Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

But 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. After the seventies, it seemed film went back to the restraints of the fifties. Back to when controversial novels and plays had to be drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays. As happened with 9½ Weeks, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, First Blood, The Color Purple, White Palace, Stick, Miami Blues, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Okay, what about Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Its open sexuality more or less made it to the screen intact. That meant you can do that kind of thing, didn’t it? Yeah, if you made it dull enough. The Unbearable Boredom of Watching. And if you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes. Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.