How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (21 page)

At this point Tarantino's story gets rather Homeric, whether he realizes it or not. In order to defeat this most fearsome adversary, The Bride—like the
Iliad
's Achilles preparing at last to confront Hector—needs a suitable weapon: in this case it's not new armor forged by an obliging god, but a legendary samurai sword forged by the master swordsmith Hattori Honzo. (The character is borrowed from Japanese films, where he was played by Sonny Chiba, who plays him again here.) Using this fearsome blade, The Bride eventually dispatches, in that climactic confrontation, hordes of O-Ren's colleagues before slicing off the cranium of O-Ren herself. First, however, The Bride dismembers O-Ren's closest associate, whose still-living trunk she deposits, after the slaughter is over, at the emergency entrance of a Tokyo hospital, as a warning to Bill. Then the movie is over.

 

What few critics have remarked on is how boring all this actually is—how random the action seems, how incomplete the narrative feels, how tedious, for all their color and noise, the scenes of violence are. If the feeling you leave with is one of flatness, it's because Tarantino has lavished his attention on (as it were) the choreography while neglecting the story. We never do learn why (or, for that matter, who) The Bride married, why she reformed herself and left the DiVAS, why they assault her, what her relationship with Vernita and O-Ren was, why they are the first (if they are) to be dispatched, why Bill seeks her death: these are questions that Tarantino either isn't interested in or is leaving for the second part of his film. The result is that the violence, however artfully enacted, never feels climactic—never feels as if it's accomplishing anything moral or emotional, which is precisely what violence can do in serious literature. (If you took everything out of the
Iliad
but the battle sequences, you'd have a work that approximates the feel—and, for what it's worth, the significance—of
Kill Bill
.) The final gruesome tableau of
Kill Bill
has, in fact, the same emotional impact—which is to say, none—as the brutal catfight with which it begins; either one could come at any point in the film, with pretty much the same effect. In this, Tarantino's film differs from its genre models, in which, however artlessly, the culminating tableaux of brutality are meant to feel, and often do feel, satisfying.

Indeed, in this respect
Kill Bill
may be said to differ radically even from Tarantino's own earlier films, in which (you could argue) the violence has a kind of point, either thematic or stylistic. When the hitman played by James Gandolfini in
True Romance
methodically beats a gamine young woman, prior to his planned shooting of her, and her increasingly bruised and bloody face keeps filling the screen, we know that he's just doing his job. By the same token, killings that are presented to get big laughs, like the accidental shooting of a minor character in
Pulp Fiction
(which precipitates a manic bout of car-cleaning) or the offhand gunning down of an extremely annoying young woman in
Jackie Brown
, could be said to illustrate something about the world in which those characters live, one in which casual violence is a quotidian affair. Even if you were reluctant to ascribe to Tarantino any moral sensibility whatsoever, you could still argue that the violent acts had a
kind of aesthetic point—they were just the commas and semicolons of Tarantino's cinematic vocabulary, ways of punctuating the progress of the narrative. And indeed, the blazing gunfights and orgies of extermination with which nearly all of the films that Tarantino has been involved in end may be said to function as triple exclamation points, an emphatic means of calling our attention to the fact that the story is now over. (The DVD of
True Romance
features the chapter titles of the various scenes; two that come toward the end are entitled “Room Full of Guns” and “Room Full of More Guns.”)

The violence in
Kill Bill
feels different—or, rather, it doesn't feel like anything at all, and not merely because Tarantino hasn't bothered to give it any emotional resonance. Whatever you thought of
Reservoir Dogs
, the torture scene was unbearable—which is to say, it affected you; the same is true for those comical killings in the other movies I've just mentioned, which affected you in a different way. (The sheer randomness of the killings reminded you that the criminals who performed them lived in a moral universe so alien to your own that the only response was to laugh.) But as you watch the limbs flying off in
Kill Bill
, the heads spinning across restaurant tables, the kitchen knives sticking out of people's chests, you look at it with the same sense of detachment with which you watch those carefully orchestrated shows on the Food Channel—you just admire the professional's expertise. After The Bride kills Vernita in her neat suburban kitchen at the beginning of the film, she turns around to find that Vernita's young daughter has witnessed the whole thing. But—as The Bride apologizes to her—the girl says nothing at all, shows no reaction. Neither does the audience.

This lack of affect, the protective distancing arising from an awareness of the “movieness” of what we're witnessing, is what Tarantino's admirers use to defend him. (“See? It's so artificial that no one takes it seriously.”) But it's not clear that Tarantino wants you to feel nothing at all. In the
New Yorker
profile, the director asserted that what fills in the blanks of his cartoonish characters, what provides the “backstory,” is what the audiences already know, as movie audiences, of the actors themselves. “Robert Forster's face is backstory,” Tarantino said, referring to the actor who plays the middle-aged hero of
Jackie Brown
:

For Tarantino, the movie fan who knows everything about the actors in the films he loves, it's unnecessary to write psychology or motivation into the movies; he's assuming that, like him, you'll be able to fill in the blanks. This goes for plot as well as character: he assumes that you, too, have seen enough kung fu movies and bad old Westerns (to say nothing of bad Seventies chick-cop shows) to know why these characters do what they do, why they're seeking revenge, and so on. He thinks, in other words, that he can devote an entire film to choreographing scenes of kung fu violence because you already know the story, in effect, and are willing merely to sit back and enjoy the fight sequences that he's hung on a tenuous plotline.

The problem with this—and, ultimately, with the “movieness” argument in general—is that the writing and the actors do “have to do” something. What, after all, if you don't know who Pam Grier or Robert Forster is? Tarantino's devotion to his B-movie idols is touching, but it shows up the flaw in the argument that (as the admiring
New Yorker
writer put it) the reason that “Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second.” But audiences are necessarily passive, whereas directors must transform what they have seen into a new vision. Tarantino certainly ingests, but it isn't clear that he digests. Watching Tarantino's films—and none more than
Kill Bill
—is like being stuck in a room with someone who, like so many of this director's characters, can't stop talking about the really neat parts in the movies he's seen. This is entertaining if you share his mania, but if you don't, he ends up being a bore.

 

Here it's worth mentioning that Tarantino emphatically rejects the notion, advanced by some critics, that his paraphrases and quotes of other films are meant to be ironic. “I mean this shit,” he has said. “I'm serious, all right.” Tarantino, in other words, has absorbed whole all
of the movies he has seen, from the vampire flicks to the Douglas Sirk melodramas he so admires; in his filmic allusiveness, there is no “take,” no postmodern frame—no point of view. He just loves these movies without judgment, without critique. “It's hard to pin down Tarantino's taste,” the
New Yorker
writer commented, “because he likes nearly everything.” Another way of saying this, of course, is that he has no taste at all.

The lack of a sense of intellectual process, or of judgment, that characterizes Tarantino's approach to his movie influences helps explain the ultimately vacant quality of so much of his work, no matter how clever it often is. This is certainly true of
Kill Bill
, but it also goes for the earlier films—the ones “about people.” When they first came out, I enjoyed the structural cleverness of
Pulp Fiction
, the comfortable plot machinery of
Jackie Brown
, the taut, depraved claustrophobia of
Reservoir Dogs
. And yet when I saw them again recently, I was surprised to find myself bored by all three. In the end, they feel wholly disposable—they're not in any significant way
about
any of the elements of which they're made up (crime, guilt, race, violence, even other movies). You realize that Tarantino doesn't have any ideas about them at all; he just thinks they're neat things to build a movie around.

This, in the end, is the most troubling thing about Tarantino and his work, of which
Kill Bill
may well be the best representative: not the violence but the emptiness, the passivity, the sense that you're in the presence not of a creator but of a member of the audience—one who's incapable of saying anything about real life because everything he knows comes from the movies. It occurred to me, after I left the
Kill Bill
screening, that Tarantino may actually think that “revenge is a dish best served cold” really
is
an “Old Klingon Proverb.” People worry about Tarantino because they think he represents a generation raised on violence; but it's as a representative of a generation raised on television reruns and video replays that he really scares you to death.

—The New York Review of Books,
December 18, 2003

E
ver since 405
B.C
., when Aristophanes, in a comedy entitled
Frogs
, hit upon the sublime idea of staging a literary contest in the Underworld between two dead writers who loathe each other's work (Euripides and Aeschylus), the best literary criticism has often been a form of sadistic entertainment—one that uses comedy's tools (humiliation, ridicule, exaggeration) to comment not on society but on art. There is, of course, an equally long tradition of critics who don't strive to score belly laughs as they illuminate great texts; that tradition, in fact, begins with Aristophanes' near contemporary Aristotle, to whose
Poetics
, written sometime in the middle of the fourth century
B.C
., we owe the first full-scale, intellectually sophisticated attempt to analyze the nature of aesthetic pleasure and to systematize the mechanisms by which literary texts produce that pleasure. Aristotle's own text is, it must be said, not the most fun to read: it would be hard to find a less humorous explanation of humor than “Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people—not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction,” etc., etc.

If a work like
Frogs
is more fun for audiences than the
Poetics
is, it's
probably because the comedy, with its ruthless send-ups of the well-known weaknesses of each of the two contestants, satisfies a primitive pleasure that lies at the heart of all comedy: the Schadenfreude-laden enjoyment of the spectacle of someone else's humiliation and, ultimately, defeat. After a long verbal duel in which each playwright enumerates his opponent's flaws with devastating accuracy, Aristophanes provides a brilliant climax that hilariously conflates a literal and a figurative “weighing” of one poet's work against the other's: each approaches a scale and utters a line from his work, and the onlookers peer to see whose words are, literally, weightier. Aeschylus—whose diction is famously more ponderous (“bundles of blast and boast,” his antagonist spits) than that of Euripides (who prefers airy
vers libre
)—naturally wins, and so Euripides must remain in the Underworld, while Aeschylus is restored to the world of the living.

It is worth noting that the comic contest between the two writers is repeatedly referred to in Aristophanes' text as a
krisis
, a word that can mean anything from “dispute” to “decision” to “judgment”; the verb it's related to is
krinô
, “to judge.” Those shades of meaning help illuminate the nature of another derivative from
krinô
: the English word “critic.” As the culminating scene from
Frogs
reminds us, disputes about the values of an artist's work are decided by a kind of weighing, which leads to a judgment. The person who performs this weighing, this judging, is the critic.

 

Critics, of course, are also judged, either explicitly or implicitly: you somehow suspect that most people would much rather see a performance of
Frogs
than plow their way through the
Poetics
. It's not that Aristotle doesn't make exacting judgments; it's just that they're too polite to be much fun. (“An example of inconsistency is the
Iphigenia in Aulis
…in characterization, just as much as in the structure of events, one ought always to look for what is necessary or probable.”) Great popular criticism, on the other hand, acknowledges and exploits the cruelty inherent in any critique, which is why we're still reading
Frogs
, and still giggling at Aeschylus's attacks on Euripides. “You, you jabber-compiler, you dead-beat poet, / you rag-stitcher-together, you say this to me? /…I won't stop, until I've demonstrated in detail / what kind of one-legged poet this is who talks so big.”

Talking big—to say nothing of Aristophanic hyperbole, comic brio, and the guilty pleasure to be had in witnessing the humiliation of others—is on offer in a new work of literary criticism by a contemporary writer, the novelist Dale Peck. The book's title,
Hatchet Jobs
, tells you a lot about its author's style. In the summer of 2002, Peck created what he proudly refers to, in the introduction to the twelve essays in his new book, as a “ruckus in the publishing world.” The cause of the ruckus was an annihilating review he'd written of a memoir by the novelist Rick Moody—to whom Peck, in an opening salvo more or less typical of his critical modus operandi, referred as “the worst writer of his generation.” Peck himself is happy to chronicle the notoriety his review garnered soon after its publication:

He does not exaggerate: I happened to be staying with friends in Italy early that summer, and I can attest that even there the phone lines and Internet connections were humming with news about
l'affaire
Moody. Peck claims, in the introduction to
Hatchet Jobs
, that his initial pleasure in his article's impact “faded as I realized that people were less interested in what I (or the writers I'd reviewed) had to say than in the possibility of a brawl,” but you can't help thinking he's being a tad disingenuous. Anyone who begins a review by stating that someone is the worst writer of his generation is someone who's interested in the possibility of a brawl.

The notorious Moody review (“The Moody Blues”) has now been collected with eleven other “writings on contemporary fiction,” which Peck has written for
The New Republic
,
The London Review of Books
, and
The Village Voice
. The surprise of the book is that its outré title (to say
nothing of its cover, a photograph of the brawny, bald-headed Peck wielding an axe) does it a serious injustice. Whatever its rhetorical excesses—and there are many—and its cramped aesthetic vision, it is an extremely intelligent book, and clearly the work of a potentially noteworthy critic—although, to be sure, one working in the Aristophanic, rather than the Aristotelian, mode.

 

Hatchet Jobs
is not, at first glance, the book that you'd have predicted Peck would end up writing, back when his career first began. In 1993 he published a much-acclaimed debut novel called
Martin and John
, which was really a collection of short stories connected by the conceit, which you learn toward the end (and sometimes suspect that Peck came up with at the end, too), that one of the characters has written them all. It was a clever book—the work of a young man, to be sure, but surprisingly sophisticated both emotionally and formally. (Although the stories are all about different people in different places and of different classes, the main characters are always named Martin and John, and the secondary characters are always Bea and Henry.) Peck's formal gamesmanship was evident again in his second novel,
The Law of Enclosures
, whose title derives, in part, from the way in which the first and second halves of this fiction (about a drearily unhappily married couple named Bea and Henry) enclose a starkly written autobiographical section in which Peck suggests the origins of certain themes and subjects that recur in his fiction: domestic alienation and violence, psychological cruelty, alcoholism, spousal abuse, child abuse, homosexuality, premature death.

As it turned out,
The Law of Enclosures
was a kind of road map for Peck's subsequent career. His next book was another novel,
Now It's Time to Say Goodbye
(1998), a sprawling affair about race and sexuality set in a rather suggestively named town (“Galatea”) in Kansas, the state where Peck grew up. It was a book whose cast of characters—an artist, an academic, a black hustler named Divine, an albino black man, a black preacher, and a white Southern belle—suggested tremendous allegorical ambitions. But after that it was as if the startling central section of
The Law of Enclosures
had exerted a kind of tug on its author, and Peck returned to nonfiction family memoir with
What We Lost
(2003),
which focused on his father's grim childhood, where once again alcoholism, child abuse, psychological abuse, and poverty were the subjects at hand. Dale Peck Sr. is, indeed, the figure who connects all of his son's writing: a powerful, frightening, tormented, and punishing father is never very far away in both his fiction and his nonfiction—and, I suspect, his criticism as well.

I am not a great admirer of Peck's fiction, which I find (perhaps because of the artificial, almost willed quality of its formal and rhetorical schemes) always to be straining rather too hard for effect. This was certainly the case with
Now It's Time to Say Goodbye
, which collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures. But even the much-acclaimed first novel seemed to me to seesaw between a strained “lyricism” (“the world accumulated history as each second passed, but I sloughed it off as though my body were coated in wax”) and cliché: “I look at him, confused, staring full on into the bottomless tranquility of his eyes.” Equally conventional, it seemed, was the affected affectlessness of the prose Peck used to describe the traumas his characters suffered—a stylistic tic you found in lots of young gay male writing during the late 1980s and early 1990s. (“I lost my virginity to my stepfather on my mother's double bed during the afternoon's heat while she was at work.”) For someone who, in his critical writings, seems to value “passion” highly, Peck hasn't put a lot of it in his fiction.

These bad habits were more in evidence in the second novel. Critics have raved about the beauty of Peck's prose, but in his fiction, at least, the diction has only gotten more portentous with time (“this drifting was his only dream, his earliest desire; it was his desideratum”), the writing more overwrought (“the shriek of the alarm had skinned him like an onion, layer by layer”), and the symbolism ever more heavy-handed. In
The Law of Enclosures
, the unhappy couple are having a new house built, and each one has a different idea of what it should look like, so that in the end it is—
like the marriage itself!
(as Peck, who is much given in his criticism to caustic italics, might put it)—“an eccentric amalgamation; inside, it looked like two jigsaw puzzles forced together.” Worse, in this novel Peck indulged even more a penchant for what I think of as bossiness: he never trusted his story (let alone dialogue) to illuminate his characters, but instead not only kept telling
you what his characters were thinking at every moment, which is wearying, but had them think things that no one actually thinks, except of course for characters in novels, who need to think them so that we realize that they're doomed or vulnerable, etc.:

Looking back, I see that Peck's bullying tendency to hog the microphone was a kind of clue to where his talent really (or so it seems to me) lay, which is nonfiction—memoir, criticism. The only really authentic writing in his first two books is the brilliant central section of
The Law of Enclosures
, where Peck the scathing critic takes over from Peck the affected novelist. Here there is total authority, as opposed to mere pushiness. And real invention, too. (There is a remarkable chapter in which he imagines inhabiting—entering, really—the body of his father, whom he wishes to understand, orifice by orifice.) In this central section, too, the emotions—above all, grief for the author's mother, who died when he was three—seem authentic rather than learned or (as with much of the AIDS material in
Martin and John
) obligatory, and for that reason achieve genuine lyricism:

That's something you don't mind being told.

There's a line in
Hatchet Jobs
in which Peck lambastes the critic Sven Birkerts (the object of particularly devastating ferocity) for being too controlling: “Birkerts,” he writes, “wants to do more than merely bring books to readers. He wants to tell readers how they should be reading them.” But this is precisely what Peck himself has kept doing in his fiction, where the impulse doesn't belong; it was only when he'd relaxed
into nonfiction that he found a style that was natural to him, a voice that was truly strong.

 

The urgent need to control—to make sure you see what he sees, with no room for dissent—coupled with a desire to seduce are, of course, the traits of a comedian as well as those of a critic, and the hallmark of Peck's style is a ferocious sense of humor that, in its wildness, its parodic ferocity, and its machine-gun willingness to hit or miss is indeed Aristophanic. This style is present on every page of
Hatchet Jobs
, which features essays not only on Moody and Birkerts, but on a fair range of novelists both established and fairly young: David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Stanley Crouch, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace, Kurt Vonnegut. There are also omnibus essays on genre fiction: gay epics, novels about black women.