(I should mention, here be spoilers)

I worry about Quentin Tarantino.

Which is not to say I don’t enjoy his films. In fact, I find them consistently entertaining, and have watched most of them more than once. One of their strengths is a creative use of violence (a feature which many decry- but I find other elements more objectionable, to which I shall turn anon). There seem to be three kinds of violence in Tarantino films. The first is action violence, not dissimilar to the kind of violence most at home in 80s action movies, with lots of guns, explosions and high body counts, to which cocktail Tarantino adds ample blood. This first kind can also be played to comedic effect, as in the death of Marvin in ‘Pulp Fiction’, or rendered cartoonish and stylised by ramping it up to absurd levels, as in many sequences in ‘Kill Bill’. The second is dramatic violence, which plays on the emotions and makes the protagonists and their actions sympathetic. The opening scene of ‘Kill Bill’ would fit into that category. The third could be a sub-category of the second, which I’ll call invisible violence. When Tarantino really wants the violence to have an impact on his audience, he cuts the camera away and instead shows the expressions on the faces of the people who are watching it. The OD scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ is brilliantly effective because of this technique and Tarantino has used it again since then- in his latest film, ‘Django Unchained’, I counted at least three instances of it.

None of this bothers me, nor do I find any of it necessarily objectionable. What does bother me lies on a more thematic level.

Quentin Tarantino is a man preoccupied with vengeance. It is an idea with which his early films toyed and with which his more recent films are obsessed. Many of the objects of his vengeance (anti-Semitism, slavery & racial prejudice) are understandable and, arguably, justified, and along parts of that road I am quite willing to follow, at least as far as willingness to be entertained goes. But not all the way.

Yesterday, I saw ‘Django Unchained’. It concerns a deliciously articulate dentist-turned-bounty hunter, Schutz, and an ex-slave, Django, whom the former buys, then frees, then trains in his line of work.

This dentist-turned-bounty hunter has excellent fashion sense. I want that coat!

The theme of vengeance features from the first scene, in which Schutz comes upon the slavers who are transporting Django and his compatriots, kills one, debilitates the other, purchases Django (making sure to fill out a valid receipt), then gives the remaining slaves a choice- free the remaining slaver and go on to be purchased in the slave market to which they were heading, or free themselves and head north. The slaves choose the latter option, and we see them for the last time as they walk slowly and deliberately towards the increasingly terrified slaver, who has been pinned beneath his fallen horse. We are meant to sympathise with the slaves as they take their revenge, and we do. Their actions are understandable. We might easily do the same. So far Tarantino has us in hand.

One of Django and Schutz’s first bounties together is three wanted slave owners whom Django served under. The lead-up to his vengeance-taking features flashbacks of one of these three giving Django’s wife the lash while he begs for mercy towards her as her cries and screams fill the air. To emphasise the point, when Django finds two of these brothers, one of them is dragging away yet another woman to be beaten. This is effective. Again, we sympathise with Django. Anger and indignation stir within us. We do not begrudge Django his vengeance.

At some point, however, a line is crossed. When precisely the crossing takes place is difficult to pinpoint. It might be when, on another bounty, Schutz urges Django to shoot a man plowing a field with his young son by telling him of this man’s crimes, and Django does so (though, through Django’s hesitation, it seems clear Tarantino doesn’t intend us to feel entirely comfortable about this). It might be when Django stops Schutz from buying a slave who is about to be mauled to death by his owner’s dogs, because it might blow their cover. By the end of the film, though, it is clear that Django (and Tarantino) has crossed a line somewhere. The slave owner who had owned Django’s wife, played by Leonardo DiCaprio (the slave owner, that is, not the wife) has been killed (by Schutz, earlier in the film) and his family is returning from the funeral. Django stands at the top of the stairs with gun in hand. The white men he kills first. We have already seen them maltreating both Django and his wife, so this is not surprising. But then he kills the older sister of the man, whom we have so far not seen guilty of anything more than the racial prejudice one would expect of a white person in the pre-Civil War South. This is played for comedic effect. After this, Django shoots out the kneecaps of the elderly black man, played very well by Samuel L. Jackson, who served as butler and confidante to DiCaprio’s slave owner. This man we have seen guilty of remarkable cruelty, but then he is also old and black. Perhaps we expected some kind of redemption for him? But there is only redemption through violence here. Django has fitted the mansion with dynamite and, after it blows up, taking Samuel L. Jackson with it, we see Django walking in slow motion out of the smoke and towards the camera. It is a hero walk, but in what way is what he has just done heroic? His wife, waiting on a horse outside the gates of the mansion, is clapping delightedly. I’m feeling a little ill.

I think back to earlier parts of the film, with slave owners whipping women or putting them in metal boxes in the sun, and wonder if, by the time the credits roll, Django is much different from those people. Of course it may be that Tarantino is trying to say something about the nature of revenge. But I don’t think he is. All the hero tropes are in place. The camera effects and cinematography leave us in no doubt for whom we are supposed to be cheering. But strip away the effects, zooms, cuts and camera angles, and the protagonist and antagonists look pretty similar.

Tarantino’s previous film, ‘Inglorious Basterds’, was even more stark in this regard. At its climax, Jews have locked Hitler and many top Nazi officals inside a cinema, which is subsequently set on fire.

As Nazis desperately try to escape from this death-trap, running about, stampeding each other, trying to find an exit, my mind ran to the Jews in the gas chambers who reacted in exactly the same way when faced with their deaths, and with a flash of epiphany I realised, “These Jewish characters have become their persecutors” The pigs had stood up. In that scene, as in ‘Django Unchained’, there is little nuance. It is intended that I should identify with the Jews of the film, as I was yesterday supposed to identify with Django, all the way to the closing credits. I couldn’t do it. What bothers me is that I think Tarantino could (not to mention one or two of the folks with whom I saw the film).

His films were not always thus. ‘Kill Bill’ was a revenge flick through and through. But there was a certain stoicism, a certain resignation to the proceedings. Beatrix is driven by a sense of duty and obligation as much as by passion. Bill, who starts out as a faceless malice, is, by the end, a very ambiguous villain. When Beatrix discovers her daughter is not only alive but has been raised by Bill in her absence, there is very little visceral rage left in her.

I wonder if any of her other dates have ended this way?

When she does kill Bill, it seems almost fated, as though it could not have been otherwise even if Beatrix had wanted it so; it is a duel between equals, and there is an air of the tragic in his final five steps. Her tears afterwards are more cathartic than the killing itself.

Going further back, ‘Pulp Fiction’ has something almost akin to mercy. When Ving Rhames chases Bruce Willis down the street with murderous intent, both of them fall into the clutches of a store-owning BDSM enthusiast. Bruce Willis has a chance to escape, but decides to go back and save Rhames. After Rhames has had his revenge on their captors, he renounces his grudge against Willis, and the two go their separate ways. Here there is, if not forgiveness or reconcilation per se, at least a union of former enemies against a greater and more immediate foe, and a wiping away of former debts.

These latter two examples have nuance. Those seeking vengeance escape with their humanity intact. We can even sometimes see two sides to the dispute. But Django and the Jews of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ are victims who have become monsters. The only thing that keeps us from noticing the transformation is Tarantino’s complete mastery of style. He knows how to handle his audience.

Exiting the cinema yesterday, I was thinking on these things, wondering if I should feel worse for having enjoyed most of the movie, feeling irritated that some of my companions didn’t understand why I hadn’t enjoyed all of it, and speculating about the reasons behind Quentin Tarantino’s apparent moral slippage over the past few years. And I recalled a curious juxtaposition which suddenly struck me as pertinent- before the film began, I and my companions sat through not one but two (slightly different) previews of the imminently opening ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.

Now ’Zero Dark Thirty’ is a movie I would not pay to see on principle, for the same reason I wouldn’t have paid to see one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films, and I suspect it is a film which will be studied by future generations for many of the same reasons current generations study Riefenstahl’s oeuvre. And, though I have not seen it, I know enough about it to know that it is also a revenge flick, albeit one based on actual events. And that makes me wonder.

In ‘Django Unchained’ and ‘Inglourious Basterds’, there is no redemption save through violence. And I can’t help but wonder if many of us suspect, and certainly many of our leaders suspect, that that is a statement of hard but unsentimental and uncompromising reality. Faced with a singularly tragic attack by a singularly determined enemy, the greatest empire of modern history extended every means at its disposal to kill a single man.  Not to detain him or try him (a dignity they at least went through the motions of allowing that other implacable foe, Saddam Hussein), nor even, as in an age at once more barbarous and more civilised, parading him through the streets of the capital in chains, but simply to kill him.

Which they eventually did, in a foreign country, under the noses but without the knowledge of that country’s duly elected government, and with the information afforded by offering fake immunisation injections to sick children. He was not a very nice man, there seems little doubt. Neither were the slave owners of the pre-Civil War South or Hitler and the Nazis. There would be few in the West or East who regret his passing. And maybe there will be a hero walk or two in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. But there will also be chickens coming home to roost for a long time yet, chickens that would otherwise have stayed quite happily in the yard. The greatest empire of the modern age cannot, like Django, have its cathartic vengeance and ride hero-like into the sunset as the credits roll.

What do I mean by connecting these things? Am I suggesting there is a link, causal or otherwise, between the trajectory of America’s foreign policy and the trajectory of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking? Not really. But there is a parallel instinct, a correlating moral sense, that is unsettling. What bothered me slightly more than the film itself yesterday was that, chatting to people afterwards, I seemed to be in a distinct minority in finding anything about it objectionable. That may be more indicative  of my fellow cinema patrons on that occasion, but I suspect that many (though not all) of the folks who would indeed be uncomfortable seeing such a movie, would be decidedly more comfortable with an identical plot but less blood. I daresay too many politicians would fit into that category. If you doubt that, I’d like to submit ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ as Exhibit A.

I wonder, have our nations inadvertently adopted the logic of a Tarantinian revenge flick? And are we as uncomfortable with that as perhaps we should be?