Tarantino

New York Press critic Armond White has offered the most incisive summary of Tarantino's work and influence: "QT made sadism hip and sent it 'round the world."

In another piece on Tarantino, White points (less convincingly, but still interestingly) to "QT's" play with race: "Tarantino is the first white filmmaker to forge a career based on disreputable, underclass taste �Ethe movie culture that black urban youth were raised on and affectionately viewed as their own. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill owe their inspiration to '70s blaxploitation movies �Ea Hollywood trend that catered to the domestic fragmentation that occurred in America after '60s political dissent, responding specifically to the social conflagrations of riots and rebellions that shifted the tax base and demographic make up of most U.S. cities. (Abandoned urban movie houses were blighted, left to feature the kind of trash-product that had been the traditional fare of drive-ins.) Blaxploitation anticipated a lasting cultural fragmentation. The pop audience that the '60s seemed to unite became newly segregated into distinct racial and generational enclaves. The young folk who grew up on blaxploitation (and who would innovate hip hop culture) withdrew into disaffected sub-cults �Eclaiming grade Z action movies, even the cheaply made and hastily dubbed kung-fu imports, as aesthetic ideals divorced of any social or ideological thinking.

"Young, white Tarantino witnessed and participated in these changes. As a new era's hipster, Tarantino embarked upon a different kind of white flight. He gravitated toward sleazy black pop but without acquiring any political identification. He could reject the traditional, bourgeois film content and claim a timely, original approach: His films emphasized the pleasure of pop without moral conscience, yet were rife with racially tinged violence. Blaxploitation was thereby reborn as something postmodern �Ea white-identified entertainment form that took lack of social progress for granted and celebrated the post-80s tenets of greed and narcissism."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 08:59 AM

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