There’s always been something slightly anachronistic about the work of Quentin Tarantino. In his earlier films, dudes with 1970s Jeri curls talked on cellphones and jewel thieves argued about Madonna’s 1980s work while driving cars from the mid-20th century. But in his most recent films — Inglourious Basterds and Tuesday’s Django Unchained — he’s gone a step further by cinematically rewriting the past. And if fan theories are to be believed, his movies may be creating an entirely new alternate world history.
Django Unchained, which hits theaters on Dec. 25, takes place in the American South in 1858, in places and times that are familiar, but what happens in those environments — like a freed slave (Django, played by Jamie Foxx) and his German bounty hunter associate (played by Christoph Waltz) attempting to rescue Django’s wife from a ruthless plantation owner — are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Since chronologically, it takes place in a time period earlier than any other Tarantino film, if you begin from Django and go forward you’ll see the America he wants us to live in, at least on screen.
(Spoiler alert: Plot points for many Tarantino films to follow.)
There is a fan theory on the internet about the connective thread that binds Tarantino’s work. It essentially takes the truths that are known about his films’ connections — things like Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction and Vic Vega/Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs being brothers and Donnie Donowitz/”The Bear Jew” from Basterds being the father of Lee Donowitz from Tarantino-penned True Romance — and extrapolates them into an integrated world.
The theory goes that in that universe, the different ending of World War II in Basterds has created an alternate timeline where the characters in many of his movies live. Within this realm, however, pop culture is given more weight because Adolf Hitler’s reign ended in a movie theater, making it perfectly plausible that gangsters would argue about “Like a Virgin.” In this sense Tarantino’s films create a parallel universe like those in sci-fi or fantasy, but specifically for people who obsess over The Good, the Bad and the Ugly instead of The Matrix.
‘A world in which we are having this conversation — a world, I mean, in which viewers collate the last names of minor characters in Hollywood movies and then publish their family trees and provide clickable footnotes to win over doubters — is the Tarantinian world in which people analyze Madonna lyrics over lunch-counter coffee.’ — Prof. Christian Thorne It’s an interesting theory, and also one that’s kind of self-defeating. We do live in a world where World War II did end pretty violently and also one in which film fans go on reddit to bandy about film conjectures, notes Christian Thorne, a critical theorist in the English department at Williams College who teaches on the history of literature, film, and radical philosophy. (He also has theories of his own about Tarantino’s work.)
“A world in which we are having this conversation — a world, I mean, in which viewers collate the last names of minor characters in Hollywood movies and then publish their family trees and provide clickable footnotes to win over doubters — is the Tarantinian world in which people analyze Madonna lyrics over lunch-counter coffee,” Thorne said in an e-mail to Wired. “The theory itself shows that the theory is wrong.”
But what if it’s not so much that these interconnected themes are a narrative structure that was intentionally put into these movies? It doesn’t have to be fully realized gambit or a secret plot. It seems far more likely, and interesting, to think that Tarantino’s early movies were just what he thought reality should look like and now he’s moving onto making films about what history should have been.
In Django Unchained, like in many Tarantino films, revenge plays a huge role. And like those movies, the revenge is happening on two levels – the level at which one character or group of characters gets revenge on a villain or villains, and the level at which that revenge is metaphor for the comeuppance of an oppressor of a disenfranchised minority. Jewish soldiers get to take out the Nazis in Basterds, women seek retribution against Stuntman-Mike-as-symbol-of-patriarchy in Death Proof, and now African-Americans get even with racist, slave-owning whites through Django, who even says about his new line of work as a bounty hunter: “Kill white folks and they pay you for it – what’s not to like?”
It’s actually amazing Tarantino gets away with this. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism — these are not easy things to turn into cinematic romps. But yet he does with such fervor that audiences always seem to want more. Part of this has to do with the fact that as a writer/director, he is an unparalleled storyteller who just happens to make hyper-violent films about sensitive subjects. Although topics like racism or misogyny are kind of hard to make real revenge flicks about because there’s usually no lone perpetrator, Tarantino has a gift of creating these characters and heightened scenarios that serve as metaphors for the whole problem.
A couple of years ago during an interview with Zoë Bell, Wired asked her if “Ship’s Mast” — the high-speed car hood-riding game her character played in Death Proof — was a real thing stunt actors did for thrills, as portrayed in the movie. Turns out, Tarantino just made it up. “That was definitely the madness of Quentin’s genius mind,” she said. It was an elaborate plot device, but a necessary to one justify the revenge enacted by Bell’s character on Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike at the end of the film. Her no-mercy neck-snapping would’ve seemed out of place for someone who was just joyriding around; the situation had to be so intense that the reaction was equal and opposite to the action.
This formula has translated into Tarantino’s newer historical films, where certain elements are so hyper-real any and all fallout seems fitting. In Django, it’s the inhumane slave-on-slave battles royal known in the films as “Mandingo fighting” (a concept based in history but with a name based on a 1970s film, naturally). In Basterds, where the wrongs that needed righted were already obvious, it was the ruthlessness of The Jew Hunter (Waltz, who gives an equally stellar performance in Unchained as a good German this time around) that warrants the explosive ending. But that doesn’t mean, like the criticism that’s often leveled at Tarantino, he makes things more violent than they need to be, he just doesn’t handle anything with kid gloves.
“It can’t be more nightmarish than it was in real life. It can’t be more surrealistic than it was in real life. It can’t be more outrageous than it was in real life,” Tarantino says in Django’s production notes about the historical setting of his current flick. “It’s unimaginable to think of the pain and the suffering that went on in this country, making it perfect for a Spaghetti Western interpretation. The reality fits into the biggest canvas that you could think of for this story.”
And that is where the true beauty in Tarantino’s films lies. Beyond their connections to each other (Mr. White used to work with True Romance’s Alabama, you’ll recall), and their connections to the real world (remember when Kill Bill’s Pussy Wagon showed up in Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone” video?) he’s created a hybrid style that is as postmodern as it is period. His martial-arts assassins are white girls from the States, his gangsters idolize Elvis, and his Westerns take place in the pre-Civil War South. That is the Tarantino universe.
Tarantino may be film’s last great Luddite — he recently said the move toward “digital stuff” in films would drive him out the business — but his movies do share something with sci-fi and superhero stories in that despite his embellishments (if they can be called that) and wild-card scenarios there is a sense that they represent what could be or should have been. It’s as if they exist in an alternate universe — it’s not reality, but it looks pretty fantastic.
It’s Quentin Tarantino’s world. And luckily, every so often he lets us live in it.
