Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy Read Online Free PDF Page A

all-powerful Detroit muscle car. With
these powerful machines, Tarantino gives Kim and Zoë the practically unlimited speed and power of the 1970 Vanishing Point Challenger and gives Stuntman Mike the parallel power of the souped-up Nova and Charger. Here the apparatus of movement and speed, the automobile, becomes both a means to pleasure and a means to pain as the drivers of cars repeatedly collide, bang each other up, scrape stock paint jobs, and spin out. This is one of several moments in which pleasure and pain seem to coincide in Death Proof .
    Bound up in the endless circulation of goods and peoples, Baudrillard also spots a bizarre interrelatedness and impersonality in American culture. In the U.S., “everything connects, without any two pairs of eyes ever meeting” (p. 60). Perhaps this is where the thrill and horror comes from in the interaction between Mike and his would-be victims: Mike’s first victims, speeding along a deserted country road, are literally in the dark up until the moments of their deaths. The eyes of the victims (Jungle Julia, Butterfly [Vanessa Ferlito], Lanna-Frank [Monica Staggs], and Shanna [Jordan Ladd]) and the victimizer (Stuntman Mike) can’t meet until Mike pulls on his headlights. Even then, it is unclear if their eyes meet Mike’s eyes or meet the technological extensions of his eyes, his headlights. Their deaths, along with the repeated event of headlights flashing on, replay multiple times, from multiple angles, and in slow motion. Only in the most sadistic (or perhaps sadomasochistic) act can eyes meet, can the impersonality of the road become personal. That is, with the exception of Butterfly, whose eyes, immediately before impact, deliberately close rather than open.

Getting Off on Car Crashes
    While Death Proof fuses simulation with reality and technology with the body, it also fuses sadism with a peculiar form of masochism through the character of Stuntman Mike. Mike’s first car crash is a deliberate act of violence (in which he drives his car head-on into his victims’ car); the machine becomes an extension of his murdering body. It also becomes a death chamber and death-proof chamber at same time as the crash kills one victim in Mike’s car while he remains largely unharmed. This scene enacts a pairing of technology with the sadistic body. However, there is also some sort of risk to Mike and it may
therefore be a genuine sadomasochistic scene.
    The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in Masochism (1989), argues that a “meeting of violence and sexuality” is characteristic of both sadism, a condition characterized by a desire to inflict pain, and masochism, a condition characterized by a desire to be humiliated and to have pain inflicted. 8 Stuntman Mike might possess both of these conditions as he desires to inflict pain and gains sexual stimulation from actually experiencing pain.
    According to Deleuze, sadism does not necessarily imply masochism nor does masochism necessarily imply sadism (p. 43). Stuntman Mike, however, confuses these separate entities and becomes a true sadomasochist: as Mike obtains a certain pleasure in doing, a pleasure in inflicting pain, when he collides with the car carrying Jungle Julia, Butterfly, Lanna-Frank, and Shanna, he obtains another sort of pleasure from his own injuries (a broken nose, a broken collarbone, and a shattered left index finger). Mike arrives at this pain willingly, even seeking it out as part of his sexual pleasure, and it is therefore a fusion of sadistic and masochistic pleasure (p. 38). Additionally, Mike seems almost completely to confuse technology and body as his car becomes the only way for him to gain sexual pleasure and inflict pain.
    However, at the end of the second part of Death Proof , the sadisms of Kim, Zoë, and Abernathy turn Mike’s sadomasochism on its head. Tarantino, in Death Proof ’s somewhat abrupt climax, invites the audience to participate in these female characters’ sadisms. After Kim