QT final project

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, and pieces of dialogue from his favorite films and incorporates them into his own creations. His critics say that these actions come dangerously close to plagiarism and leave his work devoid of substance. Those in support of the director argue that he’s a post-modern artist who borrows old defunct forms and creates new and meaningful things from their parts.

Tarantino is credited with popularizing the Independent film movement of the 90’s after the mega success of Pulp Fiction in 1994. Once it became the first Indie movie to gain over $100 million dollars domestically, big Hollywood studios began to buy out smaller Indie outfits and give them larger budgets, following the lead of Disney’s acquisition of Miramax. In an interview Harvey Weinstein (the co-owner of Miramax), referred to his company as, “The house that Quentin built.”

After years of frustration at school because of a struggle with dyslexia, Tarantino dropped out in the ninth grade to pursue an acting career. Bored with reality, his escape to Hollywood was his chance to merge his obsession with films to real life. Ultimately failing as an actor, Tarantino got a job at a video store in Manhattan Beach, California.

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. All day long Tarantino was free to watch and discuss his favorites with co-workers in this bastion of cinema and get paid to do it. Tarantino didn’t go to film school like the generation of directors before him. (Spielberg, Scorsese, and Copolla) His education was pieced together from a horde of cheap flicks from around the world.

Watching a Tarantino movie is like a lesson 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 analysis of the virtues of Superman. Tarantino builds his narrative structure around a multitude of such references in his films to, depending on your opinion, varying degrees of success.

Daniel Mendelsohn reviewing Kill Bill for The New York Review of Books, 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.”

The great success of Tarantino’s films is evidence that a large chunk of America does share his mania for pop culture. One example of this is Family Guy, partly influenced by Tarantino’s style. It is a spliced together, unfunny, reference heavy, animated show that takes the best of others ideas and diffuses them in cheap jokes until they lose all relevance. The show lacks any real substance and could only be popular with those who place a higher value on style rather than substance. (Or those with nothing better to watch at 3 in the morning) To fans that share the same mindset as Tarantino accusations of plagiarism are not taken seriously because things you learn from films and other media are more important than what happens in real life.

Or maybe the two are indistinguishable? 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 saying that he is, “going to walk the earth, like Kane in Kung Fu.” Stanley Crouch writes in his essay, “Blues in more than one color: The films of Quentin Tarantino” that this exchange 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.”

[Unfinished]