Psycho. #33

If my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions.

On balance, has Quentin Tarantino actually been any good as a director?

There’s a collection of Raymond Carver short stories called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — a fine, surprisingly woozy title considering Carver’s rather more terse style. I want to ask, in the vein of that title, what we talk about when we talk about Tarantino. What does he signify? You could pick any number of lenses through which to view him, and write a good, long essay on that one topic.

What about this one? Using figures from a site called “List of Deaths Wiki”, I calculate that — at a conservative estimate — 537 characters have died across the 10 films Tarantino has directed. That figure includes many off-screen deaths, mostly in Inglourious Basterds, but it doesn’t include the number of killings in Natural Born Killers and True Romance, which are merely written by Tarantino, not directed by him. Manners of killing include burning to death, being shot in the groin and left to bleed out, hanging, stabbing, disemboweling, decapitation, and dozens upon dozens of shootings in the head. No film directed by Tarantino has ever not had somebody killed in it. You don’t have to be a prig wafting on about “copycat killings” to feel some disquiet about that — about the bloodthirst of Tarantino’s movies, and the way these frame or exploit violence. It’s impossible to discuss Tarantino without mentioning murder and vengeance. Why is that? Why is it that this American director, born and raised in relative comfort, in the late 20th century, returns again and again to the subject of killing?