The films of Quentin Tarantino are ripe for philosophical speculation, raising compelling questions about justice and ethics, violence and aggression, the nature of causality, and the flow of time. In this witty collection of articles, no subject is too taboo for the writers to tackle. From an aesthetic meditation on the use of spraying blood in Kill Bill to the conundrum of translation and reference in Vincent and Jules' discussion about French Big Macs in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino and Philosophy shies away from nothing. Is The Bride a heroic figure, even though she’s motivated solely by revenge? How is Tarantino able to create a coherent story when he jumps between past, future, and present? The philosophers in this book take on those questions and more in essays as provocative as the films themselves.
Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy
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More About the Author
K. Silem Mohammad is the author of four books of poetry: Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), and The Front (Roof Books, 2009). He is Associate Professor of English & Writing at Southern Oregon University.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Entry in the Series,
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This review is from: Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize With a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Popular Culture and Philosophy) (Paperback)
I am a big fan of the "popular culture and Philosophy" series and I own about eight volumes. This is one of the best in the series. I read these books, both to expand my knowledge of specific philosophers and their theories and ideas as well as to peek at the depths of meaning in some of my favorite works. The decent books in the series will have essays that say "here's a philosopher, here's his idea, this is how it applies to the work in question". which is fine for the first reason i read these books. The really good books in the series have essays that say "here's some things that happen in the work, this is how it illustrates the theme of the work, here's how it relates to the big questions of life, here's how it defends/opposes this philosopher's work". That is precisely what all the essays in this volume do. Whether analyzing Kill Bill as a modern retelling of Oedipus by way of female empowerment, discussing the structure of Pulp Fiction as an analysis of the compartmentalization of time, or using the crooks of Reservoir Dogs to compare group morality, all of the essays truly elucidate Tarantino's movies.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tarantino, Miles, Coltrane and Dali,
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This review is from: Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Paperback)
Those who were taken aback by Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher and Bach" in the 80s, will understand since the 90's the unresolved feelings with which Quentin Tarantino's movies tend to leave us. It is an unresolved set of feelings that cross many conceptual modalities and that resonate deeply within the soul, feelings that "kick in" long before the intellect does. For it seems that it is the body and deeper emotions that remain alive even when the intellect has been mauled until it is rendered dead. It is, it seems that it is the body and the deeper emotions at the pit of the soul that in the end cannot be fooled. They are forever tuned in to what much later we come to recognize as art, or pain, or common sense, or logic, or depression, or insanity, or pornography, etc. Our body and our deepest emotions ultimately are about the truth that we cannot yet (and do not wish) to see: truth that we are genetically and culturally predisposed not to see about ourselves. They know even when we do not want to know (and well before the intellect knows in any case), when truth in the form of art has hit the streets. That is how we knew about Miles Davis, or John Coltrane well before we understood them. That is why we came to appreciate Dali before we could make sense of his erratic personality and his surrealistic melting clocks. That is also how we know about, and came to know Quentin Tarantino: through "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction." This book, like Hofstadter's, gives us one group of scholar's intellectual accounting of the meaning of Quentin Tarantino's movies as art -- one that attempts to map in the foreground this much deeper intellectual process that invades our bodies and our deepest emotions in the background well before our intellects are aware of it. However, unlike Hofstadter, this book's first (and only) mistake (in my view) is that it is a collection of disjointed articles, written by authors who it seems did not talk to each other - either about art or about philosophy, (or about Tarantino!) - and maybe that was the idea (!)? In fragmented pieces, and using philosophy as the key intellectual prop, they did manage to come up with the goods. But why did the editor not come back at the end and put everything together and finally put Tarantino into some kind of seamlessly meaningful context? That said, why does it not surprise me that what they found is that Tarantino's movies resonate with Nietzsche's philosophy in expected ways that are both good and bad? Why does it not surprise me that Tarantino speaks to us from the subtext of our empty American lives much more than from the conscious part (i.e. from their context or pretext)? Why does it not surprise me that Tarantino is lyrical and bluesy in the same way that John Coltrane, and Miles Davis or Salvador Dali, were? And why does it not surprise me that Tarantino speaks to us in our times (about our times): on how our deeply sublimated desire for freedom from society's silly and often cruel anti-human constraints is our greatest collective yearning? Somehow we are tired of (against our wills) being forced to become socially adjusted beings. Especially when the rules with which we are being socially adjusted are so asinine, meaningless and injurious to the health of free minds and bodies? It seems to me that striving for this kind of freedom is the leitmotif, not just of all art, but of all life itself; not just the art of Quentin Tarantino's, but of that of all artists of all stripes since time immemorial? In Gödel, Escher and Bach, the reader may recalled that it was clear that those three geniuses too were all just trying to remove and get beyond the man-made constraints of their respective eras. However, in each of these cases it was the constraints of form and logic that were cramping their respective styles and modes of expression. In this post-modern world, the constraints are different, more local, more intimate, more sinister and more scandalously brutally numbing and meaningless. Post modern artists like Miles, Coltrane and Tarantino are trying to get away from a different set of constraints: Those imposed by a small-minded, greedy, racist, mindless, hypocritical, "consumer oriented," pseudo-religious, pseudo-patriotic and empty society whose very rules are little more than fear-based fences designed mostly to preserve certain meaningless prerogatives of certain people. Their rules and laws are thus just the built-in lies that the society tells itself in order to maintain the illusion of control. What is it that such a society is hiding from itself anyway: Is it a brutal past? An inhuman, dehumanizing and unfair capitalist economic system? Or is it a fear-based system that promotes alienation and mindless amusement, consumerism and conformity over normal human values? Or is it just a racist system that continues to promote and perpetuate the lies of white supremacy? The pressure and tension on artist of today is to react to a vicious American culture that tells "second order lies" to itself and then vainly tries to hide them behind the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, just as at the same time it tries to seduce the rest of the world into believing that these self-generated lies are the truth, and mean just the opposite of what they really say. The morality of Jules, in Pulp Fiction is also trapped and terrorized by just one of many such societal lies, the one based on American style religious hypocrisy. And Jules proves that they are just as meaninglessness, as he recites and uses the same scriptural ritual in the same way that the Preachers do each Sunday, each time he (as a low-level hit man) blows the head off of innocent victims with a 45-caliber handgun. Is this not the same ritualistic moral trope the Pilgrims used for 400 years against Native Americans? Or that the missionaries on the transatlantic slaves ships used in their claims to civilize the slaves? Like Jules, did they not also come to the scene of the crime with a disarming smile and a gun in one hand, and a bible and the scriptures in the other? Or is that not what the preachers do in today's mega churches each Sunday morning? They recite scripture to us as they metaphorically point a gun at our temples, and ask for our last dollar, just like the couple did robbing the Denny's restaurant in Pulp Fiction. Only, Tarantino's heroes at least say: This is a robbery, give us all your money and no one will get hurt! Except for the artist, the mirror, mirror on the walls (as we unfailingly expect them to do) only tells us what we want to hear. They repeat ad nausea the lies that the politicians and the preachers have already told us. The artists thus have become our last line of defense against collective cultural insanity and a world that has all but spun completely out of control. They are our only remaining reliable indices of who we really are, of where our humanity really lies, and of how we got into this colossal mess in the first place. On a globe that increasingly is spinning off its axes into a mindless impersonal and alienated world, we need anchors; more and more we need reliable moral compasses; we need (as Richard Pryor use to say) someone who will stop telling us those old familiar lies and begin to tell us the truth; we need a way to find a route back to our better selves, back to ground zero: our collective humanity. Increasingly, in the present political environment (and even with a mulatto President) Americans are becoming desperate that the experiment has failed in exactly the same way that the Russian experiment failed, and oddly for exactly the same reasons: a failure to see and tell the people the truth. As a culture, we Americans desperately want to believe (indeed need to believe) that beneath the many layers of lies, deception and denials, there is a ground truth upon which it is still not too late to build a respectable and meaningful humanity. These layers of lies are finally about to suffocate us ... Only the artists are brave enough to try to dog paddle their way up to the surface above the slim as they too gasp for air. That is what Tarantino's movies are trying to do. They reflect back on us the unalloyed ugliness and the moral deadness that we have become. That is what John Coltrane and Miles Davis tried to do too. That is what Salvador Dali tried to do. We did not need philosophy to tell us that we ARE the lies that we tell ourselves, and nothing more. Richard Pryor had already told us that in many ways and many times. Ten Stars
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic,
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This review is from: Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize With a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Popular Culture and Philosophy) (Paperback)
Thought provokingly awesome book. One of the best i have read in a long while! You gotta be into this kinda thing though. If you dont LOVE philosophy, save your money. If you are one of us who do enjoy it, you will absolutely LOVE it!
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