For the second time in his career, Quentin Tarantino has won an Oscar for best original screenplay. And with this, we must acknowledge that the triumph of form over content is fully complete in American popular culture.
After all, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on us.
In many ways Tarantino is truly an excellent writer. But it’s quite a stretch to classify his scripts as great literature. Why? Simply put, he has nothing to say. There are no weighty ideas, no grave insights into the human condition, and no emotional depth. Instead, there is merely a wholesale devotion to the lurid, the snappy, and the shocking. And at that, he is very, very good.
In his endless quest for cool, Tarntino has mastered the craft of writing hip, catchy dialog. And the fact that he often has those lines delivered by excellent actors helps immensely. But while Tarantino’s scripts can be highly entertaining, they are almost invariably superficial. And so, what his films actually say is largely irrelevant; rather, the full weight of their impact is derived from how they say it.
Thus, to repeatedly acknowledge his writing as “the best” is to elevate a relatively artless technician (I’m speaking here of his writing, not his film making) over actual artists, including many who also possess formidable technical prowess. To give Tarantino multiple Oscars for authorship is to celebrate cheap thrills and hedonistic pleasures at the expense of striving and love and wisdom and everything else that makes the human endeavor truly worthwhile.
But there’s more to it that that.
The fact that Tarantino seemingly has absolutely nothing to say in an intellectual sense, and only the shallowest of aspirations in an emotional sense, leaves him vulnerable as a filmmaker.
The economy of Reservoir Dogs, and the freshness and devotion of Pulp Fiction’s genre homage, made them truly groundbreaking films that have aged very well. In his acceptance speech last night, Tarantino expressed the admirably modest dream that his films will still be watched in half-a-century. It seems very likel
y that those two will have a sizable audience for at least that long.
Many of the rest, however, are perhaps destined for the late night shlock shows that have so obviously inspired him.
The first time Tarantino really bored me was with Kill Bill, vol. I. The shallow dialog had lost some of its pizazz, and yet another “homage” had begun to seem more like an uninspired pastiche of pilfered tropes by a director who was now bunny hopping from genre to genre for an inability to be truly visionary or original.
After that, he stopped being a must-see filmmaker for me. Instead of actively pursuing his films, I caught them when the opportunity arose, and they seemed increasingly uneven. At their best they were good, but in no way great.
Then things took a turn.
Inglorious Basterds, like many Tarantino films, was ambitious in running time and shock value, if not intellectual pursuits or the finer points of the human experience. But the well crafted scenes, gratuitously righteous violence, and humming dialog had dramatically changed venues.
This wasn’t a crime caper. This was the holocaust.
It’s nothing if not risky to use genuine tragedy as your artistic stomping ground while also have nothing insightful to say.
To his credit, Tarantino took pains to point out that this was pure fantasy fiction. [SPOILER ALERT] And when a film ends with Adolph Hitler getting incinerated in a movie theater conflagration, that point is firmly made and well received.
Nevertheless, Tarantino’s racial revenge fantasy didn’t sit quite right with me. It wasn’t his use of the holocaust as a platform for shallow homage to WWII action movies. I’m okay with that. And on that level, the movie was pretty good, though a bit long. Nor was I bothered because I th
ought he was making a political point when his Jewish heroine kills Hitler by essentially acting as a suicide bomber. That’s actually an interesting way to think about it, but to be honest, I’m not sure it would ever occur to Tarantino to make a political statement in his films. And that was kind of the problem.
In the end, Inglorious Basterds came across as nothing more than a tawdry cheapening of real historical tragedy, as one man’s quest to take a thrill filled joyride through the carnage of history. Tarantino seemed to be co-opting a relatively recent historical tragedy of unfathomable proportion to act out his own repressed, fucked-up racial revenge fantasies.
He’s not alone. I think in a very different way Roberto Begnini did much the same thing with Life is Beautiful (1997), employing saccharine sentimentality instead of Tarantino’s mindless machismo.
But of course it was hard to be sure about Tarantino’s intentions. For a while I thought that perhaps my relatively mild discomfort with Inglorious Basterds was misplaced. Maybe I was just reading too much into a filmmaker who practically begs us not to read too much into him.
But then came Django Unchained. Yet again, Tarantino lives out racial revenge fantasy, this time amid African American slavery instead of the European Jewish genocide.
I don’t know if Tarantino wants to be Jewish on some level. However, he clearly wants to be black. If his latest film isn’t enough evidence for you, check out this footage of him being interviewed by some black television hosts. Warning: you will cringe. Hard. His shucking and jiving is a paean to internalized, fucked-up racial issues along the lines of: nerdy little white boy desperately wants to be cool like black people, because black people are so cool.
And then of course there’s the infamous interview he recently gave to Krishnan Guru-Murthywith of Great Britain’s Channel 4, in which 
Tarantino gets huffy about (surprise!) an intellectually weighty question, and indignantly screeches:
I’m not you’re Slave!
It could otherwise be excused as a very strange though harmless fit, but the irony of the situation seems genuinely and truly lost on Tarantino, leaving you to think he really has some deep seated shit going on.
In recent years, Quentin Tarantino’s racial hangups have compounded his artistic shortcomings. As a result, his limited reach has so greatly exceeded his flailing grasp that we are now past the point of polite critique or even satirical mockery. And his second Academy Award, particularly for writing, resolutely confirms the general stereotype of “Hollywood” as little more than a multinational corporate business model drenched in sparkle and sequins, churning out shallow and superficial cultural commodities, and maximizing profits by appealing to the lowest common denominator.