Note To A Friend On Tarantino’s True Romance (Actually, He Wrote The Screenplay. Tony Scott Directed It)

I started to look at it and as it began I remembered that I’d seen it years ago. Anyway, I watched it again. I didn’t like it much then. And I didn’t like it any more this time. 

I think there’s really good and really bad Tarantino.

Bad Tarantino is essentially marked by a kind of “I’m making something so over the top ridiculous that I’m purposely subverting the very thing I’m making/screenwriting/whatever—wink wink, nod, nod. I wonder who’ll get in on the joke with me.”.

This movie is bad Tarantino. The height of it is the next to last big shoot out scene where almost everyone—at least a dozen—gets killed. A similar scene is Gandolfini bashing the shit out of Patricia Arquette till she incredulously bounces back to kill him. 

I mean in either scene what’s with the caricature violence, so absurd as to be like a Roadrunner cartoon? It’s as if he’s satirizing these kinds of unreal scenes of violence and killing that in other movies are meant to be taken seriously or in cartoons are meant to amuse us.

So is that the point, satire?

Or is he rather just making a live acted cartoon?

I don’t think either.

I don’t think bad Tarantino knows what he’s artistically about.

After all, he isn’t an anti violence-in-film crusader. Just the opposite. He revels in violence in his films; and yet he makes some of these scenes so grossly outsized as to be mind-bogglingly absurd. 

Bad Tarantino, I argue, doesn’t have the guts to make these scenes without winking at us, without detaching himself sufficiently, as if to say, “I’m obviously not serious.” 

I say he can’t have it both ways. He undermines what he wants us to take artistically seriously. That leads to pointlessness and, so, incoherence, artistic bad faith and not a little artistic cowardice.