Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson “Family,” the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined. The hippies disgusted them. Because the hippies were their children, and they were disgusted with their children. Hippies burning the American flag in protest of the Vietnam War made them livid with anger. But black militants scared the fuck out of them. The anger, the rhetoric, the agenda, the uniform, the posing for pictures with automatic weapons, their hatred of the police, the dismissal of white America (white folks can never comprehend a situation where they can’t be forgiven for past transgressions).

“It takes a magnificent filmmaker to thoroughly corrupt an audience.”

in Siegel’s Dirty Harry, almost comically, the skill of the filmmaking was so evident that it was impossible for even the movie’s harshest critics to deny. Kael even went so far as to write, “It would be stupid to deny that Dirty Harry is a stunningly well-made genre piece, and it certainly turns an audience on.” Then in a later piece wrote, “There’s an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they’re so cleverly done—even if, as in the case of Siegel’s Dirty Harry, you’re disgusted by the picture.”

One of the big reasons Dirty Harry fails to outrage anymore is Siegel’s film had another agenda that the critics chose to ignore but the public got right away. As much as Dirty Harry is a white western fantasy played out against a modern-day San Francisco backdrop, it is also a plea for New Laws for New Crimes. The serial killer phenom to be exact.

Since 1971 we’ve become so adjusted to a world that includes serial killers in it, we can have a television series like Criminal Minds that presented for three hundred twenty-three episodes a new deranged serial killer every week for fifteen years.

Andy Robinson scared viewers in a way no movie monster ever had or ever would again (we would never again be as innocent as we were when we first witnessed Scorpio sow his sick oats). And forty years of movie serial killers haven’t diminished Robinson’s performance one iota (it’s the single best performance ever in a Don Siegel picture).

It would have been easy for writer Dickey to give the husbands a genuine (paid) river expert as their guide. He could have served the exact same plot functions as Lewis, down to the same colorful commentary that Reynolds spouts through the whole first half (the best half) of the movie. But Dickey wants us to know that as good a game as Lewis talks, he has more in common with the three husbands than the river folk that they come in contact with. Lewis has eaten shrimp scampi and fried calamari in a fancy Atlanta seafood restaurant. His cigars are Cohibas, not Dutch Masters. He knows how to order a Brandy Alexander and a Harvey Wallbanger and how they’re supposed to taste. Lewis has seen Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Lewis knows who Roman Polanski is. This makes sense when you realize that Lewis is a stand-in for the author James Dickey, who in actuality isn’t a Tarzan, but a poet.

In Dickey’s novel, Ed is a graphic artist who’s a partner in a dinky ad agency. And Lewis inherited land from his family and lives off his earnings as a landlord. It makes you wonder how Ed and Lewis became friends. How did they meet? What made Lewis invite Ed on their first bowhunting trip? What made Ed go? In the film, Lewis asks Ed, “Why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?” But Ed replies like a movie character would, “You know, sometimes I wonder about that.” That sounds like a movie line. But in the book, Ed tells the reader why he goes on these bowhunting trips with Lewis, and it’s not to bring home deer meat for his wife to cook up. He enjoys Lewis’ company and even admires him. He informs us, “He was the only man I knew determined to get something out of life who had both the means and the will to do it.”

Deliverance is a good novel, but strangely incomplete. Most books get reduced when they’re adapted into movies. But Deliverance benefits from its cinematic transformation. You can imagine Boorman reading the novel and getting excited; this adaptation gives him something to do. Boorman makes the story more vivid and compelling. Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew don’t pop off the page the way Voight, Beatty, Cox, and especially Reynolds pop off the screen. Neither do the two hillbilly rapists. On the page the hillbillies are stronger than just an idea, they’re actual characters, but McKinney and Coward make them flesh. There’s an authenticity to their on-screen presence. McKinney, Beatty, and Coward might be acting for the camera, but they’re not performing for an audience. We don’t watch the rape of Bobby, we bear eyewitness.

The ambiguity of exactly what happened to Ronny Cox’s Drew sets the whole third act off on the wrong foot. I’m fully aware it’s supposed to be ambiguous. But Boorman’s staging of that section of the action and his direction of Cox’s reaction at first confuses and ultimately irritates. Even if Boorman judged it important that the characters be confused over what happened to Drew (I don’t think it’s necessary), the audience shouldn’t be in the dark. From here on in, the movie, which was as tight as a guitar string, goes slack.

Directors like Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel were genre film masters. But they didn’t make genre films the way Jean-Pierre Melville did. The way I do. The way Walter Hill does, the way John Woo does, the way Eli Roth does. As students of genre cinema, we make genre films because we love genre films. They made genre films because they were good at it and that’s what the studios would hire them to do.

Sam Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, but he would have rather made Rashomon. Sam was happy to adapt Jim Thompson’s novel. He knew it would make a good picture. It would be terrific for McQueen. And it would possibly deliver him his first hit. But he would have rather adapted Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. So since this generation of genre directors were forced to make what at the end of the day they considered silly stories about cowboys and cops and robbers, in order to make those silly stories mean something to them, they based them in metaphors that pertained to their own lives.

When it came to artists whose film work was of an uncompromising nature in the eighties, you had David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, Abel Ferrara, Terry Gilliam, Brian De Palma (sometimes), and David Cronenberg. And that’s it. Yeah, there were one-offs. John Carpenter’s The Thing. William Friedkin’s Cruising, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher. Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon. Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die. Jim McBride’s Breathless. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. But, Hellraiser aside, these directors were usually punished for their perceived transgressions, by the press, the public, and the industry.

the curse of eighties cinema wasn’t that they wouldn’t let you shoot somebody jerking off to Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. It was that the complex and complicated lead characters of the seventies were the characters that eighties cinema avoided completely. Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties likability was everything. A novel could have a low-down son of a bitch at its center, as long as that low-down son of a bitch was an interesting character. But not a movie. Not in the eighties.

The Anti-Establishment Auteurs wanted to remake John Ford movies, but not the way Scorsese and Schrader would do with Taxi Driver and Hardcore. They wanted to remake Fort Apache from the Apaches’ perspective. And in the case of Arthur Penn with Little Big Man, and Ralph Nelson with Soldier Blue, and Robert Aldrich (not post-sixties, hardly a hippie, but absolutely anti-establishment) with Ulzana’s Raid, they did. The reason to do historical pictures in this new climate was to finally examine and demonstrate America’s history of fascism, racism, and hypocrisy. All the elements that Old Hollywood spent fifty years whitewashing in the historical pictures of old.

The Movie Brats, so dubbed because of Michael Pye’s book-length critical study of them, were the first film-school educated generation of young white male directors raised on television, who emerged and ended up defining the decade with their snazzy pop flicks. The movement had as its members, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, John Milius, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader.

The normal classic Hollywood movie sought for the audience to ignore the camera. Better for you to commit to this exercise of wide awake dreaming, if you forget you’re watching a movie. So to emphasize or highlight the camera or camera movement was to call attention to the fact that the audience was watching a movie.

But it’s the Be Black Baby set piece that makes the movie unforgettable. Suffice to say, no scene in a movie will come anywhere near it till thirty years later during the third act of Takashi Miiki’s Audition.