining ground.
Graham Barnfield
University of East London