"The Hateful Eight"

All art reflects the culture and society in which it is created. Trite though this axiom of film criticism may have been rendered by single-minded bloggers and pop culture commentators, it remains nonetheless true, and few western filmmakers have built their careers out of it with as much consistent skill and gusto as Quentin Tarantino. Who else could have so expertly synthetized Generation X dreams and self-projections into the post-modern cocktail of violence and irony that was Pulp Fiction? More than his verbose, rhythmic dialogue or his skill with actors¹, Quentin Tarantino’s true gift has been his acute understanding of the way we perceive and build our identities and values through audiovisual fiction. Pulp Fiction arrived at a time when the American independent film movement of the 1990s was reaching a cultural turning point, after which it would gradually seep into mainstream Hollywood cinema and inaugurate the current era of standardized “Indiewood” filmmaking. For better and for worse, Pulp Fiction helped ensure that transition by distilling his generation’s pop culture influences into a highly stylized language accessible to all audiences.

If, as feminist scholar bell hooks so neatly put it, “pop culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is”, then Tarantino can surely count himself among its most ardent students. As an artist, his system of values and perception of the world are built exclusively out of the films, TV shows and songs he loves. It’s an outlook that has served him well in his efforts to expand, obliterate and/or restructure the codes and confines of film genre, but struggles to operate outside of them. So far, Tarantino’s recent conscious attempts to connect his fantasized pop constructs to Big Issues from the real world that birthed them have produced good films, but at the cost of exposing his language’s political limitations. That The Hateful Eight is a more successful commentary than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained has less to do with any kind of growth on Tarantino’s part and more to do with the consistency of his aforementioned gift for expressing – and contributing to – cultural zeitgeist. Simply by staying true to himself, Tarantino illustrates the sorry state of American political discourse and pop culture’s insufficient response to it more eloquently than he ever could have by design.

While not the direct sequel to Django Unchained it was initially envisioned as, The Hateful Eight nevertheless retains stylistic and narrative choices marking it as such: The time gap between the two films is matched by the difference between the former’s Spaghetti Western aesthetics and the latter’s 70s-era revisionism. In between each gap lies a corresponding conflict over black human rights: The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.  Once again, the Old West is used as a backdrop through which past and present racial injustices are compared and equivocated. If we accept Django Unchained’s eponymous hero as a white boy’s oppression/emancipation fetish, then The Hateful Eight’s vicious, cunning, Confederate soldier-raping Major Marquis Warren (a brilliant Samuel L. Jackson) represents the next step – a fully-realized embodiment of socially-constructed racial fantasies turned against those who conceived them as justification for their oppression.

A sociological subtext that adapts itself well to the story’s Agatha Christie-like structure, which traps Warren, fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a blizzard-struck haberdashery, along with an assortment of respectable-looking miscreants. As with all Agatha Christie stories, the purpose of the mystery is to unmask the immorality that operates under the camouflage of civility. As Warren’s failure to obtain social recognition for his officially-sanctioned dignity (symbolized by a forged Abraham Lincoln letter) gradually contaminates his supposed equals, the façade of civilization begins to crumble. Not one character escapes with their dignity – or their life – intact.

What’s especially fascinating here is the double-subversion Tarantino pulls off with this set-up: With the exception of Ruth and unfortunate coach driver O. B. Jackson (James Parks), none of the main characters are exactly who they say they are, and yet the audience’s initial impression of them is mostly correct. Concealed though some of their motives and past actions may be, they are all as cruel, duplicitous and, well, hateful as they appear to be. What passes for redemption – which was Pulp Fiction’s overarching theme – is hate’s remarkable ability to adapt and change targets when need calls for it.

It’s a facilely cynical, nihilistic worldview too many mistake for sophistication, and one that Tarantino is all too eager to perpetuate. Embracing his characters’ sadism with adolescent delight, he uses his indisputable command of mood and coverage to turn his hermetic set into a map of American societal ills, in which racism, misogyny and greed are contained within their own personal cells until individual machinations bring them out into the open. The resulting cannibalistic clashes allow Tarantino to fully revel in his characters’ depravity. Far from the cartoonish hemoglobin-soaked geysers of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 or the cathartic blood ballets of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, the violence is crude, messy, up close and personal. Because almost all the involved characters, even (especially) the “lawful” ones, are unambiguously unpleasant people, we feel confident in our superiority to them and can safely indulge in the transgressive thrill of their bloody gun battles and racial slurs without being challenged or questioned over it. Unlike Sam Peckinpah, whose bloodbaths were primarily the expression of a fatalistic view of masculine urges, the physical and verbal violence Tarantino puts on display here is designed to shock us purely on a surface level.

The snowy, isolated setting, paranoid atmosphere and Ennio Morricone score, as well as the presence of Kurt Russell, are all designed to evoke John Carpenter’s The Thing but the continuous barrage of beatings and “bitch” insults thrown at Daisy instead recall the intolerably dull Vampires, Carpenter’s own attempt at a fantasized western, which saw Sheryl Lee’s prostitute turned vampire similarly subjected to horrific violence from macho protagonists in charge of guarding her. Daisy – whom Leigh plays like The Exorcist’s possessed Regan reimagined as a sneering old crone – is a more fleshed-out character, but the potential challenge posed to the audience by her dual nature as both an unrepentant racist murderer and a cunning anti-heroine manipulating her tormentors’ antagonisms to her advantage remains largely unfulfilled.

The Hateful Eight is at its best when Tarantino dials down some of his affectations (which include a jarring, out-of-nowhere voiceover from the man himself) to let his story play out as the grindhouse mystery-thriller it truly is. When the characters speak and act in their own names, they convey and illustrate ideas with greater cogency than they do as walking metaphors. On the subject of racism alone, the vision of Michael Madsen serenely humming his way across the bloody footprints of the terrified young black man he just shot before finding and executing him is far more evocative than any of the film’s many utterances of the N-word. Quentin Tarantino is an intelligent and erudite filmmaker who still has yet to make a bad film longer than his 30-minute segment in Four Rooms, but his most recent efforts point to a serious deficit in political maturity on his part. As a post-modern genre mashup, The Hateful Eight is smart, suspenseful and engrossing. As an artistic comment on current issues, it is bogged down by its own self-satisfied pseudo-liberal nihilism.

¹Which my younger, less experienced self foolishly mistook for his greatest strength while reviewing Django Unchained.