The predictably retro poster for Tarantino’s upcoming film, The Hateful Eight, which Tarantino has purported to be shooting on wide, high-resolution 70mm film, boasts a “Super CinemaScope” trademark. It’s not difficult to see why a movie fetishist like Tarantino would prefer the extra-wide aspect ratio, as it’s the frame shape that most calls attention to itself: as an invention in the 1950s made to highlight cinema’s unique properties at a moment when the hopelessly square television format was spellbinding the nation, the dimensions of CinemaScope will forever be linked to the idea of theatrical invention and thus intrinsically a shape for spectacle. As far back as his first film, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has preferred the scope of 2.35:1, using it for all but Jackie Brown. So if Death Proof is all about the outlines and perceptible forms of things, it makes sense that the shape of the screen itself would be as important as everything that goes in it. ![]() But in Death Proof Tarantino is not above placing them into boxes, all the better to get us to see how he’s playing with the labels. There are of course characters-colorful ones, funny ones, vivacious and intelligent ones, nearly all of them women. ![]() Seen this way, without the details and idiosyncrasies of character and environment that define Tarantino’s brand of American cinema, it makes sense for Death Proof to function better in outline than in specifics. Thus the climactic mission of vengeance undertaken by the second group of women becomes as grandiose and cosmic as it is literal: a universal retribution in which Woman slays Man for his continual violence against her. To put it broadly: the first half of the film follows the lengthy stalking and killing of a group of attractive young women at the hands (or more accurately, steering wheel) of a maniac the second involves the revenge meted out upon this same man by an entirely unrelated group of potential female victims, who have no knowledge of the murders we saw in the first part. In my mind’s eye, Death Proof looks like two long, narrow rectangles of near identical length lying side by side. But what may have seemed on first glance like just a feature-length gimmick is perhaps Tarantino’s purest, even most radical film, made up of a complex interplay of gazes and perspective shifts and whose narrative effectively functions as two mirrored halves gazing at one another. Death Proof’s amalgamation of these two types of exploitation movie made a lot of sense in the film’s original context: the film was first released, in a much shorter version, as part of the double-bill experiment Grindhouse, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s attempt to evoke the experience of watching decidedly non-prestige films in sticky-floored theaters during the seventies. Death Proof takes the gear-shredding seventies car chase movie as its starting point, but what it really has on its mind is the even less reputable rape-revenge genre. With Jackie Brown it was Blaxploitation, Kill Bill a kung-fu/yakuza/anime mash-up, Inglourious the World War II action picture, Django the western. As with so many of his films, Death Proof functions as both a winking throwback to and a commentary on the genres and forms it fetishizes. Its oddness-in texture, structure, narrative, and character-may account for its being the lowest-grossing, least discussed, and perhaps most misunderstood work in the director’s oeuvre. Story creates the shape of these films, but Tarantino’s 2007 film Death Proof is all shape and no story. ![]() ![]() It all might sound silly to reduce films to such outlines, but Tarantino is such a precise filmmaker and dedicated storyteller that his elegantly planned out parallels, repetitions, and narrative matches create completely self-contained, preordained, and pleasing shapes. Django Unchained is more amorphous, kind of like one misshapen oval flopped atop another. Inglourious Basterds, told as though a series of at first blush unrelated short stories, is five consecutive, overlapping squares. The Kill Bill saga a rectangular grid, five stories for each of the two films, stacked next to each other. Jackie Brown, with its three converging narratives, is a triangle. His films don’t progress in straight lines, but function as discrete story units that, when placed together, form an unforeseen yet strangely satisfying geometric whole. If you close your eyes and think of a Quentin Tarantino movie, you can practically see its shape.
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