1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 56: From dusk till dawn
Quentin Tarantino, whom my dear cousin, Adam, unfortunately resembles, is the writer of this movie, and one of its stars. (The director is Robert Rodriguez.) The Tarantino character robs banks; takes women as hostages, and then rapes and kills them; lusts after the under-aged; is singled out for a table dance by the most glamorous and dominating woman in the movie (Selma Hayek); and, in general, is perverse, paranoid, vindictive, and disgusting. Eventually, he is turned into a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if vampirism were another of Tarantino’s personal fetishes. It’s as if Tarantino assigned all the juiciest vices to himself and then got someone else to direct him enacting them. The Tarantino character and his ruthless but slightly more judicious brother (George Clooney) are on the lam trying to cross from Texas to Mexico. A gleeful reporter (Kelly Preston) details their crimes for the TV. It’s a long and terrible list. This is my favorite scene because the crimes are ennumerated but not shown. One gathers that most of the crimes weren’t strictly necessary. The same could be said of almost everything in the movie, which is a labor of love – love of sin.
Having murdered their previous hostages, the brothers pick up three more: a doubting preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his son (Ernest Liu). These hostages have more grit than the others, and so they last long enough to develop a touch of Stockholm syndrome – the fresh-faced daughter, especially. The rogues and the hostages hunker down for the night in a trucker bar. Caligula would have liked this bar. It has lots of table dancers and grotesque lowlifes played by such actors as Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin (who also plays two other characters). Here the rogues’ sins catch up with them. It turns out that the bar is run by vampires. I hope I’m not giving too much away.
In the rest of the movie, the living fight the undead. They use all the standard vampire-killing techniques. Well, almost all of them.
What about silver?, asks one of the characters.
Isn’t silver for killing werewolves?
Well, yeah, silver bullets are, but what about silver in general?
Then the daughter hostage asks the sensible question: Does anyone actually have any silver? No? Then it doesn’t matter.
The vampires aren’t tormented and joyless, as in Dracula; they’re more like the jolly creatures in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. What both sorts of monsters have in common is insatiable lust and a certain diabolical amiability. The awkward, hot-headed Tarantino could never receive a high grade as a vampire. Clooney, more suave, is a better candidate for vampirism. But his character is insufficiently lustful. I already have a wife, he tells the Hayek vampire before he impales her with a chandelier.
See, I am falling into the trap of responding to the nerd-pervert on his own terms: A, more than B, has the authentic qualities of a vampire. That is to accord too much respect to a pretty worthless connoisseurist pursuit. Probably, some gutters are more authentically gutter-like than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to play in gutters. I’m not saying that vampires don’t make compelling literary figures. Dracula is compelling. I’m saying that you aren’t supposed to like vampires, and that there’s something wrong with you if you do. The Cheech Marin barman, also, is a vulgar connoisseur; in one speech, he expounds upon the varieties of female genitalia on offer in his bar. He describes them with lurid cheer, as objects for the indulgence of one’s basest instincts. This seems to be Tarantino’s attitude toward a lot of things. Or maybe it’s just his shtick. Take some base pursuit (cruelty, lust, revenge, etc.) and dress it up as slickly as possible to revel in it.
And yet, I didn’t hate the movie. The Keitel character is dragged into a monsters’ funhouse, but he retains his decency. So do the Lewis and Liu characters. Tarantino is capable of respecting the non-fetishists in his movies; his underlying plea, I think, is: See, I can appreciate your goodness; just let me play here, in my own awful little corner. Or, at least, that was his early message. Then, as the years went along, he acknowledged that wickedness bleeds into everything, and he started making movies about fighting fire with fire, about torturing Nazis, slavers, and the like.
See also this textbook.
Having murdered their previous hostages, the brothers pick up three more: a doubting preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his son (Ernest Liu). These hostages have more grit than the others, and so they last long enough to develop a touch of Stockholm syndrome – the fresh-faced daughter, especially. The rogues and the hostages hunker down for the night in a trucker bar. Caligula would have liked this bar. It has lots of table dancers and grotesque lowlifes played by such actors as Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin (who also plays two other characters). Here the rogues’ sins catch up with them. It turns out that the bar is run by vampires. I hope I’m not giving too much away.
In the rest of the movie, the living fight the undead. They use all the standard vampire-killing techniques. Well, almost all of them.
What about silver?, asks one of the characters.
Isn’t silver for killing werewolves?
Well, yeah, silver bullets are, but what about silver in general?
Then the daughter hostage asks the sensible question: Does anyone actually have any silver? No? Then it doesn’t matter.
The vampires aren’t tormented and joyless, as in Dracula; they’re more like the jolly creatures in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. What both sorts of monsters have in common is insatiable lust and a certain diabolical amiability. The awkward, hot-headed Tarantino could never receive a high grade as a vampire. Clooney, more suave, is a better candidate for vampirism. But his character is insufficiently lustful. I already have a wife, he tells the Hayek vampire before he impales her with a chandelier.
See, I am falling into the trap of responding to the nerd-pervert on his own terms: A, more than B, has the authentic qualities of a vampire. That is to accord too much respect to a pretty worthless connoisseurist pursuit. Probably, some gutters are more authentically gutter-like than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to play in gutters. I’m not saying that vampires don’t make compelling literary figures. Dracula is compelling. I’m saying that you aren’t supposed to like vampires, and that there’s something wrong with you if you do. The Cheech Marin barman, also, is a vulgar connoisseur; in one speech, he expounds upon the varieties of female genitalia on offer in his bar. He describes them with lurid cheer, as objects for the indulgence of one’s basest instincts. This seems to be Tarantino’s attitude toward a lot of things. Or maybe it’s just his shtick. Take some base pursuit (cruelty, lust, revenge, etc.) and dress it up as slickly as possible to revel in it.
And yet, I didn’t hate the movie. The Keitel character is dragged into a monsters’ funhouse, but he retains his decency. So do the Lewis and Liu characters. Tarantino is capable of respecting the non-fetishists in his movies; his underlying plea, I think, is: See, I can appreciate your goodness; just let me play here, in my own awful little corner. Or, at least, that was his early message. Then, as the years went along, he acknowledged that wickedness bleeds into everything, and he started making movies about fighting fire with fire, about torturing Nazis, slavers, and the like.
See also this textbook.