I see your film conventions, and I raise you Tarantino

Kill Bill Vol. 1 did two things when it came out in 2003. The first is obvious - a collective parental furor that a movie so violent could be accessible to eager teenage boys. The second is slightly less obvious - intense curiosity brought about by the fact that an entire fight sequence in the film had to be turned to black and white in order to pass censorship. 

My fascination, though, was never to do with the violence in the film or the fact that it got censored - it was the way in which Quentin Tarantino went about bypassing said censorship. Plenty of films in the past have been revised to cut out shots or even entire scenes in order to be approved for general distribution. Tarantino could have easily done this, cut out a few shots of dismembered limbs (or several hundred such shots) and have the film eligible for classification. But he didn't, and that is the whole point of what makes Tarantino films so fascinating.

The Crazy 88s - dismembered in original colour

What Tarantino does best is messing around with our expectations. Instead of doing the usual thing when confronted with the Crazy 88s fight scene, he chose to colour it black and white - and it worked. This, I thought, was beautifully representative of how off-kilter and yet commercially successful Tarantino's film making is. He is a director who does not make films that could be considered conventionally entertaining. Yet his films resonate with a breadth of audience normally associated with big blockbuster Hollywood films. How does he do this? Genre.

He is, as a friend significantly more intelligent than myself put it, "a master of genre".  When we watch movies of a particular genre we know what to expect.  'Revenge Thrillers' we know will fall out in a particular way, and similarly 'sci-fi epics' and 'buddy cop movies' have standard characters and plot devices that we are all familiar with. What Tarantino does, however, is use our knowledge of a particular genre to two particular ends: to skip unnecessary steps in storytelling and then to subvert our expectations from that genre.

 

Reservoir Dogs is an example of Tarantino messing around with plot. The movie is a heist movie where no details about the heist are ever shown. The movie's focus is the personal stories of each of the characters. This fact becomes effective beyond cliché, though, when Tarantino treats the heist as assumed knowledge in order to get on with it. No film making effort is wasted on portraying the planning or the execution of the crime - Tarantino puts all his effort into creating tension and unwrapping the psyche of each of his characters.

Reservoir Dogs - The men, not the crime

Pulp Fiction manages to take a handful of known characters and spin a completely new light on them. In this movie we see armed robbers, gangsters, a mob boss, and a host of other characters that we see in other films and expect to do certain things. Much of the movie, though, acts as a 'what happens when...' for these particular tropes. What happens after an armed robbery when the two thieves decide to stop off in breakfast for a diner? What happens in the car with two gangsters on the way to a job? What do they talk about?

In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has quite a lot of fun portraying these characters in situations that would never be shown on camera. You would expect to see two gangster hitmen receiving a job, preparing their guns and taking out their targets. Instead you see them talking about holidays in Europe, gossiping about bosses' wives and having to clean up after a non-chalant but very messy mistake with a handgun.

Films that are this unconventional don't generally find the following that Tarantino's films do. Not to say that other indie films haven't found cult followings. But few have been as big commercial successes as Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds, films that made back their budget almost as many times as you can comfortably fold a piece of paper. And he achieves this by essentially exploiting our knowledge of genre conventions and surprising us in the process.

The second big reason he's able to do this (the first being that he is generally quite insane) is that he spent a great deal of his life watching everything. He spent a significant portion of time as a video store clerk, where all he did was watch films, talk about films and observe what other people liked in films. Tarantino as the ultimate consumer has a profound insight into what his audience knows. He uses this with gay abandon to generally bugger about and have lots of fun. We're fortunate that in this process he's turned himself into a successful film maker with lots of films we can enjoy.

I quite like Quentin Tarantino. He's a man who very un-self-consciously took what makes him feel like a little boy and not only turn it into career, but something that he can exhibit and make the rest of us feel like kids, discovering new things and having lots of fun.