Pop Expressions

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most recognizable directors working today, both in name and style. His character driven films laced with coarse but realistic dialogue and his use of obscure pop culture references have redefined the concept of cool, but his success has not come without controversy. Tarantino frequently borrows shots, plot concepts, music, and pieces of dialogue from his favorite films and incorporates them into his own creations. Critics say that these actions come dangerously close to plagiarism and leave his work devoid of substance, while supporters argue that he is a post-modern artist who borrows old defunct forms and creates new and meaningful things from their parts. Tarantino is neither of those things. He expresses himself with what he’s learned from films because to him they are as or more important than reality; Tarantino can only speak the language of pop.

Years before his sudden rise as an iconic director, Tarantino struggled with his education. His dyslexia made him continuously frustrated with school and caused him to retreat further into his world of movies. Tarantino dropped out in the ninth grade to pursue an acting career. Bored with reality, his escape to Hollywood was his chance to merge real life with his obsession with films. Ultimately failing as an actor, Tarantino got a job at a video store in Manhattan Beach, California.

All day long in this bastion of cinema, Tarantino was free to watch and discuss his favorite movies with co-workers and get paid for it. In his book, “What Happens Next?” a history of American screenwriting, Marc Norman pictures Tarantino as a feral child let loose in the library of Alexandria. Tarantino didn’t go to film school like the generation of directors before him that includes Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola. His education was pieced together from films as varied as classic John Ford westerns to cheap, underground, Filipino horror flicks.

Using this encyclopedic knowledge of films, Tarantino first broke into movies with his underground hit “Reservoir Dogs.” He is credited with popularizing the Independent Film movement of the 90’s after the mega success of “Pulp Fiction,” his second feature, in 1994. It became the first Indie movie to gain over $100 million dollars domestically. Because of its success, big Hollywood studios began to buy out smaller Indie outfits and give them larger budgets, following the lead of Disney’s acquisition of Miramax. Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of Miramax, has referred to his company as, “the house that Quentin built.”

Tarantino can’t help but reference his influences in his work. Watching a Tarantino movie is like several lessons in pop culture. The film might be “Reservoir Dogs” where the topic of discussion is the meaning of Madonna’s lyrics in “Like a Virgin”, or “Kill Bill” and its scene that analyzes the virtues of Superman. Someone who shares his obsession with film might notice the several shots he borrows from various directors, or that the yellow track suit Uma Thurman wears in “Kill Bill” is the same that Bruce Lee wore in his final movie. Tarantino builds his film’s narrative structures around a multitude of such references, both topical and obscure, to varying degrees of success.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his review of “Kill Bill” for The New York Books Review, compares watching a Tarantino film to being stuck “in a room with someone who, like so many of this director's characters, can't stop talking about the really neat parts in the movies he's seen. This is entertaining if you share his mania, but if you don't, he ends up being a bore.”

For fans that do share his mania, Tarantino has even begun to reference his own work for their viewing pleasure. The fictional brand of cigarettes he used in “Pulp Fiction,” Red Apple Cigarettes, has made an appearance in both “Kill Bill” and his latest work, “Death Proof.” In Tarantino’s twisted logic the name of a group of Mexican gangsters from “Kill Bill,” the Acuna boys, reappears as a chain of Mexican restaurants in “Death Proof.”

The great success of Tarantino’s films is evidence that a large chunk of America does share his mania for pop culture. In the final scene of “Pulp Fiction”, Jules tells Vincent that he’s quitting their life of crime because of his brush with the divine. When asked what he’s going to do with himself, Jules references a popular show from the 70’s, and says that he is “going to walk the earth, like Kane in KungFu.” This exchange, according to Stanley Crouch in his essay, “Blues in more than one color: The films of Quentin Tarantino,” shows “Tarantino’s understanding of how deep human reactions can be inspired by pulp; those who experience such reactions can be inspired by pulp; those who experience such reactions may only be able to describe them to others in the lingua franca of pulp.” Like the character’s he creates, and probably some of his fans, Tarantino isn’t able to express himself any other way.