Quentin Tarantino wrote an adaptation of his most recent film as a novel quite recently. It was pretty good, but filled with trivia and poorly done passages of description. In a sense, this book is made up — at least in part — of the offcuts of that stream of trivia. The novelisation was set in the dying days of the sixties; this book is set in the seventies, when a young Tarantino was first watching films and an ungodly amount of television.
It’s full of references, long rambling critical judgements, and so many names, dates and pieces of praise or criticism that the reader is often left confused.
But unlike the novel, where these interludes were generally unwelcome or tacked-on, in this form, they are the point entire: and they are diverting and fun indeed.
When attempting to describe this book in conversation, I said it was like sitting at the end of a bar, possibly wedged into a corner between the bar and the wall, while a guy who talks a little bit too fast and interrupts himself often goes on at you about movies — but not in a bad way.
In fact, although you may be trapped, you’re enjoying yourself. His enthusiasm is infectious. So it is with this book. You’re trapped in the company of a nutcase, a happy nutcase, and he is giving vent to you his obsessions.
And obsessions are always a self-portrait. So in between judgements of directors and actors, and cinematographers and producers, we get stories of the young Tarantino going to, for example, Jim Brown movies — a masculine experience if ever there was one.
And we hear about his tough mother, whom he adores perhaps a bit too much, and her apparently admirable friends.
And her deadbeat boyfriends and her successful boyfriends — one or two of whom were sportsmen whom Tarantino does not name in full, because he was either never given or cannot recall their last names.
This torrent of reminiscence is quite revealing, not least because it gives so many subtextual reasons for why Tarantino turned out the way he did, and made the films he went on to make. But also because some of it is unwitting.
His obsession with movie violence? Not only a product of all the revenge-and-guts-Bronson-type thrillers he saw as a boy, but also a result of seeing them very young and, quite crucially, never being all that scared by them. He just thought, by and large, that they were cool and sometimes funny. It’s only a movie. If only Tarantino’s early detractors could have had that explained to them at such diverting length — he must think. Then they’d have known better than to try that prissy tone with him.
Similarly, the extent to which Tarantino’s films — while being entirely his own — are in fact collages, with scenes, pieces of dialogue, and especially individual shots ripped off wholesale from other pictures. It’s not theft or even inspiration. The stuff just comes to him. He talks like that — with constant unceasing evocation. It’s who he is. He cannot but use it. It’s all part of the act.
And his love of — and sometimes disdain for — other critics. This book wants to be a Tarantino version of the Pauline Kael reviews the author read as a boy. He thinks she was really great. Magical even. Of course, they are not. Kael had, at least in her style and bearing, more class. But in another way, Tarantino’s book is Kael-like, in its utter bias, its complete partiality, its indifference to facts if they get in the way of vital impressions.
Kael spent at least some of her career lying and making things up. Tarantino never has. But when people he found interesting lied to him — there’s a very good final chapter about a lovable chronic liar and vagabond called Floyd, who let Tarantino down a lot as a boy, yet also shaped him and made him the man he is today — he remembered the story, and wrote it down, and almost dotes upon it.
This is part tirade, part love letter — the product of a restless mind narrowly but deeply focused on a few obsessions.
Obsessive people are tiring work but they also have the most contagious interests. Their hobbyhorses are unlikely to be yours and if you like that sort of thing, they’ll put you on to things you’ve never heard of or thought about. So it is with this book.
I’ve seen so few of the titles mentioned, and hey, maybe I’ll watch — at most — one or two of the ones Tarantino goes on about. I’ll forget all the asides on Don Siegel being tired and old, and Steve McQueen getting fat on some island, and this or that producer saying this or that thing, and this or that director being solely or actually not at all responsible for this or that shot, or Tarantino’s judgement that a given actor simply must have written that particular line of dialogue, because it’s just the sort of thing he would have said — not least because none of these various pieces of trivia might be true.
But I will remember liking the book, after worrying that I might not. Worrying that I might be deluged by pointless anecdotage and bored sick. And that’s something, isn’t it? So few of the maniacs who have cornered me in public over the years have been anywhere near as interesting.