Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy Read Online Free PDF

shoots Mike in the arm he hurriedly speeds away. Down the road he screeches to a halt, wails in pain, pours alcohol on his wound, then wails in pain again, weeping “Oh why!?” Tarantino encourages the audience to laugh, to become sadists themselves.
    Immediately before the final confrontation, as the girls chase Mike, Kim quite clearly becomes a sadist, and a masculine sadist at that. She also mixes technology with the body in her approach to Stuntman Mike as the rear-end of Mike’s car metaphorically becomes his “ass” and Kim promises to “bust a
nut up in this bitch right now,” being as she is “the horniest motherfucker on the road.” This sexualized dialogue meanwhile simulates the hypersexual car and body dialogue toward the end of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry .

Freeze-Frame Ending
    Looking back, the repeated images of car crashes are absolutely central to the structure of Death Proof as well as to the structures of the films that Death Proof pays homage to, especially Vanishing Point . Stuntman Mike’s violent and sadistic body forces a collision between the nonviolent bodies of Jungle Julia, Butterfly, Lanna-Frank, and Shanna, and the disinterested metal of their car and Mike’s death-proof car in the first car crash. Later, the final car crash finds Mike’s car, an extension of his murdering body, beaten and half-destroyed by his would-be victims. Here Kim, Zoë, and Abernathy prove themselves bigger sadists than the professional sadist, Stuntman Mike. Ultimately, Mike’s sadism itself might be a sort of simulation of the violence in the films he claims to have acted in.
    With its postmodern sampling of 1960s and 1970s exploitation cinema, Tarantino’s Death Proof journeys through terrain mapped by Baudrillard as it veers from simulation to simulacrum and from pleasure to pain, combining all elements in a decidedly postmodern way. Ultimately, the performance of the simulacrum, a negative effect of postmodernity according to Baudrillard, might be Tarantino’s greatest contribution to the cinema. In the end such simulacra, through Tarantino, emerge as new forms of cinematic innovation. 9

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    Unleashing Nietzsche on the Tragic Infrastructure of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs
    TRAVIS ANDERSON
     
     
MR. BLONDE: Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie? Or are you gonna bite?
    —Quentin Tarantino , Reservoir Dogs
     
Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be , to be nothing . But the second best for you is—to die soon.
    —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
     
    Separated by almost a century, the unconventional German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1890) and the American independent filmmaker Quentin Tarantino (1963- ) have more in common than their famous renegade spirit. They are also two thinkers who share a deep aesthetic understanding of their respective passions: writing, music and ancient Greek culture in Nietzsche’s case; movie-making, music, and American popular culture in Tarantino’s. In addition, they each brought their first major work to full fruition when only twenty-eight years old, and in the process they both took a real bite out of conventional wisdom about art.
    But these two mongrel artists have something else in common as well, something far less obvious: Greek tragedy. In Tarantino’s case, the violent, conflicted protagonists of Reservoir Dogs , his first film, together with its musical infrastructure and dramatically spectacular scenes, all bear a striking resemblance
to the heroes, music, and spectacle of classical tragedies. In Nietzsche’s case, the unorthodox analysis of The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche’s first book, explains the murky machinations and psychological importance of Greek tragedies with unmatched bravado and profundity. Unlike Aristotle, whose influential though