Spaghetti Psychotti

# 64

   Quentin Tarantino may come across in interviews as a tiresome egoist[i], but he did at least have the good grace and self-deprecating good humour to blow himself to pieces in his latest movie - Django Unchained. After the explosion, not even a pair of smoking boots remains to mark the passing of whichever anonymous employee of the “LeQuint Dickey Mining Company” he had chosen to play. As an actor he looked awkward and chose to speak his lines using an uncomfortable South African accent. But then, in a Tarantino movie, you can be sure that everything will turn out to mean something.

   ‘Performance’ is one of his most important and recurring themes. He requires his characters to show awareness that they are putting on an act. Similarly with costumes; hats and coats, boots and cloaks are taken up and thrown aside whenever roles change. Django’s wardrobe progresses from leg-irons and chains to the stylish apparel of a 1960s TV cowboy/gunfighter via foppish eighteenth century page-boy/valet. The tension in the final act really starts to build after Schultz has insisted that Django must ‘stay in character’ (as a slave-trader) during their negotiations with Candie and his lawyer.

   Tarantino makes interesting films but he is not a student of history – unless, that is, the history on offer is confined to ‘movie history’. When it comes to old movies, TV thrillers and grainy horse-operas, Quentin’s your man. For all I know, Django offers the astute cinéaste quotations and homages in every second frame. All other history Tarantino treats as one vast Lucky Dip into which he can plunge his hands and pluck out whatsoever he pleases. These random jewels and scabrous curios are confected into a boldly original, defiantly fictitious narrative - regardless of context, chronology and all that boring ‘authenticity’ stuff.

    Tarantino directed Django Unchained from his own screenplay. His starting point was, very obviously, the 1970s Spaghetti Westerns made by Sergio Leone and others of his ilk. He borrowed freely from TV westerns such as Bonanza and various ‘blaxploitation’ movies from the same period. Fellow director Spike Lee complains that Django Unchained disrespects his ancestors: “Slavery was not a spaghetti western… It was a holocaust.” His criticism is justified but pointless; Tarantino doesn’t even bother to get the correct date for the start of the Civil War. In manners and appearance, he modelled Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (Calvin Candie) on Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind. We can probably assume that Spike found that – albeit more genteel – epic no less disrespectful to his ancestors than Django Unchained; just differently and more quietly so.

   Tarantino is very clear that racism, apartheid and slavery produce damaged people. The victims are harmed but so too are the perpetrators. In Django, the slaves are branded and scarred both physically and mentally. The racists are diminished and rendered psychotic by their unconstrained power. They are also opened to ridicule; a posse of proto-Klansmen are hampered by wrongly spaced eyeholes in the bags worn over their fat heads. A truly interesting crossover character is Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Plainly, he sided long ago with Calvin Candie and now appears to be his devoted butler, almost as if they were co-habiting at the Mississippi branch of Downton Abbey. But the collaboration turns out to be deeply sinister and Stephen’s crippled leg an affectation, symbolic of his moral turpitude. Finally, Django declines to shoot him outright, electing to wound Stephen – properly this time - and in both knees for good measure.

   If the history Tarantino uses is fantasy, so too is the violence – which he wrongly describes as “cathartic”. His exaggerated depiction of violence is not ‘cleansing’, ‘purifying’ nor even ‘purgative’. It is more like punctuation, but punctuation applied to the typescript using a sledge-hammer. Dramatically, the periodic bouts of extremely graphic bloodshed fulfil a role not unlike that of the chorus in a Greek drama; supplying a grotesque commentary on the themes of the action and moving the story along. There is blood on the cotton fields and blood on the décor of Candyland. The fuse that will ignite the final explosion is nailed through the gore right into the architecture of Calvin Candie’s fanciful mansion.

   Tarantino’s violence is visually and acoustically enhanced beyond reality. Cumulatively, it degenerates into a tasteless extravagance. The audience at Streatham Odeon soon became immune to the sound of gunfire and the sight of gunshot wounds. Their most frequent response gradually became laughter rather than horror. The black teenagers in front of me enjoyed Django’s use of a snowman for target practice. They loved his laconic aside to the bounty hunting Dr Schultz, “You kill white folks - and they pay you for it? What’s not to like?”

   Only two episodes of violence shut us all up. One involved men fighting to the death as entertainment for a plantation owner. The other was a runaway slave torn to pieces by hunting dogs. They didn’t laugh at that; but they recovered soon enough to roar again throughout the climactic gunfights. Some of the laughter may have been of the ‘nervous’ variety but, I confess, it was difficult not to LoL when Django ordered the housemaids to “Say goodbye to Miss Lara,” moments before an obvious mannequin of that repulsive character hurtled backwards into oblivion, plucked from this life by a powerful bungee cord.

   The suave Dr Schultz (played by Christoph Waltz) embodies the new contradictions shortly to overwhelm the barbarism of the antebellum South. Cool, articulate and resourceful, he cannot bear to hear Beethoven played for the master of Candyland and is eventually doomed by a fastidious refusal to shake Candie’s hand. Schultz unerringly applies the pure rationale of capitalism. He used to be a dentist, now he makes a better return by shooting people for money. His “flesh for cash” business is outrageous by any civilised standards, but his logic is the wave of the future.  He first appears as a single point of light, coming to us out of the darkness. Objectively, Schultz has to be barking mad. How else would we describe a well-mannered but loquacious German dentist who tours the frontier, seeking dangerous outlaws and killing them on sight? But, as the story unfolds, Schultz and his distinctive little wagon, with a wobbly tooth on its roof, come to embody sanity and reason when compared to the psychopaths and simple-minded rednecks they encounter.

      By making him German, Tarantino sets Schultz and his business-model apart from the racism of the white American characters. We know (but are not told) that the pre-industrial bondage of slavery will eventually be replaced by the cash-nexus. Freed slaves, finding they have nothing to sell but their labour, will enter into a new servitude; this time under contract and therefore without visible chains. In subtle anticipation, Tarantino makes Schultz’s very survival depend on paperwork. Threatened by imminent mayhem, he calmly declares, upholds and enforces a genuine reverence for pieces of paper. A poster stating 'WANTED - Dead or Alive', a hand-written court order signed by a far-away judge and a Bill of Sale are respected by all and held sacrosanct. Yet a distant, anonymous, figure innocently ploughing his field out of virgin prairie, with his child running ahead of him, can be shot dead without remorse, justification or consequence. In America, they call it ‘The Heartland’; God alone knows why. It’s Django un-hinged more than un-chained …only “The ‘D’ is silent.”

What’s not to like?

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[i] See interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News, 10 January 2013. QT: “I’m here to sell my movie…I’m shutting your butt down.”

All at sea with Richard Parker

# 63

   In Ang Lee’s film of The Life of Pi[1], a writer (Rafe Spall) has journeyed to Canada from India on the promise of a story that will make him believe in God. In Montreal the grown-up Pi Patel, now a philosophy don, tells him two biographical stories and suggests he choose whichever he prefers.  The stories are similar but mutually exclusive; they cannot both be true. It is possible that neither is entirely true and that neither is entirely fiction. Pi[2] is our exclusive source for both stories. He emerges from both as the sole primate to have survived the sinking of a Japanese ship whose cargo resembled that of Noah’s Ark. In the subsidiary version, as the ship capsizes at night during a terrible storm, Pi is initially joined in the lifeboat by his mother, by a Buddhist sailor with a broken leg and by the ship’s cook. In the principal version we have Pi in the same lifeboat along with a zebra (also with a broken leg), a spotted hyena, a female orang-utan and a Bengal tiger (oh, and a rat). In this tale, the hyena kills both the zebra and the orang-utan before himself being killed (and eaten – along with the rat) by the tiger. Strangely, for all this carnage and for all the movie’s attention to detail, no bones, animal hides nor any faecal matter are ever seen in the lifeboat. Pi and the tiger do try pissing at each other at one point, but that is just because Pi is experimenting with ways to demarcate his territory.

 

Pi on the raft, Richard Parker in the lifeboat

   Eventually, Pi and the tiger reach the shore of Mexico having survived each other and the Pacific Ocean for 227 days[3]. In the purely anthropic version, the Buddhist sailor replaces the zebra, Pi’s mother doubles for the orang-utan and the cook’s actions are those of a hyena. The cook’s cannibalistic depredations drive Pi’s wilder self to imitate the actions of a Bengal tiger…Thus raising, in my mind at least, the possibility of an alternative ending in which it is Pi, alone, who finally walks into the Mexican jungle without a backward glance to the lifeboat.

   The Writer decides he prefers the version in which Pi manages, eventually, to co-exist in the lifeboat with the tiger. Chosen, he says, because “it is the better story.”

  “And so it goes with God,” agrees Pi without further elaboration. The assumption being, I suppose, that God at one time selected the best available stories as the basis for the various religions sampled by Pi in his youth; Hinduism, Catholic Christianity and Islam. Certainly, the story told by Pi shares with all religions that central requirement for us to believe in the unbelievable.  A smart choice by the Writer (and by God), you might think, given that the telling of Pi’s tiger story has by now consumed ninety percent of the CGI budget and filled the previous hour (or more) of screen-time. Visually, the cannibalistic, anthropocentric alternative is totally ignored. It seems only to have been offered by Pi, in desperation, when the ship-wreck investigators seemed less than convinced his ‘boy more-or-less tames tiger’ explanation.

   Throwing together a disparate group of travellers is a narrative device as old as the hills. In the movies, John Ford used it in Stagecoach (1939) and, a little closer to Pi, Alfred Hitchcock plunged-in with Lifeboat (1944). Assembled at random, travellers flung by the fates from a doomed ship into an open boat are unlikely to settle into a happy band of brothers and sisters, are they? When the dramatist adds to the natural perils of storm, thirst and imminent starvation, the human imperatives for greed, individual survival and social domination - an entirely happy outcome becomes distinctly unlikely. And so it nearly goes with Pi and Richard Parker[4] until, that is, Pi’s boundless ingenuity conditions the tiger’s behaviour and moderates his predatory instincts. The unique dramatic problem Ang Lee had to solve was how to sustain the narrative when there are only two characters on the screen, they are confined to an open boat (or nearby raft), and one of them doesn’t speak. His solution was twofold. The older Pi’s voice-over was added to explain the sequence of events and the power of 3D cinematography supplied all the visual interest and enhanced all the drama.

   The Life of Pi is the first feature film I have seen in 3D and the effects achieved are frequently spectacular. This is especially true when the tiger leaps out at us, or when other creatures seem suspended in the space between the audience and the screen. Strangely, though, the 3D experience was neither as satisfying nor as ‘realistic’ as I had expected. The technique gives such a very obviously enhanced version of ‘reality’ that it begins to look ‘unreal’. Some of the most carefully prepared shots had a strange flatness in the depth dimension. At times, I was reminded of a children’s toy theatre where cardboard cut-outs of scenery can be tabbed into the stage. The intention is to create an illusion of perspective; the result is to give an unnatural, layered, effect to every scene. Our eyes perceive depth gradually and not in such an artificially stratified way. Cinematic 3D tends to suggest there are intervals of ‘dead ground’ separating objects which otherwise appear to be in the near, middle and far distance.

   Having said that, The Life of Pi is entirely worth seeing for the beguiling beauty achieved in some of its images: the clarity of objects set apart on still water, the night sky reflected in the ocean, gashes of phosphorescence illuminating myriad sea creatures, gliding and leaping fish…These all served to relieve the repetition and growing tedium of the tiger-in-the-lifeboat saga as spun by the mature Pi from the kitchen of his Montreal apartment. It’s the odder of the two stories but it is sometimes spectacularly told.

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[1] Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi was published in 2001 and won the Man Booker prize for fiction in 2002. The film version (2012) is directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay by David Magee.

[2] Pi is played by different actors as he ages from infancy to maturity. Suraj Sharma is brilliant as Pi in the boat and Irrfan Khan is the contemporary, storytelling, Pi in Canada.

[3] I think the figure of 227 days must come from the book; in the movie it’s just a long time – and it seems like it.

[4] According to Wikipedia, Martel obtained the (tiger’s) name of ‘Richard Parker’ from maritime records of shipwrecks and subsequent cannibalism among the survivors. In the 1884 case involving the yacht Mignonette, one Richard Parker seems to have been the victim rather than the cannibal.