LogFAQs > #984889097

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

That said, it has all the hallmarks that would become his style: "Tarrantino'ing" (he didn't invent non-linear storytelling in film, but whatever), casual but graphic violence, and emphasis on dialogue-driven scenes, especially where the characters talk about the seemingly mundane, etc.

I'd argue he didn't "invent" anything. He mostly just stole ideas he liked from other movies and then did them again. Sometimes without the original context, but sometimes finding new ways to reinterpret old things.

Similar to my take over in the Beatles topic, he wasn't really an innovator as much as he was a synthesizer and popularizer. He found ways to take ideas that already existed, sort of smashed them together, and then managed to get it to the masses more effectively than his predecessors. Which in turn made people think he invented those things because his work was the first time they encountered them, even though they'd been around for years (if not decades) prior.

If I wanted to, I could make the same argument I made for the Beatles - which is that mainstream audiences were more willing to accept certain things from a dopey ex-video clerk white dude than they would have from blacksploitation or Asian exploitation films of the 70s (which is where Tarantino drew a lot of inspiration from, something he himself has always openly admitted, and even referenced in his own movies). It allowed people to pretend certain things were now "art" when previously they might have seen them as being "crass". And even then, his acceptance (much like the Beatles) mostly came via younger people embracing their work while lots of older people complained about it.

He might also have been one of the first major directors who were almost entirely shaped by "ground-level" pop culture (something that's become almost ubiquitous now, and not necessarily in a good way). So much of his aesthetic stems directly from working in that video store and watching all the movies for free, which meant he was willing to watch a lot of cheap and/or terrible movies most normal people would never be exposed to. Not to mention that some of his more memorable dialogue/rants were taken almost directly from conversations he had at the video store (his one Madonna rant, his take on Top Gun, etc)... generally, whenever a character played by Tarantino himself has an extended monologue in one of his movies, you can probably assume he's just repeating a conversation he's already had with someone else in real life when there weren't any customers and he was really, really bored.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Tbf, I'd say this is more because he became an overnight sensation after Pulp Fiction, and thus the budgets studios were willing to give him exploded, vs the shoe-string budgets of RD and PF, which force a more avante-garde style by nature.

Yeah, but I wasn't talking about Tarantino in that part you quoted, I was talking about Roger Avary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Avary

My point was more that, when Pulp Fiction first came out, people talked it up like it was a full collaboration between the two, and Avary got a lot of the credit. Considering he'd just come off Killing Zoe, you could easily make an argument that the two of them had similar quirky styles, and together they were able to polish the script way more effectively than either of them alone, which in turn contributed to Pulp Fiction taking off so strongly when Reservoir Dogs didn't (in spite of the fact that, in retrospect, I'm almost willing to say Reservoir Dogs is the better movie).

But if you look at Roger Avary's filmography post-Pulp Fiction, there really doesn't seem to be that same level of shine. Whereas Tarantino just kept putting out progressively quirkier and quirkier films.

Plus, if you factor True Romance into the mix (which Tarantino helped write prior to filming Reservoir Dogs), it's even easier to see "Tarantino before he was Tarantino" in the finished project (it definitely feels more like a Tarantino film than a Tony Scott one). Which can call into question just what exactly Avary DID contribute to Pulp Fiction.

I'm tempted to say that Tarantino's original script ideas were potentially much rougher, and it took Avary to sort of "smooth it out" to make it more appealing to mainstream audiences than Reservoir Dogs had been, which helped contribute to its booming success. But I have no real idea. And short of being able to travel to a parallel universe where Tarantino wrote and filmed Pulp Fiction without Avary to see what it would have been like, it would be very hard to ever truly know.