Quentin Tarantino, The Aesthetics Of Violence

Quentin Tarantino is one of those directors who has managed to create his own brand, his personal identity stamp. When we see one of his films, we know perfectly what we are going to find: violence, music, fetish actors, close-ups of female feet, scenes recorded from the trunk, abundant tributes, etc. A mix of aspects that the director likes, from tributes to filmmakers of the stature of Alfred Hitchcock to kung fu movies, B movies and spaghetti western and even The Flintstones .

Tarantino does what he wants, makes cameos, plays with color, recycles shots, reinvents scenes … and mixes everything until he finds what he was looking for. Many may accuse you of plagiarism, but we must ask ourselves if it is correct to speak of plagiarism when it is something totally recognized and the author’s intention is precisely to transfer a scene to another film, to another context, building something completely different.

We all, absolutely all, drink from our tastes and influences and, when creating something totally new in the 21st century, surely, we will resort to citing or reinventing something that has already been done before.

There is no doubt that Tarantino needs his influences to build his films because, above all, he is a great cinephile. On more than one occasion, he has pointed out that, to make good cinema, it is not necessary to go to any school, simply, there has to be a true passion for what is being done. Cinema is born from passion, its films are born and the unforgettable tomato sauce baths to which it subjects us. And, at this point, it is worth asking: why do we like violence so much? What is it about Tarantino’s cinema that makes him so special?

The keys to his cinema

Despite having no training as a filmmaker, his love for cinema led him towards directing. Tarantino took acting classes and worked in a video store, a place that he himself has cited as a source of inspiration. Among friends and with the intention of making a simple film, Reservoir Dogs emerged , or rather, what was to be Reservoir Dogs . Tarantino did not see it possible to make a real film at that time, so he thought to settle for an economic production and among friends. However, producer Lawrence Bender read his script and proposed to make it the film we know today.

Tarantino had just created a hallmark that would consecrate him as a director and lead him to reap countless successes and applause in the future. As for plagiarism, Taratino reuses his sources of inspiration, giving them a new meaning, placing them in a new framework and creating something new and original from them. He does not hide his sources of inspiration, but elevates them, pays tribute to them and shows them to the public. Thus, we have, for example: the famous dance scene from Pulp Fiction extracted from 8 1/2 by Fellini or Uma Thurman’s costume in Kill Bill that greatly reminds us of Bruce Lee.

Watching a Tarantino tape is a real exercise in intertextuality. His films have their own plot and identity, but they are full of allusions and references. With  Pulp Fiction  (1994), Tarantino finished his consecration as director and screenwriter, attracted the attention of the public and critics and won his first Oscar for best original screenplay.

Other titles such as: Jackie Brown (1997), Malditos Bastardos (2009) or Kill Bill (2003) would end up founding the Tarantino brand. Finally, his latest films have made a declaration of love for a genre that is very forgotten today: the spaghetti western ; with Django Desencadenado (2012) and Los odioso ocho (2015) he  recovers the essence of the genre and of filmmakers such as Sergio Leone, as well as the figure of Ennio Morricone, composer of some of the most recognizable film soundtracks. Tarantino is currently preparing a new film and has stated that his filmography will consist of only ten films.

Music is another pillar on which his cinema is built, the director himself is in charge of personally choosing the soundtrack. For this reason, we are, once again, faced with a great mix of influences and styles. Although we are in Nazi-occupied France, Tarantino delights us with a cinema that burns to the rhythm of David Bowie’s Cat People . Tarantino does not care too much about anachronisms, he himself makes the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Tarantino and a taste for violence

If something defines Quentin Tarantino’s cinema, it is violence. A totally explicit violence, blood baths that, at times, border on the absurd and lead to laughter. We do not care too much if a character dies or lives, because the truth is that there are few with whom to really empathize, a good example of this we would find in The Hateful Eight . When we go to see a Tarantino film, we do not expect to find endearing characters or that they remain alive for too long on the screen, we go to see blood, violence and laugh with it.

The music, along with its disorderly narration and an explicit violence that is even beautiful, provides us with scenes that, far from displeasing us, we love. The famous ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs , for example, is enlivened by music and dance and, in turn, is a “replica” of a scene from the movie Django (Corbucci, 1966). In this way, violence ceases to be uncomfortable and becomes an object of delight.

Can violence be a fun thing? Where is the limit? At this point, Tarantino has mentioned on several occasions that his cinema is nothing more than a fantasy, a fiction to enjoy. We must not question whether that violence is moral or not, we must simply enjoy it. A violence that, enlivened by music and loaded with games of contrast, is attractive, aesthetic. It is not the same to see a movie in which violence is represented as a reality, in a very crude way, to see a film in which violence is nothing more than an excuse for entertainment.

In addition, Tarantino has alluded to the kung fu tapes in which violence is also present and no one questions their morality, as they are pure entertainment. Faced with a film of raw, unfair or real violence such as  La Pasión (Mel Gibson, 2004), El Experimento (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2001) or Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), surely, we will not feel any pleasure, but quite the opposite: discomfort . Something that does not happen when watching a film by directors like Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, where violence is more of a catharsis, a liberation and purification through images.

This is not something new, but Aristotle already pointed it out in his Poetics , where he made a deep analysis of Greek tragedy and all that it implied. Why did the Greeks go to see representations in which violence or incest appeared on the scene? Precisely because they were taboo subjects in society, of passions that live in the human being and that are repressed for their immorality. In this way, when attending a show of the style, catharsis occurs, that is, the purification of emotions.

This question would later be developed by some psychoanalytic authors such as Freud. For this reason, the taste for violence does not seem to be something exclusive to contemporaneity, nor to cinema, but rather something that has always been linked to humans; something that, in one way or another, we have tried to translate into art. Tarantino always reminds us that his cinema is nothing more than a fantasy, it is not real, and that is why we like it so much. It is a catharsis, a game with our own subconscious, with passions and emotions; and, without a doubt, it is a cinema to enjoy.