Reservoir Dogs swept through Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto like a brushfire. Distributors who saw the film at Sundance were worried that it would end up with an NC-17 rating for its graphic violence, which drove many viewers out of the theatre. That particular fear did not materialize, although eventually the violence worked against the film’s broader acceptance. Reservoir Dogs left Sundance without winning any awards, but it became the festival’s most talked-about movie, and Miramax decided to distribute it. Over the course of that year, Tarantino turned up at festival after festival, receiving lavish praise from intellectual critics for making the hottest indie of the year. When the movie finally opened, it played for only a few weeks despite critical support, confirming initial fears that it was too violent. Miramax’s sparse marketing resulted in a modest box-office gross of $1 million. Lack of commercial appeal did not stop Reservoir Dogs attaining cult status within the industry. Most of the press focused not on the movie or its issues but on Tarantino as a self-taught auteur. In the end, Tarantino did not promote Reservoir Dogs; Reservoir Dogs promoted him.
Like Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino does not feel superior to Hollywood’s “debased” genres, such as crime movies. Quite a contrary; Tarantino has used the convention of B-movies to make personal A-films. Situated in Scorsese’s thematic turf, Reservoir Dogs is serio-comic meditation on manhood, honor, loyalty, and redemption. Like Scorsese’s best, Tarantino’s movie is essentially European art film disguised as American crime movie. He is a natural born entertainer who sees a challenge to captivate his audience with frolicsome movie. He understands that his movie is as much a reflection of pop culture as it is pop culture itself.
Though self-conscious about the noir tradition and based more on old movies than on real life, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s first directorial effort, flaunted a sparkling script and superlative performance. The movie created a buzz in the festival circuit, winning the international critics award in Toronto for making “a spectacular debut that combines a brilliant narrative sense, an expressive use of space, and insightful direction of actors.” A moral tale suitable for a jaded, topsy-turvy world, Reservoir Dogs is full of dark humor and boasts bravura stylistic command.
Centering on a group of men who, unbeknown to one another, are brought together to assist a criminal mastermind in a jewelry heist, the movie explores the dynamics of the white male psyche – identity, camaraderie, paranoia, and sexual ambiguity – under conditions of crisis and stress. Structurally, Reservoir Dogs bears a resemblance to Stanley Kubrick’s heist film, The Killing (1956), with Tarantino using similarly complex narrative format (although, after its release, some critics claimed that Reservoir Dogs borrowed heavily from the Hong Kong film City on Fire). Tarantino commented on that by saying: “I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don’t like that, then tough tills, don’t go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homages”.
The tale opens with seven mugs – played by Michael Madsen (Mr. Blond), Harvey Keithel (Mr. White), Tim Roth (Mr. Orange), Chris Penn (Nice Guy Eddie), Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink), Lawrence Tierney (Joe Cabot), Eddie Bunker (Mr. Blue), and Tarantino (Mr. Brown), sitting in a coffee shop (fast food and places to eat are important elements in the lives of Tarantino’s characters; while film-makers before him relied on locations such as bars to establish characters and develop their relationships, Tarantino relied on donut shops, pancake houses, burger bars and coffee shops) and arguing about the meaning of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin”. They sound like macho blowhards, but they are in fact a bunch of crooks on their way to a bank job. The heist that follows goes very wrong when it turns out the cops have been forewarned. The gang members slowly regroup in an empty warehouse, where they try to determine which of their members squealed. The story is pieced together through sharp dialogue and inventively placed flashbacks.
Wearing black suits, white shirts, black ties, and sunglasses, Tarantino’s guys are epitome of cool. Yet as much as these men project the typical movie image of professional, ruthless, cool killers, as the film progresses we see what they really are underneath: variously treacherous, psychotic, cowardly, or incompetent. Tarantino shows us that the ultra-cool movie tough guy is an act that they wear, much like the black suits that are their uniform. Early on, when they are assigned code names, one (Buscemi) objects to being called Mr. Pink and asks why they cannot choose their own names. Answers the boss, “I tried once. It don’t work. You get four guys fighting over who’s gonna be Mr. Black.”
The Tarantino touch is also evident in a scene in which the undercover cop (Roth), who has infiltrated the gang, experiences a panic attack before the heist, fearing he will be unmasked. The cop stands in his apartment and talks to his reflection in the mirror. “Don’t pussy out on me now,” he says, “They don’t know. They don’t know shit. You’re not gonna get hurt. You are fucking Baretta, and they believe every word, ‘cause you are supercool.” Baretta was a popular 1970s TV show, with a hero who was an undercover cop and master of disguises.
The music also plays significant role in the film as in the abandoned warehouse where most of the action takes place; a radio in the background features the disembodied voice of Steven Wright. As K-Billy DJ, who's playing a weekend's worth of '70s pop hits, he introduces familiar songs that create an unforgettable counterpoint to the action at hand. In fact, when the gruesome incident takes place, with Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle With You" blaring away, you'll never listen to that song quite the same way again. That is the brutal torture scene, in which a cop’s ear is slowly cut off, and squeamish audience is fleeing the theatre. But for all the gore, the film’s most striking image may be that of wounded Keithel holding in his arms the fatally wounded Tim Roth and combing his hair. The graphic violence not only exposed the sadomasochistic bond between the filmmaker and viewers but also expressed the violence of the underclass and its paranoid abhorrence of other groups. The all-male, white cast suggests that the violence is the only recourse for the white underclass to assert superiority over non-whites – including women and homosexuals. In the self-enclosed world of Reservoir Dogs, there is no room for women, except for a cameo of woman who shoots Mr. Orange.
Tarantino stories are not taken from real life, but rather from previously existing films, books, and TV shows. He does not so much create his stories as construct them, using material that already exists. But it is not the stories that he tells; it is how he tells them. More than other directors, Tarantino understands that in a society that takes all its points of reference from pop culture, Americans’ sense of identity is largely based on media images, which explains his appropriation of the most common artifacts of our culture.
Bibliography:
Levy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders; The Rise of American Independent Film.
New York University Press, 1999