It is for good reason that my top four on Letterboxd are films that speak more to my character rather than hold a powerful influence over me. Because if I were to be uncritically vulnerable, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would be two of the four. When I was an impressionable teenager, my cousin’s then-boyfriend let me use his DVDs. One of them was Reservoir Dogs, which I watched many times on my Xbox 360. I can distinctly remember why this film’s level of absurdist violence had such an impression on me, even though now I’d rather enjoy the pensive quaintness of Hirokazu Kore-eda or Abbas Kiarostami. The details persist with me endlessly: Mr. Pink playing the world’s smallest violin for waitresses, Mr. Orange telling himself he is “super cool” before leaving his apartment, the way Mr. White snaps at his lighter, how Joe points when he says “my way or the highway.” Reservoir Dogs has become a narrative shorthand for all things cool when the concept of cinema is developing in a young person who is discovering they want to make things.
The narrative behind Tarantino’s rise as a writer-director is one that is the wet dream of burgeoning filmmakers. A regular cinephile who works at a part-time job (movie theater, video store) while saving money to make a passion project with a self-taught film vocabulary born out of their time watching the movies. Tarantino made a name for himself by rejecting film school and New Hollywood sensibilities (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg). Instead, he embraces the independence and wittiness of his then-cultural anonymity to experiment with genre-blending and pop culture in a way that was unique for the time. This can be seen in examining the (arguably) most famous sequences of the film: the opening dinner scene and the Mr. Blonde torture scene.
Before the film’s title even comes up, the opening scene begins with eight men sitting around a Los Angeles diner discussing the analogy within Madonna’s 1984 “Like A Virgin” while also reminiscing about other popular songs from the ’80s. The scene is a captivating display of snappy dialogue much like a Mike Nichols or Billy Wilder script but the scene is made dynamic by the circling camera making the conversation feel alive. This is complimented by the palpable comradery of this group of guys arguing over the ethics of tipping because Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) does not believe in tipping. All the while the rest of the group bring up the viability of working in the service industry and it is up to patrons to keep that ecosystem sustainable. Juxtaposing this scene is the film’s mid-point where Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is torturing a policeman (Kirk Baltz) while dancing to “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel. Mr. Blonde is galavanting that the information the policeman may have about an undercover cop in the group is completely disregarded just for the sole purpose of sadism. Madsen’s complete tepid approach to acting out torture is like watching Philip Marlowe deliver the final lines in The Long Goodbye. It is shivering, it is cool, it makes me wish I could see more of his character.
Circling back to the film’s opening admiration of music, the ear-cutting scene bridges two distinct fan appreciations: grindhouse enthusiasts and pop culture nerds. This quality to bring together the high and low culture as something new, unlike your favorite mixtape, is the appeal of Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino as a whole.
In the opening scene of Full Tilt Boogie, Sarah Kelly’s 1997 documentary about the production of From Dusk Till Dawn, Tarantino and George Clooney are walking as parodies of themselves to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees. Halfway through their walk, they are barraged by an avid fan holding an oversized Pulp Fiction poster and telling Tarantino he is the reason he dropped out of film school. Tarantino rips the poster and yells at him to “get out of here with that shit.” He continues, “Is that my fault? Did I ask you to quit school?” He certainly did not tell anyone to drop out of college, but his film absolutely influenced plenty of young people (myself included) to make films they thought were cool in the same way Tarantino did. No one can imagine what notoriety will do to someone when they become a topic of conversation in film school common spaces.
Throughout Tarantino’s career, he recounts how his films themselves created a subgenre within themselves. Filmmakers aspired to reach the same cultural irony he achieved in their scripts and non-linear sequencing. Obviously, the myth of the director is not new or exclusive to Tarantino. Filmmakers before him and after have been subjected to critical discourse to unpack everything about their personal lives in relation to their films. The likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, and the Coen Brothers have had a spotlight for similarly provocative films yet they haven’t been mythologized in the same way.
If there is any reason to watch Reservoir Dogs now, it would be to see it as a relic of the genesis of the Tarantino brand of cool. However, this type of sensibility is generally exclusive to a white male audience from a certain background. Being Black or gay in the Tarantino universe is near impossible because (unless you are Samuel L. Jackson, Jaime Foxx, Pam Grier, or Peter Greene) all that is left is a regressive caricature banking on calling people derogatory slurs. One could say it is a product of its time, but Tarantino’s career is a monument of controversial language that is difficult to repeat. If there is anything valuable in using slurs, it’s how people in marginalized communities have reclaimed them as terms of power. Nonetheless, this is a retrospective on one of my guilty pleasure favorite films.
There has been a recontextualization of the relationship between Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) as homoerotic. Their star-crossed friendship was not built on a brotherly bond, or honor among thieves, but rather a deeper kinship that can best be described in this Letterboxd review:
what if we kissed in an abandoned warehouse after our jewelry heist went bust and i tenderly held you in my arms and combed your hair as you slowly bled to death from an agonizing gutshot that was kind of my fault 😳 ⁽ᵃⁿᵈ ʷᵉ ʷᵉʳᵉ ᵇᵒᵗʰ ᵇᵒʸˢ⁾
This and others like it make up a new wave of projecting queerness into films that aren’t very queer at all on the surface. Phenomenons like this have happened many times before with hyper-masculine films (Lethal Weapon, Predator, American Psycho) and to that effect, they add an incredible new layer of depth to a film that would otherwise remain stale. Reservoir Dogs is a far more enjoyable 30-year-old film if you constantly think of it as a gay romance between two strangers. Ultimately, Tarantino is a byproduct of the very fan culture that admires his filmmaking. His remix sensibility is the driving force behind what makes his films so uniquely his own while still referencing cinema’s history. In that same regard, whenever Tarantino makes his 10th and final film, there will be numerous reinterpretations of his previous work.
