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I could tell by the
lighting it was a noir kind of day. I was feeling gritty—in part because I'd skipped a
shower that morning, but also due to my generally cynical, sardonic, disillusioned
disposition. I figured myself for the tarnished protagonist whose nobility had been
eroded by pessimism and pegged the blonde as my femme fatale—both dangerous and seductive
but with a heavier emphasis on the fatal. Since I was a gumshoe of the popcorn-munching
variety, navigating a dismal terrain of barren values in the seedy underbelly of film
criticism, rife with corruption and crime, the doll was bound to have come from the
silver screen. I needed a case that would provide more than answers to a mystery but
would reveal a greater social truth. I only handled investigations that used crime,
violence, and greed as metaphorical symptoms for larger social ills, I
explained.
Someone had swindled the temporally twisted tale-telling
technique. In the art world, this was a clear-cut case of homage, but I was down on my
luck, so I agreed to look into it. My only condition was that this dame didn't dupe me
into some crime of passion and finger me as the fall guy, but she was too busy doling out
revenge at the pointy end of a samurai sword.
Tarantino's latest linear
distortion a two-part trash culture tribute Kill
Bill (see my review of Volume 1) is
packed with his stylish trademarks: the snazzy pop-referential
dialogue, quirky
characterizations and equally quirky stories that can only be conveyed through a
non-sequential sequence. To get the straight dope on the distortion, Q.T. would be the
moneyman, and his Oscar award-winning neo-noir film Pulp Fiction
would be the payoff.
While many purists refuse to acknowledge Tarantino's
work as true noir (the argument isn't specifically against Q.T., but anything made after
1958, when the "Golden Age of Noir" ended), these cinematic influences are undeniable:
low-key lighting, deep focus photography, and the multi-temporal narrative. Not to
mention that a "Golden Age" of "Dark Cinema" is somewhat a contradiction or that
Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and LA Confidential (1992) are
each definitive noir post-golden era with more
grit than all the beaches in
California. The purist's song was off-key—the
facts just didn't add up—but one note
came out pretty clear. Tarantino's
take on the techniques was tailored to a new
crowd.
Historically, noir is a sub-genre of crime/gangster films—unlike
the sweeping operatic rise and fall of gangster movies or the melodramatic action of
crime cinema, noir is known specifically for the emotional texture it sets off. It is
linked to an existential, modernist social crisis that coincided with the post-World War
II era. The general vibe imparted is one of confusion, disintegrated moral value
structures, nightmarish qualities of isolation, and a pessimistic contradiction to the
highly popular action and adventure serials that coincided them. Interestingly, many of
the early noir were actually created because of studio budget cutbacks—the lighting
techniques, for example, were less aesthetic than necessitated. Its intentional symbolic
feel was pinched from German Expressionism (think, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919)) and given a criminal context. In content, noir dealt with the undercurrent of
society, while commenting on the whole of culture itself. Its anti-hero protagonists
contrasted the upper class literary detectives and adventurers that preceded them and
broadly represented a darker facet of society. In the same way, operatic crime films
chartered the rise and fall of a gangster as an allegorical comment on the
American
dream—noir fully embraced and expressed the disenfranchised and
downtrodden.
Fittingly, Q.T. first came on the scene with a jewel
caper—a video store
clerk with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema who was about to
learn that
crime does pay—and pay well. Reservoir Dogs (1992) introduced his
unique vision with a hilarious banter about the meaning of a Madonna song delivered to a
methodically circling camera and then escalated into a non-chronological series of
episodic vignettes that mixed chaotic action with an intensely textured drama that never
lost its ultra-cool vibe. This merely complimented the crime/ gangster genre, but it was
his 1994 Pulp
Fiction that redefined neo-noir. If I was going to crack this
case, Q.T.
was the place to start…
Be sure to read Josh's
next installment, “Memory, Metaphor, and
Time: Volume 2.”
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