I think it’s safe to say that no one who seems more likely to get Me-Too’d has avoided getting Me-Too’d longer than Quentin Tarantino has. Everyone who dislikes Tarantino assumes that his widespread popularity among my demographic comes from his films’ violence, nudity, and convenience-store-encyclopedia-style references from the last 40 years (much the same could be said of Family Guy, but not all).
I also don’t think anyone has exerted such a disproportionate influence on people who want to be filmmakers but aren’t actually filmmakers relative to influence on people who are actually filmmakers than Quentin Tarantino has. Given how popular Reservoir Dogs shirts are at Hot Topic and how few people from my demographic actually shop there, I’d like to argue to the contrary, but hell, maybe they stopped selling them there since the last time I went. I think what makes Tarantino so beloved is how easily we can inject ourselves into his characters and how easily we can inject his characters into ourselves. The reason that it’s so much easier to memorize a monologue from Aldo Raine or Jules Winfield than it is from Charles Foster Kane or Hamlet is because one is written like us and one is written for us. All of the pauses, all of the repetitions, all of the anacoluthons are meshed together in a way that all other filmmakers seem to dream to capture but are never quite able to.
But just because Tarantino hasn’t been Me-Too’d doesn’t mean he’s at the center of Hollywood, or in the prime of his career. In fact, Tarantino has been falling into a bit of a twilight for several years now. His recent podcast comments branding Paul Dano “the weakest male actor in SAG” seemed a bit suicidal. Dozens of prominent actors and directors have risen to defend one of the most lovable faces in Hollywood from Tarantino’s gunslinging diss. As for his own career, The Movie Critic is firmly planted in Development Tartarus, and in its place is what will unquestionably amount to a pile of Netflix-distributed, aura-farming schlock in the form of his screenplay for The Adventures of Cliff Booth. I don’t know what the bastard is up to, but I don’t like it one bit, because it’s certainly not accidental. After all, these recent depths are being obtained despite him coming off one of the greatest artistic achievements of his career in Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, if art is measured in the amount of times I go back to watch YouTube videos of his greatest scenes. Even for a big fan of the film, I have no desire to explore its world any further.
It all comes across as a bit narcissistic, like he’s become such a fan of the Once Upon a Time characters that he forgot he’s the one that created them in the first place. Maybe he wants to create a shared universe of his revisionist Americana, much like a man-child having his favorite childhood action figures fight each other in the basement, especially when the legacies of today’s filmmakers are increasingly defined by their peaks rather than their average. Even if everyone else has moved on, maybe he just doesn’t care anymore and is stuck in a fantasy 1969 time machine world where he can keep flashing peace signs and avoid dealing with any issues of substance.
And if there’s one thing that’s slightly troubled me about that otherwise commendable film, it’s the casting of the Manson Family. Not because it’s bad. Because it was good before it was supposed to be good. Because he somehow hit a home run on every single person when nobody knew who they were, as they now percolate about and become the new faces of the industry. Austin Butler. Sydney Sweeney. Mikey Madison. Margaret Qualley. Maya Hawke and Dakota Fanning were somewhat grandfathered in, so maybe they don’t count, but they’re still there. These were all complete or relative unknowns that are going to be taking top billing for decades to come, and it strikes me as a bit unsettling that he hit on all of them in the roles of impressionable youths trained to do the bidding of a deranged, charismatic Messiah. That isn’t to say that it’s supposed to send us a message about his capacity to pull the strings of the industry, but it’s also not saying that it isn’t.
Hell, none of this really has anything to do with the rest of this piece other than the first sentence, but I didn’t really know how else to start this. The point stands that Tarantino was probably a predator at some point, and even if he wasn’t, he certainly knew some people who were. Here’s why.
It’s no secret that Tarantino was rather chummy with Weinstein from the very start of his career and that all of his films from Pulp Fiction to Once Upon a Time were financed by Miramax. I think it’s fair to say that Tarantino wins out as having the greatest magnitude of position on the fame vs. Weinstein proximity graph, and there’s no shortage of evidence that Weinstein was the Devil he knew for most of that time. In 2017, he told the Times that he “knew enough to do more than he did.” What a meaningless thing to say, but regardless, case closed. Tarantino knew. There’s nothing more that needs to be said to prove this.
What this essay is about isn’t proving this connection, because that was easily done in 115 words above (and that was a rather loquacious way of doing it). What I’m doing here is looking at one specific film of his that I doubt anyone under the age of 27 without a Letterboxd has seen, and telling everyone who saw it that if they had just worn their thinking caps for a little bit longer after the credits rolled, they could probably have figured out that something was rotten in Hollywood ten years before all of us plebeians were informed from above.
Without further ado, that film is Death Proof.
Quentin Tarantino has repeatedly called Death Proof his worst film, and much of the numbers back up this conclusion. It’s his only film that sits in the 60s of Rotten Tomatoes, and also his only film to actually bomb at the box office. Here are some of the things that those especially qualified RT critics had to say about it.
It’s just a movie where Quentin Tarantino does Tarantino stuff: stylish directing, bloody violence, and feet.
After hearing mouthy ‘dj’ woman get Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s name wrong at least twice I was left wondering if this was done deliberately to make her unsympathetic, to make her horrible end easier to bear……. No horrible end. Could it be that Tarantino isn’t as hot on the music side of things as he’d have us believe and it was a mistake? Was it a joke? Maybe it is a true indicator of how mediocre this movie is that this is my abiding thought about it.
Its one of those movies … its so scary and real and seems like a true story. reminds me of hostel 2 .
I originally planned to write this whole thing just from memory, but the apple revealed itself to be an onion as I started to draft it up. The best way to start what is going to be a convoluted and worming theory is to explain what exactly Death Proof was, because it was a film unlike anything else Tarantino ever made. It came out in 2007 as part of a grindhouse double-feature with the Robert Rodriguez film Planet Terror, spliced with fake trailers for such 21st-century classics as Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS and Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (the latter of which has gone on to be a real movie, and the former of which one can only hope will). Coming off of Kill Bill, this was very much Tarantino’s I’m-going-to-do-what-the-fuck-I-want phase over a career defined by producers letting him do whatever the fuck he wanted. And being that Tarantino is self-admittedly a product of exploitation films more than any other genre, Death Proof was the chance for him to pay homage to a type of film that any sane executive would otherwise afford a rope only ending in a noose.
The project flopped for a variety of reasons. Planet Terror and Death Proof are both very gimmicky films, filled with fake grain and deliberate filmmaking errors to generate nostalgia for the sleazy films of the 70s that you would find in, well, grindhouses (guess the etymology on that one). It turns out the intersection between that target demographic and the new breed of faithful moviegoers was a little narrower than anticipated. Audiences were confused about what a double feature was, and many of the ones that weren’t found the gimmicks somewhat distasteful. Add to that the fact that 80% of Death Proof is scenes of women talking without much in the way of plot, and you have quite the polarizing film even among the Tarantino faithful.
80% of the movie is scenes of women talking? Oh, did I mention this is a feminist film?
It certainly doesn’t seem that way for the first 40 minutes. Death Proof is a film in two parts, united by the ghostly serial killer Stuntman Mike, played by a scarred, silver-suited Kurt Russell in a 1970 Chevrolet Nova outfitted with a crash cage. In the first part of the movie, Stuntman Mike stalks a group of women down to an Austin bar, gets a lap dance from one of them, takes another one home, and then brutally kills all of them in a car crash – which he survives in his death-proof driver’s seat. 14 months later, Stuntman Mike has dodged the case, jumped town to Tennessee, rebuilt the car, and found a new group to stalk: only this time, they’re led by two feisty stunt-women who don’t give him the kindness to let him crash into them without a fight. As soon as they survive the first hit, Stuntman Mike dissolves into a whimpering mess, eventually getting chased down by our final girls, who beat him to death before the credits flash.
On the surface, Death Proof is Tarantino’s love-letter to the slasher genre, powered by the pervertedness of a women-in-prison movie and carried by the Pam Grier swagger also seen in Jackie Brown (what a sentence I just wrote). Most of the people who managed to swallow the whole thing were likely left with that as the final taste.. But after letting the movie slosh around in my gut a little more than most, it has started to appear pretty straightforward to me that the final car crash is a clear stand-in for rape, flattening out the entire film into a simple revenge tale. But there’s just enough sandpaper on that pill to give you pause before you forget about it. That’s what we’re here to talk about today. Not what this movie is about, but why it’s very obviously about Harvey Weinstein.
Tarantino is notoriously mercurial about providing interpretations of his films (check out his press tour answers to questions about the title of Reservoir Dogs), so there’s no hope of him ever confirming or denying anything I’m about to describe here. The only place to start, really, is Tarantino’s explanation for why he made the film, which I believe was the authentic kernel, even if heavily seasoned by the time it ended up in the bag. In an interview on this movie’s press tour, Tarantino described how he felt invincible in his early years as a filmmaker. God wouldn’t kill him until he made the film that he was destined to make, least of all in something as meaningless as a car crash. Of course, that reasoning only holds until you make that film, which in this case was Pulp Fiction. Why would God waste His time holding up a shield over you once you’ve carried out His bidding? That onus suddenly fell on Tarantino, compelling him to buy the safest car on the market (a Volvo) and ask his friends for as much advice as possible to dispel his sudden phobia of something as pedestrian as driving. One of those friends explained to him that for $10,000 you could pay to “death proof” your car – outfitting the driver’s seat with the same protective cage that stunt drivers use – and from that comment, the premise of this film was born.
The slasher element developed separately, although I’d guess it was in his head as soon as he heard about death proofing in the first place.
The meat and potatoes of this theory is actually just describing the plot of Death Proof in simple language: someone from the film industry uses a movie vehicle to destroy women and walks away unharmed. Who from Tarantino’s life might that describe? As Stuntman Mike puts it, his car is 100% death proof, but to get the benefit of it, you really have to be sitting in his seat. When Stuntman Mike is removed from his “movie vehicle”, however, he becomes powerless. He embarrasses himself by having to hold back a sneeze when he first approaches the first girls, and defenselessly getting the shit kicked out of him when he fights the final ones. Another tool Stuntman Mike has is his “bad list”, a small book he carries around that he uses to coerce women by threatening to put them in it – in the film, a meaningless pick-up tactic that gets him a lap dance, but a very real one in Hollywood. Instead of being put on that list, she is made a star – temporarily – while she gives Stuntman Mike a lap dance he’s minimally interested in as the rest of the bar watches intently, and then unceremoniously murdered when her novelty runs out.
And, most damningly, he has a brother named Stuntman Bob.
This, of course, may already sound like an open-and-shut case, but the evidence doesn’t become truly damning until you understand the Rose McGowan connection to Death Proof.
If anyone in my generation knows Rose McGowan, it’s probably because she was the first actress to speak out against Weinstein in 2017. Weinsten had raped McGowan when she was a young, up-and-coming actress in the mid-90s, and in 1997 she agreed to a $100,000 settlement with Weinstein (McGown had mistakenly believed the settlement contained a confidentiality clause, which is why she did not come forward for so long). What she didn’t know at the time was that Weinstein had essentially blacklisted her from Hollywood, which explains the decline of her career after Scream until Death Proof. I’m 100% confident that Tarantino knew about all of this when he cast her in this movie, if for no other reason than that Robert Rodriguez was dating her at the time and cast her as the lead in Planet Terror as a blatant fuck-you to the Weinstein Company.
Rose McGowan’s character is the first real victim of Stuntman Mike, the one he meets in a bar, tricks into driving her home, and then kills her by slamming on the brakes while she tearfully begs him not to. Considering she’s the one on the receiving end of what looks, sounds, and feels like a rape scene in this film at the hands of the Weinstein stand-in, there’s no way in hell she would agree to do it unless she felt like this was a movie explicitly targeted at Weinstein.
Death Proof is, fundamentally, an exploitation film about exploitation – operating in two registers at once. The second half makes this explicit by staging its conflict around another “movie vehicle,” the 1970 Dodge Challenger from Vanishing Point. The protagonists only encounter Stuntman Mike because they gain access to this car, and the price of entry mirrors the film’s earlier violence: Lee, a young model dressed in a revealing cheerleading outfit from an earlier shoot, is knowingly left behind with a leering, aggressively sexual mechanic so her friends can take the ride. In this case, Lee’s discomfort is not a misunderstanding but the point – her body is treated as collateral so the others can move forward. Described plainly, the scene is unmistakable: women are allowed into a cinematic fantasy only by sacrificing another woman to sexual exploitation. The car isn’t just transportation; it’s the industry itself, and someone always pays to keep it moving.
Now that Stuntman Mike’s metaphorical value has been well-established, we turn to Tarantino, and why he might have felt personally compelled to make this film.
Death Proof was made during a period of relative tension between Tarantino and his long-time muse Uma Thurman. During the filming of Kill Bill, Tarantino had coerced Thurman into doing her own stunt in a car crash scene that ended up severely injuring and traumatizing her, and then refusing to give her the footage afterwards for legal purposes. The affair prolonged itself for nearly fifteen years and wasn’t at the top of his mind when making his film, but it’s safe to say that guilt about making women perform in exploitative conditions may have been clouding his milieu around this time.
Tarantino is comfortable being the villain, at least in his own movies. Over the course of his career, Tarantino has given himself cameos as multiple rapists, a slaver, multiple racists, and a Nazi. Death Proof is no exception. Warren the bartender is a fine host and no sleazeball, drinking Chartreuse with our protagonists and ensuring that Rose McGowan’s character Pam gets home safe from the bar. But just so happens that the ride she’s going back with is Stuntman Mike, on Warren’s misguided recommendation. Warren later intervened in the Texas Rangers’ vehicular manslaughter case against Stuntman Mike, testifying to his good character and the fact of his alcohol abstention. He is, after all, a famous stuntman, and surely wouldn’t have gotten into this sort of accident unless something went totally wrong.
This may be the least challenging performance Tarantino has ever given. As a character witness to Hollywood’s most villainous predator, he was at the center of the enabling of Weinstein. .
Given everything about this movie we’ve already discussed and how precise Tarantino is with his characters, it doesn’t make such sense for Tarantino to include this as a convenient plot device to get the women into the Challenger if he didn’t also want to send a message with it. Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson talked about this scene in a Rolling Stone interview in 2007 and both said it made them uncomfortable because they’d never treat a friend like that. Both brought this up to Tarantino, and both were told separately that it would stay in the movie. If Tarantino hadn’t already been trying to make this film about Weinstein, he could not have ignored his own female leads raising these uncomfortable parallels to Hollywood predation to his face. If Tarantino was already so cognizant about how this movie would come across, would he really be ok with leaving something in the film that would make women uncomfortable if it wasn’t meant to make them uncomfortable? This comes across as a natural hedge in his confession: we may have a part in this culture, but we’re not the only ones.
Taking all of this into consideration, it’s pretty obvious that Death Proof is Tarantino sublimating his guilt about decades of enabling Harvey Weinstein. Uma Thurman asked him to do something. Mia Sorvino, his ex-girlfriend of two years, asked him to do something. Rose McGowan asked him to do something. And clearly nothing was actually done. All of that guilt, anger, and frustration could only be released in one way: handing Harvey Weinstein a literal flaming turd, a movie that insulted him, tanked at the box office, and showed him a foretelling of his eventual downfall in the most brutal way possible, at a point in his career when he could use blackmail by Streisand effect to get it done.
This isn’t to say that Death Proof is missing artistic integrity, because Tarantino is too proud a director to tarnish his incredibly spare oeuvre with something done just to make a statement. After all, he is still a Hollywood regular, so there must be some limits placed on his humanity. In an interview prior to Pulp Fiction, Tarantino went on a long rant about how most of the great directors who ended their careers in failure had made the mistake of making one deeply personal film that failed miserably and made them lose the confidence of production studios, forcing them to turn to soulless star vehicles until their spark faded into shadow. I’m sure he never thought of himself at risk for following that path and certainly hasn’t. Inglorious Basterds was much more than just a star vehicle, and as he approaches the final films of his career, he has as close to a carte blanche as anyone in Hollywood, so long as he keeps from pissing too many people off. That doesn’t change the fact that Death Proof is Tarantino’s most personal film, something between a mea culpa and an implicit endorsement of justice by any means necessary, even if he himself isn’t strong enough to carry it out.
There is no Quentin Tarantino without Taxi Driver, no Taxi Driver without Brian de Palma, and none of them without money-laundering B-movies to watch in a trench coat at the back of a sleazy midnight matinee. The point of the exploitation genre was to unmask America at a time when most movies were falling short, to show the heroin needles crunching under limousine tires and the AIDS boiling off in San Francisco Bay. Death Proof shows us that heroes aren’t the ones at the top but the ones with nothing to lose, regardless of how they dress or what they do – and that a woman scorned can make for one fearsome pussycat.
