As its title makes clear, this book focuses on three, interrelated subjects: Quentin Tarantino’s cinema, film theory and the concept of postmodernity. All three came to prominence and saw their heyday during the last decades of the twentieth century: a cultural moment that, while very recent, already seems to be far from us in many ways. In this sense, perhaps, this book may appear more as a commentary on our past than as a study fully immersed in our present and looking towards our future.
The idea of postmodernity, for instance, explicitly refers to a specific phase in our cultural history, one which many commenters seem to regard as concluded (Toth 2010; van der Akker et al. 2017; Malavasi 2017). As proven by the publication of a few monographs devoted to postmodern cinema in recent years (Constable 2015; Torres Cruz 2014; Duncan 2016; Flisfeder 2017; Wright 2017), film scholars have shown a renewed interest in this topic; their work, however, seems to be linked to the acknowledgement that new scholarly analyses of postmodern culture are now possible because the phenomenon can finally be observed with some historical distance. Even some of the main figures in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s—including Linda Hutcheon (2002) and, with some reservations, Fredric Jameson (Baumbach et al. 2016)—have clearly stated that postmodernism has run its course.
Film theory, of course, is more difficult to pronounce ‘dead,’ at least as long as cinema is still around. And yet, during these last few decades, many theorists have entertained the idea that cinema might have actually come to an end, starting to ponder the ‘end of cinema’ (Gaudréault and Marion 2015) and concepts such as ‘post-cinema’ and ‘post-media’ (Shaviro 2010; Pethő 2012; Denson and Leyda 2016; Hagener et al. 2016). In this sense, would it be perhaps more accurate to talk of ‘post-film’ theory? Whatever the case, it is certain that every aspect of the notion and practice of film theory as we have known it has been thoroughly questioned for several decades by now. As is well known, since the mid-1990s scholars have debated whether a new phase in the history of Film Studies has started, as the kind of theory that led to the birth of the field as an academic discipline between the 1960s and the 1980s has gone through a severe crisis because of a series of radical objections to its basic epistemological framework (Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Rodowick 2015). Such change in direction has now undoubtedly taken place, and much of what constituted the basis of film theory in those years is currently questioned, disregarded or simply ignored.
As concerns the work of Tarantino’s cinema, things are again different. Not only is the American writer-director is very much alive, but his ‘ninth film’ was released just last year, scoring one of his biggest box office results, collecting awards and critical acclaim, as well as the usual amount of controversy, for what immediately appeared as Tarantino’s most personal movie and, according to many, one of his finest. And yet, despite all their enduring commercial and critical success, Tarantino’s works and even his public persona feel somehow more and more out of place in the context of contemporary cinema and its endless dispersal into other forms and practices of digital media. So clearly and vocally opposed to the direction taken by the industry as concerns the use of new technologies in the production, distribution and consumption of cinema, Tarantino is trying to consolidate his filmography as a quintessentially cinematic oeuvre in the traditional sense. His much-publicised plan of quitting film direction after the release of his tenth feature looks like a rather unique testament to his loyalty to an older way of making cinema, not in spite but also because of the determination to continue his creative life by writing novels and directing for stage and television, while also releasing the results of many years of writing critical texts about films, film directors and film history. Tarantino’s projected withdrawal from directing feature films, therefore, could be seen as a way to present his oeuvre as more linked to cinema’s past, rather than to its present or future.
Leaving aside such uncertain verdicts about their current ‘health,’ the three objects of study of this book certainly have something else in common: their close relationship to cinema. If this is obvious for Tarantino and film theory, the case of postmodernity would appear less clear, as the term refers to a broad range of social and cultural phenomena. One of the premises of this work, however, is that cinema is one of the cultural areas to which postmodern theorists have often looked to develop some of their most influential concepts, as proven by the close attention paid to the medium by authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.1 That the (New) New Hollywood represented one of the most significant and influential manifestations of postmodern culture, for instance, is apparent. The number of mainstream American films that achieved enormous cultural impact and came to embody the ‘cultural logic’ that dominated the period between the 1970s and the late 1990s period is impressive: from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Batman (Tim Burton, 1989), from Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) to The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999). This centrality of cinema in the theoretical debate about postmodernism was the result of the ability of the modern medium par excellence to offer a profound diagnosis of the rise of a new cultural and artistic phase. Postmodern films, as well as postmodern film theory, were capable of developing convincing (or at least very attractive) reflections on the dramatic changes that were happening to the cultural and aesthetic hierarchies that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. In the process, they both changed in very significant ways, not only adapting to a context dominated by electronic media but actively helping to shape it.
As mentioned before, however, since the late 1990s the situation has dramatically changed, as the status of both postmodernism and cinema has been thoroughly questioned, leaving scholars to ask what has remained of them in the new century. Is the concept of postmodernity still able to provide insights into the nature of contemporary culture and society? Is twentieth-century film theory still useful for understanding contemporary cinema? This work stems from the desire to address these questions, revisiting the way in which Film Studies has engaged with the notion of postmodernity and postmodernism, and investigating the uncertain nature of contemporary cinema through the examination of the films written and directed by Tarantino.2
Since the very beginnings of his career, Tarantino has been regarded as a quintessentially postmodern filmmaker, his films being considered as some of the clearest examples of what has been defined as postmodern cinema3 and, possibly, postmodernism more broadly. Each chapter of the book engages with a series of critical questions that have been debated by film scholars and cultural theorists during the last few decades, while looking at the aesthetic and thematic aspects of Tarantino’s cinema in relation to such issues. In particular, I will examine the various, contradictory ways in which the critical reception of Tarantino’s films has been shaped by a certain reading of postmodernism and postmodern theory, arguing that they can be now reassessed from a different perspective.
Equally important for the conception of this book is the idea that Tarantino’s films possess their own theoretical weight. By connecting them to debates about postmodernism and the nature of contemporary cinema, I posit that Tarantino’s individual films, as well as his filmography as a whole, can be approached not just as passive objects, to which one should ‘apply’ a set of theories developed elsewhere. Quite to the contrary, I suggest the work of the writer-director can take up an active role in shaping our understanding of a series of conceptual problems addressed by ‘professional’ film theorists: by looking at them more closely, I try to show how many critics and scholars who ‘applied’ postmodern theory to complex works such as Tarantino’s films did not do justice either to those theories or to the objects analysed. By offering new readings of Tarantino’s work and postmodernism, this book thus tries to explore how certain approaches to film theory can still contribute to our understanding of the role of cinema in contemporary culture.
In this introduction, I will first present in detail my approach to this set of questions, describing how they guided the composition of this work. Next, I will present the content and the approach of the first three chapters, in which the other two key words in the book’s title—aesthetics and dialectics—are examined in order to frame my approach to postmodern cinema. Finally, I will anticipate how this theoretical framework is deployed in the fourth and final chapter, which addresses more directly the controversial issue of the representation of gender, History and violence in Tarantino’s films.
1 ‘Late Postmodernity,’ Film Theory and Tarantino’s Cinema
The use of the expression ‘late postmodernity’ in the title of this book intends to signal immediately that this work approaches its objects of study by placing them in a specific historical period—from the mid-1990s to the present years—that could be regarded as a different phase from what could be called ‘high’ postmodernity—from the 1960s to mid-1990s. Crucially, this expression is meant to highlight a contradictory situation. On the one hand, following Fredric Jameson (Baumbach et al. 2016), I want to stress that even though postmodernism (the ‘cultural logic’ that dominated the period that could be labelled ‘high’ postmodernity) is definitely over, the fundamental socio-economic structures that supported Western capitalism in the second half of the last century are still very much in place. If it is necessary to question the suitability of the postmodern theory developed in the 1970 and 1980s for examining contemporary culture, the broader concept of postmodernity might still be useful to talk about our present times.
On the other hand, t...