He imagines films like "Natural Born Killers," Kill Bill" and "From Dusk Till Dawn" to be ones that the characters from "Pulp Fiction," "Jackie Brown" and "Reservoir Dogs" would go see. Tarantino has suggested that there is a movie universe within his movie universe. Blonde, Vic Vega (Michael Madsen), in "Reservoir Dogs." In "Pulp Fiction," Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace has acted in a show about an all-female assassin squad called Fox Force Five her character, the Bride, in "Kill Bill" is part of just such a force. Some characters appear in several films – Sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) appears in "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "Kill Bill," as well as "Death Proof" and its "Grindhouse" double-feature, the Robert Rodriguez–directed "Planet Terror." Other characters have inter-filmic relationships both literally and figuratively: Vincent Vega (John Travolta) from "Pulp Fiction" is the brother of Mr. Like William Faulkner, who set many of his stories in fictional Yoknapatawpha county, in Mississippi, or Stephen King, who did the same with the town of Castle Rock, Maine, Tarantino has created a pretend world, work by work. What's becoming more apparent is how Tarantino's movies talk to one another, and in doing so, banter with his more attentive fans. At times, Tarantino's plucky casting works so well it resurrects the career of the actor, as it did for John Travolta after playing an aging, clinging-to-hipness gunman in "Pulp Fiction." There's a level of wry humor in this choice, a wink at the audience. Often Tarantino places television actors in major roles, most recently putting Don Johnson, famous for his cool white suit and sunglasses in the 1980s series "Miami Vice," in "Django Unchained" as Big Daddy, a plantation owner and racist who is clad, of course, in a white suit. As Jackie Brown, Grier's a middle-aged stewardess trying to fight her way out of a gangster's employ using only her wits. In the 1970s, Grier played badass tough girl Foxy Brown, an action heroine who goes after pimps and drug dealers. The actress Pam Grier, famous for her roles in blaxploitation films, drew a direct connection between those movies and "Jackie Brown." At the same time, she bucked type. Griffith's movie in quite the same way after – Tarantino has subverted its imagery completely.Įven Tarantino's casting choices play to, or against, the audience's cinematic and cultural expectations. The bit plays like a skit from "Chappelle's Show," and it makes it impossible to view D.W. Whereas Griffith lionized the Klan, Tarantino has the Klansmen ridiculously unable to see out of their eyeholes, a problem they pull over to discuss with a Southern gentility so extreme it comes across as effeminate. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" where masked Klansmen charge down a hill on horseback, intent on a lynching. In "Kill Bill," Tarantino mixed tropes from westerns and Samurai films, revealing the relationship between the two genres, a symmetry of lone warriors, experts with particular weapons, who fight outside the limits of the law for justice against selfish and cruel gangsters.Ī key concept of Bakhtin's dialogic theory is that a contemporary work of art can change one's evaluation of a past piece of art, and Tarantino demonstrates this in his latest film, "Django Unchained," in a restaging of a scene from D.W. He never borrows haphazardly he works thematically. Tarantino makes no secret that his movies converse with cinematic history – his appropriations, homages and collaging of disparate elements from other movies - elements as specific as shots that he re-creates or as general as a name, costume or song that he recycles - make clear his references. But Bakhtin's ideas prove especially helpful in talking about stories where the author's presence comes through strong – like the movies of Quentin Tarantino. In many stories, the author, like a magician, tries to hide his or her hand. The different levels also address the artworks and narratives from which they have been created. These levels engage in dialogue with one another, and the listener-reader constructs meaning by eavesdropping on their conversation. An active “listener-reader,” to use Bakhtin's term, simultaneously senses many levels to each story – the characters talking to one another within the story, the narrator telling us the story and the author speaking through the story. The eccentric Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on literature and semiotics from around 1919 until his death in 1975, had this crazy idea: Stories talk to one another. Bakhtin theorized that authors cobble narratives together from various “languages,” combining and juxtaposing familiar motifs, images and tropes from other stories as well as cultural associations, history and even clichés to tell a new tale.
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