The hour is upon us. It’s time to sort the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, the Tarantino faithful from his fair-weather friends. To be truthful, Death Proof is nothing if not a test. Did you idle away your youth watching En Grym Film and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things? Do you care how they did those stunts in Vanishing Point? Would you recognise a sequence from The Bird With Crystal Plumage if it came up and tore out your eyeball? If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions then, chances are, this is not the movie for you.
This is Mr. Tarantino playing ouroboros; there’s intertextuality in the intertextuality and the film will eat itself forever. Part of the amusement here derives from the director’s own iconic status. Those snippets from Pulp Fiction, drawn from a century’s worth of cinema, now found in every lexicon north of Antarctica, are here trotted out with ironic aplomb. Bernard Hermann’s 'Twisted Nerve' plays as a ring-tone. There’s loaded talk about some director fucking Daryl Hannah’s stand-in. “That’s a little more information than we needed to know”, sing-song ‘the girls’ right before they run into Kurt Russell’s stuntman turned serial killer. (And yes, he can be heard imitating himself playing Jack Burton in Big Trouble In Little China imitating John Wayne. That’s just the sort of movie this is.)
This is, of course, one half of the movie released in the US as Grindhouse, an homage to the golden age of what moral guardians once enticingly dubbed video ‘nasties’. To that end Death Proof is all about fast cars and loose girls meeting sticky ends. But that’s not to say it deserves to be lumped in with the same unlovely genus that brought us the recent girl-choppers Captivity or Paradise Lost. The airy quotation marks are much too pronounced and the final girl(s) do their thing well.
More than this, Tarantino has borrowed the grammar found in say, Go, Go Second Time Virgin and The Bird With Crystal Plumage (which gets an entire scene to itself) to fashion a very high art film indeed. The lovingly recreated smears and jumps and out-of-synch editing are used in the same way that Jean-Luc Godard used those little Brechtian tea-breaks. The film is even audacious enough to replay the exact same story only tweaked slightly. Four girls, gabbing like the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs has suddenly grown a tail from its y-chromosome, are all out on the town when they run into a dangerous killer. Rinse and repeat.
It’s a tribute to QT’s unnerving skills as a filmmaker that he can transplant such tricksy stratagems into the popcorn movie. And who else could get away with breeding snooty modernist tropes with the basest, grubbiest cinema known to man?
And yet Death Proof is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It may be his most ingenuous work. It has more than its fair share of raucous moments. It even boasts the absolute, hands-down, no-contest Best Car Chase Scene Ever. But Mr. Tarantino can be too indulgent with the characters he has tenderly nurtured into being. There’s more girl talk here than you’ll find in three seasons worth of Sex And The City. It may sound real and brilliant and all that. Though to properly nail the verisimilitude the assorted heroines are required to bang on. And on. And on.
One suspects these difficulties can be traced back to the Grindhouse divorce. A Tarantino doodle, created as a fun double header with his old mucker Robert Rodriguez, is a very different prospect than a Tarantino film proper. Still, walk into the cinema with a notebook and your deconstructionist hat on and you’ll come out singing hallelujahs.