The Descent to Tarantino
I recently bought Hard Core Logo on DVD, and I was really upset to find the DVD case tainted with Quentin Tarantino's name. To make things worse, the positioning of his imprint makes it appear that he directed the movie. Have a look for yourself:
The problem with criminal-as-protagonist movies is that, somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten why the criminal was a compelling antihero. "Criminal" only denotes the violation of laws, which are sadly often far removed from correct behavior. The criminal, therefore, was not necessarily immoral. The smuggler, for example, might be heralded as a free market pioneer. The drug user might be a civil libertarian and a perfectly upstanding, moral individual. But there seems to have been a conflation between those who break the law yet are not immoral and those who are immoral for the sake of immorality. The transition happened in phases, and obviously these aren't in chronological order so much as general trends:
- Virtuous criminal as hero: think Spartacus. Nominally, he's a criminal, but in reality he's supposed to be understood as a tragic hero. (Disregard historicity, for simplicity's sake.)
- Self-interested but not necessarily immoral criminal as hero: Han Solo. Sure he's a smuggler, but he's just trying to make a living and those laws were probably arbitrary anyway, right?
- Reluctant, immoral criminal: Michael Corleone, the upstanding war hero who wants nothing to do with the family business gets pulled into being a mob boss anyway. At this point, you can still sympathize with the man, even though you know he will do evil deeds.
- And here we reach the worst of the lot: unapologetic criminals who are often shrouded in byzantine plots meant to further portray their moral ambiguity (Reservoir Dogs or Snatch). But there isn't really too much moral ambiguity in these scenarios after all, we are meant to sympathize with "bad guys" doing bad things.
Obviously, I don't have a fully fleshed-out thesis here. But I do find a lot of (needlessly) violent movies repulsive (sometimes sickeningly, stomach-turningly so) because I feel they're asking me to root for people doing things I find abhorrent.
Labels: film, media, philosophy
