Quentin Tarantino's Mom

That was very mean of you, JJ. But flowers will help. A spa day too, if you're feeling generous.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if Spike Lee bought her a Lincoln?

You guys are cracking me up.

Next you'll be telling me her name is Ethel, and that she's "crazy" and "fat". Shocked to see such disrespectful behaviour from a normally nice man. It's only fair you take her out for a night on the town.

That’s fine, but if you’re going to offer drive by critiques without reading the whole post, you’re going to stumble into more of these confusing exchanges.

JJ, Barbra Streisand is playing Atlantic City and those tickets won't buy themselves.


You can go up in the Lincoln.

According to his mother, Tarantino would write her stories for Mother's Day. "He'd always kill me and tell me how bad he felt about that". True story.

No need to bring up this poor woman's past trauma.


Emphasis on the poor, as that swine MKS would say.


*passes JJ the bill*

And we just all felt bad for Rock for having that weak bladder issue whenever he sprinted to the restroom when the check came.

The Dom Perignon just goes right through me, what can I say.


Tip well, JJ. Don't want to look cheap at a fancy place like this.

On the other hand, I find these kinds of sensational scenes dim with age, the way that momentarily satisfying explosions of temper fade into an empty lashing in hindsight.


I don't think that it's insignificant that many of his social justice (pawns) patrons have voiced a lot of hesitation over his enthusiasm to take up their cause. It's indicative of a adolescent mind to find a "fire with fire" solution to these issues without understanding the vicious cyclical nature of vengence. I'm sure that Tarantino thought it made perfect sense to have Jews participate in a semi-fascist torture squad as just deserts, but any amount of thought past a few minutes should reveal complications involving the erosion of the moral authority of the nascent human rights movement, and it certainly portends some very real practical problems when this kind of revenge is taken on as national policy (Palestine, for example). Perhaps the reason why so many Jewish people had problems with Quentin's unsolicited revisionism is because they are all too familiar with the dead end of revenge (see Spielberg's Munich, a noble, if somewhat flinched, take on this problem).


Django brings up other issues. I already mentioned the kind of unsubtle sexualization of black people that Tarantino enjoys (going back to Marcelus Wallace), and that many black people are all too familiar with. But the film also, perhaps inadvertantly, engages in the also familiar "exceptional negro" myth, where most of the slaves continue to be pretty dumb, but a few (Django, Stephen) prove to have exceptional skills. Schultz even explicitly says exactly this about Django. More insultingly, he has this German dentist condescendingly telling a group of slaves about the North Star, while these slaves stare open-mouthed in confusion. I wouldn't expect Tarantino to bother to research his subjects before making a movie, or learning how slaves were actually quite well aware of the North Star, and that it's the focus of a sub-genre of slave stories and songs dedicated to its significance as a key to liberation. It's precisely the reason why Frederick Douglass named his newspaper The North Star, after all. It isn't just that Tarantino is not familiar with this history, a lot of white people are not. It's that he's not interested to learn, and hostile to those black scholars who have since pointed it out to him. It has a faint air that maybe Tarantino cares less about black people's integrity and history than he cares about using them in his tinker-toy violent scenarios. Just like his response to the Bruce Lee controversy, even when he's shown to be contradicting the exact same books and sources that he's using to defend himself, his response is selfish defensiveness. His fantasy of justice, rather than real justice, is the most important thing for him to preserve.

Fair enough, I'd say I'm in agreement with you here. I still think his revisionism shows a lot of promise and the final act of OUaTiH is a great utilization of his talents, but yeah, a number of things certainly muddle his intentions in IG and DU.

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I think, Bruce Lee thing aside, Hollywood is less problematic, but i think that this visceral indulgence in revenge is pretty juvenile, especially when divorced for the increasingly flimsy pretenses that he's used for them. The fact is that QT appears more and more like someone with a lot of unexamined emotional volatility and issues with women (it puts his insistence on personally choking Shosanna in a weird light), and these can be toxic elements when given a political dimension, however tenuous.

Examples?

Because you can discuss and analyze any filmmaker. Tarantino is discussed the most often because he's among the most popular. Note how Nolan is also discussed even though he lacks the metatextual content you're speaking of.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Malick.

True, but this is all ceteris paribus. Some things are more conducive to discussion than other things, I hope you'd agree.

Maybe the causality flows the other way; maybe he's popular because he gives us a lot to discuss, which in the current culture is actually the most important thing a filmmaker can do to stay relevant.

Sure, but being metatextual is not the only thing that makes someone's work conducive to discussion. It's just the one that applies most obviously to Tarantino.

I see this argued about quite a few people whose work I enjoy. It’s obviously true. I suppose the question, to put it as bluntly as possible, is why is this relevant? (“Who cares?”)

You either enjoy their work or you don’t. Seeing as it was briefly explored whose work is or isn’t conducive to discussion, I’m not sure why an artist’s frustrations are so conducive or important when discussing their work. Even if they really rub the viewer the wrong way, fixating on whether these frustrations are reasonable is to me the opposite of conducive.

Why should these elements be given a political dimension, anyway? I read an article in The Telegraph this morning by a columnist whose wife and daughter “gifted” (note the quote marks) him a dog, which he was vehemently against. The article details just how & why he detests the animal. He anticipates a barrage of abuse from pro-dog activists. Left me wondering: is disliking dogs now political?

I feel it’s a bit strange that something may acquire a political dimension just like that. Pretty much same question regarding “juvenile”: why is it that being mature is seen as a virtue in and of itself? Artists, especially commercial artists, are largely immature for life, and I, for one, see it as a distinct advantage for them.

Read another article over the weekend about Sky Brown, the 13-year-old who won an Olympic bronze medal. Among other things, the article argued that teenagers’ brains (that is, the brains of people epitomising “immaturity”) are wired in a way that makes it easier for them to win. They don’t care, they are not scared. They just go for it.

If only in this light, I would largely discourage any filmmaker/artist/creator from ever “maturing”. I don’t think this is quite the case here, but even if disliking his mother (he’s not even the prime example of that phenomenon) motivates Tarantino to create, why is that anyone’s business?

In terms of Django being under-researched and Inglorious Bustards and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood are grounded just enough to be plot-driven, they are very obviously, on-the-nose revisionist, so he consciously didn’t do his “research”. Having written a fair deal, I think over-researching in such cases may actually harm your own material, because you will be more acutely aware of where you are “wrong”.

I think that’s true. But he’s not under obligation to, is he? He wants to make his film entertaining, in his particular “authorial” way. Incorporating the POV you are referring to into his material would harm the material as he sees it.

Is this a dare?

No, and I expected when I said it a Malick fan would start giving me all the ways we can analyze his painterly works. But I did include, in the next bit, the idea that this is all relative: you can obviously analyze basically anything (including works of art with no deliberation behind them at all!), but analysis is not discussion, and I'd say filmmakers who care disproportionately about visuals and mood are disproportionately difficult to discuss in interesting ways with others.

"Is this pretty?" is less of a conversation starter than, say, the idea of rewriting history inside the world of the film, which has logical implications that can be parsed out independent of our subjective reactions.

It's relevant for the subsequent part of the quote that you didn't bold. As for why Tarantino's films have to have a political dimension, it's because Tarantino himself has touted this significance in Basterds and Django, and audiences have used this dimension as a key part of appraising these films.


The old adage is that you can't break the rules until you know what the rules are. Tarantino's revisionism is not some willy-nilly random fantasy, it has a stated purpose. He is simultaneously making a commentary on the history as he is rewriting it. And it matters when he makes these kinds of uninformed mistakes which end up defeating that purpose. Anytime a filmmaker, or anybody, attempts to form a commentary on something, it helps that they know what they're commenting about.

I don't think that analysis and discussion have to be so mutually exclusive. And I do think that Malick's films have more substance than being pretty pictures. Their substance is less explicit and more non-verbal, but in a way that's what makes them so compelling to write about. They're inspirational like that, for me anyway.