One of the things I do best is accept criticism and rejection. I can listen to a roomful of people spend an hour eviscerating a story I spent a month working on and walk out with a smile on my face, anxious to get back to work; I collect and display the rejections slips I receive in response to stories I worked on for six months; and rather than say something that will start a fight, I’ve learned to hold my tongue when the high school kids at the gym make fun of me for wearing glasses when I play pickup basketball. Why am I telling you this? Because I want there to be no doubt that the following response is born from a need to challenge the fallacy of one reader’s response rather than attempt to settle the score.
In a January posting praising Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I included a footnote decrying QuentinTarantino’s Death Proof for being poorly written. My critique garnered the following reader comment: “I find it really fascinating and somewhat sexist how people dismissed “Death Proof” as too talky. “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” are predominantly dialogue films but since the characters are either entirely or primarily men, we somehow find their just-as-inane dialogue as “Death Proof” to somehow be more relevant…” (Note: my post and the complete response can be read here).
The commenter is correct in that I am more accepting of the superfluous conversation in Pulp Fiction, and to a lesser extant Reservoir Dogs, than I am in Death Proof. But I take exception the reductive and intellectually lazy assertion that my response is motivated by latent sexism. I’m not denying that I’m a misogynist; I’m only saying that in this case my critique derives from the issue I have with Tarantino’s writing rather than my exasperation with having to listen to, as I said in the original posting, “girl talk.”
See, the conversation between the women at the beginning of Death Proof serves the same function as the opening diner scene in Reservoir Dogs and the sequence early in Pulp Fiction that begins with Jules and Vincent riding in their car and ends with them at the door of the men they’ve been sent to kill: the dialogue exist solely to provide characterization in advance of the main action of the plot.
The device is used brilliantly in Pulp Fiction, breaking down the archetypal conception of a gangster in a way that manipulates the sympathies of the audience so that we find ourselves rooting for characters who would otherwise be stock, Hollywood villains. Of course, this scene is merely a better executed version of the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, which depicts criminals talking in a way that defies audience expectations—a conversation over breakfast that centers around the true meaning of Like a Virgin and whether tipping waitresses should be perfunctory—and, although the characters quickly settle into gangster stereotypes, the scene, like in Pulp Fiction, succeeds in bringing depth to stock characters.
The same cannot be said for Death Proof, which presents the audience with a pair of conversations, one in the diner and another in the car, that do not break the female archetype, but in fact bends towards it. (Aside: let me add to my overall critique of Tarantino the fact that he uses diners and cars in his films the way Woody Allen uses Manhattan). Now, it’s true the basic facts of the movie—who the women are and where they’re going—are presented in the diner, as well as an unexpected interest in muscle cars by two of the characters, but overall the dialogue remains focused on the staples of female characters from film and television—relationship dynamics, sex, and fashion magazines—like a Tarantino-ized version of Sex in the City. And I would be fine with this if it had anything to do with what happens in the film or, as with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, if the dialogue was funny, but it doesn’t, and it’s not.
Although, I do have to admit I would enjoy the scene in the car a lot more if the exact same dialogue was spoken by four men in black suits and skinny ties. Yeah, like I said, I’m a bigot.
