Trying Real Hard to Be the Shepherd: A Review of CINEMA SPECULATION
Correlation between my weakened lung capacity at birth and my love for old movies can’t be understated. When I was born, I had an underdeveloped respiratory system, leading, I’m told, to a prolonged stay of several months at the hospital, nestled within an oxygen chamber, until doctors deemed I was strong enough to breathe unassisted. As I grew into adolescence, I’d puff on a series of inhalers every morning and evening, as well as don a nebulizer mask, fitted with a reservoir of medicines that would filter through a motorized device, producing a haze of vapors I’d have to breathe, twice a day, every day.
This was the eighties, so the idea of seating a child in front of a tablet or iPhone was less an idea of unreasonableness than one of witchcraft. In the absence of these gadgets, and as I was at an age insufficient for reading (at least, initially), my parents sat me in front of the TV for my twice-daily dosages, sometimes placing a video cassette into our Beta player. We weren’t a wealthy family, and as VHS had already trounced its aforementioned competitor by this point in time, our capacity for video collection stunted itself by whatever materials could be found at yard sales, swap meets, or other means, either discounted or free. The newest film we owned was Real Genius (1985), and even that was a gift from an aunt who’d upgraded to VHS and no longer needed her obsolete tapes. (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial [1982] pulled up a close second, which should provide a firmer awareness for the kind of moviegoing experiences which engrossed me in elementary school.) Classic horror movies (Universal monsters), Marx Brothers films, and fare of equivalent age and verve were my bread-and-butter, to the point I dumbfounded childhood friends when I couldn’t quote lines from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (until it eventually appeared as a “Sunday Afternoon Movie” on TV), but passed one-liners by Groucho on the playground, which no one, save the teachers chaperoning our hijinks, understood.
As time passed and my lungs strengthened, I undertook cross-country and track-and-field, and my family obtained a DVD player. This was the era (late-‘90s), in which AFI (American Film Institute) annually composed Top-100 lists of the best movies of all-time, broadcasting them on network television. Their first ranking was inclusive of all genres, and then subsequent years focused specifically on Comedy, Romance, and other specifications. Initially, I’d watch the lists and jot down movies I hadn’t seen before, thinking there would only be a couple. After the first program, I immediately realized how desperately I aspired to noviceness.
The small mountain town I lived in had two video-rental places. One focused more on newer films, while the other had a laundry list of classics on reserve. In time, unsurprisingly, the latter became defunct; but, before it did, I was able to put a plethora of notches into my belt. Meanwhile, one night, my sister came home with a copy of a film she’d rented from the “newer-movie” establishment, and as I attempted to swallow whatever cinematic pellets I could find, I joined her in watching it.
I specifically remember my parents were away on date night (the annual policeman’s ball). Moreover, I was still at an age where my parents thought it best I be babysat in their absence. How my sister had heard of the film she’d selected, I’m not sure, but the moment she put it in and hit Play, my life “in the movies” would never be the same.
The blood. The screaming. The cursing. The irreverent dialogue. I didn’t know what a “reservoir dog” was, and I didn’t care. What I’d experienced was far different than the classic cinema I poured through my eyeholes. This was new and kinetic, but, somehow, served the same flavors my AFI-acclimated palette so desired. There were notes of Scorsese, DiPalma, Mann, Coppola. At the time, I couldn’t pinpoint homages and pop-culture references from the seventies the way I’d later absorb them upon further viewings. As a child of the eighties, it was a decade beyond my grasp, ingested only through other forms of media, including, of course, film.
The director’s name seemed as artistic and abrasive as the movie itself: Quentin Tarantino.
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To today’s audiences, the name “Quentin Tarantino” is synonymous with artistic flare, cutting dialogue, and ultra-violence, but at the time of my initial baptism into his cinematic career, he’d only just finished his third film, Jackie Brown, and his second, Pulp Fiction, was completely unknown to me. (I believe I recognized the movie poster—Uma Thurman lying on a bed with a gun and dogeared paperback strewn in front of her, smoke leaking from her cigarette to the ceiling—but hadn’t registered what it represented.) It’s almost impossible to describe to younger generations the kind of upending impact he had on movie landscapes in the nineties, especially to an oddball child who subsisted on black-and-white film noir and slapstick comedies of the thirties and forties. (Man Bites Dog, a French mockumentary/drama that came out at the same time as Pulp Fiction carries a lot of similar weight to Tarantino’s films [and I highly recommend it], but films of this ilk seem to have fallen out of notoriety as their directors lacked the ingenuity and chutzpah to maintain relevance throughout an oeuvre, the way directors like Tarantino and Kubrick have.)
Tarantino has since positioned himself into a premier league of filmmakers as both auteur and commercial darling. His movies are events, and his knowledge of classic (and obscure) cinema shines unparalleled. Whereas I’d spent my childhood attempting to view what movies critics and industry insiders considered “the best,” graduating from AFI lists to foreign-media suggestions, art-publication rankings, and recommendations from my favorite filmmakers, by the time I graduated college, I’d tapped nearly every Criterion Collection disc my local library had, and subsequently ventured into the darker realm of grindhouse spectacles, praised, if not emulated, by Tarantino, most especially through his post-Jackie Brown career. (Yes, Jackie Brown is an homage to seventies-era Blacksploitation, but with movies like Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, Deathproof [originally part of a double-feature presentation with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, entitled, of all things, Grindhouse], et. al., Tarantino threw off the bridles of strictly dramatic storytelling for a cobbled brilliance only someone immersed in genre spectacles of his own childhood could muster.)
Anyone who’s seen a Tarantino interview knows the chaotic brilliance the man possesses, when it comes to opining moving pictures. His encyclopedic knowledge of the peaks and troughs of cinematic excellence fizzes in bursts of fragmentary sentences and run-on adoration for talents and stories only a scholar would know without meaty references at hand (like reading Pale Fire, cover-to-cover, without batting an eye). Witnessing his explanations and examinations, one can’t help but wonder how someone like Tarantino not only exists, but found his way into a profession so utterly suitable to his strengths.
Cinema Speculation, written by the great director, is a series of essays, chronicled sequentially through chaptered films (although dribbled with anachronistic takeaways from his personal life and interests), each of which left a lasting impact on either Tarantino himself or the works of his favorite actors, directors, etc.,…which indelibly left a lasting impact on him, too, through tangential means. Stories of Tarantino (as young as the age of six) accompanying his parents on dates to the theater, watching things even children of today, let alone adults, would find shocking (Deliverance, for example), are coupled with behind-the-scene tales of said films, taken straight from conversations the author had with individuals involved with their productions.
Impeccable annotations of the films in question also bring to light interconnections with other classics even those immersed in old-Hollywood films might have missed. (For example, I’d never realized the parallels between Taxi Driver and The Searchers. [In fact, it seems many seventies classics owe their story structures to The Searchers?]) All the while, Tarantino shirks the high-brow composure of most film scholars, deciding instead to construct his written pieces in his everyday parlance. Unexpected sentences crop up in choppy, messy ways. Thoughts break and fall away, only to be picked up again, later on, in a single passage. Repetition of ideas, plot points, and words (how many times can one person use the term “shotgun-wielding” on one page?!) abound. Swearing and innuendo are frequent, but not overbearing—not for Tarantino, at least. Overall, reading Cinema Speculation is an experience, I’d imagine, akin to transcribing the innerworkings of a talented, shrewd, furious mind, attempting to expose its innermost angsts and appreciations onto the page with the same passion and vitality that it gained a seat at the filmic table in the first place.
Tarantino demonstrates that everyone’s entry point into the world of films is as unpredictable as it may be unprecedented, but what films mean—to audiences, to the movies themselves, to their industry, to the era in which they were produced—can be as uncanny as any tale told. The film industry is a business, but every movie that’s made, be it Citizen Kane or Caged Heat, means something to someone, and impacts the evolution of the medium as a whole. No, Tarantino isn’t as polished an author as his movies might suggest, but he enters into the world of the written word the same as he had the world of movies—his own way. And that has to be respected.
Side Note: Tarantino’s chapter on Rolling Thunder (1977) was so intriguing, I actually set the book down the second I’d finished it, logged on to the streaming service, Kanopy, and sat through the entire movie, picking the book up once more, after the end credits had finished scrolling. I was not disappointed!
