George Clooney (16 page)

Tarantino rejected the offer of directing the picture so that he could concentrate more fully on his own performance. Originally, Tarantino's script had all the Fullers and Geckos survive but slimmed this down to a representative member of each group. Although he had written other
scripts, and in the chronology of his subsequent career
From Dusk Till Dawn
seems to come after his breakthrough successes of
Reservoir Dogs
(1992) and
Pulp Fiction
(1994), this was actually Tarantino's first official, paid writing job, with early drafts dating back to 1991. The initial stand-off with the family is reminiscent of
Reservoir Dogs
with male, aggressive robbers, dressed largely in black suits, pointing handguns at targets in quite a choreographed, stylized manner at angles from one another and Seth even turning his pistol sideways for no reason other than to look cool. Later, in the club the camera circles Seth and Richie, back-to-back as they attempt to hold off the vampires, and as in the opening sequence with Vince (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) in
Pulp Fiction
, they are framed in a two-shot, firing their pistols at the same time to shoot down Chet. The lengthy quotation from Ezekiel 25:17, climaxing with a threat to “raise vengeance,” which eventually finds its natural home in Jules's speech delivered before killing people, was in early drafts of the script here.

Mexico represents freedom from U.S. law and, at a personal level, freedom from moral prohibition. The club, the unsubtly named Titty Twister, is a liminal state, a place where the normal rules of life no longer apply, making it a suitable place for the appearance of the supernatural. Chet's monologue on the steps of the club, listing the various types of sexual service on offer, also reflects the sense of carnival and excess that operates here. As the film's title suggests, its borderline status is also related to chronology during the hours of darkness, literally from dusk till dawn—according to folklore, the period when vampires may operate.

There is a further generic twist in the club, as the out-of-tune piano of a western is replaced by the diegetic music from the band and particularly the act of Satanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek, overcoming her phobia of snakes), so named after a 1975 Mexican horror film, which Tarantino saw while working in a video store. A large saloon brawl becomes a fight to the death with female vampires, and Seth shoots down the chandelier in an updating of a Zorro-style stunt, so that the structure stakes Satanico. The same iconic setting of scantily clad dancing women, a snake, and the foot-in-mouth act appears in Ramstein's video for “Engel” (“Angel”) (Zoran Bihac, 1997).

As a vampire narrative, it hardly stretches the conventions of the genre, beyond the film's opening. The use of masks, animatronics, and computer-generated imagery represents the state of special effects technology in the mid-1990s for a relatively low-budget movie (although it had crept up to $17 million by the time of its release). The action even halts after the initial outburst of violence so that Seth can organize a
regrouping and a gathering of knowledge about vampires (mostly derived from films), possibly also for audience members unfamiliar with the genre. It is confirmed that they (vampires, not viewers) can be repelled with crucifixes, even makeshift ones, that they need to be staked through the heart, and to kill them you need garlic, sunlight, or silver (although they are not entirely sure about the latter point). The entities include some that have very little connection with vampires. The creature that almost pins Seth and that is dispatched by Kate is more an indication of the special effects genesis of the script. The film, given an extensive rewrite by Tarantino, was based on an original idea by John Esposito and Robert Kurtzman, whose background in special effects meant that first drafts of the script were really just contrivances for plenty of gore and makeup. Esposito created similar monster scenes in
Graveyard Shift
(Ralph Singleton, 1990), where a potential allegory of an industrial machine literally eating its workers morphs into a random creature attacking humans in tunnels.
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Like the buddy movie dialogue at the end of the opening sequence, in the middle of the film there is a moment of philosophical reflection, which sits uneasily with the trashy generic markers around it. After the pastor has punched Seth after taunts about his faith, Seth asserts that despite having no religious faith himself, if the creatures outside represent pure evil, then there must also be a heaven. It is unclear at this point whether he is just trying to rationalize what he has seen with his own eyes or trying to act as a catalyst in reigniting the pastor's faith, so that this can be used as a weapon, in blessing holy water for example.

The film seems to drift further into cliché with Sex Machine starting to recount a lengthy Vietnam anecdote (ironically the sort actually experienced by Savini personally), but Rodriguez takes advantage of the empty dialogue to take the volume down and cut back to Savini, who has been bitten, and the voices that he is starting to hear. With almost a comic touch, we see the physical signs of transformation in his hand that he tries to hide behind him. This is continued in the shot in which Savini's anecdote continues, but as he faces the camera (and the other characters) a pair of gnarled, vampiric hands slowly appears on his shoulder. The impossible gradually invades a realistic shot. There is a playful element in the dialogue, not just in Satanico's resolution to make Seth her slave dog and call him “Spot” but in Seth's rejection of slavery with the quip (improvised by Clooney himself) “No thanks, I've already had a wife.”

The film has overtones of the work of John Carpenter, not just in linking ethnicity with a sexually deviant social underbelly as in
Big Trouble in Little China
(1986) but more explicitly in his later
Vampires
(1998), where
we also see a modern-day narrative set in the American West with vampires, apparently unkillable unless staked, bursting into flames on contact with sunlight, especially seen breaking in shafts of light through a building at daybreak. There are even minor Carpenter tropes like the use of jump-cut dissolves as Seth stakes his first vampire with maximum effort, unseen just out of shot. As with Carpenter, the jump cuts seem to suggest a reduction of time and yet the slow dissolves act in the opposite direction, producing a curious effect, mixing compression and elongation of time within the same sequence.

By the end, the club has been destroyed, but since we do not see the source of the vampires their complete destruction is impossible to ascertain. The pastor, Scott, Richie, and countless others have been killed, but Kate and Seth survive, the money is intact, and Seth gets to meet his contact. Kate seems to inherit the motor home and a new sense of independence, driving off alone. The very final shot, pulling back to reveal the back of the club, which seems half landfill site and half Mayan temple, suggests that the club may not be a solely modern manifestation of evil but its crude style also makes it more of a nod to the kind of grindhouse cinema to which Tarantino seems drawn.

There is a bond of sorts between Kate and Seth, who have lost both a brother and perhaps their innocence about things supernatural. As he lets her go with a wad of cash, Seth's final piece of dialogue underlines the difference between himself and his late brother: “I may be a bastard but I'm not a fucking bastard.” Exactly what Kate is euphemistically offering, when she asks if he wants “some company,” is a little ambiguous but the George Clooney persona is not ready to be linked with associations of exploitative sexuality. Although operating in a very different genre, both here and in
One Fine Day
, his on-screen character keeps his word and comes to represent the values of reliability and paternal protectiveness. In both roles, there is also a quick-thinking, resourceful element, whether it is using a security guard to speak Spanish over the phone to help reach a key interviewee in the earlier film or improvising makeshift crucifixes here.

The parallels between Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake
Nelson) as they escape from prison and Homer's
The Odyssey
are clear from the outset with the text appearing on screen (“O muse”), the first line of Homer's epic poem. However, in an irony suitable to the quirky nature of the film, it was nominated for an Oscar for both Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. The classic tale is evoked in several names, like the central character, Ulysses, as well as the Reform Party's candidate for governor, Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), the incumbent governor, Menelaus “Pappy” O'Daniel (Charles Durning), and McGill's ex-wife Penelope (Holly Hunter). Even Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), with his eye patch, alludes to the monstrous Cyclops. Like Homer's
Odyssey
, the narrative opens with an escape from imprisonment and climaxes as Ulysses returns to Ithaca (here in Mississippi), disguised as an old man (he dons a terrible false beard at the final concert) to prevent his love from marrying a rival.

The nameless blind man whom they meet on the flatcar and who delivers a number of ominous pronouncements (that they will travel a long way, find a fortune but not the one they seek, and see a cow on the roof of a house before ultimately finding salvation) is clearly an Oracle figure, close to Homer's Tiresias, who returns at the end, similarly unexplained and slightly detached from the narrative that occurs around him. The odd notion of a blind driver does not seem to occur to the trio of escapees, but it is picked up in the character of Mr. Lund (Stephen Root), the radio host and record producer (except his loss of sight does not really grant any increased wisdom since McGill is able to fool him into paying more for nonexistent musicians). As McGill, Pete, and Delmar are sitting by a campfire, they (and the viewer) gradually become aware of movement behind them. White-robed figures, men and women, walk slowly past, singing in what McGill describes as “some kind of a … congregation.” The power of song and movement acts hypnotically on the trio who follow the figures to their destination, suggested by the lyrics: the river. The camera cranes up to take in the river scene of communal baptism.

Perhaps the most obvious allusion is the scene with the siren-like women, whose voices are heard by Pete as the trio are driving along in a stolen car. We follow Pete as he bursts through foliage and share his sight line as he is struck by a vision of three women. Like the cheerleading scene-as-epiphany for Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) in
American Beauty
(Alan Ball, 1999), there is a slow track up to the object of lust, and the trio seem impotently hypnotized by a vision of beauty with close-ups on each man, a nonnaturalistic level of perfection and coordination of the women's movement with provocative wringing of clothes in slow motion, all the time their own wet clothes clinging tightly
to their bodies. Ignoring McGill's formal set of introductions, the women just keep singing, slowly approach, and offer him alcohol. The lyrical content of their echoing song, including the line “You and me and the devil makes three,” underlines their role as temptresses, and certainly the way they squeeze Delmar's face suggests that he has lost control of his own faculties. With the shift into more discordant whistling, the frame fades to black. Rather than Homer's Circe, who turned Ulysses's men into pigs, we have nameless beauties, which also sing spell-binding songs and apparently transform Pete into a toad.

There are also clear parallels with
Sullivan's Travels
(Preston Sturges, 1942) in which a film director called Sullivan (Joel McCrea) sets out to make a gritty documentary about the reality of poverty in the United States during the Great Depression but ultimately rejects the project, learning that escapist fantasies can do more to cheer the spirits of his audience. The title of the original film was to be
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In a sense, the Coen brothers give us the film Sullivan never made but blended with his later understanding about the value of fantasy. Thus serious elements are juxtaposed with a lighter tone and neither is allowed to dominate completely. It makes for a slightly unsettling mix at times, but compared to other Coen work perhaps accommodates more comfortably their tendency toward the quirky and eccentric alongside dark humor.

The cinematography of Roger Deakins evokes his work on
The Shawshank Redemption
(Frank Darabont, 1994), another tale involving prisoners, escape, and lyrical beauty of the American South. It is the first film to be entirely digitally corrected, so that the film's lush colors (it was shot in a Mississippi summer) are converted to the look of an older sepia tone to deepen a sense of nostalgia and pleasure in countryside that was less forgiving at the time.

What contributed to the development of the film as a sleeper hit is its music, from the opening sound of the chain gang singing, heard before we see it. Despite the presence of armed guards on horseback, the workers almost seem content with the melody and rhythm raising their spirits and sustaining an element of hope. However, although “Po Lazarus” by James Carter, a genuine, original plantation song (the only one in the film) is heard at this point, the notion of a contented group of workers is only a consoling cliché. It soon gives way to “Sweet Rock Candy Mountain,” a world dominated by the sweet and artificial. The melody and lyrics seem to ameliorate the lot of the poor and oppressed, but such music is also used manipulatively by disreputable politicians as part of their campaigns. As the escapees listen to music at Walter's house, we hear “You Are My Sunshine,” used again at the political rally near the end when McGill
meets his daughters, representing the nostalgic appeal of a more innocent, romantic age. The music is often motivated from within the scene, not just via the radio. We see several scenes of groups singing, the volume of which rises and falls as we approach or depart from their presence (like Mr. Lund groaning badly off-key in his sound booth). This includes Tommy with his guitar, the congregation by the river, and most obviously the Soggy Bottom Boys themselves who take an impromptu detour to sing “into a can” for money.