Pesci and De Niro are one of the most frightening warped love stories in modern film. Put that beside Scorsese’s lack of interest or achievement with women on-screen (though Sharon Stone is a loving gift to misogyny in Casino), and it’s possible to feel a smothered pulse of homoeroticism in Scorsese’s work that is the more suggestive because it is not acknowledged. (The most telling American films about gay feelings have been made not directly but obliquely, in films that are ostensibly confident about manhood, dames, and violence.) Scorsese has persisted with the confrontation between boys dressed up as men. The Age of Innocence tried to deal with women and society, but it is not as true to Edith Wharton as Terence Davies’s English film The House of Mirth, which has an exceptional, fatalistic performance from Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.
Scorsese may have worked too much—there are films that seem rushed, overcalculated, or gloating, and that blur cinematic dazzle with human uglinesss—Cape Fear (1991), Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010)—but time and again he explores the medium like a surgeon at a massacre. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are landmarks. In its complex use of music as a base, Casino is as engrossing as it is brutal, and a knowing and compromised portrait of the mind-set of Las Vegas. Scorsese gazes at the place like a would-be priest, in horror. But the movie-mad kid can’t look away. When I first saw Casino, I thought it was just Marty doing gangsters again. It is that, but there’s more. The De Niro character (Sam Rothstein) is a terrible man, but he’s also a martyr figure, patient and stupid, trying to trust his wife, Ginger, hoping to see his “brother,” Nicky, shape up, striving to keep order (hanging his pressed pants in the closet of his office rather than risk creasing them by wearing them). Amid the garishness of Vegas, the foul chant of its language, the head in the vise, the blow jobs, and the bravura smaller parts (James Woods, L. Q. Jones, Frank Vincent, Don Rickles), there is a spirituality, the cockeyed naïveté of a questing soul who knows he will burn, if not at the stake then in the front seat of his car. The ultimate riddle in Vegas is that while many people go there for a few days because it promises an adventure with hell, the characters in Casino have a helpless sense of heaven there. Las Vegas is a biblical city, and no other film has delivered that so fully.
Scorsese looks at clothes, décor, and male gesture like a cobra scrutinizing a charmer. You feel he is realizing his own desires, or bringing them to life: he hungers for his own imagery as a fantasy made vivid. No one is more alive in the moment, or such a defender of history. He has fought to preserve films, to celebrate their past, and to revive neglected triumphs. He was a saint of generosity and admiration to Michael Powell, and he surely learned from the repressed extremism in many Powell films. That at the age of seventy he wants to do Frank Sinatra says so much about him: it ought to be a young man’s subject, and the American movie has so often relied on kids like Orson Welles, Irving Thalberg, and all the dudes going out on Friday nights. But in movies these days, a seventy-year-old has to pass for a kid to stay alive.
By 1963, aged twenty-one, Scorsese was about to complete his BA in film studies at New York University and was making a short film, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? On graduating, he went for an MFA, too, and later he would dedicate Raging Bull to his teacher at NYU, Haig Manoogian, who had just died.
Also in 1963, Quentin Tarantino (of Irish, Italian, and Cherokee descent) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, places he has been loyal to in the talk in his work. Aged two, in a family that split up before he was born, he moved to Torrance, California, and never went beyond high school. He saw movies instead, and built up his knowledge and his unrestrained rapid-fire talk about motion pictures by working as a clerk in a video store in Manhattan Beach. (Video began to take off as Tarantino reached his late teens.) So maybe you didn’t need to go to film school, in the way the generation of Coppola, Lucas, and Scorsese had assumed.
He had tried to work as an actor, but a chance meeting with Lawrence Bender prompted him to start writing screenplays—anyone could hear that Tarantino exulted in his ability to deliver impromptu riffs on hardboiled talk. It was like a teenager who had been programmed by the history of film noir and then had a shot of adrenaline in his heart. (Tarantino seems fascinated by drugs, and sees film as a companion to them.) So he wrote what became True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the latter for Oliver Stone, rather as Stone once got his break dreaming up tough Cuban talk for Al Pacino in Scarface. In a world where the pitch is a vital step in getting any film made, a director has to be able to talk a meeting into silence, awe, and green-lighting.
Then, in 1992, he made his directing debut with Reservoir Dogs, a seething pastiche of noir in which the black-suited figures were named after colors (like the balls in pool or snooker). The film was full of references, quotes, and lifts—probably more than Tarantino remembered. He admitted trying to do a new version of Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), and other video-store dogs cited the marked debt to City on Fire, a Hong Kong film of 1987 by Ringo Lam.
As for “reservoir dogs,” it was prison slang for rats or snitches, but it was also possible that Tarantino came up with the title when he garbled the name of Au Revoir les Enfants (“that reservoir film”), another 1987 film, by Louis Malle. We’ve most of us met video store clerks who play games with titles, talk in dialogue, and seem to have been up all night watching three screens.
Tarantino’s first plan was to film Reservoir Dogs on 16 mm for as little as he could manage. In the end, it cost about $1.2 million (with Harvey Keitel, Mr. White, putting up some of the money). Raging Bull is in love with movies, to be sure, but it does convey a sense of boxing and New York, as well as male chauvinism, brotherhood, the festering boredom of nightclub life, and the bond between violence and sex. By contrast, Reservoir Dogs gives the impression of knowing and caring about nothing from life. Whatever it has came from movies or comic books, and the color-coded status of the gang members is a foreshadowing of video games. (There would be a video game from the film in 2006.) It is hypnotic, and the talk and many set piece shots are as mannered as if six Marx Brothers had done a course on James Ellroy for their rhetoric major in prison. Though frequently blood-soaked, the film reaches a cruel nadir when Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen—his character’s real name is Vic Vega) razors off the ear on a bound and gagged cop, to a musical accompaniment (“Stuck in the Middle with You”), and does a prowling, shuffling dance while luxuriating in the prospect of torture. Blonde tells the cop, “I don’t give a fuck what you know, but I’m going to torture you, regardless.”
Tarantino would have said it was only a movie (he forgave those who walked out on the film); and he might have added that movies had no other purpose than to extend and advance cinematic forms. Reservoir Dogs lays out a trinity of young male aspirations that is still with us: the kick of lyrical badmouth, the idealization of gangsterism, and an assumed familiarity with both that comes from movies. This is Mr. White before doing the jewelry store heist:
“When you’re dealing with a store like this, they’re insured up the ass. They’re not supposed to give you any resistance whatsoever. If you get a customer, or an employee, who thinks he’s Charles Bronson, take the butt of your gun and smash their nose in. Everybody jumps. He falls down screaming, blood squirts out of his nose, nobody says fucking shit after that. You might get some bitch talk shit to you, but give her a look like you’re gonna smash her face next, watch her shut the fuck up. Now if it’s a manager, that’s a different story. Managers know better than to fuck around, so if you get one that’s giving you static, he probably thinks he’s a real cowboy, so you gotta break that son of a bitch in two. If you wanna know something and he won’t tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then tell him his thumb’s next. After that he’ll tell you if he wears ladies’ underwear. I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.”
Reservoir Dogs made its modest money back, though Miramax (founded in 1979) did not market it with gusto. In fact, t
he film played better in England, where interest in cruelty and video technology seemed ahead of American standards. At that point, sensing a dynamic new talent as well as a practitioner whose taste for guns, language, and music played to a young audience, Miramax said they would finance Tarantino’s next film. For just over $8 million they got Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and grossed close to $300 million across the world.
Pulp Fiction (1994) was one of the most influential pictures made in America since the advertised death of pictures. It helped excite a new younger generation about movies, rather as Easy Rider had done. Its unceasing reliance on classic movie situations, with so many scenes of violence and foul language, was a sneer of rejection for older audiences. But its intricate formal structure as a narrative encouraged the idea that a film was just a set of scenes that had no relationship with closure or meaning. It made a shape, like a snake eating its tail. The film hoped to imitate its title, but it was shot to resemble old Technicolor, still wet from the processing baths. The music was chosen lovingly, the cast was worthy of a poster, but the characters had no backstory or dramatic provenance. They were figures from a movie landscape, frequently caught in the Mexican standoff pose that seems built into Tarantino’s DNA and ready to take priority over any other kind of meeting. At least Pulp Fiction had a few women: Reservoir Dogs had been strictly male, with allusions to homosexual urges. The nonstop rhythm of violence was offset by droll literary conversations about hamburgers, breakfast, foot massages, the Bonnie situation, cleaning the back of a car of blood, brains, and skull fragments, and whether God was there or not.
When Vincent Vega (John Travolta) takes Marcellus’s wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), out for the night, the film does not bother with the possibility that they may begin to like each other. There is not enough mind or sentiment in them to reach that conclusion, and Tarantino is not much interested in sex on-screen. But as iconography, their night is a catalogue of pop culture references—in the diner they visit, Jack Rabbit Slim’s, where stand-ins represent the stars, and in their slinky version of the twist, where the film nods to Travolta’s past. (Pulp Fiction did a lot to revive his strange career.)
Every section and nearly every shot is a set piece in a line for which Tarantino takes no kind of realistic or narrative responsibility. That helps account for the energy and freshness of the film, and indicates how many American films at the turn of the century were formally stagnant, and short on excitement. You could not resist Tarantino’s own thrill, and it drew attention to the crazy verbosity of his lowlifes. Why do Vincent and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) do the job they do? So they can talk. The actors (notably Bruce Willis) seemed excited that their normal pattern of over-paid and conventional inertia has briefly given way to chatter and danger. Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolfe is not just a master fixer but a drug called spiel. It is a film that might have gone on forever, just as its convoluted structure is available for further loops and intersections. If you ever wonder why your own kids think it’s fatuous for a film to seek their emotional involvement, or for its story to be sincere or dramatic, Pulp Fiction had the cheerful thrust of getting those archaic hopes to walk the plank.
To talk of this postmodern stress on form for form’s sake, and movie trashing literary traditions, it may come as a surprise to note how successful the film was with its wide-eyed detachment. Yes, the actors loved the trick as well as the talk, and the film was as funny in desperate moments as, say, Some Like It Hot or The Shining. So many ghosts were being given up—and exorcism was dear to the heart of the young movie audience. There had been a picture about that show, ridiculous exploitation, but as gripping in 1973 as Carrie’s white hand reaching out from the black grave in 1976. The film of The Exorcist was a telling case: terrifying and revolting when it opened; addled and comic on rerelease in 2000. It was a sensation you could not preserve, because its impact—the phantom of meaning—depended entirely on the superstition and the anticipation of 1973.
Pulp Fiction has lasted. It is a beautiful maze as knowing and insolent about the prehistory of films as Kane. So it left you wondering if Quentin Tarantino might prove as smart or as doomed as Orson Welles. You remembered that Welles himself had not been able to pull his kid’s trick off for long. And Citizen Kane had never been the box office coup that Pulp Fiction managed.
Tarantino is nearing fifty now, and there have been hiatuses in his career. But has he made progress? He has never found the comedy or the elegance of Pulp Fiction again. Jackie Brown may be underrated, but the two-part Kill Bill seems to me a sign of a general absence of any personal subject matter that doesn’t come out of pulp fiction. That problem was glaring with Inglourious Basterds (which is Tennessee guys against the Nazis, with a lengthy standoff scene in a bar that is an abyss or interval in the arc of the film). The idea of nitrate film burning Adolf Hitler is full of comic potential, but the film never approaches the soaring, musical brio of Pulp Fiction, and it leaves one wondering how much or how little Tarantino knew about the war, as opposed to war movies. There may be a level of education now in which some young people are ready to settle for our slipshod pop-cultural “meanings” of history or what they pick up in the family atmosphere called Facebook. But Tarantino needs more than his merry admission of helplessness in the current climate of filmmaking. Did he deliver everything he had in Pulp Fiction? Would it matter if he never made another film?
In case you are uncertain, that is not omniscient, objective history (wherever that treasury is hiding), it’s vulnerable opinion. But history has to include opinion, and I am dealing with Scorsese and Tarantino out of an interest in the question how does a director make a career, a living, or even art in unsteady times? How does he or she keep finding the stamina without wondering why survival is so pressing? So it’s useful to note that Scorsese had never had an unequivocal hit until The Departed (and that was a restrained success), while Pulp Fiction trumped its own budget by a factor of more than thirty. The kids and the critics were alike in believing they had seen something so astonishing it redefined the possibility of cinema and its role in our experience. The power of the light show had been reasserted, along with the invitation: come ready to be dazzled but leave your feelings at home. If you look at Pulp Fiction now you already feel some of the nostalgia you might get in watching Casablanca. But it’s not easy to think of a middle-aged Tarantino. He has said he will retire by the time he is sixty, or sooner than that if digital eclipses film—and that is happening. The new kid sensation could soon seem old-fashioned.
David Lynch is sixty-five and increasingly difficult to define. At first he appeared to be an exceptional yet typical example of someone who noticed film during an art school education. Born in Missoula, Montana, the son of a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the American Film Institute Conservatory. He has been a painter all his adult life, and he has talked about the darkness in his painting in a way that helps one watch his films:
Color to me is too real. It’s limiting. It doesn’t allow too much of a dream. The more you throw black into color, the more dreamy it gets…Black has depth. It’s like a little egress; you go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.
The potential slide toward dream in cinema was there from the beginning—and it is present in the work of directors who would hope they were down to earth. An Astaire-Rogers musical seems like a business proposition. People still marvel at how hard Fred worked striving for ease. But if you plunge into one of those films suddenly (in the way the surrealist leaders went to cinemas in the 1920s), you see only the proud unlikelihood of a dance scene so that it’s easier to feel the erotic rapture of those two figures in their whirling embrace. Last night I watched The Searchers (1956) ag
ain. I know the film. I know the places in Monument Valley where it was shot. But coming upon it unexpectedly on television, I saw how the burnished ochre mesas were obviously psychological forces, loaded with the threat of rape and revenge that impel the film. This awareness lasted just a moment, and then the plot reassembled itself and actual landscape resumed. I doubt John Ford felt this, or needed to—he had identified Monument Valley as his world years earlier. I have discovered that David Lynch is generally not comfortable talking about such things. But Lynch is a filmmaker who does not flinch from his allegiance to surrealism. He was also the creator of a primetime series on ABC television, Twin Peaks, that was a hit, no matter that its opposition was Cheers—until the network destroyed the story’s power by insisting that it settle the riddle of who killed Laura Palmer.
At art school, Lynch made short films that were abstract, symbolic, and what we mean by “experimental” when we can’t identify the genre or the commercial aim the film believes in. (Of course, it is possible to make a movie that has no commercial aim.) His first feature, Eraserhead (1977), was in that same vein. But something in Lynch was attracted to the chance of a regular movie for a large audience, and it seemed to hinge on his abiding sense that appearance screens us off from a world of savagery, ecstasy, and the dreamlike. (He had lived a lot in Los Angeles.) So, at Mel Brooks’s invitation, he made The Elephant Man (1980), based on both fact and a stage play. It was a heartfelt picture, not afraid of sentimentality, direct and pleading, and reluctant to intrude on John Hurt’s fine performance, but it may have helped Lynch discover a release for his own feelings.
Next, he moved on to work for Dino de Laurentiis on the science-fiction picture Dune (1984). Dino and Lynch were so different that their partnership seemed arranged as a test. But the tycoon was impressed with the kid, and said he would give him the money ($6 million) to make what proved to be Blue Velvet (1986). Dino granted Lynch final cut, and left him alone.
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