Tarantino’s Cul-de-sac.

   After 27 years and nine official films does anyone feel sort of betrayed by the cul-de-sac of Tarantino‘s career arc?  When he began his career, the younger version of Tarantino was perpetually fawned over and heralded as the leader of the 1990s independent film rebirth and revolution (for which most of the credit should really go to Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Linklater) and Tarantino’s films have always been excessively gushed over.   Tarantino does know how to make engrossing films, but his screenplays often are like versions of one another in different settings with sometimes a different tempo, different music, a couple of different actors, and so on.  But okay, since most filmlovers drank the Tarantino kool-aid a while back, let me put together a different portrait of a director who probably didn’t need to be as celebrated as Tarantino has been.

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  The relative lack of anything much going on in the narrative of his films outside of fights is often why Tarantino makes up for it with explosions and distracting jokes and heads being blown off and crap like that.  And I guess you could say that his films going nowhere philosophically with rapid-fire dialogue about cheeseburgers and all of his favorite things does kind of match (1) the go-nowhere path of his country of origin, the United States of America, also (2) of Harvey Weinstein, (3) of Hollywood, (4) of style over substance, (5) of the depthless nature of being a celebrity, (6) of vacuous celebrity worship, (7) of the dark side of popular culture, (8) of this generation being a hall of mirrors via online social cliques and alienation, (9) of the pursuit of no real end goal, (10) of Tarantino’s goal of 10 films and done, (11) of Tarantino’s attempt to deify faded actors or any actor at all (who are never gods), (12) of helping Scientologist John Travolta to return from the dead only for John to die again.   But this is not an intentional go-nowhere aesthetic by Tarantino, but a go-nowhere of actually nothing underneath, no depth, no purpose or real abiding vision that will matter decades from now.  And his defenders drink the kool-aid because they love the violence and they could give a shit about implications, giving Tarantino a pass and giving him cover, saying it’s “like a comic book” or “it’s a B-movie”, which is sort of like letting a Wall Street white-collar thief get away with it because “they all do it”.

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  Maybe Tarantino is merely a Trojan horse filled with pig blood.   It’s not entirely clear  … but there’s really not enough proof that he isn’t just a Trojan horse filled with pig blood.    In Tarantino’s limited comic book universe, portraying the Manson family in the new movie as “bad” is stating the obvious, very good guy vs. bad guy in the writing department of the new movie, and most of us are already aware of what happened with Charlie Manson and the runaways living on George Spahn’s ranch.  The latest Tarantino film is just a kind of comic book justice “heroes-always-win-in-the-end” claptrap resolution.   As horrible as what happened to Sharon Tate and the others murdered by the Manson family was, the moments in history of losing innocence are important for a reason, because good guys don’t always win and re-writing it to have a happy ending with good-guy heroes is as dumb as Tarantino’s ending for Django giving the horror of slavery some kind of easy redemption.  Rewriting history to create catharsis needs a surgeon, not a butcher.  Traveling back in time to kill Hitler in his “Inglourious Basterds” film… history’s biggest killers did their irredeemable damage and it is never undone.  Denial is futile.  There was no God to stop it.  Nothing will ever reverse the fact that people were tortured and slaughtered and definitely nor will a low-grade B-movie dolled up to look like a major production.  The amount of money that Tarantino gets from people like Harvey Weinstein for the past 30 years to make movies will not undo history.  Using a fictional device like Tarantino does in this latest movie and in his films about antebellum slavery and World War II works better as a dream sequence, not spinning harebrained fiction from fact.   A better film about actually reflecting the pain of American slavery came out the same year as Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”, the historically accurate and emotionally brutal film “12 Years a Slave”… and it won best picture.

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  Tarantino‘s inability to handle the persistence of the past is tantamount to a tantrum, something to which Tarantino is prone.  Watch almost any of his interviews and you’ll see the same child-throwing-his-ice-cream-on-the-ground reaction.   So Tarantino using this latest film as a time machine back to 1969 to put members of the Manson family to death is kind of like a child who can’t handle the fact that his father is gone or that his older brother died in a car accident.   Tarantino visiting upon history a flexibility so he can simply resurrect Sharon Tate and exact revenge and capital punishment on three members of the Manson brood is Tarantino not being able to accept mortality, even though his films traffic in mortality, albeit a flippant comic-book Hollywood mortality.  Tarantino’s relatively (compared to how he is over-regarded) under-developed intellect and his obsession with comic book-level storytelling, but at the same time being treated as a major filmmaker, is a dilemma that’s been a problem in the film industry since younger Quentin Tarantino came into the field in 1992.  And he has inadvertently contributed to the dumbing-down effect of filmgoers, who still largely expect mayhem and blood and violence and way too much action and really not that much in the department of brains.

 One of the things one tends to get from Tarantino‘s interviews is that there is a boorishness and a crudeness to Tarantino‘s temperament, something resembling the glare and intimidation of over a quarter century in the auspices and the loving embrace of his career-making grand-demon father figure Harvey Weinstein and that kind of fuck-you gangster Weinstein mentality is evidenced by the increasing misanthropy and misogyny on full display in Tarantino‘s films, peaking maybe in the brutal and ugly hanging at the end of “The Hateful Eight”, along with a healthy dose of tongue-lolling while hanging from a noose from the only female character in that film.  So Tarantino now trying to redeem himself in this latest movie of his by going God-like in his own mind into 1969 to let Sharon Tate live again is a page, perhaps, out of Richard Linklater’s alternate reality theory of his seminal indie film “Slacker” in 1991, that all threads in time and space exist in one form or another.  But Tarantino is not delicate or adept at the metaphysical acrobatics the way Linklater is.

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 It is strange that Tarantino’s films are the ones turned into Hollywood events, because if you look at Richard Linklater’s impressive artistic development from “Slacker” onward, for the sake of parallel careers and seeing the growth of an artist in the public eye, both filmmakers give us a lot to talk about, but Tarantino’s drivel tends to be pretty forgettable, ultimately, where Linklater’s dialogue is very evocative and resonant decades later.   To be fair, one of the other celebrated directors of that era was also “El Mariachi”‘s director Robert Rodriguez, a close friend of Tarantino’s, and he developed even less than Tarantino, as an artist, Rodriguez’s films normally even more exclusively devoted to blood-spilling and destruction.   But the blossoming of directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Linklater, Soderbergh, and Jim Jarmusch (and a few others) is one of the details of how Tarantino being spoiled and doted on far too much by master-rapist Harvey Weinstein arrested Tarantino‘s development as an artist, kept him from doing more and better rewrites on his screenplays, screenplays that tended to sound too much alike, and the lack of rewriting is why Tarantino’s films often have long aimless lulls in the middle.   You could say that Tarantino’s films are kind of how James Cameron films used to be regarded as events, for some reason (mostly because Cameron sucked up all the oxygen, money, and any other available resource for his cinematic turkeys), but culturally, as with Tarantino, James Cameron films have become sort of insignificant and disposable, no real value other than eye candy and vicarious adrenalized releases for two or more hours.

  As Tarantino seems to have drifted through many failed romantic relationships in his personal life and spent a good deal of his life as one of the very closest friends of Harvey Weinstein, Weinstein clearly being Tarantino’s main enforcer and protector, benefactor, financier, and surrogate father/godfather/uncle, you can see from his actions, films, and interviews how warped and arrested Tarantino’s worldview remained.  Weinstein himself called his relationship with Tarantino “the best marriage I have ever had”.  Linklater, on the other hand, without a sugar daddy holding his hand, grew by quantum leaps as a filmmaker, as did Paul Thomas Anderson.  Outside of their films, Linklater and Anderson are not as ethically warped as Tarantino or as surly as Tarantino is.   Tarantino’s pissy attitude is noticeable primarily in interviews.   Tarantino seems stunted as an artist having the same violent tantrums in his films, the same tantrums in interviews with journalists who challenge his films, the same Tarantino-talks-to-Tarantino-about-life dialogue in his films, dialogue sometimes seemingly lifted from an Elmore Leonard novel, literally in the case of the adaptation of “Jackie Brown” (1997) from Elmore Leonard’s “Rum Punch” (1992).

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   In Tarantino‘s latest film, the notion that the Manson family and their murders represented the loss of innocence in Hollywood and/or represented a turning point in Hollywood history or anywhere else is completely false and badly narrow-minded, if one looks even one year prior:   1968 … Robert Kennedy was killed, Martin Luther King was killed, and the ‘68 DNC in Chicago was a bloody disaster of police brutality.  Or we can talk about the assassination of  Medgar Evers and JFK in 1963 and Malcolm X in ‘65 or the insane bloodlust of the Vietnam disaster that started unofficially in the early ‘60’s and lasted officially until 1975.  Cities burning and raging across the United States.  And Hollywood was declining as soon as television became normal in every home, long before the Manson family went blood-red.  Hollywood itself was never an ideal place or fair to most of its inhabitants, the Los Angeles dream machine spinning illusions at a rate that kept pace with the equally false political sleight of hand, both lying shamelessly about something manufactured out of whole cloth called the “American Dream”.  There was never anything remotely resembling innocence in Hollywood and throughout Los Angeles county.

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 Saving Sharon Tate via a shallow and superficial film device accomplishes only another protective and self-serving fetish for Quentin Tarantino and he is mainly indulging in an insecure male savior-complex exercise of thinking he is saving a Hollywood angel, Sharon Tate, from the demon Charles Manson.  But really, psychologically, this is only Tarantino trying to make up for the misogyny that he has directed at women in his recent films and our memories aren’t so short from a couple years ago that we don’t remember that Uma Thurman herself disavowed Tarantino and his shallow feminism from “Kill Bill” in 2016, during the year of the exposure of Tarantino‘s godfather Harvey Weinstein as one of the main culprits in the rape culture and crushing career abuse that Weinstein exacted on anyone and everyone, and there were many of those anyones.   Tarantino himself seems to have done a very good job of disappearing the writer Roger Avary, who co-wrote “Pulp Fiction” with Tarantino and shared the Oscar with Tarantino when the Oscars were handed out the following year, and years later, decades after their falling out, Avary now seems like was one of the main reasons that “Pulp Fiction” was much better written than all of Tarantino‘s other efforts.

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 In terms of being an entitled and spoiled beneficiary of Harvey Weinstein‘s crushing blows to the careers of many others in favor of Tarantino‘s, Tarantino’s entitlement issue is much more on display in his latest movie.  More than just running to defend Sharon Tate’s honor,  this Hollywood film is also Tarantino saying “How dare anyone, especially a nobody, kill a presumed future member of Hollywood royalty and then become somebody more famous than Tate”, as Manson did, because Tarantino very much loves being Hollywood royalty now, even though he is nouveau royalty even after 30 years (no one else has been as large of an asshole, if one were able to measure those depths).   This new movie feels more like Tarantino at a restaurant saying to a busboy who asks him a personal question “How dare you talk to me” and a lot like Weinstein‘s abuses and liberties taken.  Tarantino wants there to be a pecking order and an immortal royalty, a God-given chosen selection of special important VIP people.   That’s why his films are always so reverent of the star machinery itself and of himself.  And is also why Tarantino is always obviously trotting out the music he listens to and the films he watches and was influenced by and the people that he hangs out with.     But people tend to buy the Tarantino schtick hook, line, and sinker also because most other films ejaculated out of Hollywood are so god-awful and even more shallow:   Disney pabulum, Star Wars and Marvel hot dog-adjacent garbage, the artistic nutritional equivalent of beer-battered fried beef rinds or ranch dressing.   But the shallowness of pop culture is infectious to some, colors and lights pop in people’s eyes, a whole generation now having grown up with screens in their face most of the day, a generation completely plugged into the matrix and loving it.  So, to them and a lot of the population, a film like Tarantino‘s is almost like high culture.   Seeing a Tarantino orgasm on screen, they feel like they’ve used their brains more than usual …and that expenditure of brain cells sort of feels like depth sometimes.

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 What Tarantino has accomplished by his flaws and via his excellent technical ability with film illusions is a kind of dialogue from Tarantino that always feels more like a monologue.   And Tarantino snipping at critics often has a flavor of his not being happy or satisfied that his wildest dream of becoming a powerful Hollywood player came true, absolutely everything in life he ever wanted – Hollywood supremacy is his, final cut, the last word in whatever he wants to say through the characters and stories.  Even with all that, one rarely sees other directors getting as offended or as surly as Tarantino for having a moment in one of his films challenged or criticized with a fair question in a Q&A after a screening.

 But Tarantino‘s self-aggrandizement and the obviously sensationalized adrenaline rush of his films, a lot like the cover of the New York Post or the New York Daily News, the dialogue which then drops into the background after a film, ceding to his yammering angrily in interviews like Donnie Trump, and it seems that somehow, to Tarantino, journalists are the enemy for daring to challenge him or his beloved surrogate father and main patron Harvey Weinstein.  So when the blowback occurred of Weinstein finally getting what he deserved and getting arrested for rape, Tarantino responded by acting like he’s a champion of all women.  Then, in Quentin’s very next film, Quentin rushes to save Sharon Tate from one of the most horrible murders in modern history, trying to set himself up to be immune from criticism, attaching himself to a character for whom everyone feels sympathy in Sharon Tate.  As a piece of history, it was an obvious choice for Tarantino, but would’ve been much better handled by a more capable artist.   Tarantino seems to like to go big and obvious with his historical projects:   World War II, American slavery, and Charles Manson.   But a lot of it, especially his new movie, appears to be in the category of Tarantino manipulating the perception of himself, something Harvey Weinstein himself taught Tarantino to do, manipulate the PR to one’s advantage.  Tarantino uses his new film to try to shield himself from the Weinstein rape blowback and the collateral damage… and somewhat successfully so far.

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  Momentarily saving Sharon Tate from history’s permanence accomplishes only a small reprieve for Tarantino, even though he’s now again catapulted himself back into the gullible audience’s good graces, back in the territory of being an untouchable by having had a financially successful film and a big opening weekend that impresses studio executives, with this latest emission.  This only lasts because of audiences buying tickets.

But if you look at someone like David Lynch, who has already devoted most of his best work to the theme of salvation, alternate realities, archangel time travelers (agent Cooper), and has handled it in a way that was much deeper and more enlightened than anything Tarantino has approached, it puts it in a clearer perspective.  Lynch seems to put a marker on the “loss of innocence” in America (that Tarantino sees marked at the Manson murders) somewhere closer to the nukes being unleashed in 1945.   Both directors seem, like a lot of artists, concerned with the theme of how salvation can be achieved.   Lynch is much better at reflecting the core values and the ugly history of Hollywood decadence and tragic illusions in a film like “Mulholland Drive”, not a worshipful rewriting of history like this drunken, weaving, and lazy Tarantino Hollywood fantasy tale, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”.  Both directors are mistaken if they think life in America or anywhere else in the world was ever really that ideal or innocent.

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  More should be said of Tarantino‘s foremost film world bestie and longtime godfather, Harvey Weinstein, who finally fell into that beckoning pit of comeuppance, ignominy, and perdition.  Tarantino, only now that it’s well-past time, is acting like the contrite son with some calculated media spin and unfortunately predictable deflection to separate himself from Weinstein’s fall.  Rather than doing anything outside of the usual damage-control rhetoric, like establishing a foundation for women in film or some other substantial and major commitment of some kind,  Tarantino is now claiming that he was victimized somehow by Weinstein.   His latest stunt and distraction to look like a victim is his new claim that Weinstein owes him $5 million dollars.  Tarantino also seems to be doubling down artistically with this new movie, rather than trying to show another more human and compassionate side.   One of the lessons of Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s agent Cooper character is that when violence is unleashed it is not redeemed and it can never be redeemed or reversed, it simply isn’t undone, and when someone has suffered badly they can never unsuffer.  So Tarantino trying to write or direct his way out of his being an accessory to Weinstein’s crimes rings really very hollow, especially by trying so hard to show how much he supposedly cares about Sharon Tate.   Tarantino’s attempt to wax emotional about Tate seems entirely contrived and designed as an attempt to send a feminist message, but it fizzles coming from the guy who shielded Harvey Weinstein’s crimes for over two decades.  (And seriously…?  By sending a failing actor and a stuntman in his latest film, both men no less, to be the heroes?  If he only really responds via his art, Tarantino is digging himself an even deeper, darker hole.)

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  The reason that Tarantino‘s celebration of violence is so dumb and doesn’t just artistically reflect human behavior to prove a point is the same reason something like pro wrestling or mixed martial arts are so damn dumb – it’s because we don’t have time for it anymore.  It’s that the human race has reached the point where the base instincts of violence and primordial impulses can’t be coddled anymore with excuses or through any other kind of justification, whether that excuse becomes calling it “entertainment” or “a good film” or any other mediocre bullshit excuse like “I just needed to let off a little steam” or “lighten up“ or “my dad loved boxing”.    “Just a movie” is one of the ultimate bullshit excuses.   The vast majority of the world and the United States gets a lot of its influence from movies and also a lot of its information.  And these Hollywood films definitely aren’t “just movies” anymore, they are not just passing entertainments, a lot of people having their entire psyches shaped by these films and TV shows.   Tarantino has never really fully understood or grasped the importance of this, or just conveniently dismisses it, and it shows in his films, but he was always in the position to understand it and he chose not to and chose to deflect instead.   And that has made him even more dangerous in terms of the effects of his films and the glamorizing effect of his polishing bloody turds, and also how many critics and viewers treat his films like important events.   Tarantino films stopped having any depth pretty much right after he dismissed Roger Avary, the fantastic and essential co-writer of Pulp Fiction.   Tarantino did also attempt to take full credit for the writing of “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, which Avary fortunately prevented.  But sadly, most people don’t think of Roger Avary when Pulp Fiction is mentioned now.

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  In terms of destroying careers and the effect of Harvey Weinstein and blacklisting people in the film industry, director Peter Jackson has recently made a full admission that he followed orders and blacklisted actors like Rosanna Arquette and Mira Sorvino at the request of Harvey Weinstein, so one can easily do the math on how Tarantino may likely have destroyed the career of people like Roger Avary and probably others.   Now is the time to again speculate about that kind of horrific crap.   But instead, people are creaming all over a new Tarantino film, as normally happens when the PR ramps up, and film audiences look the other way for the sake of watching Tarantino’s indulgent films guilt-free, and audiences are myopically celebrating his career again.

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 Some critics have put Tarantino under the microscope, but they don’t often like putting it in print because people are afraid of Tarantino, just like they were afraid of Weinstein … and that’s exactly why Weinstein was able to stay in power another 20 years in the independent film world after everyone already knew he was a rapist and a pig and a bully, rather than removing him for being an unfit person who crushed other people’s dreams to benefit and enrich himself.    The same way that the excessive showering of attention and wealth on Tarantino by Weinstein took resources and attention away from other better filmmakers that deserved far more financing and attention.   But Tarantino and Weinstein, both being the same variety of self-immersed asshole, enjoyed each other‘s company so much that the relationship remained intact for 25 years and was only reluctantly pulled apart by force a couple of years ago due to the persistent and inescapable rape charges surrounding Weinstein.   Tarantino distanced himself because it was convenient for himself to do so (and untenable to not) and because everyone else had abandoned the toxicity of Weinstein.   The DNA of those kinds of gangster motivations is written into most of Tarantino’s screenplays, but played out in real life with the long-standing and very dear friendship between Tarantino and Weinstein.

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  Richard Brody of New Yorker magazine did excoriate Tarantino and a lot of what Tarantino‘s new film represents and there are other critics who have also been good at putting Tarantino under the microscope, rather than worshiping Tarantino’s every move, unlike many undiscerning critics and many lazy filmgoers in it for a quick fix, a quick high, another mainline dose of Tarantino junk.   For a lot of them, Tarantino became a restaurant in a good location, kind of like bar food when you’re drunk.  Or a great drug dealer.

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   We’re at a point in time where people have to see these things for themselves.   I personally don’t expect filmgoers to change their habits because the film world has continued to degenerate into a focus on action and blood, on the small screen also, and vocabularies have been diminished via social media and smartphone culture, intelligence dropping.    The new Tarantino film is technically and stylistically very well-made and that is part of the main seduction of Tarantino, so people are under the impression that they are getting a masterpiece by an auteur.  But what they’re really getting is Tarantino’s adrenalized and masculinized films that have the same basic effect as Stallone or Schwarzenegger’s films did in the 1980s, where stylizing and reflecting violence is justified, except the ’80s crap is so dumb that it was taken less seriously, whereas with Tarantino films he poses as an intellectual to gullible liberal audiences, his main demographic, and other audiences, who buy it, eat it in heaping portions, and wallow in the rush of his violent and graphic adolescent displays of gratuitous horseshit.   The testosterone intoxication of Harvey Weinstein’s monster (QT) is very much like what audiences expected from a Steven Seagal film, circa late ‘80s.   Tarantino‘s accomplishments are really much closer to a kid showing off in the Camaro his dad bought him, peeling out of a parking lot.  Tarantino’s relatively good taste in music and production design aesthetics does make his films seem like they are more than they really are, but when broken down and deconstructed there’s a resounding hollowness.   All this is evidenced in Tarantino’s intellectual vapidity, his using the new film to reinforce the death penalty, his addiction to violence, his reliance on stylized coolness in pop culture to deflect criticism and closer scrutiny, his posing as a B-movie guy to justify creative laziness and his superficial dialogue and sloppy narrative choices,  the classism and racism built into his treatment of characters, and, of course, his inability and unwillingness  to properly address all of these intellectual queries in interviews with legitimate journalists asking him fair questions, journalists who are too often willing to give him free time to promote his films, because … he’s Quentin Tarantino.

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  One of the main flaws of people are overlooking in his latest movie is that the centerpiece of the film is saving Sharon Tate, but in the context of his career in association with Harvey Weinstein, it does still appear strictly as a weak apology, more rhetoric to shield himself from blame, and even as such you only have to look at the misogyny in his previous movie “The Hateful Eight”, the last film he made under Harvey Weinstein‘s auspices to see what Tarantino really thinks.  And you can also look at what Tarantino does to the two women at the end of his latest movie and how badly they are brutalized, even compared to the death of the male character Tex Watson in the same scene.  Tarantino’s misogyny can’t help but express itself.   And his films are pretty heavily populated and dominated by male characters, as female characters are often more an expression of the apologist side of himself or the side of himself that always wanted to appear more evolved or progressive than he actually is.  Or the female characters are just casually hyper-masculinized, as Uma Thurman was in “Kill Bill”.

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 Tarantino is now at the point in an artist’s career when you can make more of an assessment of how profound of an impact said artist has made and have they been truly insurgent or has it been primarily sales?  His only significant film with any depth since “Pulp Fiction” is “Inglourious Basterds”.

 Most of his films are riddled with undiagnosed misogyny, casual racism, and inherent misanthropy, as I have hammered home.    Tarantino films at this point tend to be vanity pictures that cater to his own insecurities and his own need to burnish his legacy and his reputation, so he uses the best actors, the best cinematographers, the best production team money can buy, all with few budgetary constraints… but there’s nothing really that new in the chamber with a Tarantino film anymore (some might argue “ever”, as his films are extremely derivative) and his last film that was truly independent and did not have vast sums of money available was “Reservoir Dogs”, made almost 30 years ago.

 Miramax was owned during its “Pulp Fiction” heyday by Disney and the Weinstein brothers were hardly an independent outfit since they had all the money in the world at their disposal and Harvey Weinstein was only taken down due to serious criminal charges, even despite Weinstein‘s very close relationships with Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton and … fill in the blank with anyone else campaigning that year.

 (Obama‘s daughter Malia interned at the Weinstein company in her year off before college and was there at Harvey’s company only weeks before the rape charges against Harvey surfaced.  Weinstein was a longtime Democratic supporter and donor and Michelle Obama always spoke very highly of Weinstein, at one point in 2013, calling him “a wonderful human being, a good friend, and just a powerhouse.”)

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So again, um… you don’t see an apology to Weinstein’s victims anywhere at the beginning or even in the end credits of Tarantino‘s latest film do you?

Or are a portion of the film’s profits being committed to protecting women in the film industry and elsewhere?

But people keep making excuses for him.   Some of his fans will boycott Woody Allen and Roman Polanski based on stuff that’s less proven and less toxic than Harvey Weinstein, but every time they watch “Pulp Fiction” or “Reservoir Dogs” or “Kill Bill” or “Inglourious Basterds” Harvey Weinstein gets paid again.

                         Weinstein, Michael Madsen, & Tarantino.

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