(SOME SPOILERS)
(NOTE: "first half" and "second half" in the following refer to the first and second half of Tarantino's DEATH PROOF. I do not discuss PLANET TERROR.)
The title of this post refers initially - perhaps only - to the fact that most Tarantino features have women as their central protagonists.
Still, many of the iconic images of Tarantino's films are of men. Further, Tarantino'searly career was largely built on (a) violent spectacle between MEN and (b) dialogue scenes in which MEN TALK (about Madonna, about hamburgers and foot rubs).
Since Jackie Brown, however, Tarantino's representations of women develop along two vectors:
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the spectacle of violence (KILL BILL); and
* to reconcile the female protagonist with the scenes of dialogue (DEATH PROOF).
Thus it is the fact that WOMEN TALK in DEATH PROOF that brings his career full circle; completing the wholesale REGENDERING of the auteur persona first announced in the all-male world of RESERVOIR DOGS.
A key issue here is SOCIABILITY which, for Tarantino, is always verbal. Prior to DEATH PROOF the issue of female sociability has not been raised: Jackie Brown and Kill Bill involve solitary female protagonists. DEATH PROOF, by contrast, focuses on a group of women (again, a regendering of RESERVOIR DOGS).
Make that two groups. Because what is striking about DEATH PROOF is its doubled narrative. The first half of the film focuses on one group of women: they meet Stuntman Mike and are killed. The second half, we are introduced to a wholly new group, unrelated to the first: they meet Stuntman Mike and kill him. In effect, the same story, twice, only with different endings and characters. (Structurally, this has parallels to PSYCHO.) Each half of the film is formally different; these formal differences, moreover, correspond to two different conceptions of female sociability, as follows:
1. Female interaction as conveyed through montage of individualizing closeups and medium shots (the first group). I would note here that Tarantino's approach to editing is more discontinuous than in any other of his films. Rather than cut between repeat camera setups (e.g., shot-reverse shot), each setup feels discrete - a chain of single images that do not repeat. (This needs another viewing to be verified.) The discontinuity of the film's first half is also seen in the "missing reel" gag, edits that mimic a "bad" reel change, etc.
2. Female interaction as conveyed through camera movement (the second group). This is first evident in the lengthy dialogue sequence that introduces the group, comprised of extremely long single takes, in which the camera is constantly encircling the women. The film's second half, it can also be noted, lacks the pastiche of low-grade exhibition evident in the first (and evident throughout Rodriguez's Planet Terror). Finally, the stylistic trope of encirclement, through camera movement, recurs in the film's final sequence in which the women beat Stuntman Mike to death.
To wrap up here. Approach (1) seems to me definitive of representations of male dialogue in Tarantino's earlier films: witness the opening of RESERVOIR DOGS. Approach (2) is new. The question then would be: to what extent can this stylistic departure be related to the process of regendering that has defined Tarantino's work? To put it in the crudest terms: if approach (1) is to be matched with male interaction (in DOGS), should approach (2) be matched with female interaction (in DEATH PROOF)?
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RK, you're analysis of Tarantino's shift in gender is interesting. He has effectively recast himself as a kind of women's-film director in the past few years. As you hint, the diner sequence among the four women in the second half of Death Proof alludes to the opening diner sequence in Reservoir Dogs, as the camera rotates around the women as they discuss men, their careers and Vanishing Point. Tarantino also has given the female protagonists of the first half the obscure-music fetishism made famous by the K Billy-loving thieves in Tarantino's first film.
Of course, Tarantino has not done much more than merely replace his earlier protagonists' one X chromosome with a Y, so it remains to be seen how important a shift in his outlook this is. I wonder if Tarantino has been influenced more by Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Suicide Girls?
On that odd note, I'll sign off. I'll post more later on both segments of Grindhouse.
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