It all starts with the wind, the
ever-present white noise humming behind all that takes place. Or maybe it
starts with the ambient rattle of the stagecoach, which, paired with the steady
vibrations of the vehicle itself, seem to promise a gradual descent into sleep
for at least one of the wayward travelers housed within. Or maybe it really all
starts with the pulsating orchestral thrum of Ennio Morricone’s main titles,
all horror film menace and military march precision, the perfect doomsday sturm
und drang for that lone stagecoach on its way to a rendezvous with bloodshed
and slaughter. All of them forming the persistent, haunting aural landscape
that allows for no escape from the brutality of the land, of the people, of the
country.
That wind raged through the air
on the day that my cohorts and I ventured forth across the barren winter
landscape of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois on our pilgrimage to see The Hateful Eight in 70mm. Situated, as
we were, in Columbus over the long Christmas week, we had the option of
visiting a multiplex in suburban Cleveland to see Quentin Tarantino’s newest
cinematic brainchild in its original format, our only viable in-state option at
the time. But it made sense to venture forth across the frozen tundra for this
filmic experience, to brave the elements and the passage of time in order to
pay tribute to the communal art of the filmgoing experience, to see a 70mm
presentation in a theater which we knew had a track record of flexing its large
format screening chops.
Throughout the essays that have
gradually, sometime meanderingly weaved their way toward this final literary
destination, I’ve focused so much on the vitality that Tarantino’s films bring
to a jaded, spectacle-deprived modern audience. How their profane, bombastic,
panache can only be fully appreciated on the big screen, preferably with a
crowded house of like-minded enthusiasts (or people who just enjoy a good night
out at the movies.) The Hateful Eight
is the ne plus ultra of this stylistic verve, filmed in a format that hasn’t
been used since the ‘60s, ensuring that any theater wishing to screen it in
said format would have to shell out the time and scratch to retrofit their 35mm
projector for the cause. A dead format being used to revive a dying format. Let
the exorcism begin.
Or maybe, as Jim Morrison once
invoked, the ceremony is about to begin. In being tailor made for the
theatrical setting, Tarantino’s films have served as a stern rebuke to the
much-promised democratization of media that modern technology’s siren song has
offered forth. The widescreen tv, the tablet, the phone: all information
portals that have allowed us to permanently embed cinematic memories and
experiences into the immediate fiber of our beings, yet also the vessels that
have transported so many of those memories and experiences into the dreaded,
debased realm of “content.” Lawrence of
Arabia becomes just another distraction from work, or part of a
multi-screen experience. Blue Velvet
is an oddball story flashing across your palm in broad daylight, not a terrifying
experience that you’re forced to give yourself over to in the dark, like
Jeffrey Beaumont on Frank Booth’s nocturnal thrill ride. None of the ceremonial
imperative that was once an integral part of the moviegoing experience remains.
But all the accoutrements
associated with the 70mm Hateful Eight
screenings, the programs, the overture and intermission, the limited seating
(only one screen per venue), the pure thrill of being told that this was a
rarity…these all work to summon once again what lies at the heart of the
classic cinematic experience: the shared sense of partaking in something that
is literally bigger than ourselves. Godard might have famously noted that
cinema is truth 24 frames per second, but it’s also dreaming at that frame
rate, a mass hallucination into which we willingly enter. If cinema is a church
to some, and religious ecstasy has often been proven to be a temporary
fantasy…well, connect the dots. Our voyage on that frigid winter’s day served
as the perfect backdrop for The Hateful
Eight because it transformed a mere film screening into a two day
commitment to eventually sitting with 500 other movie maniacs, communing with
the unexpected (I studiously avoided plot details beforehand), encased in a
room together in defiance to the elements, much like the titular bandits and
lawmen.
If we sought to tap into that
dream state that cinema at its best invokes, then the 70mm format held the
promise of providing the deepest representation of that state. Digital cinema
can serve as a mighty evangelist for those living where film is no longer
readily available, but it also remains a simulacrum, a series of 1’s and 0’s
being thrown onto a screen playacting the part of the image. In a world where
veracity is in question like no time before, 70mm (or even 35mm) is a tactile
summoning of the purity of the image, light literally being forced through a
physical strip of celluloid, film grain a constant, ever-changing, luminescent
dance. I’ve heard stories of stories of Hateful
Eight audience members swearing off film screenings afterward due to the
inherent mild bob and weave that can crop up in the image. But that’s part and
parcel of the aforementioned purity: the knowledge that what we are watching is
a living element, re-animated from a dormant state by mechanical gears and
electric illumination.
Having seen it twice in 70mm (a
local venue eventually screened it in that format) and once in its slightly
reduced DCP presentation, I can attest that while the digital version is
engaging, the original film version is absorbing, enthralling. In digital, DP
Robert Richardson’s lush use of color and his signature hot spotlight effects
feel slightly pale, but on film they’re warm, vibrant, hypnotic. Morricone’s
score can be cranked up as much as you want in digital, but it doesn’t
approximate the full power and majesty it possesses when being read directly
off an analog film source. Even the second time, with an audience that was
maybe a tenth the size of my maiden voyage, the tactile nature of film being
projected was a thrilling sensory experience.
All of this discussion of truth
in presentation for a film that is premised on the fine art of lying and
performance. For once again, we’re in Tarantinoland, in which the storyteller
is king, and in which the tale being spun holds more power than any firearm or
axe. What’s new here is how QT portrays this liar’s paradise, or, more
accurately, where he chooses to portray it. This is the third straight period
piece he’s directed, and it’s not hard to believe that it’s been a conscious
choice predicated on allowing his legion of talkers to match wits without the
modern equalizers of cell phones and the internet. But even though they’re
obsessed with language, Inglourious
Basterds and Django Unchained
carry with them the allure of mobility, the movement from one physical space to
another. Those two films might feel slightly alien to our contemporary
sensibilities, but The Hateful Eight’s
daring gambit is to craft an environment that might be even more alien: a
single room in which people are essentially trapped and forced to deal with
each other. Remove the classic locked room mystery nature of the plot and you
have a societal microcosm which can feel completely befuddling to a modern
audience trained to annihilate even the hint of boredom by retreating to their
devices when things get slow. Minnie’s Haberdashery is a societal microcosm
wherein the only escape is interior in nature. It can be a discomfiting viewing
proposition: a few friends have felt like the film takes forever to get to its
point. I would argue that that is the
point, the experience of this motley crew of refugees navigating their way
through the minefield of deception an often circuitous, frustrating, comedic,
human endeavor.
And just as Scherazade prolonged
her life with a tale well told, lying proves to be a survival mechanism for
these characters. What might be less obvious is the larger world in which
Tarantino situates them. Much of The
Hateful Eight feels like a spiritual cousin to Django Unchained, which served as a hopeful alternate historical
stab at the destruction of slavery. This film surveys a post-Civil War society
in which unity and brotherhood compose the grand communal mythos, but in which
the hard reality is composed of back-stabbing and naked self-interest. Marquis
Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) might not have physical enslavement to worry about,
but he’s a slave nonetheless to society’s rampant racism and the legacy of
supposed cowardice that earned him exile from the military. Fellow bounty
hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is about as close to traditional moral
authority as the film gets, but he’s so hardened by the nature of his work as
to be more hollowed out mercenary than heroic figure. Daisy Domergue (a
show-stealing Jennifer Jason Leigh) seems for quite a bit to be the victim of a
deeply ingrained misogyny before revealing herself to be the most devious
character in the whole film. Among the lead eight characters, only Chris Mannix
(Walton Goggins) ultimately proves to be exactly who he presents himself as.
The fact that he’s a dumbass good ol’ boy still in thrall to the philosophy of
the renegade Confederate army that his father led tells you a lot about the
moral landscape of the film. To be a liar is to be suave, intelligent, urbane,
cunning. The chessboard at the center of the Haberdashery (a lie in and of
itself) is the most apt metaphor: to paraphrase that old axiom about gender
relations, all of these characters are playing chess while Chris is stuck in a
checkers world.
But it’s his checkers mentality
that ultimately serves as what comes closest to passing for redemption in this
story. Goggins really commits to the relative unlikeability of the role,
playing Mannix in such broad fashion as to seem almost cartoonish at times. It
proves to be a canny choice, throwing the audience’s admiration toward the more
restrained, scheming charisma of the other characters, only for their self-interest
to backfire as they’re systematically murdered in a daisy chain of violence.
Ultimately, it’s Mannix’s basic morality that ends the cycle of bloodshed. The
chess player would take Daisy’s offer of easy bounty money for her escape and
Marquis’s murder, but Chris decides to live up to his new role as Red Rock
sheriff at least once by doing the right thing.
Maybe, even above the omnipresent
wind, and Morricone score, and rampant lying, it all comes back to that
infamous Lincoln letter that Marquis Warren uses to disarm so many white folk.
In a desolate moral landscape defined by the hyper-libertarian code, the ghost
of Lincoln still hangs over the proceedings as the one possible unifying force,
so much so that when Warren reveals the letter’s false nature, John Ruth is
(for probably the only time in the film) genuinely hurt (just as he was
genuinely touched to read it.) In one sense, that letter is representative of
the big lie that society has bought into, the one that says we can actually
live together and transcend matters of race and class. In another, it’s a
symbol of the myths that we need to believe to continue on. Take the final shot
of the film, in which a dying Chris reads it aloud for the first time. Even
though he knows of its falsity, those inspiring, forged words serve as a
temporary balm for his pain, mirrored in the visual of his passing away in
tandem with the black man that he was raised to hate. After finishing it, he
tosses it to the side, and the audience is left to wonder how much power he takes
from it and how much he’s dismissing it as a temporary salve.
It’s such a powerful tableau that
it can be easy to ignore the other figure in the shot: the now-hanged Daisy,
dangling from the rafters on the left side of the frame. Her presence recalls
the film’s extended opening credits shot, in which a wooden statue of a
crucified Christ is also prominently featured on the left side of the frame.
From the beginning, the audience is being told of the agony and suffering that
are to come, while also being given a visual hint of the secret martyr at the
center of the story, the slavery-battling president shot down before his time.
It can be tempting to read that final scene as confirmation that, yeah, maybe
we can all just get along. But nobody
gets out of this tale alive, and the enduring bracketing images of the
narrative are of two of the most agonizing forms of death. Hope might be
society’s necessary illusion, but it’s a much more nihilistic philosophy that
dominates this tale. Which, perhaps, makes it even more of a contemporary story
than it would appear to be, a fitting parable for an era in which, at times, we
seem to have made negligible progress toward the unity that Lincoln strove for.
Just like that wind that persistently howls outside the Haberdashery, there’s
ultimately no escape from the inhumanity that has dominated mankind’s existence
from the beginning.
