Tarantino’s Flag and Societies of the Globe
Furthermore to the prominence of the body plus the prevalence of materials, another aspect of Tarantino’s incarnational aesthetic is the director’s widespread interest in visuals, color, buildings, costumes, and characters that reflect the vibrancy and diversity of human customs.
One way this is expressed is simply the ubiquity of literal color in Tarantino’s surface finishes. It’s everywhere. The man loves primary colors especially, whether yellow motorcycles (Kill Bill: Vol. 1), bright blue flight attendant uniforms (Jackie Brown), or red dresses (Inglourious Basterds) and (of course) flowing red blood. As if the bright walls, cars, and costumes weren’t enough, Tarantino also gives his characters and settings vibrant names: Misters Brown, Blonde, Pink, White, and Orange in Reservoir Dogs, Vernita Green as well as Domicile of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and then, of course, Jackie Brown.
Color also manifests itself from the diversity of ethnicities and nationalities represented. In the same way that Tarantino’s movie channels are each a pastiche of genres and pop society anachronisms, they are also mosaics of race and nationality: Caucasian, Asian, African, Hispanic, Jew, Gentile, European, American, and so on. Tarantino makes a point of rendering this diversity in sharp relief. In Kill Bill: Vol. 1 he calls thought to O-Ren Ishii’s half-Japanese and half-Chinese locale, as healthy as Sophie Fatale’s French/Japanese heritage. In Inglourious Basterds he exaggerates the Britishness of his British characters (see Mike Myers and Michael Fassbender inside “Operation Kino” briefing scene), the Frenchness of his French characters (see cinephile Shosanna looking bohemian while practice and smoking in a Paris café) and the Germanness of his German characters (see the sloshy beer-drinking of the Nazis within the Tavern scene). Tarantino’s characters’ names also reflect this celebration of culture at its most whimsically exaggerated. You can almost smell the magnolia blossoms in a Southern belle name like Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (Django), and you can virtually description the dirndl dress and blonde braids in a Bavarian name like Bridget von Hammersmark.
Tarantino’s globetrotting video tutorials relish the anthropology of place, even if it is “place” as filtered through the fantasies and genres of pictures and pulp ebooks. His movies are about Los Angeles through the lens of hardboiled crime books and 1950s Hollywood; Tokyo through the lens of anime, samurai, and yakuza crime vids; Europe through the lens of spy and warfare cinema hall; the American frontier as filtered through John Ford and spaghetti westerns, and so on. It’s not that Tarantino isn’t enamored with the places and cultures themselves—he is—on the other hand he’s even better-quality enamored with the way that surface finishes has explored, exaggerated, remixed, and mythologized them.
Tarantino’s love of place and customs also manifests itself on a better-quality material level in his love of buildings, production design, and memorable complete pieces. The director’s preference for episodic portrayal lends itself to the building of elaborate scenes and sequences (or “chapters” as he often calls them) that are supported by the scaffolding of memorable physical spaces. From Pulp Fiction we vividly remember the colorful colors and Hollywood pastiche of Jackrabbit Slim’s. From Inglourious Basterds we recall the “Operation Kino” tavern as well as motion picture theater that is the location for the show’s explosive climax. In Django we have the epic “Candieland” plantation, where the final fifty or so minutes of the motion picture play out (before the plantation is spectacularly blown to smithereens).
In a manner icon of|similar to|a dead ringer for|a twin of|in the effigy that of Wes Anderson, Tarantino often takes time to explore the spaces of these ready pieces with his camera, floating through walls, above ceilings, and below floors to immerse the viewer inside space. Within the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Tarantino establishes the space at length by consequent several characters around, giving us a route of the Japanese restaurant/bar before the bloodbath begins. A similar thing happens inside the climactic chapter of Inglourious Basterds, when Tarantino’s camera watches Shosanna put on her makeup and then (from above) sees her taking walks from her apartment out to the balcony overlooking the foyer bustling with doomed Nazi revelers.
Whether it be Col. Sanders white suits, cotton fields, and Spanish moss paying homage to the Antebellum South, the music of Ennio Morricone celebrating Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, or prolonged car chases glorying in 1970s grindhouse window films, Tarantino’s movie theater are full of a lively, exuberant embrace of the eccentricities and diversities of human ethnicity. Finer than just a celebration of pastiche, reflexivity, and irony, Tarantino’s surface finishes are earnestly in love with the quirks, colors, songs, sayings, celebrities, superheroes, myths, histories, and imperfections of man. In this they are deeply human, grounded among the messiness of life, death, and everything in between.
Who can forget the famous dinner scene in Pulp Classic tomes, at Jackrabbit Slim’s, where John Travolta and Uma Thurman order menu items like the Douglas Sirk steak (set “bloody as hell”), the Durwood Kirby burger, and the $5 Martin and Lewis shake? Or the climactic action between the Bride and Bill in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which prominently features Bill making a sandwich, set with mayo, mustard, and Bimbo bread sans crust? Or the fabulously wrought tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds, where beer, biersteins, and bubbly abound?
It’s one thing to include materials as a prop in a picture; basically every movie has it somewhere, generally sitting on tables uneaten throughout dialogue scenes. In spite of this Tarantino’s camera takes special concentration of provisions. It pauses for a close-up on the delectable apple strudel and then pauses another time when the waiter plops a dollop of cream on it. In Jackie Brown the camera takes special concentration of coffee being poured into a mug. In Django the camera takes a moment to zoom in on Dr. Schultz pouring a golden, refreshing looking draft beer and then scraping off the excess figurine.
Sometimes provisions is just a conversation critique, as within the famous “Royale with Cheese” dialogue scene between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (Travolta) in Pulp Works of fiction. Other times it is a representation’s trademark, as in Ordell’s cocktail of choice (the screwdriver) in Jackie Brown, or Calvin Candie’s white cake and coconut cocktail, or Stuntman Mike’s greasy nachos in Death Proof. Frequently stores is associated with the rare traditions or critique of pop customs being mined at the moment: sushi among the Tokyo sequence of Kill Bill: Vol. 1; rice right through the Pai Mei training sequence in Kill Bill: Vol. 2; apple strudel with the Nazis and 33-year Scotch with Lt. Hicox in Inglourious Basterds; sweet tea and bourbon cocktails in Django Unchained; and so on. Food is a rich, sensuous part of culture, and Tarantino loves customs.
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