Inspiration Case Study #7: The Case of the Director Who Likes It When People are Stuck
[Published on the Facebook Thunkity Thunk: Open Ideas forum on May 1, 2020]
Before casting my SPOILERS-heavy beach rock skipping across the surface of a certain famous film director's broad body of work, which is already well known for its ripples across culture, I want talk about myself and a related proclivity I've long had, which extends across many disparate areas of my life: I like to be in tight spots.
By that I mean, I like both being physically confined (to a certain extent, and voluntarily of course) and being stuck in a physical location in a more general sense. An example of the former could be having layers of bedding tucked tightly up against my limbs. An example of the latter could be having to wait for quite a while at an airport or even a bus stop -- in any kind of weather! Like Jack White extolling the virtues of working with very limited elements -- a la Piet Mondrian -- in the liner notes of the White Stripes' "De Stijl" album, I enjoy the focus that comes with constraint. I can fall asleep easier if everything on top of and around me isn't all loosey-goosey. And if I am waiting for, say, the arrival of transportation, I enjoy having to turn in-depth to whatever reading material is at hand (or turn to my imagination or observations of minute details around me), rather than succumbing to the innumerable obligations and distractions that plague me from getting anything done at home.
Being stuck is to be in utero with pregnant possibilities, pushing outward against supportive walls.
Thus, it shouldn't come as any surprise that with a reference-heavy director like Quentin Tarantino, it's a motif that recurs from one work to another like clockwork. When he shows us characters stuck in various places, in peril, he's reminding us of not just what humans are and aren't capable of in such situations, but also of the symbolic potency we soak up in seeing this, and overlay upon the film going experience as a whole.
Tarantino has written several film scripts that he hasn't directed, but to keep this short I'll confine myself (Ha!) to just those works he's had a thorough, auteur-type hand in. And first, I'll get out of the way the one exception to the rule that I could find, which is an asterisk to his oeuvre anyway. "The Man from Hollywood," his contribution to the 1995 anthology film "Four Rooms," does not seem to feature any kind of confinement. However, we could consider Tim Roth's bellhop character Ted as being confined in the penthouse when the rich people coerce him into participating in their dangerous betting game. All his feature films don't include such hairsplitting, though; in fact, many have on-the-nose confinement as such a central plot point that this theme stands out like the dollop of cream on Hans Landa's streudel.
"Reservoir Dogs" (1992): A) Tim Roth's Mr. Orange/Eddy is confined by being an undercover cop on the lam with a jewelry heist gang; and B) Kirk Baltz's kidnapped police officer Marvin Nash is trapped first in the trunk of a car and then in the chair in the warehouse, where Michael Madsen's Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega tortures him.
"Pulp Fiction" (1994): A) Ving Rhames's Marsellus Wallace becomes trapped in the basement of the pawn shop by the racist owners, where he is tortured by them until Bruce Willis's Butch Coolidge rescues him; and B) The Gimp is trapped in a trunk down there, until he is released.
"Jackie Brown" (1997): Chris Tucker's Beaumont Livingston is trapped in a car trunk by Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell Robbie, who shoots him. (Note: this is the only film Tarantino directed that is adapted from someone else's original source material -- an Elmore Leonard novel -- rather than an original screenplay by him -- or him and someone else, as is the case with "Pulp Fiction" -- yet he still chose a story that included this trope).
"Kill Bill: Vol. 1" (2003): A) Uma Thurman's The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo/Black Mamba becomes trapped in her own body in a coma in a hospital bed after David Carradine's Bill shoots her in the head at her wedding alter. (This scene is actually shown in the second film). As she regains consciousness and control of her body, she kills a man who is trying to rape her, as well as the hospital worker who had been selling access to her. And B) She tortures Julie Dreyfus’s Sofie Fatale in the trunk of a car.
"Kill Bill: Vol. 2" (2004): Michael Madsen's Budd shoots The Bride with a blast of rock salt and then buries her alive in a wooden coffin, which she manages to punch her way out of, then digging her way to the surface.
"Sin City" (2005): This near technicality of a credit is the only other exception to the rule here. As a favor to Robert Rodriguez, who had scored "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" for $1, Tarantino then directed one scene in his friend's film for the same amount of pay. The scene is just Clive Owen's Dwight driving and having a conversation with Benicio Del Toro's dead Jackie Boy. I would say we should leave out any of Tarantino's "for hire" work, except that directly after this he directed...
"CSI: Grave Danger, Parts 1 & 2" (2005): In these, the only television episodes Tarantino directed (as well as wrote the story for), George Eads's Nick Stokes Crime Scene Investigator is kidnapped and buried alive in a glass coffin with his gun and explosives. He is saved by his team in the second episode in the... nick of time.
"Death Proof" (2007): In Tarantino's half of the "Grindhouse" film he made with Rodriquez (and others, who directed the fake trailers), he features a villain named Stuntman Mike, played by Kurt Russell, who is a serial killer who entices women into his crash-proof car that only has a seat belt for him, then causes them to bounce around inside and die, as is shown with Rose McGowan's Pam character.
"Inglorious Basterds" (2009): This film -- which I consider to be Tarantino's "masterpiece," to use a word from it's last line of dialogue -- both opens and nearly closes with people stuck somewhere. A) In the course of the first scene, we learn that Melanie Laurent's Shosanna and her family are hiding under the floorboards of the French farmhouse where Christopher Waltz's Colonel Hans Landa is interrogating the farmer. The Nazis shoot them all through the wood, but she escapes, running across the fields. B) Four years later, when she is running a movie theater in Paris, she and her assistant/lover Marcel, played by Jacky Ido, lock the doors when it is full of Nazis, including all the higher-ups, and burn it down.
"Django Unchained" (2012): A) Kerry Washington's Broomhilda Von Shaft, the wife of Jamie Foxx's title character, is sent into the "hot box" -- essentially a coffin half buried but exposed to the summer sun -- as punishment by Leonardo DiCaprio's plantation owner Calvin Candie; and of course B) the topic of the film, slavery, is itself the ultimate kind of confinement.
"The Hateful Eight" (2015): Channing Tatum's Jody character is revealed toward the end to have been hiding under the cabin's floorboards for most of the movie.
"Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" (2019): A long section of this film is dedicated to Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth character going to the Spahn Ranch to check on the owner, George Spahn, whom he suspects is being kept confined in his home by the Manson Family kids.
Special consideration should be given to Tarantino's Revisionist History Trilogy: "Inglorious Basterds" (which at one point has the title card "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France"), "Django Unchained," and "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood." They all are referred to as cinematic "fairy tales" by reviewers and interviewers, but I think that's a misuse of that genre term. Fairy tales include certain tropes -- such as young protagonists and magical helpers and/or antagonists -- that are lacking in these films. Certainly, Tarantino gives a nod that direction with the "Once upon a time..." phrase, but that's more of an homage to one of his cinematic idols Sergio Leone, who directed "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) and "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984). No, I think these films have in common something else: they break out of the confinement of history. Thus, they cast into relief the potential and prevalence of the getting stuck/getting-out-of-being-stuck conceit that is seeded across the course of all of Quentin Tarantino's films.
And isn't the film going experience itself one of the most common situations where we are voluntarily stuck somewhere for a couple hours? For my money, while "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" was lauded as a paen to the key industry in that titular location, it is actually "Inglorious Basterds" that has the most to say about all facets of the cinematic experience, from the interplay between directors and stars and fans and theater owners and even projectionists and film developers. As Shosanna and Marcel do with the Nazis in that film, Tarantino and other directors get us trapped in our seats in a sense -- whether back in theaters, beside strangers, again at some point in the future, or at home on the couch, alone or with loved ones -- where we enjoy the experience of battling our way out of the limited elements of a suspenseful plot. That kind of confinement is mutual and beneficial, for our mental health and the flexibility of our imaginations. This process wouldn't be possible if it wasn't done together, as an interplay between the filmmaker and their audience.
As the band Stealers Wheel sings over the famous torture scene in "Reservoir Dogs":
Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you/Stuck in the middle with you/Here I am, Stuck in the middle with you