This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Michael Sicinski’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
[5]
I've always had a few more problems with Tarantino than it's cool to admit. I tend not to appreciate the casual racism he sprinkles throughout certain of his films, and I realize that makes me sound like a "scold" or a "prig" in some quarters. It's not that I think Tarantino is racist; far from it. He is committed to a lowbrow sort of mongrel culture and genuinely loves all the people who swim in his bubbling po-mo stew.
In a way, that's where the trouble arises. In Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and Django and most certainly in The Hateful Eight, it's hard to miss Tarantino's big honking use of racial epithets. They are never casually deployed. And that's because Tarantino wants to place them in quotation marks, using them as cultural or historical markers of racial strife, in order to presumably level some form of critique. It seldom works, because there's very little of the writerly finesse necessary to make those quotation marks wholly visible while at the same time allowing them to blend in to some form of fictional fabric with enough verisimilitude ("naturalistic as hell," as per Reservoir Dogs) to prevent the effort from looking and feeling like a cheap stunt or faux-"woke" showboating.
If there weren't such bold claims being made for The Hateful Eight on so many different registers, it would be easy, and rather obvious, to wave it away (not to say "dismiss" it) as QT's fucking-around picture, a lark on the level of Soderbergh's Ocean's films. Talented director, cast of good friends, having fun and making a film that is a throwaway in every respect. We can’t call it a B-picture, because after all, who more than Tarantino has worked to establish the aesthetic validity of the disreputable? That’s not what we’re dealing with here.
But there’s the problem, right? We’ve heard a lot about “category confusion” during this Oscar season, but what about good old-fashioned category error? I mean the type of logical confusion that demands simple discrimination. Precisely because of Tarantino’s hubris, which is legend, he doesn’t seem able to recognize when he’s making A-level or B-level work. He’s like Prince in that way, and like His Royal Badness, who’s around to tell him otherwise? Plus, let’s face it: no one’s questioning Tarantino’s genre facility, his magpie’s ability to collect elements from the history of martial arts films, Westerns, bloody revenge flicks, gearhead movies, European Nazi exploitation dreck and the like, and pomo-jimmy it all into hi/lo epics like Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, or Death Proof, a tight little structuralist number that too many morons, QT included, seem intent on mistaking for a bad movie.
But here’s the rub: the auteur doesn’t know when he’s making his own version of a trashy little diversion. First, for all the cool-daddy posturing, Tarantino is kind of a tight-ass; he doesn’t know how to relax and really have fun. The Hateful Eight clearly ought to be an utterly pointless exercise in bloodletting, but he insists on trying to make it “meaningful.” Second, and more damningly, he thinks that everything he touches is transformed into a self-aware genre “riff,” something he elevates by deigning to engage with it while insisting via nonstop lip service that those lowbrow masterpieces require no elevation.
Why else insist on taking a bottle-episode shoot ‘em up and shoehorning in a bunch of eight-diagram pole positions on racial anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War? Granted, this is partly a byproduct of H8’s unsubtle dalliance with The Western in Quotation Marks: the (quite lovely) Morricone score, the vast “Wyoming” landscape, and the direct quotations from Stagecoach and The Searchers, right down to actually having Kurt Russell play John Ruth as a straight-up John Wayne impression. (He actually goes so far as to drop Ethan Edwards’ catchphrase, “That’ll be the day!”) And although I bow to no one as a partisan of celluloid’s unique character, the fact that Tarantino chose this film not only to shoot in 70mm retro-VistaVision, but to roadshow with retrofitted 70mm theatrical presentation, is a bit mystifying, and speaks to the misplaced hubris attached to this overripe trifle.
There’s potential here, given that the time period between the war’s end and Lincoln’s assassination represents a liminal space of adjustment and renegotiation. But if we take the film at its word – Tarantino’s script – there’s little here beyond a premise, and some overheated baiting between Maj. Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the Confederates. His back-and-forth with Mannix (Walton Goggins) in the coach (“You got me talkin’ politics…”) is practically an expository primer for anyone in the audience who might not be aware there was ever a war between the States, with the legal status of African-Americans having been an issue. Once within the unfriendly confines of Minnie’s Haberdashery, we’re treated to Warren’s (possibly apocryphal) explanation to Gen. Smithers (Bruce Dern) of how the General’s son tried and failed to collect the bounty on Warren and, prior to being dispatched in the snow, was made to service the good major’s “big black dingus.” A hate-fellate: could QT not resist the pun?
But beyond the big black anachronistic euphemism, there’s the simple matter of plausibility. Again, many may argue, and not without reason, that this is the wrong tree to be barking up, particularly when analyzing the work of a director whose revenge fantasies have included blowing up Adolf Hitler in a movie theatre and unleashing an enslaved superhero as a killing machine on the unfree South. And yet, if Tarantino’s allegories have no connection, however tenuous, to history as we understand it, then what good are his racial provocations or, in the case of Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his gendered interventions?
Domergue – her name is improbably pronounced “Dahmer-goo,” as if drawing out yet another pun, asking us to believe she simply revels in the brains and viscera in which she’s bathed, her own and others’. A murderess and gang member (“We’re all gang members!”) chained to John Ruth, who intends to bring her into town, collect a bounty, and watch her properly hanged for her crimes, Daisy is not in much of a position to inflict pain on others when H8 begins. At this point her violence is chiefly verbal (greeting Warren with the N-word) and symbolic (spitting on Warren’s apocryphal letter from Lincoln). The fact that she dispatches the already-dying Ruth is a matter of circumstance (she’s connected to him, after all), which is not to say that Daisy is not a vicious psychopath, or that she wouldn’t kill every motherfucker in the room if given the chance. It’s just that, under present conditions, she is not.
Daisy is, however, subject to all manner of brutality. It starts with Ruth pistol-whipping her in the back of the head, and continues from there. By mid-film, when Ruth throws a piping hot plate of stew in her face, we’ve become so inured to Domergue being physically abused by men that this act strikes us almost like a “Three Stooges” bit of slapstick; it takes a second to realize that the boiled food would actually burn her skin. This treatment of Daisy continues right up to the very end of H8 when, in honor of the fallen John Ruth, Warren and Mannix decide that a simple execution is too good for this “bitch,” and they lynch her right from the rafters of the Haberdashery.
Many observers have commented already on the misogyny of H8, and I won’t elaborate on this any further. I think the treatment of Domergue speaks for itself and, pace the assertion of my friend and colleague Mike D’Angelo, I don’t think her characterization and treatment would be the same if she were a male character. But the Domergue “situation” is another example of how Tarantino’s exploitation instincts get muddied up with his ambitions as a high-art auteur and a social commentator.
In interviews, Tarantino has placed Domergue as the latest in a long line of strong woman protagonists in his films. Many critics defending H8 against charges of misogyny have followed suit. But the director’s reasoning is a bit off. He compares Daisy to Jackie Brown, The Bride, Zoë, Abernathy, and the gang, and Shoshanna, by claiming that she takes a licking and keeps on ticking. “I want your allegiances, to one degree or the other, to shift slightly as the movie goes on, and frankly, depending on where you’re coming from.”
But why should allegiances shift so easily? “Where [we’re] coming from” is socially determined, and not something that flip-flops around a sliding scale based on the narrative vicissitudes of Tarantino’s movie. If playing with our notions of honor, decorum, femininity, the historical association of women with hysterical behavior, the challenge of a non-nurturing woman character, the uneasy place of women before the Law, all of these social discourses that we bring, consciously or not, into the theatre, then why have only one woman character, whose sole function is to have committed violence we never actually see, have her protected by a gang of men, and then have a group of men kick the shit out of her? This makes for awesome, button-pushing exploitation. (“Wait’ll they see this!!) But it is too underwritten and ill-considered to have the social function Tarantino ostensibly wants. And that’s because the social function, as usual, is an afterthought, if not an excuse.
Stephanie Zacharek defended the film thus: “The more [Domergue] gets hit, the more she grins and cackles, as if she were drawing banshee strength from the abuse — a notion that may seem like misogyny but is in fact its triumphant opposite.” Somehow, the revenge plots of Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds and the empowerment narratives of Jackie Brown and Death Proof, whatever their virtues and flaws, have been transformed into a sub-psychoanalytic riff on masochism. Is that Tarantino’s social content? Women draw power from subjugation? This seems like a stretch, and I’m not sure anyone would want to defend this position outside the dark, air conditioned confines of the theatre. (BDSM aficionados would be especially offended by this claim. Did Daisy have a safe word?)
But perhaps the silliest conclusion drawn by H8, the main function of Domergue’s placement as the pariah mit vagina in this Civil War Sausage Fest, is that women as so vile, crazy, and out of control, that they can bring racist white men and angry black men together. While the Part II alliance between Warren and Mannix was formed by chance (Mannix almost drank the poison coffee, therefore Warren knew he wasn’t on Team Domergue), eventually they quelled their lingering post-Civil War hatred and mistrust into a genuine bond. This bond, of course, was forged in blood on the battlefield, and as they lay (probably) dying, having sent Daisy Domergue to hell, their unlikely union is clearly meant to represent the possible future of the new American republic. “We may have our centuries-old differences, but man, bitches be crazy!”
Well, okay. Black men got the vote fifty years before women. But… Yeah, see my point? And if you want to look at a film that has more to say about how white men’s political allegiances are triangulated between black men (and other races, for that matter) and white women, D.W. Griffith actually got it right. It’s a short jump from The Birth of a Nation (1915) through Willie Horton right up to “[Mexicans]’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Tarantino is under no obligation to be an accurate historian, or even a particularly intellectual speculative historiographer. But these are the terms on which he mounts his claims for seriousness, the cream in his B-movie vinegar. He should just stop.