Quentin Tarantino is a maestro when it comes to on-screen violence—I mean, every single one of his films features entire sequences dedicated to shootouts, sword fights, or general bloody mayhem (even his segment in Four Rooms builds up to a guy's pinky getting chopped off). But is there more to all of the carnage and bloodshed than mere spectacle and thrills? This video essay by Julian Palmer of The Discarded Image examines Tarantino's use of violence in his work to find out.
So, just how violent are Tarantino's movies? A quick Google search will tell you just how many characters Tarantino has killed since Django Unchained, and even though the death toll reaches over 560, it doesn't even make it on the top 10 list for most on-screen deaths in a movie. That honor belongs to Guardians of the Galaxy with 83,871 deaths. (That is not a typo.)
Credit: Slash Film
I think this is one of the main points the video tries to explain, how one death can be considered brutal and cruel, while another can be comical and almost unimportant. Perhaps it's not about how many characters you kill off in a film, but how you do it. I mean, is violence really seen as violence when it's Indiana Jones shooting the Cairo Swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Not really, in fact most people laugh at that scene. But when it's Ordell shooting Louis at point blank range in the front seat of a car, it's startling mostly due to the facts that the scene and the setting are so intimate, and Ordell is a ruthless m-fer.
But even though scenes from Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, and Django Unchained are full of blood, bullets, and all-out carnage, there seems to be some sort of rhyme and reason for it. Tarantino himself is not a big fan of real-world violence, but he appears to see a huge chasm between actual violence and movie violence—the two are not closely related. At a 1994 press conference, he told Newsday:
Violence is just one of many things you can do in movies. People ask me, 'Where does all this violence come from in your movies?' I say, 'Where does all this dancing come from in Stanley Donen movies?' If you ask me how I feel about violence in real life, well, I have a lot of feelings about it. It's one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it.
What do you think about how Quentin Tarantino uses violence in his films? Do you think there's a limit to how much a filmmaker can include depictions of violence in their work before it becomes "irresponsible"? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: The Discarded Image
