Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (4 page)

Death Proof
throws away memory in favor of the speed of the muscle car. Moving away from memory like this is actually part of
Death Proof
’s structure: with the movement of the story from Texas to Tennessee, Tarantino practically erases the entire first half of the film, with the exception of a few passing references and the character that links them together, Stuntman Mike.

Baudrillard, in
Simulacra and Simulation
(1999) and
America
(1994), argues that the United States, and Hollywood productions in particular, are evidence of an all-pervading “hyperreality.”
⁶
It is in hyperreality that there is “no more fiction or reality,” only a blurring of the two.
⁷
Hyperreality and simulation, in turn, connect directly to the hyper-speed of capital’s circulation: everything moves, everything sells, everything disappears.

According to Baudrillard, “America is neither dream nor reality” (1999, p. 3). Instead, it is hyperreality through and through. The U.S. and American cultural productions must be understood “as fiction” (p. 29). And
Death Proof
always seems ready to embrace its position as fiction whether it’s through countless references to other films or fictions or the self-imposed cult status of the film.

The characters of the second part of the film are in fact, simulations. As actresses playing stuntpersons (Kim [Tracie
Thorns] and Zoë [Zoë Bell]), and actresses playing a make-up girl and an actress (Abernathy [Rosario Dawson] and Lee [Mary Elizabeth Winstead]), they create simulations in their fictional work. They also constantly draw attention to their occupations verbally, be it as stuntperson, make-up artist, or actress. Meanwhile, when the action shifts from the stuntperson’s game of “Ship’s Mast” to the actual violence on the part of Stuntman Mike, Stuntman Mike still
simulates
violence. The action consists at base of stuntpersons acting out car chases from their favorite movies.

What Baudrillard calls “the era of simulation,” others more loosely dub “postmodernity.” Theorists now, according to Baudrillard, must primarily concern themselves with the “question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” itself (1994, p. 2). Images and markers of reality take the place of what anyone might actually consider “reality.” Simulation is essentially a representation. It is a representation, however, that bears no link to what it claims to represent (p. 6). You might think of the filmic references packed into
Death Proof
: to what extent do these references actually throw back to their originals and to what extent do they simply exist as references (that reference nothing)?

Baudrillard outlines four distinct stages of simulation. In the first stage, the image “reflects” a “profound reality.” In the second, the image blurs or obscures a profound reality. In the third, the image disguises the nonexistence of a profound reality, and in the fourth, the image bears absolutely no relation to any reality at all. The fourth stage sees the simulation become a
simulacrum
, a simulation or duplicate without an original. Finally, the real begins to mimic the simulation of real images of the real become more real than the real itself (p. 6).

Baudrillard writes that simulation is a repetition of an original object or image. However, this repetition is somehow more authentic, more “real” than the real (1999, p. 41). Tarantino’s car chases, in many ways, are perfect simulations, as they appear more genuine to the viewer than the car chases in, say,
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
,
Vanishing Point
, or
Gone in 60 Seconds
(1974). The challenge for us as viewers of
Death Proof
is to determine where simulation stops and the simulacrum starts. You can dig deeper and deeper but eventually certain images and objects that appear to be references are pure simulacra.

Could you simply call this originality? Perhaps. But there’s something else. It’s originality with a façade of references and referentiality. In this way, Tarantino seems to write his own cinematic history from his own cinematic library. After seeing
Death Proof
, you can’t help but look differently at the female characters in Russ Meyer’s
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965). Tarantino replaces that film’s original historical context and meaning with his own.

Similarly, the car chase that closes
Death Proof
is a hip-hop style sampling of
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
’s and
Vanishing Point
’
s
chase scenes. It even includes similar automobile makes. Tarantino’s car chase ultimately holds this referential significance and so might be characteristic of the third stage of simulation. However, the simulacrum emerges as Tarantino begins to self-consciously reference a sort of mythic exploitation film. Here Tarantino simulates a simulation thus producing a simulacrum.

The road in Baudrillard functions in many of the same ways as Tarantino’s road, specifically in the closing car chase and crash in
Death Proof
. The road is a way to move quickly, as quickly as possible, and to forget. It is a way to traverse the referential desert of simulated and anonymous Tennessee (a bucolic landscape harking back to the car chases of
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
), or the semi-rural road networks surrounding Austin, Texas (p. 5).

Similarly, in
Death Proof
, Tarantino’s stuntpersons Kim and Zoë find America in the road, in the uninhibited circulation of driving, in the unqualified
free
dom of the
free
ways. This is a freedom to traverse as much space as one wishes at the moment of one’s choosing. Baudrillard observes the ability and willingness to move quickly and a parallel willingness to forget in the U.S. According to Baudrillard, Americans shake themselves free of “historical centrality” (p. 81). As postmodern Americans embark on their daily commutes, they think about only the present
now
.

 

Baudrillard argues that “the only truly profound pleasure” these days is “that of keeping on the move” (p. 53). Tarantino takes this pleasure one step further as he presents the audience with the mythology of the all-powerful Detroit muscle car. With
these powerful machines, Tarantino gives Kim and Zoë the practically
unlimited
speed and power of the 1970
Vanishing Point
Challenger and gives Stuntman Mike the parallel power of the souped-up Nova and Charger. Here the apparatus of movement and speed, the automobile, becomes both a means to pleasure and a means to pain as the drivers of cars repeatedly collide, bang each other up, scrape stock paint jobs, and spin out. This is one of several moments in which pleasure and pain seem to coincide in
Death Proof
.

Bound up in the endless circulation of goods and peoples, Baudrillard also spots a bizarre interrelatedness and impersonality in American culture. In the U.S., “everything connects, without any two pairs of eyes ever meeting” (p. 60). Perhaps this is where the thrill and horror comes from in the interaction between Mike and his would-be victims: Mike’s first victims, speeding along a deserted country road, are literally in the dark up until the moments of their deaths. The eyes of the victims (Jungle Julia, Butterfly [Vanessa Ferlito], Lanna-Frank [Monica Staggs], and Shanna [Jordan Ladd]) and the victimizer (Stuntman Mike) can’t meet until Mike pulls on his headlights. Even then, it is unclear if their eyes meet Mike’s eyes or meet the technological extensions of his eyes, his headlights. Their deaths, along with the repeated event of headlights flashing on, replay multiple times, from multiple angles, and in slow motion. Only in the most sadistic (or perhaps sadomasochistic) act can eyes meet, can the impersonality of the road become personal. That is, with the exception of Butterfly, whose eyes, immediately before impact, deliberately close rather than open.

While
Death Proof
fuses simulation with reality and technology with the body, it also fuses sadism with a peculiar form of masochism through the character of Stuntman Mike. Mike’s first car crash is a deliberate act of violence (in which he drives his car head-on into his victims’ car); the machine becomes an extension of his murdering body. It also becomes a death chamber and death-proof chamber at same time as the crash kills one victim in Mike’s car while he remains largely unharmed. This scene enacts a pairing of technology with the sadistic body. However, there is also some sort of risk to Mike and it may
therefore be a genuine sadomasochistic scene.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in
Masochism
(1989), argues that a “meeting of violence and sexuality” is characteristic of both sadism, a condition characterized by a desire to inflict pain, and masochism, a condition characterized by a desire to be humiliated and to have pain inflicted.
⁸
Stuntman Mike might possess both of these conditions as he desires to inflict pain and gains sexual stimulation from actually experiencing pain.

According to Deleuze, sadism does not necessarily imply masochism nor does masochism necessarily imply sadism (p. 43). Stuntman Mike, however, confuses these separate entities and becomes a true sadomasochist: as Mike obtains a certain pleasure in doing, a pleasure in inflicting pain, when he collides with the car carrying Jungle Julia, Butterfly, Lanna-Frank, and Shanna, he obtains another sort of pleasure from his own injuries (a broken nose, a broken collarbone, and a shattered left index finger). Mike arrives at this pain willingly, even seeking it out as part of his sexual pleasure, and it is therefore a fusion of sadistic and masochistic pleasure (p. 38). Additionally, Mike seems almost completely to confuse technology and body as his car becomes the only way for him to gain sexual pleasure and inflict pain.

However, at the end of the second part of
Death Proof
, the sadisms of Kim, Zoë, and Abernathy turn Mike’s sadomasochism on its head. Tarantino, in
Death Proof
’s somewhat abrupt climax, invites the audience to participate in these female characters’ sadisms. After Kim shoots Mike in the arm he hurriedly speeds away. Down the road he screeches to a halt, wails in pain, pours alcohol on his wound, then wails in pain again, weeping “Oh why!?” Tarantino encourages the audience to laugh, to become sadists themselves.

Immediately before the final confrontation, as the girls chase Mike, Kim quite clearly becomes a sadist, and a masculine sadist at that. She also mixes technology with the body in her approach to Stuntman Mike as the rear-end of Mike’s car metaphorically becomes his “ass” and Kim promises to “bust a
nut up in this bitch right now,” being as she is “the horniest motherfucker on the road.” This sexualized dialogue meanwhile simulates the hypersexual car and body dialogue toward the end of
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
.

Looking back, the repeated images of car crashes are absolutely central to the structure of
Death Proof
as well as to the structures of the films that
Death Proof
pays homage to, especially
Vanishing Point
. Stuntman Mike’s violent and sadistic body forces a collision between the nonviolent bodies of Jungle Julia, Butterfly, Lanna-Frank, and Shanna, and the disinterested metal of their car and Mike’s death-proof car in the first car crash. Later, the final car crash finds Mike’s car, an extension of his murdering body, beaten and half-destroyed by his would-be victims. Here Kim, Zoë, and Abernathy prove themselves bigger sadists than the professional sadist, Stuntman Mike. Ultimately, Mike’s sadism itself might be a sort of simulation of the violence in the films he claims to have acted in.

With its postmodern sampling of 1960s and 1970s exploitation cinema, Tarantino’s
Death Proof
journeys through terrain mapped by Baudrillard as it veers from simulation to simulacrum and from pleasure to pain, combining all elements in a decidedly postmodern way. Ultimately, the performance of the simulacrum, a negative effect of postmodernity according to Baudrillard, might be Tarantino’s greatest contribution to the cinema. In the end such simulacra, through Tarantino, emerge as new forms of cinematic innovation.
⁹

TRAVIS ANDERSON

MR. BLONDE:
Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie? Or are you gonna bite?

—Quentin Tarantino
, Reservoir Dogs

Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to
be
, to be
nothing
. But the second best for you is—to die soon.

—Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy

 

Separated by almost a century, the unconventional German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1890) and the American independent filmmaker Quentin Tarantino (1963- ) have more in common than their famous renegade spirit. They are also two thinkers who share a deep aesthetic understanding of their respective passions: writing, music and ancient Greek culture in Nietzsche’s case; movie-making, music, and American popular culture in Tarantino’s. In addition, they each brought their first major work to full fruition when only twenty-eight years old, and in the process they both took a real bite out of conventional wisdom about art.

But these two mongrel artists have something else in common as well, something far less obvious: Greek tragedy. In Tarantino’s case, the violent, conflicted protagonists of
Reservoir Dogs
, his first film, together with its musical infrastructure and dramatically spectacular scenes, all bear a striking resemblance
to the heroes, music, and spectacle of classical tragedies. In Nietzsche’s case, the unorthodox analysis of
The Birth of Tragedy
, Nietzsche’s first book, explains the murky machinations and psychological importance of Greek tragedies with unmatched bravado and profundity. Unlike Aristotle, whose influential though relatively pedantic study of Greek drama provided us with the universally imitated structure of classic Hollywood narratives, Nietzsche’s lively and provocative analysis found in tragedy the key to an understanding of art in general. And that key unlocks in Tarantino’s film a textbook example of the artistic paradigm articulated in Nietzsche’s book. In fact, the correlation between these two works is almost uncanny. Thus, a Nietzschean interpretation of
Reservoir Dogs
can not only help explain the otherwise puzzling dissonance between the beauty and horror, comedy and violence, and music and story characteristic of Tarantino films to date; it can also provide us with more than mere Beggin’ Strips
^®
for philosophical thought about all cinematic art.