No, I'm talking about girls in both groups. The depiction of Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character was by far the most condemning.sevenarts wrote:I assume you're referring to the first group of women here as being portrayed as "naive or just plain stupid" in comparison to the second group
Two of the girls in the first group were given zero characterization, specifically the longhaired blonde and their driver friend (from later on). Just sitting and watching people talk does not equal character development, which could easily be defined through choices and action (not the kind you think) in the time Tarantino dedicated to superficial conversations. So much of their dialogue was interchangeable that at least two characters in Death Proof made the same statements regarding films in the same period of 30 minutes, even though they didn't know each other.For me, the most interesting (and even radical) aspect of Tarantino's film was the relatively equal treatment of all the women in terms of character and depth, regardless of whether or not they die and whether or not they get revenge.
Zoe Bell had an entire 8-minute, single shot sequence dedicated to setting up her character through expository dialogue regarding an off-screen, previous event. Kim was established as an angry "gear head" who was a cartoon character we were supposed to buy as deep because she cursed a lot and was a racist. She had 4 or 5 stock lines in every scene with very little variation, and I even started counting them in each episode. Other than their passion for films and cars, many of the girls in the second group had little to do but act like men, or in Abernathy's case, learn to. Again I point to Winstead's character, who was left to be potentially sexually molested and was the only of the four girls to act stereotypically feminine.
I honestly don't see how you could argue that all the girls received equal characterization unless you count time spent onscreen dispensing dialogue as defining.
That's not morally ambiguous you're talking about, but morally objectionable. So they went to a bar, drank a bit, but they did not go with the men to have sex and even had a designated driver.The usual set-up in this kind of movie is to kill off characters who have committed morally ambiguous actions -- which there is, undoubtedly, plenty of in the first half.
Other than maybe smoking pot, their actions were so bland and of no consequence (you drink at a bar) that I couldn't seriously read what they were doing as deserving of consequence in any setting. Only Butterfly did anything that objectionable, with a lap dance for a stranger we didn't even see. As she was the only girl who seemed to show any definable qualities in those sequences, both vulnerability and apprehension/fearfulness, I was only that much more at a loss to understand what purpose her death served with what was otherwise an assembly of cookie cutter ciphers.
If Tarantino truly believes that he's channeling those elements of a slasher film, then why did the characters seem to be avoiding men? The film also clearly established, before their death, that Stuntman Mike had photographs and was stalking them. Therefore they were not killed as a result of their behavior, but as an inevitable conclusion to a story that had started before the film and was just now being resolved. The slasher film "message" relies on the audience's recognition that the killer's motivations are so ambiguous that only by the presence of these objectionable elements prior to their death will there be some kind of implied reason for their execution. If there was no other logical explanation, and we know they're doing bad things, why else would they be killed?The "message" in so many of those old slasher/killer flicks is that if you have sex, do drugs, drink, party, you will die.
We have an explanation here, Stuntman Mike likes to rape women with his car and he creates scenarios where he fixates on a number of victims and then executes that plan. The girls' actions are rendered irrelevant, but by the nature of Tarantino's inclusion of said acts we are supposed to believe he has made some kind of achievement in recreating the convention. If their actions don't serve the purpose they did in the films he wishes to emulate, then he is simply referencing these so-called morally objectionable elements and not actually implementing them.
As you said yourself, he took a different direction. But his setup does not support that change in direction, which happens nearly halfway through the film. The new direction renders everything we've seen about the girls completely inert. Why did we just sit through half of a film of this so-called morally objectionable action if it was designed to be meaningless? It's the same problem I had with everything else in the film, in that these episodes exist entirely on their own terms inside of a different movie universe and we're not supposed to think about what impact the content of these chapters have on any other chapter.
That means that there is nothing to be gained from the entire experience and it drops into a completely indulgent and random form of "best of" chunks from whatever film aesthetics Tarantino wishes to visit. Its Kill Bill all over again, except with zero story progression/revelation/development and no through line character that has anywhere to go but get killed. It's my feeling that his attempt to create any cohesive feature doesn't work here because he's more interested in throwing together what he liked from those films (homage) than actually working over the formulas. Now it's a slasher movie, now it's a racecar movie, now it's a rape revenge drama, and so forth. Why? Because these girls are doing potentially bad things, there's the car from that Vanishing Point movie I mentioned several times minutes ago, look they are pissed at that rapist and are going to kill him like in those movies, etc.
Again, I point out the problem is that the parody here was never established. Yes, some spoofish bits arrived in the final minutes, but you're trying to put everything else into that context. The rest of the film shared absolutely no tone, character or subtext with those final moments (arguably, nothing in the movie shared anything). There is no navigation, only bits that are strewn together with performances and dialogue. Scream was a feature that established its contrived world from the get go, whereas no clear clichés or conventions were visible in Death Proof until... after watching the resolution... you go back trying to find them. You won't. Like Kill Bill, you have a patchwork of ideas that do not necessarily lend themselves to each varying episode, as they are intentionally isolated and the film relies solely on the cumulative effect and through line character to feign cohesion.Hell, even Scream parodied that moralistic aspect of horror films.
The boyfriend was a non-existent, off-screen character was only referred to, while the sleazy bar guys literally disappear.But Tarantino takes an interesting route here, in that he gives us a group of party girls -- drinking, dancing, flirting, smoking pot -- who are killed, and yet he completely sides the audience with them, never moralizing, never implying that their deaths are a natural result of their decadence. Instead, the male aggression and rage that kills them is implicated -- not just the obvious Kurt Russell, but the sleazy bar guys who try to prey on the girls and the cheating boyfriend who never shows up.
Because some guys at the bar wanted to sleep with them and the popular director boyfriend didn't show up? There is no relationship there to the guy who rapes people with their car. There's nothing to distinguish those bar guys from any male caricature in the same films you're referring to.Tarantino is externalizing the (male) preonceptions that underpinned those old slasher flicks.
You're attempting to rationalize a camera aesthetic that only compliments the most transparently pleasurable and superficial aspects of the narrative. Furthermore, you're trying to say that because people drop a lot of dialogue that it makes them intelligent (this surely wasn't the case with many of them). That it somehow excuses camerawork that would otherwise be seen exactly for what it is in any other scene in any other movie where it serves the same function with the same expository dialogue. You cannot convince me that there was a purpose behind the gratuitous deconstruction of women down to their sexual parts when it's not Mike viewing them or even the bar guys, but only Tarantino's eye existing on it's own terms.He replaces the slasher moralizing with a more complicated depiction of women that focuses on them as both sexual objects (the many caressing camera movements along their bodies) and as thinking people (the reverent treatment of their sometimes funny, sometimes banal conversations).
One perfect example is at the very beginning of the film when the camera focuses on one the crotch of one of the girls who has to pee, only followed up later in a bit of dialogue (when they were also alone) discussing how some people get off watching the other person pissing. This does not serve male aggression, or any established exploitative genre, but does enlighten us on yet another fetish Tarantino wishes to fixate on as pleasurable.
What made them complex? I didn't see anything other than a lot of talk describing how they were going to fool some people, how excited they were that Jungle Julia was getting attention and where they might score some pot. As characters, most of them were not defined as anything more than part of a group consciousness that was looking to consume entertainment. You yourself argued that they were depicted as the general fodder setup in slasher films to enjoy excess and then be slaughtered. Again, I would argue that outside perhaps Butterfly, they were perfect examples of genre cannon fodder. We just had to spend a lot more time staring at them before any purpose they served was intentionally omitted.The women in the first segment all die, it's true -- but this alone hardly marks them out as stupid, especially since they didn't have the chance for survival and revenge that the second group did. And just on the level of character, I felt as though these women were every bit as complex, well-depicted, and interesting as those in the second half.
Why is it joyous? What is so wonderfully funny about something so horrible? And what conventions are you referring to? You just said he side-stepped that slasher formula and went for something entirely different. Furthermore, his use of the camera is just as implicated in enjoying this glorified violence as his fictional characters.As for the second half, I think it's clearly true that the girls' revenge here is a co-option of specifically *male* violence. And I think it's equally clear that Tarantino is consciously calling attention to the fact that it's male violence, which is why the whole ending sequence functioned, for me, as a joyous parody of these conventions.
Where is the critique? The film celebrates and even stretches each moment of victory as they beat the man to death. The same can be said of the innocent motorists who were mowed down by the “heroinesâ€The implications of anal rape when the girls are chasing Russell, the over-the-top cheerleader dancing in the final freeze frame -- it's so deliberately exaggerated that these scenes can only function as a simultaneous celebration and critique of the conventions of male violence.
