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After Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) forever changed the gangster genre (or created a “sub-genre” as Tarantino once said), cinemas were cluttered with imitators featuring stylised violence and smart-talking gangsters, and narrated in vignettes or episodes. With a handful of exceptions — including Get Shorty (starring Pulp Fiction’s comeback star John Travolta) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (which marked Guy Ritchie as a would-be Tarantino) — all these were duds, critically and commercially.
Among their many problems was the fact that none of their writers and/ or directors was Tarantino. Pulp Fiction became the phenomenon it is because Tarantino brought to it not only his unique referential film nerdiness — honed over years of watching movies of every kind — but also his disciplined, analytical mind, with no room for loose, flabby plotlines or undercooked characters.
Both these qualities are on display in the filmmaker’s first non-fiction book Cinema Speculation, comprising essays that are a mix of memoir and film criticism. From early boyhood, Tarantino writes, he accompanied his mother and stepfather to the movies, most of them age-inappropriate (including John Boorman’s highly controversial, graphically violent Deliverance and Don Siegal’s Dirty Harry, which Tarantino describes as the first serial killer movie).
“I was encouraged to act mature and well behaved. Because if I acted like a childish pain in the ass, I’ll be left at home with a babysitter, while they went out and had a good time,” he writes. Young Tarantino decidedly wanted to be included in “adult time”, so he paid for the privilege with silence even as he kept his eyes and ears wide open, only letting his curiosity get the better of him on the ride home when the movie would be minutely dissected and most of his questions answered.
His early exposure not only to the mainstream cinema of 1970s Hollywood but also to kung fu imports from Hong Kong, as well as the exploitation films screened in the bountiful grindhouse cinemas (which showed only low-budget horror, exploitation, and adult films), shaped Tarantino’s cinematic sensibilities. This is evident in his films, from Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2, a homage to the cult Swedish revenge exploitation film Thriller: A Cruel Picture as well as kung fu films, to the blaxploitation-inspired Django Unchained.
Tarantino’s analysis of Ali MacGraw’s widely-panned performance in The Getaway is a lot more charitable because he sees in her not “one-half of a the greatest bank robbing couple in crime film literature”, rather as “one-half of one of the greatest love stories in crime film cinema”. Without doubt, Tarantino’s critical perspective is wider and more generous in its scope than most, taking in performances and movies that were considered oddities or failures, but in which he finds gems to mine.
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