Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip

ArtForum, Summer, 1996 by Howard Hampton

So now that everyone is good and sick of Tarantino, a slew of quickie biographies has appeared to explicate his singularly uninteresting life. As Wensley Clarkson's Shooting from the Hip rather too earnestly attests, the Tarantino mystique's chief allure is for frustrated video-store clerks: he's proof that watching too many movies can be a career track to making your own. While Clarkson's book is utterly clueless about American life and far from authoritative about anything else, on some perverse level it may be (as Clarkson fatuously proclaims) "the most fascinating account of his life you are ever likely to read." Reading between the hype ("the ultimate 20th Century artist": uh-huh), you can make out the source of its subject's cult: a supermarket sweepstakes of high and low cultural totems, a rapt tour of authenticity lost. In this paradise of simulation, Harold Pinter and Welcome Back, Kotter merge to give us Vincent and Jules discoursing upon Big Macs, foot massages, and divine intervention; if the fact that erstwhile sweathog John Travolta later did a TV movie of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter was forgotten by most people, Tarantino surely wasn't one of them.

This form of crypto-pop exotica is doubly enticing to a Brit like Clarkson - England having come down with the most rabid case of Tarantino mania, replete with "Doggies" who dress like the Reservoir Dogs characters and recite the film's lines in Rocky Horror unison with the screen. No wonder the author cruises Tarantino's past like Hugh Grant searching Hollywood Boulevard for the colonialist cheap thrills conjured up by a Divine Brown's name alone. The closest Clarkson comes is Q.T.'s being jailed for $7,000 in unpaid parking tickets in 1989. Reconstructing the episode in a breathless chapter dubbed "The Animal Factory," the author sounds a bit like Bertie Wooster narrating Midnight Express: "Quentin removed his pants and stood there, shivering with a weird combination of fear and genuine cold, aware he was about to undertake a voyage into the unknown depths of society."

Here you catch Clarkson pretending that Tarantino's movies have something to do with experience or real life, when in fact they're ecstatic riffs on movie conventions, gory jokes on audience expectations. Instead of a conventional biography, a far more interesting tack would have been to delve into his psyche via the films that have influenced him. Clarkson helpfully lists a hundred or so of Tarantino's favorites, and they evoke his vision of the world as so many superimposed morphologies, a never-ending series of double features. Cross Stanley Kubrick's The Killing with Ringo Lam's City on Fire and you get Reservoir Dogs; what rough beast might yet slouch from the collision of Magnificent Obsession and Maniac Cop 2? Beyond the currency of hipness (meaningless now that sitcoms like Mad about You crack Leni Riefenstahl jokes, and good ones at that), Tarantino does have a few qualities that set him apart from most of today's "cutting hedge" filmmakers: a true directorial eye, a terrific rapport with actors, a pulse. I doubt he'll ever make a film as immaculately portentous as Safe, but his brand of applied unreality will never be half so antiseptic either.

Howard Hampton writes for Film Comment. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum.