Guns trump social hierarchies in Tarantino’s violence – and we shouldn’t be afraid to revel in it
carnival, n. A season of riotous revelry. (OED)
gratuitous, a. Done without any good ground or reason; uncalled-for. (OED)
Everyone recalls The Bride and her sword in the climax of Kill Bill, in which the blood of Gogo and the Crazy 88s is expertly dispatched around a gymnasium by Uma Thurman. This kind of orgy of violence is central to the Tarantino effect. During a recent screening of The Hateful Eight, my companion and I eagerly anticipated the most gruesome moments. We squealed with pleasure when captive gang member Daisy Domergue sawed off the arm of the corpse she was chained to. The gore doesn’t disappoint in this film, in which Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and companions seek refuge from a blizzard at Minnie’s Haberdashery. All is not as it seems as they gradually realise that this is a plot by Daisy’s gang to attempt to free her.
Like many of us, I have often been troubled by my attraction to director Quentin Tarantino’s excesses. I think of myself as a peace-loving person who doesn’t need gratuitous amounts of blood-spilling to have my movie-candle lit. Tarantino was forced to defend his previous release Django Unchained against what some saw as its exploitation of racial violence, with Spike Lee denouncing its ‘blaxploitation’. By contrast, Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker suggested that the violence in Django is actually a route to the ‘spiritual redemption’ of the characters. Though surely, given the passions stirred in us while watching any Tarantino movie, there must be something deeper happening as we watch.
Violence in popular cinema represents the industry’s struggles to ‘balance…the forces changing society and those controlling it’, as David Slocum wrote in Social Research in 2000. Violence is based on conflicts which drive the narrative, whether these function to cement or to challenge existing cultural ideologies. In Tarantino’s films, though, the dynamics of the conflicts are often subsumed by the dominant spectacle of the bloodshed itself. In an interview with Gerald Peary, Tarantino himself has commented that the work he admires goes ‘beyond gratuity’ and the violence becomes a ‘justification unto itself’. In The Hateful Eight, the black Major shoots to death an old white general after a tense conversation during which they realise that they were on opposite sides of the civil war. Soon enough, we care less about the war than what a chair looks like after someone has been shot whilst sitting in it. A gang member carefully covers up the chair with a cowhide rug, and our intrigue remains diverted from the plot to the cinematic details of the aftermath.
With our attention on the nitty gritty of the violence, the premise of the conflict is the other component in understanding its effect. Tarantino’s conflicts frequently exploit real-life power differentials: in The Hateful Eight, race relations; in Kill Bill, gender (the protagonist’s only identity is as ‘The Bride’, which symbolises the oppressive nature of women’s expected role in society). Tarantino makes explicit the social hierarchies of our environment, which usually operate beneath the surface. Starkly articulated power relations are then subverted by the installation of a crystal clear alternative power code: whoever is holding a weapon has the power. This subversion brings a visceral sense of liberation unique to Tarantino’s filmmaking. We revel in these moments, in which the gore and brutality is fetishised, and the hidden oppressive order of things is turned on its head.
This revelry is reminiscent of the carnival tradition, a season in which, as Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, ‘the jolly relativity of all things is proclaimed’. Think of the carnival king rites: a strong symbol of power from day-to-day life is elevated, exposed, warped and mocked. This brings momentary relief from the tyranny of the social order. The effect can also be found in non-cinematic parts of life: BDSM, or consensual power play, is a kind of carnivalisation of sex. Recent research has demonstrated what its practitioners have known for a long time: that BDSM is associated with improved psychological health. Perhaps research into Tarantino’s movies would demonstrate similar results. Since we are all affected by unacknowledged power dynamics, carnivalisation can bring a sense of community and control to anyone open to it.
Violence becomes gratuitous when it fails to acknowledge the unequal power base of the society it depicts. In the action movie Taken, for instance, sex slavery in Europe is used as a pretext for a story about male heroism (unsurprisingly, of the white, heterosexual, American, middle-class, able-bodied, fertile, married, monogamous, native English-speaking, muscle-bound variety). In what is practically a caricature of the hegemony, a father (Liam Neeson) must save his daughter from Arab slavers. We learn next to nothing about the nature of the girl’s ordeal or the psychological effects of it. The Arabs are two-dimensional incarnations of pure evil. This is just one example of many popular films that use violence to cement and glorify the status quo.
There is, of course, a long tradition in independent and world film – and in Hollywood to some degree – of using violence to explore the experiences of the oppressed, such as in Precious and City of God. These films explore complex power relations by zoning in on the perspective of the disenfranchised. We press on the pain in these movies; we pause and hover over the things that make us uncomfortable. Just as in Tarantino’s movies, hidden power relations are exposed: but here, the synergy we feel with the rest of the audience is one of collective sadness. The exposure of the truth is not pretty, polite or easy. Films that treat power in this way are more likely to be found in arthouse cinemas and festivals for an audience that demands more than pure entertainment.
At the multiplexes, though, the social order is reinforced and glorified on a daily basis. This fact – and not the projectile blood-vomiting or severed noses themselves – is what should make us uncomfortable. Insightful films that dwell on the consequences of the violence tend to have a lesser mass appeal. Quentin Tarantino has found a way around this, and The Hateful Eight encapsulates his expert use of the Hollywood machine. We cannot label his exploded heads and dismembered arms as ‘gratuitous’, since they are combined with underlying power conflicts that are consciously articulated. The exposure of these conflicts and their renegotiation serves to challenge the social order and create a ‘carnival’, attracting the masses and discerning viewers alike. In this way, cinema has found its very own carnival king.
The Hateful Eight will be released on DVD in the UK on 9 May 2016.
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