Almost ten years on from its
release, Grindhouse, the epic
three-hour exploitation homage double feature from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin
Tarantino, seems both more prescient and more bizarre than ever. On paper, the
project seemed like a dream pairing for film fanatics of a certain mien, the
twin exemplars of DIY ‘90s indie film success (at least on a pop consciousness
level) joined together for their ultimate tribute to the horror and
exploitation films that shaped their formative years. Both had steadily risen
through the ranks of mainstream Hollywood success, but they still swore fealty
to the childlike enthusiasms of the fan imperative.
Or, as some would say, the
childish enthusiasms. It’s always been a thin line that these two directors
have walked between those sensibilities. At the heart of each of their oeuvres
lies a deeply ingrained sense of fetishization. Rodriguez made his mark
rehashing ‘70s and ‘80s vigilante action tropes through the split diopter lens
of the Latino experience and the Spaghetti Western. After establishing his DIY
credentials with the $7000 shooting budget of El Mariachi, he elevated that film’s story to the level of
quasi-mythology via Antonio Banderas’s smoldering charisma, Salma Hayek’s
vibrant sexuality, and the studio luxuries afforded to him in making Desperado (he would fully embrace that
mythos with the finale of the trilogy, Once
Upon a Time in Mexico.) But as time passed, his fetish seemed to shift
toward the emerging digital technology that allowed him to control more and
more aspects of his productions. Taking full advantage of green screen imaging,
he was able to unleash some of the more fantastical elements of his imagination
in the Spy Kids films and, most
notably, in the two Sin City
omnibuses. The latter films are intriguing deconstructions of the noir genre,
eschewing any sense of connection to standard notions of the real world in
playing out as fugue states borne from a lifetime of cinema madness.
Unfortunately, that lack of connection to reality began to bleed into all of
his projects as he embraced the freedom of green screen. Rodriguez isn’t quite
to George Lucas levels of digital onanism, but there’s a certain weight that’s
gone missing in many of his films.
Of course, Tarantino’s fetishes
embrace nearly all forms of the classic cinema of the cool, from Spaghetti
Westerns to Italian gialli and gore films to Blaxploitation to ‘70s crime sagas
to the entire AIP universe (there’s also his passion for feet…but that’s a
different essay altogether.) Kill Bill
seemed to be his final say on those preoccupations, a heady brew of stylistic
influences filtered through revenge archetypes. Critics and fans alike wondered
if he could strike out in a new direction after such a seemingly exhaustive
endeavor. So when Grindhouse was announced,
it almost felt like maybe this was
the natural end point for his fetishization of the ‘70s cinematic world, one
final blowout that not only paid tribute to those films but actually aped their
style and presentation. After all, in a culture soaked in retro instincts, a
loving recreation of a ‘70s grindhouse double bill by the two chief proponents
for that era seemed a wholly fitting expression of the zeitgeist and a
distillation of the cut-up imperative that the internet era had so greatly
accelerated.
Ah, but the best laid plans…
Released over Easter weekend in
2007, Grindhouse was a resounding
financial flop, even though its critical reception was strong. Even though I
had a total blast seeing it on opening day, in retrospect a lot about this
project seems a bit daft. Sure, it’s a tag team effort from two of the biggest
directors in the then-burgeoning geek universe, but it’s also a three-hour
double feature that was sold partially as one big film and partially as a double
feature. I’m still not sure who thought that Easter weekend would be a good
time to release this profane enterprise, and I can’t believe that timing didn’t
have an effect on its success. Watching it on video all these years later, I
was struck by just how much of a niche enterprise it’s become (and probably was
at the time.) The fake ‘70s-era trailers, the drive-in snipes, the faux
scratches and pops, the missing footage….even in 2007 these markers were relics
of the past, pitched directly at the hardcore or aging audience who spoke that
language. A general audience of those unschooled in that cinematic milieu (or
those too young to have experienced it) were likely dumbfounded by some of the
tricks on display. Ironically, the digital innovations that Rodriguez so
embraced have helped turn Grindhouse into
even more of a curiosity in this near post-film world.
The genius of Tarantino’s
previous films lies in the canny way that he melds references to the past with
characters who feel totally modern and complex, thus making them much more than
a wax museum with a pulse, as Vincent Vega famously says in Pulp Fiction. I still find Grindhouse to be thrilling on a
nostalgic level, but there’s now a wax museum feel to many of its charms. Planet Terror, Rodriguez’s extended
paean to Cannon Films via George Romero, is a fun little potboiler with some
fantastic gore effects, but much of it also feels like a bunch of actors
playing archetypes (as opposed to breathing life into those archetypes.) Of
course, my qualms might be completely missing the point; cheap thrills are the
lingua franca of such an endeavor.
Death
Proof,
on the other hand, has really grown on me since that maiden screening. In
recreating the grindhouse experience, Rodriguez and QT consciously set out to
make the A-picture more readily accessible and dynamic, while allowing the
B-feature to stretch out in sometimes confounding, yet still interesting, ways.
The most common contemporary criticism of Grindhouse
(one which still pops up here and there) was that with Death Proof, Tarantino had given in to his own worst tendencies,
falling so in love with his dialogue that he created a film that foregrounded
boredom at the expense of the car chase thrills at the end of the picture. That
critique remains an odd take on the film, because viewed in immediate
succession to his other works, Death
Proof reveals itself as no less talky or digressive than QT’s more lauded
works. Well, maybe a bit more digressive, as many of the extended conversations
on display here are very much in the minutiae-obsessed vein of the stoner
mindset. But there’s also a bit of a curdled, misogynist undertone to some of
the knocks against a story that places so many of those conversations in the
mouths of women. Plot is not the central focus of much of the film, but the
evocation of these characters’ worlds, of the often minor concerns that make up
their lives, captures a sense of neo-realism that is often absent from QT’s
work.
And it’s only through the
extended focus on those shaggy dog passages that Tarantino can spring the film’s
narrative trap. In discussing Death Proof,
he compared it to a mixture of the car chase and slasher film, except the
slasher’s weapon was a car. The wielder of that murderous instrument is Stuntman
Mike, marvelously embodied by Kurt Russell. In a cast of relative unknowns and
character actors (Rosario Dawson was the only major name at the time,) Russell
brings a palpable old Hollywood presence and grandeur to his portrayal of a man
who was once a major film player, but whose career has been reduced by age and
the industry’s reliance on CGI. When they meet him, the film’s first group of
women poke fun at Mike for his anachronistic wardrobe, ducktail hairdo, and
mildly geeky demeanor. But there’s a seductive charm that age, experience, and
his own psychotic self-confidence have endowed him with, enough to lull all of
these women into believing that he’s just another good-looking barfly. When he
drives his custom stunt car straight through their ride, graphically severing
legs and heads in a shocking act of brutality, it’s still a shock, even when
you know that it’s coming. The killer on the road, brain squirming like a toad….
Death
Proof’s
second half serves as a refutation to the semi-misogynist thrills that the
slasher film often provided, summoning forth a cadre of badass ladies headed up
by real-life stunt woman Zoe Bell (who served as Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill double.) It’s telling that
Mike never gets to work his sly charms on this group, eschewing that foreplay
for a direct road confrontation that ranks as one of the most thrilling action
sequences in modern cinema, Bell barely strapped to the hood of a 1970 Dodge
Challenger and flailing about as the death proof car pursues she and her
friends. Seeing this chase on a giant screen in 2007 had me literally on the
edge of my seat, the danger made so vivid by the obvious and complete lack of
computer chicanery on display. If Stuntman Mike is a living elegy to analog
cinema, Bell is a reminder that the pleasures of that world haven’t all
disappeared. Sans any flirtatious affectations, Mike is satisfied with merely
threatening their lives (a variation on skipping dinner to make out in the back
seat?) But his male bravado is completely deflated when they first shoot him in
the arm, and then turn the tables by engaging him in a high speed pursuit of
their own. The visceral delight that Bell, Dawson, and the hyper-aggressive
Tracie Thoms take in mowing him down is still quite the subversive thrill,
especially in a society that too often relegates feminist power to a polite and
conciliatory realm. And it’s matched by how much of a sniveling coward Russell
and QT reveal Mike to be. In a career marked by accusations that he only lives
vicariously through the cool of his cinematic heroes, it’s here that Tarantino
offers a meta-commentary on that very mindset in this slug of a human being who’s
convinced himself that he’s the cock of the walk.
It was impossible to know at the
time, but Stuntman Mike’s existence as a man out of time would be very
prescient. Death Proof would be
Tarantino’s swan song to the contemporary era (at least as of this writing.) It’s
hard to know how much of his departure to the ’40s and the Civil War era in his
subsequent films has been driven by the accelerated encroachment of technology
on a world that he still views through a distinctly analog lens. Nonetheless,
his retreat even further into the past wouldn’t prove to be a matter of
retrograde infantilism. Indeed, the films that followed Death Proof would contain some of his finest work, and serve as a
fascinating document of his evolution as an artist. And it all began once upon
a time, in Nazi-occupied France…
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