Hamilton on Tarantino and Genre

Quentin Tarantino: Unity Through Genre and Popular Culture
By Chloe Hamilton

Critics of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino consistently attack him for the manner in which his films appropriate styles of other films.  What seems to be at the heart of this issue is Tarantino’s use of cinematic modes that are commonly associated with racial minorities.  These critics posit that a white American filmmaker has no business making a highly stylized film that references samurai revenge, kung fu, blaxploitation, sexploitation, or spaghetti westerns.  On the surface, in our politically correct times, Tarantino’s cultural borrowing seems to mock racial equality as in his most recent films, Kill Bill, Volumes 1 & 2, the white American (blond with blue eyes no less) Beatrix Kiddo uses martial arts to dominate and obliterate her mostly racial minority foes.  However, Tarantino’s films deserve more careful analysis than this.  In order to truly understand these films, it is necessary to keep in one’s constant thoughts the terms "genre history" and "genre theory."  It is through genre theory and history that this paper will examine a Tarantino-scripted film, From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez director, 1996), as well as Tarantino's own Kill Bill, Volumes 1 & 2.

Before going any further the terms “genre history” and “genre theory” will need to be pinned down.  To draw on definitions offered by Rich Altman in his essay “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”:

Genre history attempts to chronicle the development and practice of genre structures.  Genre theory is less easy to summarize in a single sentence.  It is synchronic, divorced of history.  Through genre theory, theorists are able to analyze films in terms of timeless structures.  In genre theory there is much discourse surrounding the seemingly binary oppositions of semantics and syntax as well as ideology and ritual (Altman, 682).

Altman is able to resolve these conflicts through synthesis.  For him, there is never an “either/or” issue, but instead one of “this and that.”  Using the semantic approach, one looks at the “building blocks” of a film: mise-en-scène, stock characters.  This differs from analyzing the underlying structures of the film, finding the thematic oppositions, in other words: the syntactic approach.  Altman asserts that the best way to analyze a film is to look at its semantics and its syntax.

With these tools, we can begin to inspect From Dusk Till Dawn.  The first half of the film seems to operate in the mode of a western.  Looking at its semantics, its recipe, Rodriguez (though it was Tarantino who wrote it) offers shots of dry desert vistas.  Our first human counter is with Texas Ranger and a liquor store clerk engaged in a trashy dialogue about the mentally deficient in the food service industry and then moves into a discussion of the fugitive brothers, Seth and Richie Gecko.  From this encounter we are given the stock characters of “the sheriff,” “the saloon operator,” and the “bandits.”  Not long after this the Fuller family is introduced and can be looked at as “the pioneer family.” These semantics are somewhat abstract and useless until we look at them, as Altman suggests, within the syntax of the western, the binary opposition of civilization and savagery, or more poetically: Garden and wilderness.

In looking at the semantic elements we are able to use syntax as the framework in which they are arranged.  The Texas desert is a borderland.  It mediates between the garden and wilderness.  The Gecko brothers are savage killers and so, represent wilderness.  The Fuller family members, in their motor home, are clearly of the garden.  The ranger and liquor store clerk, like the desert, are mediators between the two worlds even if they are quickly executed.  When the Gecko brothers hijack the Fullers’ motor home, it seems that this is the start of a traditional western in which civilization and savagery play out their conflicts on screen, but then the motor home crosses the border and stop at a bar known as “The Titty Twister” and suddenly something very strange happens.

Here three other genres rear their heads: sexploitation, blaxploitation, and horror.  A man billed as “Chet Pussy” delivers an extensive monologue about all the pussy that can be found inside the bar.  When the Geckos and Fullers enter there are all sorts of topless women dancing on tabletops.  They wear exotic headdresses, presumably Mayan and skirts that look more like loincloths.  Two other notable men are introduced in this scene, Frost and Sex Machine.  Frost is a burly black man who smokes cigars and fought in “’Nam.”  His badass attitude clearly aligns him with blaxploitation.  Sex Machine has a gun (that when cocked resembles an erect penis) attached to his groin.  Like Chet and the dancers, Sex Machine is another campy semantic element of sexploitation. This is not to say that From Dusk Till Dawn becomes a sexploitation or blaxploitation film, it is simply the semantics that have been changed, or more accurately, new semantic elements have been added.  The film is still operating in the western syntax of garden and wilderness binary opposition, but then the lights go down and Satanico Pandemonium is introduced and all hell breaks loose, literally.

This western suddenly becomes a horror film.  The semantics are altered again as the bar gets even darker and the dancers become female vampires, devouring their male victims.  The film’s syntax changes too.  It is no longer garden versus wilderness, but human versus monster or the more severe good versus evil.  From the start of the film, Richie Gecko is a monster of sorts, or at least a monstrous human, in that he rapes women and has hallucinatory fantasies.  When he is bitten by Satanico Pandemonium and rendered a true monster, his brother Seth must kill Richie in order to save the humans from the monsters.  With the change in syntax, the opposition becomes humans against monsters, whereas earlier in the movie the opposition is the bandit Geckos versus the pioneer Fullers.  Only when the syntax changes from western to horror and Richie becomes physically, not psychologically monstrous, does Seth realize that he must stop Richie.  This killing marks the clearest distinction in the shift from the syntax of the western to the syntax of horror in the film.

What is also very interesting is the way the characters get right into the new genre.  Quickly they run through the list of things that will kill vampires.  The list is clearly derived from vampire horror movies and in this way the film becomes self-reflexive.  Even though the characters in the film are able to adjust easily, it’s rather jarring for the viewer.  Geoff King in his essay “Genre Benders,” expresses that “It is not unusual for a leap in required suspension of disbelief to occur early in a Hollywood film…What is unusual about From Dusk Till Dawn is that it devotes more than an hour of running time to the establishment of one set of conventions before switching to another” (121).  This alarms the viewer because normally, genre sets the viewer up, lets the viewer develop an idea of what to expect in the movie and then follows that framework. “Films with clear genre locations offer specific pleasures according to the individual genre: the pleasure of being scared, uplifted, thrilled, brought to tears, or whatever.  All genre films share one particular kind of pleasure: a blend of sameness and difference” (120).  With the self-reflexive dialogue about vampires, Tarantino simultaneously calls attention to the construct of film, but also denies the viewer’s expectations because he has switched to a new genre.  This partly explains why the viewer is so disoriented but something else is going on as well.

Another dimension of genre involves ritual and ideology.  Altman, following Levi-Strauss, discusses genre films in terms of ritual so that in a way these films can be seen as satisfying the public’s needs as myths once did.  Through the syntax in genre, binary oppositions such as good and evil can be played out on screen, as they once played out in mythological tales.  Genre then, can be looked at as a response to the viewing public’s needs and desires to have conceptual oppositions addressed and resolved visually.  Altman pairs this ritual approach with an ideological approach.  Counter to Levi-Strauss, the ideological approach stresses the idea that genre is a Hollywood ploy that lulls the viewer into submission.  In engaging the audience through semantics like visual style, Hollywood is able to affirm the culture’s dominant ideology without the audience even noticing that they are being manipulated.  For most genre theorists, ritual and ideology are opposing camps, but not for Altman.

More allied with Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of audience absorption, Altman synthesizes the separate approaches of ritual and ideology.  He states that, following ritual, genre films do respond to the public’s needs, but genre films also follow ideological approach because the conflict resolution in the film will almost always manipulate the public in order to reaffirm the dominant ideology.  In other words, genre allows the viewer to grapple with binary opposition, allows for play between the dominant and subversive, but ultimately will reinforce dominant ideology.  This brings us back to From Dusk Till Dawn and the syntax of the western.

When the film was last mentioned it had just switched to horror syntax, it should also be noted that once the monsters are wiped out, the film returns to the western syntax.  Though western and horror syntaxes seem related, they are not the same.  In horror syntax, the humans must defeat the monsters.  In western syntax, the garden-wilderness dichotomy is not nearly as absolute.

In a traditional western film like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), there will be two heroes—one from the garden (Ransom Stoddard) and one from the wilderness (Tom Donathan).  They will both vie for the affections of a virtuous woman.  At the film’s conclusion, this woman will choose the garden hero.  Even though the audience respects both heroes, dominant ideology will have them recognize that the civilized man is the better choice.  However, in From Dusk Till Dawn, the outlaw hero, Seth Gecko and the pioneer heroine, Kate Fuller, are the only two characters left standing after the bloodbath at the Titty Twister.

Seth leaves Kate in front of the bar as he drives to El Rey, which is even deeper into the wilds of Mexico.  In the context of the western genre, this makes some sense.  The outlaw bandit and the pioneer woman are not supposed to end up together.  However, there is no one else to accompany Kate, no one to bring her back to the garden.  In the end, she stands near her motor home, with no clue as to what her next move will be.  Not only does Tarantino confuse the viewer in switching the syntax at the film’s midpoint, but also he potentially disillusions the viewer by not concluding the film in a manner typical of western syntax, or by concluding the film at all.  Throughout the film, Tarantino toys with established genres, but it is not until this scene that one is certain that he is thinking of film in a rather revolutionary way.

Now that genre, Tarantino’s approach to genre in particular, has been analyzed, it is possible to briefly discuss Kill Bill, Volumes 1 & 2.  As I mentioned earlier, there has been some controversy over the genres that Tarantino plays with in these films.  People worry that he is co-opting minority genres in a way that separates them from their cultural context, thereby rendering them stylish, but without substance.  Using the analysis from earlier in this essay, I will emphasize popular culture and genre as a means to dispel this anxiety.

Quentin Tarantino is very much a product of a culturally mixed, media saturated generation.  When he references other genres it seems that he is more drawing from the bank of popular culture, not robbing racial groups of something unique to their culture.  This is particularly clear in the quote that opens the film: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”  This quote is not related to any ethnicity, but to popular culture, to the television show Star Trek, because it is actually an old Klingon proverb.  Though not all viewers would recognize the proverb’s origins directly, most will recognize Klingons as a race of aliens in Star Trek.  This is a signal to the viewer to expect more popular culture references within the film itself. 

Indeed even in reading through the iconic cast at the opening credits, the viewer should know to gear up for a film that deeply rooted in popular culture.  Of note is David Carradine, cast as Bill (AKA the Snake Charmer).  Though we (members of the popular culture) have not all seen the show Kung Fu or its later series sequel Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, many of us are at least aware that such a show existed and the story seemed to involve Carradine as a martial arts master in the American west.  This was a conscious casting decision on Tarantino’s part and like the Klingon proverb makes another nod at the viewer that there will be more references to come.   

In the film’s first scene, Bill shoots the Bride in the head.  We see his hands and hear his voice, but do not see his body, or even his face.  We focus on the Bride’s brutalized face, hear her utter the words, “Bill, it’s your baby” and then later we see the Klingon proverb.  This sets the viewer up to sympathize with the Bride and to recognize that this will be a revenge film, one in which the lone protagonist strikes out to destroy those who have tried to destroy her.  Revenge films relate to western genre syntax in that the protagonist is generally trying to break free of the wilderness and settle down in the garden before he or she is pulled back into the wilderness through a savage attack.  This will be addressed later in the paper.  Tarantino divides Kill Bill into ten chapters and within each chapter, isolates a main genre (though he often uses two or more genres) and uses a particular set of semantics.  This essay will not focus on each individual chapter (there are ten), but will look at a few chapters in both films as they relate to the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). 

“Chapter One: 2” involves the Bride’s confrontation with Vernita Green (AKA Jeanie Bell, AKA Copperhead).  The scene takes place in the suburbs and this conflicts with the semantics of Chinese martial arts and blaxploitation that are set in the revenge genre syntax.  Tarantino plays with the viewer’s expectations.  The women speak English, but there is something funny about the way that they are talking.  Vernita and the Bride talk about the previous scene in which Bill, Vernita and the other DiVAS attacked the Bride and left her for dead.  They sprinkle their dialogue with words like “bitch” and “ain’t” that seem to connote Ebonics and so reference blaxploitation.  However, they also periodically talk in a stilted manner, using key words like “intention,” “beseech,” “for that.”  This speech style is reminiscent of the subtitles in a martial arts film, meaning that if one were to read out loud the subtitles of such a movie, this is what it would sound like.  Let’s not forget how bizarre this is especially because this scene is taking place in the suburbs, a space that we normally associate with stability and normality.  All of this genre and culture mixing may look like Tarantino is just randomly assembling elements of popular culture in an attempt to be stylish, but this can also be thought of as his reminder to the viewer that this is first of all a film and second that this is more than anything, a film about film.

“Chapter Three: Origin of O-ren Ishii” is done in anime.  Though most animation is by nature, stylized, this scene is intensely stylish. Using anime is a pop culture clue to the viewer to expect excessive violence.  Though the scene does serve to explain O-ren’s character, its narrative purpose could have been expressed in a more efficient way.  The scene is incredibly fragmented and Tarantino manipulates time, calling attention to the anime as animation, not reality.  Blood shoots from bodies in a bright red shower.  Time slows down as this stream breaks into thousands of large globules.  The sound effects heighten this effect of gore.  The syntax is also revenge genre and semantics are anime of the ultra-violent kind.  All of the elaborate manipulation in the scene is not meant to develop the narrative, but to reassert that this is a film and films can have sequences like this specifically because they are not real.

“Chapter Five: Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves” uses primarily Japanese martial arts semantics.  One of the most interesting scenes in the whole movie rests within this chapter.  For potentially self-conscious purposes, the issue of miscegenation is raised.  The night that O-ren Ishii (AKA Cottonmouth) is named head of the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, one of the sub-bosses raises the issue of purity and perversion and O-ren, a Japanese-Chinese-American, decapitates him.  She goes on to make a speech that this is not an appropriate issue to debate, but what she is talking about seems not only to address her multiculturalism, but the film’s multiculturalism.  Others have noticed this of Tarantino’s films. “[M]iscegenation—racial, cultural, musical, arterial—is not only an enduring thing of his […] but a structural and methodological linchpin” (Norris, 26).  Also at the nightclub, “House of Blue Leaves”, the band that performs is the “5,6,7,8’s,” a group of Japanese women playing music in the style of American surf rock.  In offering examples of the Japanese adopting American culture, Tarantino seems to suggest that every culture references other cultures from time to time under the larger umbrella of pop culture.  What strengthens this notion is a point where O-ren and the Bride share a pop culture memory.  They split up the famous tagline of a children’s cereal: “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.”  Despite racial differences, these characters are united through popular culture.

Even as this chapter has used the semantics of Japanese martial arts, this is not its syntax.  In the battle scene between O-ren and the Bride, at first O-ren insults the bride for using a samurai sword, calling her a “silly Caucasian.”  The Bride manages to wound O-ren, who then apologizes for her insult.  As equals, they continue to battle until the Bride scalps O-ren.  This attack is most commonly associated with Native Americans in classic westerns and so is a semantic device that should trigger recognition by the viewer of the western.  With this shocking attack, Tarantino reminds the viewer that even as he dabbled in semantics of other genres, the underlying syntax structure was revenge western.  This is where Volume 1 ends. 

Volume 2 uses the same introductory scene of Bill shooting the Bride, again, referencing the western genre, but Tarantino follows this with a scene of the Bride in black and white direct address, explaining to the viewer what took place in Volume 1.  The scene is in black and white and uses dramatic orchestral music that reminds one of the noir genre.  However, in Chapter Seven: The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz and Chapter Nine: Elle and I, we encounter Bill’s brother Budd (AKA Sidewinder) and Elle Driver (AKA California Mountain Snake) and again are immersed in western semantics, but also when the two women fight in the trailer, kung fu semantics in terms of fighting and speech come into play.  This mixture of western and eastern all culminates in the Final Chapter (Chapter Ten), in which the Bride (now known as Beatrix Kiddo) and Bill are reunited.  As mentioned earlier, David Carradine, star of Kung Fu, plays Bill.  In this cultural memory, of Kung Fu, the film pulls together the conflict of east and west in one character.

In this last chapter, things finally gel completely.  Bill explains to Beatrix that she will always be a killer, so in this way she is wilderness and cannot leave it.  Then, Beatrix kills Bill and with her daughter, B.B., drives off to god knows where.  Regaining her daughter suggests domesticity and so, evokes the garden.  However, we know that this will not be the traditional garden because Beatrix will always be a killer. Beatrix and B.B. will end up in a mediated space a new frontier of garden and wilderness.  This is a new western ending of sorts.  Tarantino shows us that in genre the final outcome does not always have to be one or the other, but that sometimes, it can be both.

Though evoking multiple genres is stylistically very “cool” for audiences, this is not Tarantino’s goal: “The genre formulas that Tarantino so lovingly reenacts and expands upon are not so much in-jokes as traces of sacred ritual, complete with the requisite vestments and liturgy” (O’Brien, 22).  So Tarantino makes references to pop culture not simply to “wink” at the viewer but to relate to the viewer in a new way.  His highly stylized effects call attention to these pop cultural elements making them visually stunning and easy to recognize.  Furthermore all the surface effects call attention to the film as a film.  Everything that happens in the film is in the diegetic world only.  When Tarantino references pop culture, he is not pasting these ideas onto the cultures themselves.   All the cultures that he references are strictly in pop culture terms and do not speak for a true population, only a film population.  Tarantino unites all cultures through pop culture creating something that everyone can understand through the language of film.

Works Cited:

Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

King, Geoff.  “Genre Benders.”  From New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction.  Columbia University Press, 2002.

Norris, Chris. “Mixed Blood.” Film Comment, v. 39, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003). 

O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Devotional Furies.” Film Comment, v. 39, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2003).

Comments

[Nathan Westlake]

Hamilton does not pay enough attention to the complexity of the genre issue. Yes, it is relatively true that, “The Gecko brothers are savage killers and so, represent wilderness. The Fuller family members, in their motor home, are clearly of the garden.” I would also mention the parallel that both groups of people are running from the consequences of “civilization,” and that neither is so clearly of the garden or wilderness, but we can let that slide. What I take issue with, is when she says, “When the Gecko brothers hijack the Fullers’ motor home, it seems that this is the start of a traditional western in which civilization and savagery play out their conflicts on screen, but then the motor home crosses the border and stop at a bar known as “The Titty Twister” and suddenly something very strange happens.” Wait a second here. Are you trying to claim you have to wait until “The Titty Twister” to get something weird, something that contradicts your typical western?! Huh. Last time I checked, the psychopathic fantasizing rapist killer little brother wasn’t part of John Ford’s classical western semantics.

By themselves, not paying attention to details like that is relatively okay. But on the whole, Hamilton over simplifies the ways it is possible to apply Altman’s semantic / syntactic approach to contemporary semi-genre films. Notice how Altman’s examples are from the classic era of Hollywood. It’s simply not possible to categorize a film like From Dusk Till Dawn as cleanly as Hamilton does. She would be better off if she recognized the limitations of this approach, and then tried to show the significance the approach can have when used on From Dusk Till Dawn and other films.

[Megan Vig]

Chloe Hamilton posits a very strong argument about semantics and syntax using the Quentin Tarantino film, From Dusk Till Dawn. However, I do not fully agree with her analysis of the film’s syntax and semantics. In her essay, she starts out by describing Altman’s argument of what syntax and semantics are and I agree with her. The building blocks (i.e. mise-en-scene and stock characters) are the semantics and the syntax is how and in what ways those building blocks are put together (the underlying structures or thematic oppositions). Altman synthesizes the semantics and syntax and thinks that through this synthesis is the best way to analyze a film (Altman, 682).

When Chloe applies this theory of syntax and semantics to the film From Dusk Till Dawn, I don’t agree with her choice of labeling. She says that the beginning of the film is syntactically a western and then in the middle changes to be syntactically a horror film. Her reasoning for this is that the movie switches from being a garden vs. wilderness to human vs. monster or good vs. evil film. I disagree with this assessment and think that the film is syntactically a western the whole way through while the semantics change in the middle from that of a western to that of a horror. In the beginning, as Chloe suggests, From Dusk Till Dawn resembles a western with the Gecko brothers (symbolizing wilderness and the uncivilized) and the Fuller family (symbolizing the garden and civilization). When these people cross the border in the motor home, however, the film remains syntactically a western. “The Titty Twister” now represents the wilderness – the bar is in the middle of nowhere and the people in the bar are “uncivilized” or less civilized than the Gecko brothers and the Fuller family. Therefore, the Gecko brothers and the Fuller family, who arrive in a motor home (representation of civilization), represent the garden. This opposition of good and evil that Chloe sites as a prescription for a horror syntax is one that can also be found in the western (i.e. the Indians equal the evil and the cowboys equal the good) and is in fact found in this film. The workers or vampires within “The Titty Twister” are the evil and the Fuller family and the Gecko brothers are the good or “less-bad” people.

There simply has been a shift of what the wilderness is and what the garden is and who belongs to which area. The movie switches from one frontier to another and all the while stays within the western syntax. There is a transformation that occurs in terms of semantics as Chloe suggests (switch from road-movie, Southwest landscape, gas stations and motels to vampires and wooden crosses), but contrary to Chloe’s idea, the syntax stays the same throughout the movie.