ANOTHER VOICE
Going to the dogs while slyly combining piss-take of the genre
CHARLES MOORE
Don't go to see the film Reservoir Dogs, which was described in City Limits as 'slyly combining piss-take of the genre with seri- ous hi-octane revelling in blood and perfor- mance, achieving the balance of irony and narrative intention . . . '
The film is about a raid on a diamond shop which goes wrong. Some of the gang who make the raid get shot, and others take refuge in a warehouse with one of their number (played by Tim Roth) bleeding heavily (he bleeds through almost the entire film). One of them brings a captured policeman back and tortures him while the others, except for the wounded Roth, are away getting the loot. He cuts off the policeman's ear, looking 'sexy' (City Limits) as he does so, and pours petrol over him. Then Roth, who is actually an under-cover cop, surfaces from the pool of his own blood and shoots the torturer. The other gangsters return, shoot the tortured police- man and then accuse Roth of being a cop. One of their number (Harvey Keitel) says no, Roth is a good (i.e. bad) guy, so they quarrel and all draw their guns on one another and fire simultaneously, except for a cunning homosexual gangster who sneaks off with the diamonds. As Roth and Keitel lie bleeding the former tells the latter that he is a policeman, so the latter tries to shoot him, but is shot instead by a large number of cops who burst in. The film ends.
Told like that, it sounds a conventional cop-and-robber film which might be fun, and in fact it is fun in a way. There are a few good jokes and it is well acted, particu- larly by Harvey Keitel, and you want to know what happens next. The film should not be singled out as a bad film. There are scores worse. I only mention it as an exam- ple of the cinema as fashion victim.
The director, who is called Quentin Tar- rantino, naturally wants to make his name, so he wants a critical as well as a box office success, and he knows that to get that you have to try various tricks. Let us go back to the City Limits review, which, again, I only take as exemplary rather than particularly awful. 'Slyly combining piss-take of the genre.' You must be sly. It would be fatal not to 'work at more than one level'. So you must know your genre, and include in your film 'homage' to previous masters for the critics to recognise. I read somewhere that this film — or maybe it is another one with 'dog' in the title which has just been
released — is a homage to a 1950s film by Stanley Kubrick. And your use of the genre must be a 'piss-take', because that shows you are cleverer than all those dreary old directors who just told it straight.
So you take the piss out of this genre, and you slyly combine this with 'serious hi- octane revelling in blood and performance', thereby 'achieving the balance of irony and narrative intention' which is the City Limits' master chef's recipe for the perfect cine- matic dish. If you remove from the first phrase the words which do not really mean anything you are left with 'revelling in blood'. That is a good thing, then, at least when slyly combining with a piss-take of the genre.
What all this means in practice is that the Reservoir Dogs all say 'fuck' every other word and that they all wear dark suits with drain-pipe trousers, thin ties and white shirts and talk dirty about Madonna. They have colour-coded pseudonyms. When they are outdoors they put on dark glasses which wrap close to their heads. They do things, including torture, to the sound of songs from the 1970s. When they shoot peoplp or get shot they are absolutely covered in blood, and when they cut off the ear of a policeman we are invited to watch exactly how they do it, noting the gore, the style of the boot from which the torturer draws his razor, and how sexy he is as he goes about his business. All this makes violence 'so utterly alluring' (City Limits).
It is wrong to ask whether it is a good thing to make violence utterly alluring because that shows that one does not realise that it is a piss-take of the genre and 'Mayday! Mayday! Oh to hell with it. Squidgy! Squidgy! Is there anybody out there?' that one is shockable, two failings that would end one's career as film critic on the spot. And it is true that recognising a genre is a necessary part of artistic appreciation, because it means recognising a set of rules and a tone of voice. But I cannot see why such films are better because the violence ts so completely explicit or that blood should be revelled in. Would City Limits have praised Mrs Thatcher for 'serious hi-octane revelling in blood and performance' during the Falklands war? Obviously not, because the Falklands was real (and because they did not like Mrs Thatcher). It must be all right to do this revelling, then, because this is art. But that suggests that art is somehow less important than reality, which is an anti' artistic idea. The sly piss-take of the genre is the grown-up equivalent of the parent's assurance to the anxious little boy: 'It's all right, darling. That man's not really dead. It's only on television.' And the critics are that little boy pretending to be brave. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is quite revolting and quite unnecessary for the plot. I suppose it would be justified on the grounds of realism, but that justification Is undercut by subverting the genre stuff. The only reason it is there must be that torture is a la mode. Is that a mode worth praising? At the end of the film, I began to wonder if the whole thing had not been made bY clever coven of feminists trying to discredit men. There are no women with speaking parts in the film. By the end the amount n; blood and killing and male bad temper all' bravado and sadism is so great that ttl,e message seems to be not that violence 15 utterly alluring but that men are complereb, stupid. If I am right, Mr Tarrantino is sb indeed and has combined a piss-take of the critics with his other qualities. But I fear I am wrong. Reservoir DO seems to be part of a wider fashion. It .1s, one which encompasses the actors. Cr Limits also published an interview with l'01/ Roth, who looks like and, it turns out, is 3, nice Jewish boy from North London. r3°,` Tim knows which side his bread is butteree' 'Roth chuckles . . . What he'd actually Wee to do is run a bar, something like the Calf,° bar in Malta, where they give you a kalle when you walk in to protect you from 111,,t drunken sailors. He has the striped T-sbl. and tattoo to get on with. Now it's jusl, matter of building up a lot more muscle and getting good with knives.' What a mall'
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