How Quentin Tarantino’s Self-Mythologizing Began
‘Pulp Fiction’ at 30.
LAST WEEK, THE TRADES reported that Quentin Tarantino had abandoned his plans to make The Movie Critic. The movie, as it had been described in earlier reports, sounded interesting, and I, like many others, had been looking forward to it. But movies that have been publicly announced end up not being made for one reason or another all the time. Tarantino’s own career is littered with unrealized projects (Killer Crow, Kill Bill: Vol. 3, etc.), but The Movie Critic would have been, according to the ten-movie-limit Tarantino has imposed on his filmography, his tenth, and therefore last, picture. And since we now know it won’t be The Movie Critic, fans are left wondering what the final Tarantino movie will be. Many fans are also going the route of psychoanalyzing Tarantino, assuming that the director, having put a specific endpoint to his filmmaking career, is psyching himself out as he pursues what in his mind has to be the perfect Last Movie.
I myself am pretty dubious about trying to read the mind of a director based on a few news stories in industry publications. As I said, movies don’t get made constantly, and only Tarantino knows why this particular one isn’t getting made. But to be fair, he has brought this kind of backseat psychology on himself. The idea of walking away from filmmaking in favor of maintaining a perfect ten-film body of work seems ludicrous, especially if, as I do, you see filmmaking as something Tarantino was clearly born to do. Still, it’s a self-mythologizing idea, the sort of thinking that Tarantino—more of a public figure than movie directors tend to be—has made a major part of his career. His argument has always been that he doesn’t want to find himself an old man making weak movies that are mere shadows of past glories; he’s said that he doesn’t want to end up like Billy Wilder, making Buddy Buddy at 75. Having seen Buddy Buddy, I can’t blame Tarantino for wanting to avoid that specific fate. However, this thinking not only presumes certain things about his own work (I’m an unapologetic fan of Tarantino’s films, but even I can see imperfections in that supposedly perfect filmography), it also presumes that the older a director gets, the worse their films become. Martin Scorsese refutes this theory, and he has a lot of company. Tarantino, for whatever reason, imagines he’ll only get worse if he doesn’t stop soon, which is a strange way for someone as famously cocky as he is to go about his work.
All of this is only accentuated by the fact that 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Tarantino’s most famous and most influential film. After the eyebrow-raising success and storytelling ingenuity of his first movie, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Tarantino blew apart the film world just two years later with his sophomore picture, Pulp Fiction. The “difficult second album” is supposed to be, well, difficult, and while on paper everything about Pulp Fiction—its ambition, its headline-making cast (John Travolta is back!), its unique mix of humor, violence, and even spirituality—suggested Tarantino’s ego had led him to fly too close to the sun, worries were assuaged after actually seeing the movie.
Doubts dissipated in the first several minutes, when Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer’s diner conversation about how best to safely and successfully continue their lives as armed robbers changes from theoretical to active. They both leap from their chairs, pulling guns on everyone in the crowded diner, and the shot of Roth and Plummer freeze-frames during Plummer’s crazed threat of violence, and then Dick Dale’s blasting guitar kicks in as his version of “Misirlou” heralds the film’s opening credits. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Pulp Fiction, but that opening, and that freeze-frame, and that music, comprise what is still, to me, one of the most bracing, exciting, energizing film moments of my lifetime. Seeing Pulp Fiction for the first time in the theater, after that bit I was ready and willing to follow Tarantino absolutely anywhere.
AND PULP FICTION WAS OFF LIKE A ROCKET. It premiered in competition at Cannes, where it went on to win the Palme d’Or. Though technically an independent film, Pulp Fiction had, among other things, some Danny DeVito money behind it, not to mention the exciting idea of a renaissance for John Travolta, and a costarring part for genuine superstar Bruce Willis. Being beloved by critics and festival attendees was just the beginning. There’s a strong case for describing it as the most influential American film made after 1990. If only the imitators were as good as Pulp Fiction; unfortunately, what we mostly got was one uninspired knockoff after another (though some good filmmakers did find a place in the aftermath simply by virtue of Tarantino having shown that neo-noir was a commercially viable genre). Films like The Boondock Saints (an easy target here, but only because it’s so bad) and Two Days in the Valley elevated being flippantly and thoughtlessly “cool” as some kind of genuine aesthetic, rather than the empty posturing it is. The irony here being that the worst of these knockoffs bore virtually no resemblance to Tarantino’s style, let alone his seriousness of purpose. Lesser filmmakers wanted the glory without doing the work.
After Pulp Fiction and its follow-up Jackie Brown (1997), Tarantino’s filmmaking began to change. A broader, flashier, more visually aggressive, and even much bloodier style took over in films like the Kill Bill movies and Django Unchained. It seemed that he’d left behind the comparatively subtler, sunlit style of his early films. He’s made some excellent movies since then, but I can’t help but feel somewhat nostalgic for his Pulp Fiction era; it wasn’t precisely realistic, but it took place in a reality recognizably our own. I am particularly thinking of moments like the shot of Bruce Willis trying to sneak up to his own apartment, knowing that gangsters are looking for him, and if they find him no good will come of it. Tarantino, who moved to Los Angeles from Tennessee at an early age, clearly considers the Hollywood side of that city to be a part of him, and he a part of it, and in this tracking shot that follows Willis, we see playgrounds overgrown with dry brown weeds, dumpsters, grubby apartment buildings and their dull brown courtyards. Not the glamorous L.A. that many L.A.-set films would have you believe is all there is to the city. Tarantino’s wild stories told in these real places are what we were all originally drawn to. Crazy violence and mad coincidences appearing to be everyday occurrences, so humdrum was the landscape that surrounded them.
The knockoffs also misunderstood the genius of Tarantino’s nested storylines and his affinity for the dingier side of things, and Tarantino undoubtedly bristled at some of the comparisons even as he gloried in earning adjectival status: Tarantinoesque. His ego hadn’t led him to disaster (and still hasn’t), but he knew he was good. His pride, not misplaced, in his own talents made him realize that his dream of being a major and renowned film director, whose place in cinema history was secure even if he never made another movie, must have led to his decision to limit himself to just ten films.
I don’t think people are wrong to guess that Tarantino is afraid of screwing up: He wants to be perfect, and by imposing that limit, he’s making his dream of a “perfect” filmography seem achievable. There are other legendary directors whose filmographies are similarly short, of course, but they weren’t deliberately planned that way. Tarantino’s hero Sergio Leone, for example, died with eight films done but various projects in planning stages. And while Stanley Kubrick, whom Tarantino has denied having any affinity for anyway, pursued his own brand of perfection, this tended to block him, and he wound up making just five films between 1970 and his death in 1999. Tarantino, to my knowledge, is the only artist, in any medium, who sees their collected works as being compact by design.
Tarantino long ago bought into his own hype, and I haven’t minded one bit. He has the kind of power and money now that he didn’t have in 1994. He’s become a grand figure, and his films now suit that grandeur. But there’s something about having limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, that can really kick one’s artistry into the next gear.
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