Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

by Julián Herbert

  This must be one of the most lamentably sincere passages Broch wrote. In the first place, the image of Nero he evokes seems to me not “archetypal” kitsch but kitsch internalized in the POV of the author: everything is sacrificed for the sake of rhetorical effect; it is almost as perfect in its parodic reach as the Jewish fantasy in the scene from Inglourious Basterds where Adolf Hitler dies during a massacre of Nazi leaders. But, still more importantly, the entire passage has a strong whiff of embittered authoritarian nihilism. The petitio principii related to art borders on the impossible: not even Joyce, Pound, or Eliot would have been capable of approving of it, let alone Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, or John Ford. In essence, what Hermann Broch calls kitsch art is what we would call tradition.

  This problem (of tradition and the sublime or, as Eliot terms it, of “tradition and the individual talent”) will become a constant preoccupation throughout the twentieth century. Harold Bloom was the cultural figure charged with formulating a systematic response to it, and he did this by generating a complete theory of literature in which the relationships of power between works and authors do not correspond solely to the avatar of the sublime (the canonical), but also to that of parody; in Bloom’s coinage, “the anxiety of influence.” For Bloom, the history of literature revolves around an age-old contest in which writers quote one another, re-create and challenge one another; self-parody; invent precursors; steal and plagiarize subjects, techniques, and visions; so constructing a corpus of superior works, and also a relational frame for reading, psychoanalysis, and interpretation. T. S. Eliot parodies Shakespeare in a negative sense in the first verse of “A Game of Chess,” the second canto of The Waste Land, but he also parodies Dante (in a positive sense) throughout his Four Quartets.

  Many critics believe that Bloom’s work is nothing more than an attempt to oust Eliot from his throne as the dominant English-language literary censor of his day. The main objective of this—apparently successful—exercise in usurpation was not so much to erase the figure of Eliot as to emend the political construction of the Western canon: if Dante was the greatest Western poet for Eliot, for Bloom it was Shakespeare. This political campaign fought over parody and the sublime is the common driving force behind three major books written by Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, and Shakespeare.

  Enough of gringo professors and Austrian industrialist-novelists. What I’m trying to say is that Q’s narrative technique—the sum of references, quotations, and plagiarism—is nothing new; it is located at the center of the artistic tradition to which we belong and, moreover, has stylistic features also to be found in the works of Eliot, Joyce, and Mikhail Bulgakov, to mention just three writers without whom it would be impossible to understand twentieth-century art. The difference is that Q distills his influences from B movies, the subgenres of exploitation film, memorabilia, gore, cartoons: kitsch art in high doses, world fragments that were not sublime until they came into his hands. This simple demiurgic skill alone would be enough to place Tarantino among the great contemporary masters of the tension between parody and the sublime. But Q also added a Shakespearean element to the formula: the revelatory soliloquy, that obsolete dramatic technique that Bloom, in his genius, describes as “self-overhearing”: the character overhears himself.

  I dreamed that my job consisted of transcribing complaints by fictional characters about their creators. I still had my old typewriter. I’d been assigned a station at the end of a red corridor. My clientele stood in a long line before me. Some were white dragons with long mustaches like octopus tentacles, others resembled moldy statues of presidential dwarves with permanent smiles carved in stone, yet others were wearing Oscar de la Renta suits. I filled in a form for each of them, adding the specific complaint in the box at the bottom of the page—the majority were related to physical attributes; very few of these beings mentioned their woes or adventures—stamped the document, gave the complainant a copy, and placed the original on a metal tray. A boring bureaucratic job that not even the outlandish appearances of most of my service users could enliven.

  An explosion woke me up. It seemed to be at some distance, perhaps near the entrance to the underground complex. Something in my body recognized the frequency of the sound: “A bazooka,” I said. I stood up and made straight for my walk-in closet, where I took off my pajamas and put on a Nike tracksuit: I had no desire to repeat the experience of finding myself in the street inappropriately dressed. A few moments later, one of Jacobo Montaña’s attendants came into my bedroom. He had a 12-guage Remington Wingmaster shotgun slung over his shoulder and was carrying a bulletproof vest.

  “We need to get the fuck out of here, sir. They’re blitzing us.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he strapped the vest around my torso and pushed me toward the exit. We crossed the plastic garden, where some of Montaña’s men were repelling what I recognized, even at that distance, as a squadron of the Mexican Naval Infantry, and headed down the main corridor, away from the entrance to the bunker.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s another exit that comes out on gringo soil. Just follow me and don’t ask questions.”

  Those were my guide’s last words: a bullet entered the back of his neck and took his left eye out.

  I decided to crawl on my belly along the floor, as I’d seen in thousands of action movies. Lead, dust, and pieces of concrete were flying around me. I had no idea which way to go. I followed the long corridor, turned into the storage area, and reached the room that housed the basketball court. There, I got to my feet and opened the door. Inside, sitting in the bleachers, was Jacobo Montaña. He was wearing his everlasting Rosa Gloria Chagoyán terry cloth bathrobe and hugging a bulletproof vest as if it was a teddy bear.

  “The pigs have tracked you down, champ. Congratulations.”

  The words were spoken with bitterness, but also with a weariness that indicated a vein of sick joy.

  The feds and the marines burst into the room in military formation. I knelt in the middle of the court and clasped my hands behind my neck, as I’d also seen in thousands of movies.

  It’s midday on the streets of Los Angeles. An olive-green two-door Maverick ’74 is traveling west along Beverly Boulevard, approaching North La Brea. Gildardo is at the wheel. Rosendo is in the front passenger seat.

  “Who told you?” asks Gildardo.

  “I found it on the internet.”

  “Since when did you start using the net? Weren’t you fired from telecommunications command?”

  “I found it, right?”

  Gildardo twists his mouth in a gesture of scorn.

  “Seeing is believing.”

  “He’s the fucking owner of the movie theater, OK? He’ll have to turn up there sooner or later. And if he doesn’t, we take one of the employees and plank him till he gives us the home address.”

  The Maverick passes the New Beverly Cinema and stops, engine still running, a few yards from the property. Over the entrance, a banner with bright red lettering on a luminous white background reads: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY QUENTIN KILL BILL THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR.”

  “I can’t park here.”

  “Don’t. Keep the engine running and the blinkers flashing. I’ll go investigate. A couple of minutes, no longer.”

  Rosendo opens the door on the passenger side and starts to get out, but Gildardo grabs the lapel of his jacket to detain him.

  “Just tell me one thing. Why are we doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  Rosendo seems confused.

  “This.”

  “The job?”

  “The job.”

  “A job’s a job, that’s what you said. Someone’s gotta do it.”

  “Yeah. But look at us: we cross the border, drive to L.A. to take out some famous dude just ’cause Jacobo Montaña’s got a piece of dry snot worrying his brain.”

  “If Montaña says he wants the head of Quentin Tarantino, we take him the head of Quentin Tarantino. Don’t think about
it, don’t try to change the date of the test, don’t piss around wasting time the way you were doing with Melanie: you just do the job you’ve been given. And that’s it. The day we start questioning orders, we’ll be living like animals and end up killing each other.”

  Rosendo makes another attempt to get out of the Maverick and Gildardo stops him once more.

  “Montaña’s been taken.”

  Silence.

  “When?”

  “It was on Telemundo a while ago. The pigs blew up the bunker. They’re flying him to Organized Crime right now.”

  “Call Dante Mamulique.”

  “I already did. He said to go on as planned until further orders.”

  “So there you are. What part didn’t you understand?”

  “It’s not like we’re about to take out some journalist or a bolero singer, Rosendo. Have you seen this man’s movies? He loves samurais. He must have a whole fucking army of them for protection.”

  Rosendo takes out his .357 Magnum and inspects the magazine, barrel, and trigger.

  “I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about samurais. That’s why I travel armed.”

  He returns his weapon to its holster.

  The entrance to the New Beverly Cinema is deserted. From inside, a man with Latino features runs out. He’s tattooed, is wearing a muscle shirt, and is carrying a semiautomatic firearm. A uniformed police officer appears behind him; he’s pulling out a regulation pistol as he runs.

  In the Maverick, Rosendo says:

  “Here’s how it’s gonna be: we’re gonna find Tarantino. We’re gonna cut off his head, like we were ordered. And we’re gonna take it back to Mexico and hand it in a gift box to Don Jacobo Montaña. Or to whatever motherfucker’s in charge of the cartel when we get there. Period.”

  Rosendo gets out of the car. The tattooed Latino runs toward him, with the uniformed police officer in pursuit. Sirens sound in the distance. The tattooed Latino gives a half-turn and fires at the police officer. The officer fires back. Twice. A stray bullet hits Rosendo in the leg. Rosendo drops to the sidewalk, extracts his gun from his shoulder holster, and opens fire: his first bullet hits the tattooed Latino between the eyes, the second gets the police officer in the chest. The sirens are getting louder.

  Gildardo jumps out of the Maverick and attempts to help Rosendo to stand. Patrol cars grind to a halt, surrounding them. The uniformed officers shield themselves behind the doors of their vehicles and take aim at the sicarios.

  “Police,” shouts a nasal voice above the confusion of sirens, moans, hammers being de-cocked, threats, and banging doors. “Drop your weapons.”

  Rosendo shoots at the officers. Gildardo takes his gun from its holster and follows his example. The officers return fire: bullets hail down on the two bodies until both Rosendo and Gildardo fall lifeless to the ground.

  Members of the LAPD approach cautiously. The red lettering of the banner over the entrance to the New Beverly Cinema is unscathed. It reads: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY QUENTIN KILL BILL THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR.”

  Harold Bloom says that William Shakespeare was the inventor of the human. Put that way, the idea sounds weird, but what Bloom is referring to—not without a degree of baroque adornment and exaggeration—is the modern emergence of a metahumanity: the invention of fictional characters with profound psyches, beings not only capable of self-awareness but also with access to sudden revelations of the unconscious. In broad outline, Bloom’s theory is that pre-Shakespearean characters are not completely individuated but depend on such conventions as destiny, hubris (the vice of exaggerated pride that characterizes classical Greek heroes), symbolic representations, allegory (Dante), themes (for example, the king’s favorite knight who falls in love with his new queen), and so on: they are, in the end, social conceptions poured into the molds of individual people. By contrast, Bloom insists, Shakespearean characters gradually detach themselves from the mold and the material that filled it to acquire a status that, in some pain-filled way, makes them similar to humans, no longer taken en bloc but one by one: they are characters with cognitive power. Pedro A. Jaramillo defines this power as “the mode in which each individual classifies knowledge to establish an internal mental order … : one of the keys to personality. It is the basis for any understanding of the reactions of individuals at a given moment, and the soundness of their judgments.” Shakespearean characters are, then, more mimetic than those of preceding eras; their capacity for imitating flesh-and-blood humans (their parody: their parallel ode) is complex and credible. The most noteworthy features of a written character with cognitive power are, on the one hand, doubt (since self-determination and free will are social phantoms, while doubt is inherent in absolutely anybody at all: Am I really awake? Did that really happen last night or are my senses deceiving me?). And on the other, desire and change: a mimetic character is not what he is but what he wants. And, because he wants a lot of things, he cannot always be the same; his essential nature is imprecise.

  So far this is just stating the obvious, and that is why, historically, the best way to exemplify it has been through Hamlet’s soliloquy. A man argues with himself about the appropriateness of being or not being, about the dreamlike or real nature of death, and about whether the weight of the latter is due to panic in the face of nothingness or something more subtle: the possibility that there might be, beyond life, a more profound primordial horror than nothingness. Harold Bloom’s ideas don’t at this point appear entirely detached from the Western critical tradition. But he goes on to say that what adds a further dimension to Hamlet’s words is not his solemn demeanor: it is the fact that the character overhears himself as he speaks those words. That is to say, in any literary piece influenced by oratory, the characters know in advance what they are going to say. It is as if their consciousness had already, for a long time, been writing, rewriting, and rehearsing the lamentations and prayers they direct to the gods. In Shakespeare, by contrast—I’m still channeling Bloom here—when the character says something and we, the audience, hear it for the first time, the character is also hearing himself say that thing for the first time. And, on saying it, he discovers it: discovers a central aspect of his personality. At this point, the writing is no longer oratory but psychoanalysis. That is why Bloom considers Shakespearean creations to be the grand antecedent to the work of Freud. And that is also the reason for not only their strangeness but also their familiarity.

  I don’t intend to linger on a clarification of how far my theories about Shakespeare coincide with Bloom’s; I will say only that “self-overhearing” is a rhetorical figure that appears in certain passages of the book of Job. What I would like to point out—to put the finishing touches on this brief summary of my master’s thesis—is that one of the principle ingredients of Q’s work is parody of the Shakespearean soliloquy constructed from pop references. I could give various examples (Jules in the coffee shop attempting, with rabbinic eagerness, to elucidate a misquoted passage from the Bible stands out for me), but I believe the most perfect of all is Bill’s soliloquy. Speaking to Beatrix Kiddo, his loved one and enemy, the character says:

  As you know, I’m quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book, not particularly well drawn. But the mythology … The mythology is not only great; it’s unique…. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S,” that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears—the glasses, the business suit—
that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He’s weak … he’s unsure of himself … he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race. Sorta like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plympton…. You would’ve worn the costume of Arlene Plympton. But you were born Beatrix Kiddo. And every morning when you woke up, you’d still be Beatrix Kiddo.

  “Are you calling me a superhero?” she asks, and Bill replies, “I’m calling you a killer.”

  What is the character actually talking about? Of course, when he describes his former girlfriend, Bill is describing himself, as in one of those spectacular multiple-dream images where, according to Lacan, all characters are the Ego. That already entails a literary refinement that transcends the stylized hyperviolence of the film. Nevertheless, the soliloquy reaches its apogee in the analysis of comic books: when Bill describes Superman, he is, between the lines, describing the Nietzschean superman, the one who rises above “herd morality” and the death of God to construct a new world. A world that, in one of its most poorly planned dystopias, ended in Nazism. The analogy between the killer and the superman isn’t new (there’s at least one other memorable movie that addresses it: Hitchcock’s Rope). But the Shakespearean mechanism Q employs to address it (the character overhears himself) makes it sadder and darker; makes it sublime.