Race On The QT

Blackness and the Films
of Quentin Tarantino
ADILIFU NAMA
Race on the Qt
Race on the Qt
Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino
adilifu nama
Austin
UniveRsity of texas PRess
Copyright 2015 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2015
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libRaRy of congReSS cataloging data
Nama, Adilifu.
Race on the QT: blackness and the films of Quentin Tarantino / by Adilifu
Nama. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
iSbn 978-0-292-76814-7 (cl. : alk. paper)
iSbn 978-0-292-77236-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Tarantino, QuentinCriticism and interpretation. 2. African Americans in
motion pictures. I. Title.
Pn1998.3.t358n36 2014
791.4302'33092dc23
2014026611
doi:10.7560/768147
foR tamu, SPRout, Zam-Zam, and Wah-da-da
contentS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ix
chaPteR 1. Reservoir Dogs and True Romance

chaPteR 2. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown
13
39
chaPteR 3. Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2,

and Death Proof 67
chaPteR 4. Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained
coda
121
Notes
135
Bibliography
Index
155
147
93
acknoWledgmentS
I must give thanks to various people who have contributed to the com
pletion of this project. Former students Maya Haddad and Courtney
Cowings happily took on the task of preliminary grunt work rounding
up articles, and Lauren Frazier helped me navigate the technological
maze of Loyola Marymount University. Special recognition goes to
Jim Burr, my sponsoring editor at the University of Texas Press. He is
an editor with imagination and willingness to explore and break new
ground. I can say for the record that my previous books have posed a
challenge to conventional notions of scholarship regarding their topics
and the style of writing. This book is no different in those regards. But
JB was down and that has made all the difference. In addition, Leslie
Tingle was invaluable as my copy editor.
A quick shout-out to Fede at The Ohio State University. Big thanks
to Professor Charles E. Swanson, who is one of the most earnest peers
I know. He always had an open door, and when called on he answered
without hesitation. Charles hooked me up with Elida Elli Portillo, a
cinematographer who became my go-to person for technical film mat
ters that facilitated the completion of the book. Most important, I must
acknowledge my family for truly having my back when my sunshine
turns to rain and my rain to sunshine. They are my rainbow. Thank you
Tamu, Nia, and Nizam. My love, your love, our love is eternal.
Race on the Qt
intRoduction
Dont let the pigmentation fool you: it is a state of mind.

QUentin taRantino on being black1
foR juSt oveR tWo decadeS, Quentin Tarantino has provided audi
ences with films that are simultaneously thrilling, compelling, suc
cessful, and, quite often, offensive. The Tarantino tongue-in-cheek
style is a mash-up of lurid violence, shocking body horror, and bellig
erent racial politics where whites nonchalantly articulate the n-word.
Interracial relationships abound, and abundant and seemingly crude
images of black criminality are the norm. Despite the range of critical
and popular responses to the body of Tarantinos work, he is possibly
the most iconic Hollywood film director of our time. Moreover, adoring
fans and ambivalent critics alike have displayed a nearly neurotic need
to decode Quentin Tarantino as an American pop-culture icon.2 Con
sequently, the mantle of Hollywood film director is an inadequate
and flimsy expression for who Tarantino really is as a person. Those
unwilling to accept conventional Hollywood bylines and biographical
narratives turn to his films for intriguing insights into the curious
personality that is Quentin Tarantino. Cinematic scavengers explore
Tarantinos films to piece together patterns and uncover clues that re
veal not only his filmic formula for success but also his interior psycho
logical makeup. Accordingly, Tarantino films are not merely cinematic
excursions through odd worlds replete with violence and enchanting
dialogue; they do double duty as a Rorschach test for exposing the real
Quentin Tarantino hidden beneath the auteur veneer.
What do his films say then?
Certainly Tarantino is a fetishist. His self-indulgent proclivity to
Race on the Qt
focus our/his gaze on pedicured toes and barefoot female actresses con
tributes to making him appear as merely another strange dude in a long
list of peculiar creative types the dream factory has historically em
ployed. If this is the clearest conclusion such fixations dictate, then
Tarantino is just a modern-day version of eccentric Hollywood direc
tors like Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Russ Myers,
David Lynch, Tim Burton, Sam Peckinpah, John Milius, and Melvin
Van Peebles, whose excesses and idiosyncrasies make for personas that
periodically rival the films or genres they have come to define. Given
this backdrop and Tarantinos oddball persona, he is indeed in good
company. But such an assessment is too glib and generic; Tarantino de
mands a more exacting analysis.
Certainly, Tarantinos rock-star status is not just a function of his per
sonality or the quality of his films. Yet, a more socially critical analysis
of Tarantino is just as problematic. When critics, fans, and detractors
insist on distilling Tarantino down to a more specific categorization,
the calculations are quite irregular. Genius. Savant. Saint. Sinner. Out
sider. Hollywood royalty. Racist. All of these categories are used to en
compass the complexity of Tarantino, but none of these labels are ade
quate for accurately defining the hyperactive man with the gift for gab.
Despite the inherent shortcomings of these tags, the notion of Taran
tino as a racist is the most compelling, disturbing, perplexing, contro
versial, and in many ways, the most unjustifiable of all the labels that
have dogged him. Why? Because it suggests that Tarantinos films are
also racially toxic and what he says in their defense is evidence of his
personal racial animus.3
Across various interviews regarding his films, Tarantino has said
such things as, I grew up surrounded by black culture . . . It is the cul
ture I identify with . . . [W]e have a lot of people inside of us, and one
of the ones inside me is black . . .;4 When Richard Pryor and Eddie
Murphy do their stand-up acts and say nigger, youre never offended
because theyre niggers. You know the context its coming from . . .;5
I just dont feel the whole white guilt and pussyfooting around race
issues . . .;6 and I like booties. Lets just say, I have a black male sexu
ality.7 Admittedly, Tarantino, like his films, chronically blurts out in
polite company statements that are extremely problematic even when
delivered in private. Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often
awkward frankness associated with Tarantino and virtually all of his
films when it comes to race vis--vis blackness.8 Moreover, such off
the-cuff commentary offers supporting evidence that Tarantino has a
intRodUction
warped notion of black racial formation in America, a perspective that

evokes the worst in the racial imaginations of the white audiences that
view and enjoy his films. In this sense, Tarantino is a figure of extreme
interest because of the controversy he engenders around race. Even
trade industry publications such as the Hollywood Reporter have noted
that, Beginning in earnest with a monologue by the director himself
in Pulp Fiction, in which he says n----- repeatedly, he has displayed a
propensity for including the term in his films that is unmatched among
white directors.9
But for me, examining Tarantino for his racist tendencies is too re
ductive an analysis and too easy a solution for not engaging the cine
matic representations of race in America that are his films. Stopping
Tarantino from making another film or stigmatizing him to such an ex
tent that his career is ended will not dispel racism as ideology or prac
tice. Moreover, blaming the director or writer for the anxiety around
race that films stir in the viewer or critic is a convenient intellectual
evasion. A more challenging approach is deconstructing why and how
Tarantinos films resonate with established and emerging discourses
concerning race in America. Such an approach is more concerned with
engaging the range of cultural work his films represent regarding race
relations in society, not mere authorial intent that reductively trans
lates the racial discourse and racial meaning across his work as a func
tion of a series of oddball personality quirks. Accordingly, Race on the
QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino confronts the racial
frankness in Tarantinos films and not the man himself. Rather than ex
plore the inner machinations and racial motivations of Quentin Taran
tino, this book is committed to critically examining what Tarantinos
filmic body of work has said and is saying about race in America cine
matically, symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely, cynically,
sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and brilliantly.
On the surface, Tarantinos fanboy sensibility for 1970s Blaxploita
tion films appears to inform his representation of blackness and the in
clusion of black folk in his films.10 Hence, his filmic choices are reason
ably assumed to be functions of personal tastes (or lack thereof).11 But
a closer examination reveals that context, rather than a fondness for a
specific genre or eccentric proclivities, also accounts for the racial ele
ments that permeate Tarantinos films and the racial discord they often
express and evoke.
One only need look to the halcyon days of the Hollywood film in
dustry during the 1970s to find a source for the racial topicality found
4 Race on the Qt
in Tarantinos films. Conventional readings of Tarantino place Blax

ploitation cinema as the taproot for the revenge and subversive racial
motifs in his films, rather than the insurgent (or auteur) cinema that
emerged in Hollywood during the 1970s. Before the shift to blockbuster
films as the driving economic model, and concurrent with this insur
gent cinema, was the faddish success of Blaxploitation cinema. Blax
ploitation became a quick means to infuse a floundering Hollywood
studio system with cash as the dream factory was forced to retool and
revamp what types of films were profitable and popular.12 As an unex
pected result, there emerged a collection of gritty American films that
spoke to the cultural, political, sexual, and racial zeitgeist of the early
1970s beyond the Black Nationalist and militant pop politics of Blax
ploitation, a paradigm imitated following the success of Melvin Van
Peebles film sensation Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (1971). The
Liberation of L.B. Jones (William Wyler, 1970), The French Connection
(William Friedkin, 1971), Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1971), Mean Streets
(Martin Scorsese, 1973), Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973), and Blazing
Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) are a small sample of films from the early
1970s that are emblematic of the racial candor woven into the works of
the period. Such films foregrounded casual racism by whites, or at the
least did not avoid it as an ongoing presence in American society.
Even cinematic classics such as Francis Ford Coppolas The God
father (1972) were intimately involved in the cultural politics of race
in 1970s America. Although the film harkened back to the 1940s and
1950s, the racial politics it presented spoke to the relevancy of race in
1970s America in the wake of Black Power militancy and cultural na
tionalism. Take for example the racist soliloquy of Don Zaluchi (Louis
Guss) when Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) calls for a meeting amongst
the heads of the five mafia families to salvage his criminal empire. As
the dons weigh the pros and cons of selling heroin, Don Zaluchi an
nounces his support for drug distribution with this caveat:
I also dont believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they
wouldnt do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says,
I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment,
we can make fifty thousand distributing. So they cant resist. I want
to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I dont want it near
schools! I dont want it sold to children! Thats an infamia. In my city,
we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. Theyre ani
mals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
intRodUction 5
Rather than being viewed as an example of how Coppola held dispar

aging beliefs about the dark people of America, dialogue such as this en
hanced the aura of authenticity regarding conspiratorial backroom nego
tiations when profit and power are divvied up among white organized
crime elites. In this case, criminal endeavors are informed not merely
by greed and avarice but by a perverted racial morality whereby blacks
are viewed as expendable and therefore the perfect target market for ad
dictive and debilitating drugs that are presumed to have no real moral or
social cost.13 When viewed against the concurrent, rising fast and fading
even faster Blaxploitation film fad that presented virtually all white char
acters as racist automatons, Don Zaluchis edict appears devoid of artifice
and sounds like an elegant explanation of how and why real black com
munities were overrun by drug dealers and addicts both then and now.
By and large, the Hollywood film industrys candid display of Ameri
can racial politics is best understood as a product of the heightened
awareness and topicality of black and white race relations during the
early to mid 1970s. In a film like The Godfather, racial politics were
expressed by allusions to casual racism circulating in the smoky back
rooms of white organized crime syndicates. In a film like The Spook
Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973), the depiction of a violent
black response to rampant white racism fulfilled fantasies of over
throwing the U.S. government, similar to the vivid predictions made by
Malcolm Xs Ballot or the Bullet speech (1964) and promised by black
militants such as H. Rap Brown.14 Arguably, Martin Scorsese is the only
director from that intrepid period of American cinema who continues
weaving a racial subtext into his films. Case in point, Scorseses film
The Departed (2006) begins with a narrative monologue that has the
main antagonist, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), proclaim:
I dont want to be a product of my environment. I want my environ
ment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was
only a way of sayingwe had each other. The Knights of Columbus
were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of
the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldnt get a fucking job, we
had the presidency. May he rest in peace. Thats what the niggers dont
realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, its thisno one
gives it to you. You have to take it.
Certainly, the above comments boldly define the beliefs and moti
vations of a disturbing character. But more important, Costellos com
6 Race on the Qt
ments also reveal a series of assumptions and arguments concerning

the cultural politics of race in America, past and present. In terms of
the bygone racial politics of Boston, Costellos comments symbolize the
deep-seated ideological racism that plagued Boston and rose to the sur
face with the violent school-busing crisis of the mid 1970s.
Arguably, one of the most controversial and divisive developments
concerning access to quality education emerged during the mid 1970s
with forced busing to ensure school integration. The backlash to black
integration of the Boston Unified School District included violent pro
tests by working class whites.15 Against this historical backdrop, Cos
tellos seemingly random film narration sets the stage for a politically
and racially relevant reading of how The Departed integrates racial ten
sion, and how the Protestant work ethic, opportunity, and luck are sig
naled as scarce resources for black folks. At a broader, ideological level,
Costellos comments can be read as a thinly veiled rebuke of white lib
eral public policy and as a refutation of academic explanations for the
economic and social disenfranchisement experienced today by a dis
proportionate number of black folk in the American social order. Cos
tellos claims buttress conservative arguments that black youth who
fail to achieve are symptomatic of a lack of personal motivation and
drive, and, in a phrase, that they suffer from a welfare mentality. Cos
tellos perverted version of the white, middle-class work ethic fuses
religion, politics, and racial biases so that economic, cultural, and en
vironmental conditions such as housing discrimination, poor schools,
lack of male role models, and limited exposure to positive reinforce
ment become nonfactors for determining black success. Ultimately, in
this sense, The Departed is not merely a film about double-crosses and
divided loyalties, but is a cinematic reminder of the central place that
race occupies in a major northern city and U.S. society.
Tarantino continues this aesthetic tradition born of the insurgent
cinema of the 1970s by articulating racial anxieties circulating in
American society. Any discussions concerning Tarantinos filmic influ
ences must wholly dialogue not just with Blaxploitation but with the
totality of the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. New Hollywood
cinema radically rejected the studio-dominated western and musical
film productions of the 1920s to mid 1960s in favor of taboo subject
matter, more realistic violence, and political topicality with films like
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks,
1967), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Alice Doesnt Live Here Any
more (Scorsese, 1974), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), One Flew
intRodUction
Over the Cuckoos Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), Carrie (Brian De Palma,
1976), Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), The
Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), and Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert
Benton, 1979). Consequently, despite Tarantinos seemingly anachro
nistic articulation of racial dynamics, he is drawing from an established
and venerated filmic tradition.
Tarantinos inclusion of racial animus in his films is similar to what
William Friedkin did with The French Connection (1971), Brian De
Palma with Sisters (1973), Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather
(1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Martin Scorsese with Taxi
Driver (1976), and Paul Schrader with Blue Collar (1978). Nevertheless,
Tarantinos version of racial sensibility is often jarring and easily courts
criticism as misplaced, ill conceived, and out-of-touch given his status
as a white male. Instead, conventional wisdom dictates that Spike Lee
is unquestionably American cinemas most skilled (and accepted) racial
provocateur for our present era. To Lees credit, no other modern-day
director has successfully used race as a topical source to generate pub
licity, garner cultural clout, and make contradictory polemical state
ments about race in America. A quick thematic inventory of Spike Lees
films makes the point strikingly evident: School Daze (1988) addresses
the insecurity and animosity between dark- and light-color complex
ions amongst African Americans; Do the Right Thing (1989) taps racial
prejudice and white police brutality as its central focus; Jungle Fever
(1991) is a diatribe against interracial intimacy between black men and
white women; Malcolm X (1992) is a cinematic tribute to Americas
most trenchant and charismatic race critic; Get On the Bus (1996) is
a racial road-trip movie to the Million Man March; Four Little Girls
(1997) is a thoughtful but awkwardly detailed documentary of Southern
white racial terrorism against blacks during the civil rights movement;
Bamboozled (2000) is a jumbled satire for and against contemporary
black minstrels in the media; and Miracle at St. Anna (2008) is a film
dedicated to recuperating the role and stature of black World War II
soldiers. All of these films individually display flashes of brilliance in
documenting the trails and tribulations of being black in America.
Yet, as a whole, in spite of a prolific body of work, there is a strain
of disingenuousness coursing just beneath the surface of too many of
Lees films. In this regard, the racial issues examined in many of Lees
films appear as a gimmick. Films such as School Daze, Jungle Fever, and
Get On the Bus use racial discord as a slick distraction to package and
promote films that have weak or underdeveloped plots and inconsis
8 Race on the Qt
tent acting; they display little internal logic, present meandering story
lines, and chronically showcase student film-school tricks. Without a
doubt Spike Lee, at his best, is the Oscar Micheaux of our era, a pio
neering black director whose bread and butter is the race film. At his
worst, Lee comes perilously close to indulging in racial hucksterism.
Consequently, across the bulk of Lees filmic work hot-button racial
issues are used more like agitprop to support a series of mediocre titles.
The cultural upshot is that in-group racial orientation does not nec
essarily provide a director with ability or insight when it comes to ar
ticulating racial politics in America, a point dreadfully underscored by
black directors such as Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels, whose films make
Spike Lee look like Ingmar Bergman in comparison.
In contrast, white film directors such as John Sayles with Brother
from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1986), Lone Star (1996), and Honey
dripper (2007), and Norman Jewison with In the Heat of the Night
(1967), A Soldiers Story (1984), and The Hurricane (1999) are accom
plished filmmakers who have provocatively tackled and integrated
racial issues across their bodies of work. But while Sayles and Jewison
have periodically taken race to task, Tarantino is a white director who
makes race a sharp cornerstone in all his films. In this sense, Taran
tino demands more than a cursory conversation about race, given how
all his films have included black folk of various styles, temperaments,
and motivations. In other words, Tarantino films are very much about
race even though the type of paint-by-numbers racial thematic found
in Spike Lees films or the garish racial sociology found in the film
Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009) is absent. Consequentlyand counter
intuitivelyTarantinos films are more likely to implicate us as viewers
in the wrongheadedness and seductive irrationality of racism in ways
the often ham-fisted Spike Lee fails to dictate and Lee Daniels neglects
to achieve in the contrived and squeaky melodrama The Butler (2013).
This is not to say Tarantino is all finesse. The repetitive use of the
n-word as an everyday utterance in Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown
(1997) or a characters matter-of-fact comparison between a giant ape and
African Americans in Inglourious Basterds (2009) irritate like finger
nails clawing against a chalkboard. In this regard, Tarantino appears
intent on making the audiences squirm to the sounds of Americas
racial proclivities past and present. But for many critics and scholars,
the aforementioned examples are merely more evidence of Tarantinos
presumably racist perspective. For example, critic Sean Tierney views
Tarantino through the prism of white studies, examining him in terms
intRodUction
of his star personae and public rhetoric, and unabashedly proclaims

that the filmmaker is an active advocate of the very racism Tarantino is
a critic of.16 By focusing on Tarantino the personality, however, Tierney
for the most part bypasses the body of work for which Tarantino be
came famous in the first place.
In contrast, the caustic film critic Armond White takes Tarantino to
task for what he shows on screen. White views Tarantino as expressing
racial hostility vis--vis the racist utterances of his various charac
ters, particularly with the frequent use of the n-word in a non-salutary
manner.17 He basically views Tarantino as a derivative director who
revels in the worst aspects of Blaxploitation film, producing pop sleaze
without the politics. Whites racial analysis is too brittle and facile for
my liking. Without getting into the dubious merits of an argument con
cerning the constructive power of the n-word and Tarantinos inability
to deploy the term in a useful manner, I believe Whites type of criti
cisms reflect a rather reductive approach to investigating race as it re
lates to Tarantinos films. Instead, the use of the n-word across Taran
tinos films also functions as a transgressive reminder and marker of the
real racial animosity that circulates throughout American society, not
just in the mind of one white Hollywood film director.
Not all voices of racial reason share such a strident characteriza
tion of Tarantinos work. The widely published cultural critic and racial
gadfly Stanley Crouch has written a couple of extended essays on the
merit of Tarantinos work as a metaphoric treatise on racial misce
genation and, ultimately, cultural diffusion and hybridity.18 His essay
Blues in More Than One Color in particular is a well-written celebra
tion of the Tarantino filmic touch. Crouch even goes so far to compare
Tarantino with Ralph Ellison, one of the few authors who can claim
the rarified status of writing the great American novel, with his racial
tome Invisible Man (1952). As talented as Crouch is as a cultural critic,
his film studies technique comes across as cloyingly labored. Like a
John Coltrane solo that is virtually divorced from its original compel
ling melody, sounding more like an exercise in extended improvising,
Crouch often muddles his points by engaging in extended intellectual
riffing on topics near and dear to his heart but not quite germane to black
racial formation. Most important, Crouch skimps on framing Taran
tinos films in terms of other films. This lack of cinematic engagement
severely hampers any explanation of how QTs body of work is situated
filmically and obscures what type of conclusions are articulated in re
lationship to race and American cinema. The result is a colorful but
10 Race on the Qt
convoluted rumination on Tarantinos films from Reservoir Dogs (1992)

through Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) that devotes too much time to describing
narratives and plot points of the various films and affords little time
to making meaningful connections between the characters, scenarios,
and outcomes connected to real racial issues and dynamics operating in
American cinema, society, and culture. Nevertheless, Crouchs notable
contrarian viewpoint serves as a counterweight to various hackneyed
claims that Tarantino is a racist. For Crouch (and I agree with him on
this), Tarantino is a complex screenwriter and director who questions
Americas traditional notions of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Certainly much has been made of the reality that Tarantinos filmic
corpus is chockfull of references, homages, similarities, plagiarism, and
allusions to other films, both obscure and well known, that are char
acteristic of the Tarantino style. This postmodern pastiche, however,
only makes sense when viewed in relation withand, periodically,
againsta broader cultural and social discourse concerning race in
America. Thus, reductively translating the racial politics of Tarantinos
films as primarily homages to Blaxploitation cinema is too narrow an
analysis.
Similarly, any fruitful discussion of race in Tarantinos work that
goes beyond name-calling and kneejerk claims of race-baiting must
view his work in relationship to broader and ongoing racial discourses
circulating in American society. Rather than start from the unspoken
supposition that the director is a sinner/saint or bog down the analysis
of Tarantinos films with notions of positive or negative stereotypes, my
approach in this book is quite straightforward. I frame and then decon
struct Tarantinos film work as a form of referential cultural production
in dialogue with historical and concurrent racial anxieties in American
society. Accordingly, the style I have adopted for this project is cultural
criticism within a film studies framework that self-consciously refrains
from the jargonistic overkill of most academic writing and the promo
tional puffery of a celebrity expos. By reading and deconstructing the
racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance (1993), Pulp
Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof
(2007), Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained (2012) in relation
ship to the cultural politics of race in America, I argue that Tarantinos
films reveal a dialogical expression of race, particularly around the ar
ticulation of blackness. Consequently, the eclectic fusion of cultural
criticism and film analysis in this book is less concerned with autho
rial intent and more focused on the symbolic and cultural meaning
intRodUction
11
individual films create and engage as racial representations, ideology,

American cultural politics, pop culture, and U.S. race relations.
In chapter one, Reservoir Dogs is examined in terms of how the film
subversively states, restates, and revolves around blackness as a mar
ginal and excluded identity in the face of an old boy network where
whiteness is privileged. True Romance is examined in light of the ways
race is coded and the manner in which white racial purity is articulated
and critiqued. In particular, the crisis of white masculinity is exam
ined in relationship to shifting and encroaching notions of blackness
informed by the pop cultural trends of the period. In chapter two, I ex
amine how Pulp Fiction constructs white masculinity even as it spec
tacularly and disturbingly alludes to the stifling, sadomasochistic im
pulse present in white supremacy as idea and practice. Moreover, the
film is deconstructed as a racial fairytale, highlighting the racial im
port of key vignettes. For Jackie Brown, I analyze the ways in which the
film embraces and exhibits multiple tensions of race, class, and gender.
The films title character highlights limited racial- and gender-based
economic opportunity, and the character of Robbie Ordell explores the
pathology of black overcompensation and self-hatred. Chapter three
takes on the action-drama mash-ups Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and
Death Proof. I examine how the Kill Bill films engage race, in this case
the fetishization of Asian iconography and culture, in a manner that is
both problematic and progressively subversive. The films are consid
ered for the many ways they attempt to negotiate issues around yellow
face in American cinema and mark the threshold of and boundaries
between homage and racial appropriation in the form of a white pro
tagonist as a martial arts master. With Death Proof I examine how race
and gender are used to affirm Amazonian black sexuality and signify
resistance to white male hegemony as objectification. Black gender
politics are mapped around the violence and sexuality of the female
protagonists. Chapter four examines Inglourious Basterds and Django
Unchained. The former is discussed as a racial/ethnic diatribe that sym
bolically and literally attacks white supremacy as an institution and
personal practice. The film employs various visual signifiers and adopts
specific racial rhetoric as a means to comment on American racism as
a system of exploitation related to Nazism. Finally, I offer Django Un
chained as a continuation of Tarantinos highly provocative critique
of race relations in America, one that destabilizes American history
and the mythological constructs of black enslavement in American
pop culture. The depiction of black enslavement in American cinema
12
Race on the Qt
is explored along with the common aesthetic representations that film

makers often employ to portray the horror of black racial oppression. I
argue that Django Unchained is most appropriately characterized as a
Gothic horror film rather than a spaghetti western.
Many fans, as well as critics, have insisted on focusing on Taran
tinos use of violence, and they reductively attribute his inclusion of
black actors and racial issues as homage to the Blaxploitation film of the
1970s. Others interpret the films as revealing some warped racial preju
dice lurking deep in Tarantinos subconscious. Instead, I argue that the
overall result, for better or worse, is a body of work that ideologically
engages the cultural politics of race in America, but this engagement is
either uncritically lauded, carelessly overlooked, or roundly criticized
because of prejudices attributed to the director. As counter-intuitive
as it may appear, when it comes to the body of Tarantinos films, the
radical racial politics coursing through them is hidden in plain sight
and very much on the quiet, or as I prefer, the QT. Consequently, the
title of this book, Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin
Tarantino is more than a play on words. It is also an exercise in pro
viding a more explicit examination of the racial import lurking beneath
the surface of Tarantinos films.
Upon first viewing, the violence and prolific profanity found in the
films of Quentin Tarantino threaten to overwhelm the racial commen
tary woven throughout the body of his work. A deeper and sustained
reading, however, reveals a subversive racial milieu layered with cul
tural and ideological concepts that are greater than the sum of their
parts. Accordingly, Tarantinos films are not merely movies that enter
tain; they symbolize racial anxieties circulating throughout American
society. Such observations are not automatically evident just by exam
ining QT films for negative or positive representations of black people,
black life, or black culture. Beneath a veneer of interwoven plotlines
depicting profane violence and death are critical considerations of real
and imaginary elements of blackness in America. The films engage
long-standing racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. The fol
lowing chapters may not definitively settle debates surrounding Taran
tinos personal racial politics, but they will reveal more accurate in
sights and conclusions concerning the weaknesses and strengths of the
racial rhetoric and representations found in his films.
chaPteR 1
ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance
Its always best to start at the beginning.

glenda the good Witch, The WizaRD of oz (1939)
in 1991, five loS angeleS police officers were surreptitiously video
taped beating a black motorist after a car chase. The videotape was
subsequently shown on a local news outlet, and shortly afterward the
image of Rodney King being hit repeatedly with batons became a ubiq
uitous representation seared into the collective consciousness of a
nation. The brutality of those recorded images inflamed various seg
ments of the polyglot communities of color throughout Los Angeles,
but it was not until a year later, when a jury acquitted the officers who
beat King, that the fury found expression. In the wake of the verdict,
anger and indignation fueled fires that were set throughout Los Angeles
and persisted over several days. The LA riots had the city ablaze, and
roughly five months after one of the most devastating, racially driven
civil disturbances in American history, Quentin Tarantinos Reser
voir Dogs (1992) dbuted. Given that Reservoir Dogs liberally sampled
from a Hong Kong action flick (fatefully titled City on Fire [Ringo Lam,
1987]) that was set in Los Angeles and included blatant scenes of white
racial prejudice, Tarantinos first film, about a botched bank robbery,
conveyed a great degree of synchronicity.1 Against the searing racial,
political, and cultural backdrops of the riots, Reservoir Dogs crackled
with energy and made Tarantino a hot commodity poised to become
an iconic director.
Reservoir Dogs is a refreshing, dialogue-heavy heist-gone-wrong
film that gives an obnoxious thumb-in-the-eye to Hollywood cine
matic conventions. With its loopy storyline that jumps back and forth
in time and the oddball casting of a young Steve Buscemi as a hard
14 Race on the Qt
ened bank heist sideman, Reservoir Dogs emerged as a notable counter

point to the timid and corny aesthetic sensibility coursing through
much of early 1990s American pop culture. Emblematic of the pedes
trian popular entertainment of the period were television shows like
Baywatch (19891999), with its hegemonic idealization of whiteness,
Seinfeld (19891998) with its ultrawhite rendering of New York City,
and the bizarrely bourgeois The Fresh Prince of BelAir (19901996).
Pop-punk music groups like Green Day, Blink 182, and Limp Bizkit
produced radio-friendly songs that no longer sonically railed against
commercialism with atonal and shrill music. Ultimately, the pop cul
ture of the period was a littered landscape of niche marketing and frag
mented genres all competing for the suburban youth dollar. Reservoir
Dogs, with its fractured narrative and sure-footed, expletive-laced re
imagining of American gangsters, appeared as a strident critique of the
milquetoast mainstream pop culture of the early 1990s. Before Reser
voir Dogs would become integral to a growing refashioning and infatua
tion with pulp criminality, though, the harbinger of this transforma
tion in pop culture was happening not in film but in music.
Arguably, Niggas With Attitudes aka N.W.As sonic ode to the street
thug, Straight Outta Compton (1988) kick-started the pulp gangsta rap
phenomenon and upped the ante for audiences tolerance of hardcore
street profanity and depictions of raw violence. Hip-hop grew out of the
black-and-brown miasma of the South Bronx, a culture and music that
were in response to Lyndon Johnsons failed War on Poverty, Richard
Nixons benign neglect, and Jimmy Carters failed leadership.2 The
gangsta rap of Los Angeles was spawned in the 1980s against the na
tional backdrop of Ronald Reagans political indifference to race and
local Los Angeles Police Department chief Darrel Gates hardnosed
paramilitary law enforcement tactics. Gates approach coarsened the
antagonisms between the thin blue line and communities of color
in Los Angeles, a sentiment fully expressed in N.W.As leave-nothing
to-the-imagination rebel song, Fuck tha Police. Soon after the release
of Straight Outta Compton, with its emphasis on inner-city everyday
gang life, street-level gangsterism became a source of entertainment,
intrigue, and fashion which took off as a cultural phenomenon. By
the mid 1990s gangsta rap had quickly moved from the margins to the
American mainstream where the alchemy of marketing, consumerism,
and American youth culture coalesced to create pop gangsterism.
Gangsta rap records like Dr. Dres The Chronic (1992) went triple
platinum; films like John Singeltons Boyz n the Hood (1991), the Hughes
ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 15
Brothers Menace II Society (1993), and Brian De Palmas Carlitos Way

(1993) found popular audiences; and the extraordinary popularity of the
video game series Grand Theft Auto (1997) affirmed the new genre was
more than a passing fad and that it held potential for reaping money
making success. Cinematically, sonically, and digitally, American pop
culture clearly communicated, Gangsters make the world go round.
Reservoir Dogs is a hybrid articulation of this growing gangster aes
thetic with its hyperbolic narratives of violence and unabashed mascu
line posturing.3 In other words, Reservoir Dogs is the visual analogue
of the type of hypermasculinity and extravagant violence rapped about
on top of 1970s funk samples. Reservoir Dogs even uses funky seventies
music as its soundtrack, a formula that was also prevalent in hip-hop
and was popularly referred to as G-funk during the early 1990s, whereby
rappers layered vivid tales of violence and black nihilism on top of but
tery baselines and the harmonious sound of synthesizers. Reservoir
Dogs also opts for the dissonance inherent in gangsta rap by combining
raw depictions of mutilation and torture with music. The voiceover
for K-Billys Super Sounds of the Seventies radio show introduces the
1970s pop song Stuck in the Middle with You as a bound police officer
is tortured and has his ear sliced off by a psychopathic hood. Along
with gruesome acts of violence, Reservoir Dogs also explores notions
of loyalty and the problematic aspects of honor amongst thieves.4 Of
course, having high-minded premises grafted to seedy settings and de
plorable acts of violence would become a signature feature of the Taran
tino touch in future films.
On top of shocking viewers with unseemly violence and disturbing
depictions of mutilation set to bubbly pop music, the examples of racial
cultural politics peppered throughout the film also make Reservoir
Dogs a seminal film. Admittedly, even in retrospect, Reservoir Dogs ap
pears primarily concerned with showing copious amounts of blood and
guts. But beyond offering an updated version of Americas splatter-film
past, Reservoir Dogs engages American racial politics and provocatively
toys with black racial references that suggest the filmmakers interest
in having characters express a racialif not racistperspective. Not
surprisingly, Reservoir Dogs articulates such sentiments in an often
offensive and abrasive manner. Just as torment and violence are crudely
spliced with existential angst, the obscene and off-putting racial lan
guage found in various exchanges between white characters offers
critical ideological implications about race in American society.
For example, when it comes to offensive dialogue, the opening of
16 Race on the Qt
Reservoir Dogs offers a jarring introduction. The film begins with

extremely boorish banter around a restaurant table with Mr. Brown
(Quentin Tarantino) waxing idiotic about whether or not the sexual
symbolism of Madonnas decade-defining pop song Like a Virgin
(1984) is a size queens anthem about liking large penises. Mr. Browns
contention is deliberated among several other white men gathered
around the table, a motley cast of criminals, bagmen, and enforcers.
Buried in the back-in-forth dialogue over the merits of Mr. Browns ar
gument are the questionable comments of crime boss Joe Cabot (Law
rence Tierney) when he mumbles to himself about finding a black ad
dress book in a jacket he has not worn in a coons age. One could
reasonably assume that Cabots coon comment denotes some archaic
folk reference to the passage of a great deal of time and its relationship
to an actual raccoon.
Racially speaking, though, his inflammatory statement rivals
Mr. Browns sexual vulgarity. A coon is an established racial slur and
its visual analogue is the caricature of a black person as comically lazy,
verbally befuddled, and vulgarly ignorant.5 Moreover, given the fact that
all the members of the diamond heist crew are white, Cabots racially
tinged comment brings into stark relief the absence of any black crooks
at the table. Given this context, Cabots coon comment is charged
with racial undertones. Although Cabots racial comment is delivered
as an absent-minded throwaway line, it foreshadows a litany of racial
name-calling throughout the rest of the film that explicitly degrades
African Americans. Consequently, Cabots comments foreshadow how
racial prejudice is woven into the everyday attitudes and beliefs articu
lated in the film. A subsequent flashback signals the purposeful ex
clusion of blackness from Cabots crime syndicate and subversively
indicates the priority given to white racial homogeneity within the dia
mond heist crew.
The film follows six crooks, men who are all strangers to each other,
hired by Cabot to carry out a diamond robbery. They all use false names
to protect their identities in case any of them are caught by law en
forcement after the heist. Identities are assigned to the various heist
men using color-specific code names. The crew consists of Mr. White
(Harvey Keitel), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker),
Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), and Mr. Pink
(Steve Buscemi). Immediately after being given the name Mr. Pink
by Cabot, Mr. Pink declares his dissatisfaction with that color as his
alias. He advocates that he be Mr. Black. A vigorous argument ensues,
ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance
17
which concludes with Cabot declaring that no one will be Mr. Black
because everyone on the last job wanted that name as their alias and
it became a source of hostility and violent confrontation. Here the ab
sence of blackness is not arbitrary; the broader ideological implications
suggest blackness is a disruptive presence that warrants marginaliza
tion. But blackness is literally barred within this racially homogenous
group of men, a point signaled verbally with the racially disparaging
language directed at black people and signaled visually with the char
acter of Holdaway (Robert Brooks).
As the only black person in Reservoir Dogs, Holdaways solitary
figure is a visual counterpoint to the myriad group shots of the ex
clusively white heist crew, a point visually underscored by a series of
juxtapositions that show Holdaway in stark contrast to Cabot and his
crew. From the deserted rooftop of a building, to the center aisle of an
abandoned and graffiti scrawled amphitheater, to a restaurant scene
where he sits alone in a large booth, Holdaway is often shown alone in
open spaces, whereas the diamond heist crew are constantly shown as
part of a group occupying cramped quarters. On the surface, this optic
framing displaces Holdaway to the margins of the film and diminishes
his agency in the narrative. Ironically, the black detective Holdaway is
the films most marginal figure, but he is the ideological center of Reser
voir Dogss racial politics. The films primary focus appears to be the
strange, tension-filled relationship between Mr. White/Larry (Harvey
Keitel) and Mr. Orange/Freddy (Tim Roth) as they move from associ
ates, to savior and saved, to executioner and executed. Unquestionably,
the emotional drama of the film revolves around this pair. Mr. White
is the staunch defender of Mr. Orange as a stand-up guy, not the under
cover cop that the audience knows he is and the remaining criminals
begin to suspect he might be. As it stands, Freddy, the inexperienced,
unsteady, nave but talentedly deceptive undercover cop compels the
attention of the audience as the central force in the film. A deeper look,
however, reveals that Freddy is really a cipher for Holdaway. Freddy
is only able to walk among the hardened and vicious heist men he is
assigned to deceive because of Holdaways precise tutelage about the
mannerisms and mindset he must master in order to convince real cons
he is one of them, a point communicated in a series of flashbacks. The
stage is set for black racial dynamics to emerge as a central element
in the film, a setup indicated by the first Holdaway flashback which
shows Holdaway sitting at a restaurant booth as Freddy saunters up to
take a seat.
18 Race on the Qt
Detective Holdaway (Randy Brooks) plots his takedown of Cabots crime syndicate
with Freddy in Reservoir Dogs.
Holdaway is dressed like a member of Mao Tse-tungs Red Guardin

camouflage attire. He wears a cap with a five-pointed red star promi
nently placed front and center. Emblazoned on the front of his red
t-shirt is the image of Che Guevaras face. In this odd getup, Holdaway
signifies an urban guerilla planning the overthrow of a corrupt and
racist capitalist regime. What the revolutionary getup suggests, Hold
aways actions clearly convey. He is a formidable tactician and the prin
cipal architect for bringing down Cabots crime organization, a point
clearly telegraphed by his verbal rebuke of Freddy for holding an infor
mant in high regard for supplying a cover story that checks out with
Cabot. In the most unapologetic manner, Holdaway informs Freddy
that his Long Beach Mike informant is a crummy fink who does not
deserve any praise for his referral. Holdaway further establishes his su
perior training and his significance in molding Freddy into an effective
undercover agent by demanding that Freddy memorize the details of a
fictitious chain of events called the commode story. Holdaway pro
vides Freddy a monologue several pages long about possessing a signifi
cant stash of marijuana on his person while using the restroom as sev
eral police officers with a police dog talk shop and he calmly goes about
his business. Ultimately, the commode story is what seals the deal for
convincing Cabots criminal crew that Freddy is a hardboiled felon and
suitable crook for their impending diamond heist. The slight smirk that
Holdaway shows after asking Freddy, You use the commode story?
not only signals the covert delight that Holdaway holds in duping
Cabot, it also suggests Holdaway is a cold, calculating law enforcement
professional intent on bringing down Cabots syndicate. Consequently,
the only on-screen black character in Reservoir Dogs is the central

causal agent of the films narrative and is able to play masterfully with
changing and constructed identities of the underworld . . .6
Of course, the nonlinear narrative and Holdaways significant off
screen presence work to displace the centrality of his character to the
narrative. Despite this distortion, Holdaway, not Mr. Orange, is the
ruthless mastermind of the film. Admittedly, Freddy/Mr. Orange pos
sesses several qualities that might make him appear to be the architect
of Cabots demise. Freddys fresh face works as a built-in alibi as to
why the more seasoned thieves (and Cabots off-screen subordinates)
have not come in contact with him as a criminal, making Freddy a com
pelling candidate for infiltrating Cabots crime empire. Freddys youth
also explains his appeal for recruitment as an undercover cop. Yet if a
black candidate (or for that matter a woman) possessed the same fresh
face, the minority agent could not expect any real consideration as an
undercover agent for this particular job, a point constantly emphasized
by the crude racial banter, chronic use of the n-word, and misogynistic
tone articulated toward women by Cabot and his men. Hence, even
though Holdaway is a street-savvy, experienced undercover cop who
knows the ins and outs of enhancing ones cover, he could never in
filtrate Cabots organization. In this sense, raceor more specifically,
racismis the driving undercurrent of Reservoir Dogs. Racism dictates
that Freddy, the nave and not-so-sure-footed undercover cop, is the
central figure of the film, but not its catalyst. Rather Holdaway is the
principal force operating in the film, which makes him the solitary
brain that brings down Cabots organization.7 Holdaway must take ad
vantage of the one particular quality that makes Freddy an ideal can
didate to effectively infiltrate Cabots inner crime circlehes a white
male.
Holdaway is a powerful signifier of black racial retribution given
the racist nature of Cabots crime empire and the men who work for
him. In addition, Holdaway functions as a symbolic counterweight to
various racist assumptions and derisions directed at black people in
the film, a point brought into striking relief when Mr. Pink racializes
what it means to act like a professional. Mr. Pink must defuse a tense
scene in which Mr. White and Mr. Blonde confront one another about
who botched the diamond heist. Mr. Pink frantically intervenes in
Mr. Whites and Mr. Blondes alternating displays of exaggerated male
posturing, empty insults, and threats of physical violence. He deesca
lates the volatile situation by declaring, Am I the only professional?
20
Race on the Qt
Fucking guys are acting like a bunch of fucking niggers, you want to
be niggers, huh? Theyre just like you twoalways fighting and always
saying theyre gonna kill each other. . . . On one hand, Mr. Pinks re
frain about professionalism shows that Pink is the voice of reason
and common sense. He is the one who tries to keep the robbers from
turning on one another and he rightfully surmises that the robbery was
compromised from the very beginning.8 On the other hand, Mr. Pinks
comments belittle black competency and establish black behavior as
highly emotional, impulsive, immature, needlessly violent, and self
destructive. Against this rhetorical backdrop stands Holdaway, the only
black professional in the film, who is a radical critique of the racial
one-liners that characterize blacks as inferior and unprofessional.9 In
direct contrast to Mr. Pinks racist edicts about blacks and profession
alism, Holdaway is a cold and calculatingeven Machiavellianlaw
enforcement professional who has concocted this plan to take down
Cabots organization.
White professionalism is an overarching theme and ethos that cir
culates throughout the film. Without a doubt, Cabot, Mr. Blonde,
Mr. Pink, and Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn) are unabashed racists, but
they are also men of respect, power, authority, and professionalism.
In fact, their dress code (virtually identical business suits, white
shirts, and black ties) blatantly signals a type of professional confor
mity typically associated with traditional corporate attire. Moreover,
the corporate sensibility their clothes suggests is clearly telegraphed by
a heated debate over the logic of tipping a waitress in which statistics
concerning gender and wage elasticity figure large. By showing these
men having such a debate, the film dramatically underscores the point
that this set of criminal operatives and decision makers are more than
a bunch of white bigots or crude criminals thrown together by hap
penstance. Cabots crooks symbolize the tensions at work in American
corporate capitalism and demonstrate how calculating business logic
is infused with and operates alongside gender discrimination and racial
animosity. Reservoir Dogs does more than express racial hostility, how
ever. The film frankly demonstrates a white racial prejudice that exists
not as an overt act of social victimization but as an everyday sensibility
and attitude that shapes and informs the contours of white masculine
entitlement in contest with gendered or racialized identity.
In particular, the connection between white masculine entitle
ment and racism in Reservoir Dogs is dramatically highlighted when
Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega visits Cabots office after serving a five-year prison
Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) engage in economic banter
concerning the value of tipping waitresses in Reservoir Dogs.
term. Before Vega arrives, Cabot is shown ensconced in an imposing

corner office dispensing financial advice on the phone while sitting in
a leather chair behind a large desk framed by bright white elephant
tusks. The visual cues clearly indicate Cabots entrenched economic
status and power as a big-game capitalist. Racial anxieties prominently
amplify who Cabot is and what he symbolizes. When Vega informs
Cabot that his parole officer is a stickler for parolees following the
rules, Cabot responds with this jarring observation: You know it never
ceases to amaze me, a fucking jungle bunny goes out there and slits
some old womans throat for twenty-five cents and he gets Doris Day
for a parole officer. A good fellow like you winds up with a ball-busting
prick. Interestingly, Cabots racial rhetoric casts whites as the victims
of preferential treatment given to blacks and suggests an American
system now at work where reverse racism is normative and good white
men are punished. This point is highlighted again after a short display
of comic wrestling between Cabots son, Eddie, and Vega followed by
Eddies crude but jesting declaration to Joe Cabot: Aint that a sad sight,
Daddy? A man walks into prison a white man and walks out talking
like a fucking nigger. You know what I think? Its all that black semen
been pumped up your ass so far now its backed into your fucking brain
and now its coming out your mouth. Reservoir Dogs repeatedly draws
attention to the perceived misfortune of white men in America. In
this sense, Cabots and Eddies disparaging take on Vegas parole situa
tion highlights the power of black people and black culture, equating
close proximity to blacks and extended interaction with blacks with
corrupted whiteness. Eddies comments express a deep-seated anxiety
22
Race on the Qt
Big-game capitalist Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), his son Nice Guy Eddie (Chris
Penn), and Vic Vega (Michael Madsen, back to camera) discuss their next caper in
Reservoir Dogs.
with maintaining racial boundaries and perfectly dovetails with the

conservative cadence of race relations in the 1990s, in which whites
perceived themselves to be victims of unfair racial gains by blacks in
the wake of the civil rights struggle, Black Power movement, and affir
mative action programs.10
What makes Reservoir Dogs racially complex is its refusal to rely on
comfortable racial clichs like Caucasians hiding under white sheets
masquerading as sacred robes or neo-Nazi skinheads performing a
frightening parody of the Third Reich minus the goose-stepping. In
stead, Reservoir Dogs demonstrates how racism, as an attitude and an
outlook both mundane and repugnant, is fully articulated by men who
make good on promises, express how much they value loyalty, display
sincere acts of gratitude, are humorous, and have names like Nice Guy
Eddie and fathers who are likably gruff. Hence, the economic advan
tages of white male privilege are couched in everyday racist rhetoric
even as the film details the absurdity of arguments that construct white
racial identity as disadvantaged relative to black folk.
For example, Cabot creates an effective cover for standup guy Vic
Vega to meet the gainfully employed stipulation of his parole without
actually working. With this scene, Reservoir Dogs shows Cabots power
to circumvent the stipulations of Vegas parole. On an ideological level,
however, the scene subverts the faade of reverse racism expressed by
Cabot earlier in the film, and it negates Vegas supposed diminished
white status as it was iterated earlier by Nice Guy Eddie: that Vega has
come out of prison a nigger. But because Cabots crime syndicate has
businesses all over the place and he is able to put Vega on the payroll
as a dockworker (who doesnt actually show up to work), Vega is taken
care of with a minimal amount of personal effort. Cabots exhibition
of power, along with Vegas advantageous access to social and com
mercial networks, fully negates any claims of white victimhood.11 Ulti
mately, the scene functions as a recuperative staging ground where Vic
Vega not only is made economically viable but is also fully restored as
a white man of honor, respect, and economic security.
But like any film noir title of merit, in the end there is no happy
ending, no redemption, and no escape for any criminal character no
matter how sympathetically he is written. There is only death, and
Reservoir Dogs delivers in that regard. None of Cabots men live, and
even Freddy, the undercover cop (Mr. Orange), is killed. Although the
audience is denied a shot of Holdaway solemn and stoic in his victory
over Cabot, despite the loss of innocent lives, he remains the cause of
Cabots and his racist syndicates internecine demise. The ruthless mas
termind and hero of the film is Holdaway, not Mr. Orange.
The black antihero of Melvin Van Peebles seminal Blaxploitation
film Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song warns his audience at the
films end that a baadasssss nigger is coming back to collect some
dues ..., and Holdaway makes good on Sweetbacks promise, although
in a much more covert manner. Nevertheless, as the only on-screen
black character, Holdaway is the central causal agent of the films nar
rative and is able to play masterfully with changing and constructed
identities of the underworld . . .12 Ultimately, Holdaway causes Cabot
and his racist syndicate to meet their demise. Consequently, Reservoir
Dogs has more in common with the Blaxploitation, racial revenge nar
ratives that were the sustenance of a cash-strapped Hollywood film in
dustry in the early 1970s than it does with the 1950s film noir, gang
ster flicks Tarantinos first film invites comparison to. This conclusion
makes Reservoir Dogs a racial revenge narrative that situates blackness
in a position of power and agency, and it defies superficial readings that
the film is simply a racist, robust display of white masculinity.
In retrospect, at its best the blunt racial rhetoric in Reservoir Dogs
creates the superficial impression for the audience that it is a fly-on
the-wall. As a technique, it lets the audience feel they are witnessing
and listening to something private,13 awkward, and possibly taboo:
whites comfortably referring to black people as jungle bunnies and
24 Race on the Qt
niggers. Admittedly, any attempt to free the n-word from the prison
house of language is problematic. But the use of the n-word in Reser
voir Dogs is more than a device; rather, it is a propositionor better,
a reminderthat there are white men in America who are racists and
not all of them wear sheets while they burn crosses. Admittedly, with
its motley crew of white gangsters who are shown disparaging black
folk, Reservoir Dogs on the surface appears to be a film committed to
strident retrenchment of white male confidence. I argue that this is a
misreading. In fact, it is the gangsters racial hubris that is thoroughly
skewered in the film by Holdaway, not as a pure narrative device but
as an ideological foil to the brash prejudice that circulates amongst the
syndicate of white thugs.
Moreover, the use of the n-word propels the narrative beyond the
realm of just some crime-caper-gone-wrong B-movie and into the realm
of a crime-caper-gone-wrong B-movie with ideological ramifications.
The film works to negate its audiences simple passive experience and
offers the option to address the racial prejudice of the characters and
possibly the viewer(s). Reservoir Dogs subversively invites the viewer
to agree with or deny the veracity of the various racist suppositions
characters offer up, such as Mr. Pinks declaration that violent unpro
fessionalism is akin to acting like a bunch of fucking niggers. In this
sense, the film critically challenges racist tropes that masquerade as
common sense. Admittedly, the degree to which this technique out
weighs the knotty deficiencies of using racially inflammatory language
remains debatable. In fact, if various critics are to be believed, the mere
use of the n-word is a glaring signpost of the racism of the film and the
filmmaker.14 Nevertheless, Tarantinos first flick is a tour de force in
cunningly playing the race card with a deft sleight of hand. The racist
and robust display of white masculinity in Reservoir Dogs garnered
criticism for questionable and ill-defined notions of blackness and
prompted many to speculate about what Tarantino thinks about black
peoplerather than what Tarantino thinks American society thinks
about black people. As a result, Tarantino himselfand the degree to
which the film did or did not resonate with white viewersbecame the
focus of alarm, rather than the type of racial politics the film was ad
dressing. Either way, Reservoir Dogs served notice to film aficionados
that a new director was in town. And as Tarantinos reputation, critical
acclaim, and commercial success increased with later films, his deploy
ment of black racial representation became bolder. Tarantinos subse
quent films would still engage racism, but they would abandon the type
of narrative displacement used in Reservoir Dogs with the Holdaway

character.
foR the moSt PaRt, Tarantino remained an unknown quantity after
Reservoir Dogs. However, his next film project, True Romance (1993),
confirmed that he was a gifted writer. This recognition was made all
the more impressive given that Tarantino only wrote the screenplay
for True Romance; the film was directed by Tony Scott, a brand-name
director with a strong directorial perspective. Nonetheless, not only
does Tarantinos knack for vibrant dialogue and kooky characters shine
through in True Romance, like Reservoir Dogs the film also exhibits a
vigorous display of white masculinity and aggressive racial rhetoric.
In contrast to the racial histrionics found in Reservoir Dogs, True Ro
mance plays with numerous signifiers of blackness and makes a more
blatant critique of white masculinity and the crisis of confidence that
emerged in the 1990s.
Admittedly, the crisis of white male confidence was not unique to
the 1990s. The ongoing reshuffling of white male privilege had started
several decades earlier in the wake of the civil rights movement of
the 1950s, black power crusade of the late 1960s and early 70s, and
womens movement of the 1970s. These movements and the social dy
namics they initiatedan influx of blacks into the middle class, black
studies in higher education, and more women in higher positions in
the workplacewere driving forces for eroding significant portions of
white male power in American society. But this trend did not occur
uncontested. The Ronald Reagan/George Bush era of the 1980s to early
1990s was able to successfully reassert and rehabilitate a traditional
image of the American white male as patriotic patriarch. By reani
mating the tropes of the American cowboy and rugged frontierism, the
Reagan/Bush era placated white, working-class racial fears that tradi
tional white patriarchy was diminishing.15 Yet by the mid 1990s the
shockwaves of third-wave feminism were being felt, black intellec
tuals and college students were embracing and advocating a revamped
form of black power in the guise of Afrocentricity, and rap music was
muscling its way into the mainstream as the popular rebel soundtrack
of Americas youth. In large part, these developments were expressions
of previous political and cultural tensions working themselves out
naturally, not conspiratorial plots hatched to topple white men. Never
theless, True Romance exhibits a degree of paranoia concerning the im
pending encroachment of blackness into the world of whiteness. This
26
Race on the Qt
alarm over racial boundaries is first signaled by the frightening figure of

a white pimp named Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman). Later it is explicitly
marked in a monologue about the legacy of miscegenation by the black
Moors in Sicily delivered to the so-called dark Italian hoods. As a re
sult, True Romance holds a significant place in Tarantinos film oeuvre,
because, like Reservoir Dogs, True Romance clearly articulates real and
ongoing racial anxieties prevalent in America.
True Romance features Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Ala
bama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) as two star-crossed lovers who must
outsmart mob men, battle a vicious pimp, sell several bags of blow,
and live to tell the tale by escaping to Cancun, Mexico, with hun
dreds of thousands of dollars. The story begins in Detroit, Michigan,
where Clarence is a bona fide member of the lonely-hearts club. On his
birthday he is sitting by himself in a grimy theater catching a kung fu
action flick. To his surprise and eventual delight in walks Alabama,
an attractive platinum blonde. Their chance meeting leads to after
film chitchat, sympathetic intercourse, and, soon after, Alabamas dis
closure that she is a call girl hired by Clarences boss to give him a
good time on his birthday. Despite such an inauspicious set of circum
stances, Alabama and Clarence quickly come to the realization they are
soul mates. Up to this point, True Romance has the makings of a gritty,
off-kilter, romance movie meets road movie. This strikingly changes,
not in direction (because the film is a gritty, off-kilter, romance movie
meets road movie) but in symbolism, semiotics, and dialogue con
cerning black racial identity and white male insecurity.
Similar to Reservoir Dogs, where a tantalizing morsel of dialogue
foreshadows the films bold racial overtones, True Romance offers up a
racial tidbit for the audience to ponder before the full barrage of racial
rhetoric is unleashed. After leaving the theater, Clarence and Alabama
are shown talking in a diner. Clarence asks Alabama her favorite color.
Her response is black. Soon after, she confesses to Clarence, I was a
call girl. Call girls have pimps. Clarence inquires, Was he black? This
exchange signals what is to come: a film fully focused on white racial
anxiety juxtaposed with the specter of blackness as a desired, asserting,
controlling, and racially compromising presence that threatens white
ness as a chaste identity and secure status. This point is further under
scored when Clarence, set to wholeheartedly embrace a life of domestic
bliss, is unsettled by Alabamas disclosure that her pimp of less than a
week is alive and well. Clarence subsequently feels compelled to con
front Alabamas pimp, Drexl Spivey.
Drexl (Gary Oldman) in True Romance.

Drexl embodies one of American cinemas most perverse versions of
what Norman Mailer called the White Negro, a term Mailer coined
to typify whites who seek out and try at best to emulate and at worst
to mimic African American style, mannerisms, language, and cultural
expressivity.16 Admittedly, Mailers term is a facile catchphrase for char
acterizing Drexl. Most likely, the character of Drexl owes its existence
less to Mailer and more to Sport (Harvey Keitel), the degenerate white
pimp coded as black in Taxi Driver (1976). Clarences pursuit of Ala
bamas pimp in True Romance is similar to the quest of Travis Bickle
(Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver to save Iris (Jodi Foster), a prostitute
(and surrogate love interest), from the clutches of Sport. Like Travis,
Clarence dons a green army-surplus jacket and gazes in the mirror as a
precursor to meting out his version of justice by violently slaughtering
Drexl along with several other bad guys. In each film the pimps are
white men. But by employing various racialized cues such as physical
mannerisms, clothing, and language, they clearly connote black racial
identity.
Arguably, Taxi Driver employs these signifiers as a subversive tech
nique to deflect criticism that the film is racist while still articulating
conventional racial tropes of the black pimp. But in True Romance, Gary
Oldmans performance seems most rooted in the tradition of blackface
minstrelsy, an antebellum era form of popular entertainment in which
whites performed on stage masquerading as blacks, a practice that later
made its way to American cinema.17 Numerous dubious examples of
black racial pantomiming in American cinema are informed by tradi
tional blackface: Al Jolson belting out his signature song My Mammy
in The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927); Gene Wilder strutting his stuff
28 Race on the Qt
in Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller, 1976); Neil Diamond reprising Jolsons

pioneering performance with an Afro wig in the trite remake of The
Jazz Singer (Richard Fleischer, 1980); C. Thomas Howell passing his
way through the halls of Harvard in Soul Man (Steve Miner, 1986); and
Robert Downey Jr. giving an Oscar-nominated performance for Best
Supporting Actor as a black man named Osiris in Tropic Thunder (Ben
Stiller, 2008), a burlesque sendup of the modern war film.
In time, blackface minstrelsy and the stereotypes associated with
the genre would also morph into imitations of black folk without the
greasepaint, black shoe polish, or burnt cork white performers formerly
used to paint themselves black. Emulation of black style and notions of
cool became more commonplace, particularly in popular music with
artists like Pat Boone, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Vanilla Ice, and Eminem,
who at various times in their careers have been accused of appropriating
blackness.18 Although in True Romance Oldman lacks the burnt cork or
black shoe polish of long-ago blackface, his aping of black mannerisms,
voice inflections, and overall urban African American male swagger
succeeds in conveying the message that Drexl is a black white man. In
reality, Drexls shtick is just bad and maybe that is the point. At first
glance, such a dreadful imitation highlights the awkward nature of the
type of white racial mimicry Mailer seems to deplore when describing
whites who try to emulate black folk. Notwithstanding Drexls racial
disavowal, blackness is still used as visual shorthand to express deviant,
violent, and degrading beliefs, practices, and circumstances which ulti
mately signify how low Alabama as a white female has fallena trope
that owes its origins to D. W. Griffiths racist masterpiece The Birth of
a Nation (1915). In Griffiths film, virtuous whiteness is symbolized by
Flora (Mae Marsh), an ingnue waiting for her brothers to return home
from the Civil War who finds herself pursued by an African American
man (played by a white actor in blackface) intent on raping her. In order
to escape sexual defilement at the hands of Gus (Walter Long) as he pur
sues her to the edge of a precipice, Flora flings herself from the cliff to
her death. Later in the film, the Ku Klux Klan, portrayed as a gallant
organization, will slaughter Gus.
Unfortunately, this type of fear-inducing black character remains
commonplace in our contemporary era. Black men are signified as
sexual victimizers of the white female protagonists in Hollywood films.
For example, Steven Soderberghs critically acclaimed film Traffic (2000)
is a classic example of how black masculinity is used to convey the de
scent and social (and literal) death of a young white woman. In Traffic,
Caroline Wakefield (Erika Christensen), the daughter of a conservative

judge (Michael Douglas), smokes crack with a nude black man (Vonte
Sweet) who is her pimp/dealer. His blackness communicates dread
and the extreme degree to which the white character has fallen from
her previous privileged status. She has become a tragic figure beset by
drug addiction and exploitative intercourse.19 James Tobacks Black and
White (1999) is an appallingly entertaining film that also makes black
men an imperiling force for white women.
In True Romance, Drexl articulates a similar sensibility vis--vis his
cultural, stylistic, and personal expressions of black racial identity. But
in True Romance, Drexls performance of blackness, although poorly
executed, does perform progressive ideological work. In fact, Drexl is
a surprisingly subversive figure given Hollywood cinemas history of
presenting solitary white men operating in exclusively black contexts
as culturally detached, de facto rulersan absurd setup found in Abel
Ferrarss King of New York (1990) and any of the Tarzan films. Because
Drexl is the lone white male surrounded by black subordinates, it is
reasonable to expect his character to be saturated in signifiers of black
ness. In this sense, Drexl Spivey is a dubious improvement over char
acters in numerous other films that deny the cultural intimacy that
occurs between different racial groups immersed in particular socio
economic contexts. Ultimately, however, in True Romance, Drexls
blackness is a source of acute anxiety and an ideological tableau for
white masculinity to reassert its centrality, a core theme of the film.
For instance, Clarence symbolizes traditional white American mas
culinity with his attempt to enact an expression of white patriarchal
powerdominance over womens bodieswith Alabama. He cannot
fully embrace and perform his traditional white patriarchal role until
he has confronted and vanquished his black counterpart and sub
verted Drexls control over his cherished new wife. Alabama, as a pros
titute, was/is the property of her symbolically black pimp, Drexl.
In this sense, Drexl compromises Clarences maleness through his
perceived authority over Alabama, and Drexls wholehearted embrace
of blackness as a form of transgressive identity threatens Clarences
whiteness. When Clarence confronts Drexl with Alabamas status
as Clarences wife, a heated exchange between the men reveals how
Clarences whiteness is an insecure source of racial subjectivity. When
Clarence fails even to glance at the nude breasts of a black woman in
a movie playing on a nearby television screen, Drexl pontificates that
Clarences lack of attention directed at the gratuitous display of black
30 Race on the Qt
female nudity betrays his nervous mental state and overall amateurish
ness when it comes to negotiating with hardened criminals. Tellingly,
Clarence retorts, I aint looking at the movie cause I already seen it
seven years ago. Its The Mack, Max Julien, Carol Speed, and Richard
Pryor. Interestingly, The Mack (Michael Campus, 1973) is a Blaxploi
tation cult classic about a black pimp. When Clarence name-drops the
title and the names of the principal black actors, True Romance sug
gests Clarences knowledge of pop cultural blackness, and possibly even
pimping, is more in-depth than Drexls.
While Clarence and Drexl argue as to whether or not Alabama re
mains a prostitute, Clarence is physically compromised and his drivers
license is inspected. When his last name is revealed to be Worley, Drexl
declares, It sounds almost like a nigger name! Not only does this com
ment suggest intense anxiety concerning Clarences whiteness, it also
signals that Clarence represents a mediated form of whiteness similar
to, but not to the degree of, Drexls hyper-blackness. Eventually the
exchange escalates until Clarence kills Drexl by shooting him in the
groin. This symbolic act of castration functions to affirm white chivalry
in the time-honored tradition of vanquishing the dastardly blackvillain
who threatens the well-being and honor of the white maiden.20 As such,
the confrontation between Clarence and Drexl does more than display
romantic pyrotechnics. Ideologically, the scene establishes a reasserted,
albeit reformulated, expression of whitenesseven if Clarences white
ness is marred by his almost nigger name.
This racial dilemma is further brought into focus with Clarences
father, Clifford (Dennis Hopper), a former cop who now works as a secu
rity officer and lives in a trailer next to railroad tracks. Cliffords life
and thwarted ambitions poignantly symbolize the waning stature of
traditional whiteness and blue-collar masculinity. The post-industrial
bleakness of Detroit is showcased when Clifford drives from the aban
doned structure he guards to the untidy trailer where he lives. The deso
late, post-industrial setting signals that Clifford is a diminished figure,
economically hobbled and unable to articulate any grand vision for
Clarence and his new wife when they visit him. The best Clifford can
do is to reach out to his old police contacts for information concerning
the death of Drexl.
Undoubtedly, Cliffords value rests in his past. His is a stagnant life,
and by extension so are the racial politics he blatantly spouts when
he is confronted by gang-boss Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken)
concerning the whereabouts of Clarence and Alabama. The climatic
scene shows Clifford sitting in his cramped trailer surrounded by sev

eral mob goons as he realizes his best hope is for a quick death, because
his interrogation promises to be prolonged torture. To achieve his end,
Clifford offers up a corrosive observation to Coccotti that reeks of crude
racial eugenics and biological racism:
You know, I read a lot, especially about thingshistory. I find that
shit fascinating. Heres a fact I dont know whether you know or not.
Sicilians were spawned by niggers. No, itsa fact. Yeah. You see,
uh, Sicilians have, uh, black blood pumping through their hearts. If
you dont believe me, you can look it up. Hundreds and hundreds of
years ago, you see, um, the Moors conquered Sicily. And the Moors
are niggers. You see way back then, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from
Northern Italy. They all had blond hair and blue eyes. But, uh, well
then the Moors moved in there, and well, they changed the whole
country. They did so much fucking with Sicilian women that they
changed the whole bloodline forever. Thats why blonde hair and
blue eyes became black hair and dark skin. You know its absolutely
amazing to me to think that to this day, hundreds of years later that
that Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. Now this . . . No, Im quoting
history. Its written. Its a fact. Its written. Your ancestors are niggers.
Huh?
It is easy to imagine Drexl gleefully accepting Cliffords homespun
ode to eugenics and black racial lineage as the ultimate compliment,
but for Vincenzo Coccotti it serves as the ultimate insult. Cliffords
statement is so deplorable that Coccotti murders Clifford in a fit of rage
before he can acquire the information he so desperately wanted con
cerning the whereabouts of Clarence and Alabama.
In True Romance, Cliffords working-class American whiteness
serves as an honorable contrast to the suspect whiteness of Coccotti
and the ersatz blackness of Drexl. Yet despite Cliffords nobility in re
fusing to betray his sons whereabouts, he is dead, just a memory
maybe even a ghostalong with the politics symbolized by his racist
declaration. (Ultimately, Cliffords sacrifice is empty, since after Clif
fords death Coccotti learns of Clarences whereabouts anyway from a
note on the fridge.) Nevertheless, his diatribe about white niggers still
reverberates after his death and manifests as a racial specter for Coc
cotti and his crew that stands in stark contrast to the hyper-blackness
of white Drexl. Drexls one-eyed, facially disfigured black version of
32
Race on the Qt
Star-crossed lovers Alabama (Patricia Arquette) and Clarence (Christian Slater) take a
ride with the top down in sunny California in True Romance.
white masculinity that signifies the blemish of cultural miscegenation

is a dead end.
In contrast, because of Cliffords accusations, Coccotti, and by ex
tension the men who work for him, have a fervent desire to symboli
cally cleanse themselves of the racial stigma they carry. Their need to
seek vengeance and to commit violence against Clarence and Alabama
is not solely a function of Clarence mistakenly taking a suitcase that
was full of Coccottis cocaine. Given the acute racial anxiety around
blackness first symbolized by Drexl and later amplified by Coccotti and
his horror about white racial impurity, racial anxiety now threatens to
consume the couple. In order for Coccotti and his men to reclaim pre
vious notions of white racial purity, Clarence and Alabama cannot just
be captured, they must be expunged, symbolically erasing the mongrel
ized whiteness invoked by Cliffords racist rant.21 Against this backdrop
of traditional articulations of whiteness that are just as outdated as the
socioeconomic life of the city (Detroit) they have left behind, it is quite
appropriate that Clarence and Alabama flee to the global center of per
sonal reinvention and transformationHollywood, California.
In the palm-tree paradise of sunny southern California, Clarence,
the off-beat comic store clerk who couldnt corral a date on his birthday
a few days earlier, becomes a killer of bad men who brokers a cocaine
for-money swap, carries a gun neatly tucked in his waistband, and com
munes with the spirit of Elvis. He convinces jaded real and wannabe
Hollywood players that he is authentic. The radical reinvention of
Clarence Worley, along with the look and feel of the film, has a very
dreamlike quality. (Maybe Clarence didnt escape from Drexls clutches.)
The visual scheme of the film shows Detroit as overcast, dim, and flat
and presents Hollywood as perpetually sunny, vibrant, and awash in
yellow and gold tones.
Fittingly, within this Hollywood context the narrative pivots toward
Alabama. Unlike Clarence and Clifford, Alabama has not had the op
portunity to confront the racial anxieties signaled earlier in the film
when she declares that she is not white trash, a pejorative racial cate
gory that stigmatizes poor whites as degraded and tainted.22 In addi
tion to confronting the cultural politics of race and class, she also must
banish the sexual stigma of prostitution. The confrontation between
Alabama and a Coccotti hood named Virgil (James Gandolfini) in a
hotel room in Hollywood is the focal point for resolving these multiple
tensions.
Coccotti has sent Virgil from Detroit to catch the couple and find
the suitcase full of stolen cocaine. When Alabama returns to her hotel
room, she finds him waiting for her with a shotgun resting in his lap.
Virgil repeatedly threatens to give Alabama a brutal beat down if she
fails to betray Clarences location and hand over the suitcase of cocaine.
Virgil emphasizes that Alabama will lose her pretty looks from the pun
ishment he promises to inflict, a blatant example of misogynistic mas
culinity. Alabama refuses to give in to his demands, and eventually
Virgil makes good on his promise to beat her. After a series of brutal
punches to Alabamas face, Virgil subsequently throws her through a
glass shower door. Lying in the tub bruised and bloodied, Alabama is
beaten physically but her spirit is not broken. Accordingly, she cackles
contemptuously at Virgil and declares he looks ridiculous. Virgil im
mediately rushes to look in the mirror, making himself the object of
his own male gazea signal that his self-image is informed by pro
found insecurity; a signal that also functions as a means of critiquing
white masculinity and female objectification.23 While Virgil is momen
tarily transfixed and distracted by his own self-doubt, Alabama is able
to commandeer the situation and swiftly dispenses with Virgil in a bar
rage of violent acts: she beats him with a toilet lid, burns and stabs him,
shoots him several times, and bludgeons his dead corpse with the butt
end of a shotgun.
Clearly, Virgils panicked response to Alabamas taunting cackle
serves as the catalyst for his demise, but most important, this scene
marks a shift in Alabamas identity, liberating her character from an
identity based primarily on her attractiveness to men and her value
according to male sexual objectification and validation. Killing Virgil
34 Race on the Qt
negates her marginalization as eye candy and emancipates her from

the multiple degrading stigmas presented earlier in the film: prosti
tute, sexpot, white trash, airhead, and tramp. Alabamas primal scream
of defiance and victory in the face of Virgils demise authoritatively
announces her freedom from these liminal and degrading subjectivi
ties. As a result of her death match with Virgil, Alabama is no longer a
victim and any derogatory terms that defined her in the beginning are
dispelled. On the surface, Alabamas refusal to cooperate with Virgil
suggests she is a loyal and submissive wife dutifully protecting her hus
band. Ultimately, however, Virgils sadistic attack serves as a set piece,
allowing Alabama eventually to embody the most empowered figure
in the film.
From this point in the film to its end, the acute racial anxiety promi
nent in the first half of True Romance drastically recedes. Instead, mul
tiple anxieties around gender appear: Alabamas rejection of her sexual
objectification; the spectacle of violence against women; Alabamas
twist on male-bashing feminism and white male heterosexual inse
curity with Elliot Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot), an emasculated actor and
errand boy for Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek), the affected gay film pro
ducer interested in purchasing Clarences stash for a cut-rate price. With
these elements and figures the ideological import of True Romance reg
isters a knee-jerk cultural anxiety around heterosexual masculinity in
American society. To this point, conventional white masculinity must
be reinvented and concessions made to political and cultural pressures
involving race, gender, and sexual orientation. In order to do this, the
third act of True Romance functions to recuperate and restore Clarence
and Alabama in such a manner that they can fulfill traditional gender
roles; in doing so, the film settles for pat Hollywood resolutions.
The bad guys and police officers who could identify the couple die in
a blaze of bullets during the climatic shootout, allowing Clarence and
Alabama to escape with the money from the cocaine deal and establish
an idealized life. The film concludes with a forced note of domestic
bliss on a beach somewhere in Mexico. Alabama supplies an intrusive
narration in which she proclaims undying love for Clarence and re
marks how cool Clarence is as he plays with their young son. Clarence
has become a proud father, Alabama a doting mother and sympathetic
wife. True Romances closing shot of Alabama viewing Clarence from
a slight distance diminishes the provocative and compelling race and
gender dynamics present earlier in the film by tacking on a conven
tional ending that feels contrived.
The conclusion clearly registers a conservative impulse in which

Clarence and Alabama fulfill conventional familial roles. Earlier in the
film, Clarence had invoked the cool pose of Elvis Presley and the rugged
machismo of Steve McQueen in the film Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968). By
the end of True Romance, Clarence has become a subdued, voiceless,
and wounded symbol of white masculinity, a status clearly telegraphed
by his wearing an eye patch like Drexl. Whereas early in the film, Drexl
symbolized how black sociocultural habits and expressions served fully
to supplant his white racial identity, by the end of the film Clarence
replaces Drexl to symbolize a form of wounded whiteness.24 In this
sense, True Romance neatly encapsulates a crisis of white male con
fidence that was reemerging in 1990s America, a point fully expressed
as a paranoid vision of a multicultural America in Joel Schumachers
Falling Down (1993).25
While Clarence Worley is an intrepid figure, the main character
in Falling Down is a defensive character appropriately referred to in
the film as D-Fens (Michael Douglas), an unemployed defense engi
neer. The film follows D-Fens as he, frustrated by freeway gridlock,
abandons his car and heads out on foot across the urban terrain of Los
Angeles, trying to arrive at his daughters birthday party on time.26 On
his journey he encounters a multicultural maze of people: a Korean
store owner, Latino gang members, a Neo-Nazi, and cynical African
American youths. He perceives a general belligerence against his work
hard and receive what is fair ethic that spurs him to violence. With his
buzz-cut hair, white-collar short-sleeved shirt, and briefcase D-Fens
consolidates multiple signifiers into an image of civic respect, domestic
responsibility (he just wants to make it to his daughters birthday
party), and white American middle class rage when confronted with the
multitude of malfeasants. Of course, in comparison to Falling Down,
True Romance is much less paranoid or hyper-focused on white vic
timization. Nevertheless, both True Romance and Falling Down cap
ture the rising ideological tide of white victimization that was washing
across the American cultural landscape during the recessionary early
nineties. However, True Romance rejects the sheer alarmist impulses
that clearly register as white male martyrdom in Falling Down. To the
films credit, True Romance signals that white masculinity is mutable,
and Clarence represents a more ambivalent and modified articulation
of American whiteness, whereas Falling Down invokes a paranoid re
treat into an imaginary past. In True Romance, tropes of pop cultural
blackness, burgeoning Riot Grrrl gender politics, and, to a lesser ex
36
Race on the Qt
tent, male homosexuality are all points of symbolic contestation, lit

eral negotiation, and mediated resolution.
Cinematically speaking, the critical success of True Romance was
as much a validation of the Tarantino touch as it was of Tony Scotts
quick-cut directorial excesses. With the film Natural Born Killers (1994),
Oliver Stone also would try to capitalize on Tarantinos writing chops
by adapting a screenplay loosely attributed to Tarantino. Under Stones
stifling grip, Natural Born Killers exhibited virtually none of Taran
tinos panache and nearly all of Stones self-indulgent penchants that
first began to surface with the film The Doors (1991) and fully registered
in the gaudy Any Given Sunday (1999) and the monotonous Alexander
(2004). The experience would appear to have made Tarantino distrustful
of having his work interpreted by another director; it certainly spurred
him to distance himself from the film.27
Despite Tarantinos chilly reaction to having his brand of ultra
violence modified, his variety of gangster chic spawned a range of imita
tions as America prepared to enter the new millennium. Films such as
Killing Zoe (Roger Avary, 1993, with Tarantino as executive producer),
Things to Do in Denver When Youre Dead (Gary Fleder, 1995), The Usual
Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), 2 Days in the Valley (John Herzfeld, 1996),
and Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998) are a few of the more accom
plished of the pack of cinematic copycats that appeared in the wake of
Tarantinos scintillating debut. As the decade of the 1990s came to an
end, oddball gangsters became the standard for the new millennium, a
style fully registered in Guy Ritchies Snatch (2000), Jonathan Glazers
Sexy Beast (2000), and the television show The Sopranos (19992007),
which normalized a name like Big Pussy as an acceptable mob alias.
Not until the 9/11 terrorist attack on Americas eastern seaboard
and the subsequent psychological fallout did a range of films begin ap
pearing that were more concerned with articulating post-9/11 anxieties
than with identifying with idiosyncratic gangsters. Indicative of post
9/11 anxieties lurking within American societywhere terrorism, ter
rorists, and torture became household wordswere films like Collat
eral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002), Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom,
2003), The Hunted (William Friedkin, 2003), the documentary Fahren
heit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004), Saw (James Wan, 2004), Hostel (Eli
Roth, 2005), War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005), Snakes on a
Plane (David Ellis, 2006), Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006),
United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006), Reign Over Me (Mike Binder, 2007),
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), Man on a Ledge (Asger Leth, 2012), and
the cable TV series Homeland (20112014), to name only a few.
In terms of the gangster genre, films such as Ghost Dog: The Way
of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) and Gangs of New York (Martin
Scorsese, 2002) foreshadowed the imminent exhaustion of the modern
mobster genre. But with The Departed (2006), Scorsese provides proof
that the cycle had gone full circle with a semi-remake of a Hong Kong
thriller where an undercover cop infiltrates a mob crew. Sound familiar?
Nonetheless, when addressing the cultural politics of race in America,
Tarantino remains markedly unique. Indeed, subsequent Tarantino
films extend the multiple ideological tensions concerning race pre
sented in Reservoir Dogs and True Romance and foreground blackness
as essential to their narratives. Often women occupy the center of his
films, and black characters occupy a significant place in many of his
most interesting films. Despite placing women and minority charac
ters as prominent figures in his films, Tarantino remains a commer
cially successful filmmaker who garners critical consideration as one
of American cinemas premier directors.
Interestingly, however, the next phase of Tarantinos body of work
would also irrevocably place him in contention as an auteur and an ac
complished racist. In Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, blackness is front
and center, and these two films appear to use the n-word like a modern
day mantra; it seems as if with every other line of dialogue a character
drops an n-bomb. As his body of work grew, it became apparent Taran
tino was making good on the racial subtext foreshadowed in his pre
vious work and was not satisfied with his characters just tinkering with
the lock on Americas Pandoras box. His next two films threw wide
open the lid on Americas racism and black stereotypes and reached
deep into the darkest corners.
chaPteR 2
PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn
Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.

heRmione gRangeR, haRRy PoTTeR anD The
chamBeR of secReTs (2002)
With PulP Fiction (1994) Tarantino not only avoided the sophomore
jinx, he also firmly established himself as an A-list director, received
several Oscar nominations, and won an Oscar for best original screen
play. Besides earning film industry accolades, Pulp Fiction also gener
ated ample cultural fodder as ardent cinephiles and casual moviegoers
debated whether the film was a pop masterpiece or a deeply flawed
work.1 The film recombined various genres in a way that broadsided
moviegoers and critics alike, offering charismatically self-reflective
characters; visceral violence; and a mix of menacing dialogue, wacky
speeches, and crisp wit.2
The stylistic surface of Pulp Fiction enchants with its unconven
tional and fractured nonlinear narrative. Certainly Tarantino was not
the first director to deploy a nonlinear approach so convincingly to
convey a story. Akira Kurosawas Rashomon (1950) and Stanley Ku
bricks The Killing (1956) are notable examples that use a variety of sub
jective perspectives to shatter expectations concerning linear narrative
conventions. Nevertheless, in Pulp Fiction, Tarantinos narrative for
mations appear shockingly original. Even though various faultfinders
debated whether its racial import made Pulp Fiction a deeply flawed
film or a pop masterpiece,3 such cultural debates were immaterial to
ardent fans and the Hollywood film industry. Winning an Academy
Award for best original screenplay firmly established Tarantino not
only as an A-list director but also as a cultural force. Pulp Fictions suc
cess tempted myriad filmmakers to imitate the freshly minted auteur
40 Race on the Qt
with knock-off films like Things to Do in Denver When Youre Dead

(Gary Fleder, 1995) and 2 Days in the Valley (John Herzfeld, 1996) along
with other films featuring nonlinear narratives like Memento (Christo
pher Nolan, 2000) and Irrversible (Gaspar No, 2002).
Pulp Fiction depicts acts of deplorable violence, yet the most dis
turbing aspect of the film is not the violence but the profusion of the
n-word in the dialogue. Tarantinos own confusing comments about
his aesthetic choicesand Spike Lees chastisement of Tarantino for
having a range of personal shortcomingscontributed to creating a
fervor concerning the degree to which his films were mainstreaming
the n-word and teaching white audiences to view the term as accept
able.4 Critics rushed to offer opinions on the generous use of the word
and to ponder Tarantinos motivations and racial politics.5 In the en
suing fixation over the thoughts, beliefs, likes, lies, indiscretions, and
insights of Quentin Tarantino, the prior mainstreaming of the n-word
in American pop culture was conveniently forgotten. In the mid-70s,
Redd Foxx used the n-word as a punch line on the prime-time tele
vision show Sanford and Son (19721977). In that same decade there
were dubiously titled films like The Legend of Nigger Charley (Martin
Goldman, 1972), The Soul of Nigger Charley (Larry Spangler, 1973), and
Boss Nigger (Jack Arnold, 1975) playing on marquees across America.
And the legendary comic album Bicentennial Nigger (1976) by Richard
Pryor was receiving mainstream accolades, such as winning the
Grammy Award for best comedy album.
Nevertheless, the cultural politics of who could say it to whom under
what circumstances and how to gauge the intended meaning were areas
of racial etiquette that remained for the most part uncharted territory
in the late 1990s. A decade later the public firestorm that Tarantino
ignited with his liberal use of the n-word in Pulp Fiction and Jackie
Brown (1997) was still raging to such an extent that the n-word was given
a funeral by the Detroit branch of the naacP in the wake of sitcom star
Michael Anthony Richards (Seinfeld [19891998]) n-word tirade directed
at an African American heckler during a comedy stand-up routine. But,
as the maxim cautions, beware of premature autopsies.6
Given its current circulation in American pop culture and the peri
odic fallout associated with it, despite the official funeral for the racial
epithet, the n-word is alive and well. Take, for example, the social media
uproar when Gwyneth Paltrow, a white actress and ultramodish patron
of hip-hop, tweeted Ni**as in Paris for real; she used the title of a hit
song written by Jay-Z and Kanye West (supplemented by the words for
PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 41
real) after a show in the City of Light. Or consider the conservative

backlash following news commentator Tour Nebletts use of the term
niggerization to explain the strategy deployed to undermine President
Barack Obamas campaign for a second term in office. And, my favorite,
envision a white woman using American Sign Language to sign the
n-word while interpreting lyrics performed by the Wu-Tang Clan at the
2013 Bonnaroo Music Festival. Such illustrations epitomize how the use
of the n-word is as robustand fraughtas ever in popular culture and
highlight the inherent absurdity of race in America. In this sense, the
incessant use of the n-word in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown is less
about the crude racism the use of such an epithet implies and more
about the ubiquitous and often disorderly deployment of the n-word
across contemporary American pop culture.
At its best, Pulp Fiction pairs black and white characters in such a
way that the power dynamics between them fail to follow the Holly
wood convention that chronically situates black characters as subser
vient secondary characters. At its worst, the film awkwardly deploys
the n-word and offers fantasized visions of black masculinity. Implicit
in the critique of racist rhetoric in the film is the idea that such racist
language should not be used at all or, if it is necessary to the context,
used as much.
The origins of the romanticized racial dynamics and imagined
notions of black life operating in Pulp Fiction can be traced to Norman
Mailers critical and indulgently baroque essay, The White Negro:
Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Given the signifying cool poses
of black masculinity expressed by Pulp Fictions lead white characters
Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), the
trope of the white Negro is a formidable explanation. In the topsy-turvy
world of Pulp Fiction, the social construct of whiteness is a fantasized
form of black cool, with Travolta and Willis easily signifying the white
hipster: a figure who displays a penchant for deploying black cultural
expressivity as a subversive cultural calling card that articulates and de
fines him as a cool white man.7
Interestingly, both John Travolta and Bruce Willis had cultivated
their popularity earlier in their careers by signifying black cool. In the
pop-film sensation Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), John
Travolta pulled together various elements of black cool when, as Tony
Manero, a white, working-class disco dandy, he rhythmically strutted
across the screen to the blue-eyed soul soundtrack of the Bee Gees.
Similarly, in his debut album The Return of Bruno (1987), Bruce Willis
42
Race on the Qt
Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction.
borrowed heavily from notions of black cool when he adopted the alter
ego of an ersatz bluesman named Bruno who covered classic soul songs
of the past. Willis further embellished an affected blackness as a com
mercial pitchman for Seagrams Wine Coolers during the late 1980s.
Consequently, given the background of the white leads and the stylized
violence and coolness operating in Pulp Fiction, the two actors easily
invoked disparaging likenesses to hipster heroes.
Yet Pulp Fiction is more than a statement of white hipster style and
ironic articulations about race.8 Below the stylistic codes, the film tele
graphs a range of radical racial representations that deliver insights
about American race relations beyond white misappropriation of black
cultural cues and language. For example, the opening dialogue be
tween hitmen Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega
(Travolta) presents a white man who sounds black engaging in sublime
chitchat with a black man with a Jheri-curl hairdo over the types and
names of fast-food products in Europe. Certainly, their conversation
(ridiculous yet somehow spellbinding prose that sounds like a tran
scendent discussion on the mysteries of life), as well as their look
(matching black suits and ultra-cool demeanors), is overloaded with a
flurry of stylistic codes. The overall affect conveys a certain intellec
tual verve and shared cultural intimacy between the characters. As a
result, the cool conversational exchange between Jules and Vincent
foreshadows the radical restructuring of interracial tandems that Pulp
Fiction articulates.
When it comes to pairing black and white characters in films, the
Hollywood film industry has a penchant for black characters who exist
only to facilitate the life and love(s) of their white partners. The ten
dency to make black characters derivative figures who articulate their

purpose and relevancy exclusively in relation to the white protagonist
can be found in any installment of the Shirley Temple films that in
clude Bill Bojangles Robinson, as well as in myriad films like The De
fiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), A Patch of Blue (Guy Green, 1965),
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill,
1982), Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989), Ghost (Jerry Zucker,
1990), The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991), Kazaam (Paul M. Glaser,
1996), American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998), The Green Mile (Frank
Darabont, 1999), The Family Man (Brett Ratner, 2000), The Legend of
Bagger Vance (Robert Redford, 2000), Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick,
2006), Reign Over Me (Mike Binder, 2007), The Adjustment Bureau
(George Nolfi, 2010), and The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011).
Without a doubt, Pulp Fiction stands in stark contrast to the lop
sided contours of how Hollywood has habitually fit white and black
characters together. Ostensibly, Jules and Vincent engage in mundane
yet simultaneously delicious dialogue to pass the time. In fact, Jules
and Vincents verbal tennis match over the sexual and social etiquette
appropriate to massaging the feet of a crime bosss wife is more than
entertaining banter. Rather, by having a significant portion of their ini
tial onscreen time focused upon their conversational rallies, Pulp Fic
tion brilliantly establishes Jules as a bona fide peer of his white counter
part. Jules compelling oration not only proves his point but also inflicts
punishment, a theme telegraphed when he insists on delivering pseudo
sermons and bible verses before killing his victims. Consequently, as
the film progresses, Jules is clearly revealed as Vincents pedantic and
philosophical superior.
In Pulp Fiction the lead black characters exhibit a proclivity to toy
with their victims with sadistic loquaciousness. Marsellus Wallace
(Ving Rhames), the head gangster in the film, is as charismatically ver
bose as Jules Winnfield. For example, Marcellus offers Butch Coolidge,
an over-the-hill boxer, a sinister and poetic admonishment about the
upside of taking a dive in an upcoming fight and the pitfalls of pride
when purposefully losing. The full impact of Marsellus monologue
is signaled at the conclusion as he itemizes Butchs status as a past
his-prime pugilist. Marsellus extends an envelope stuffed with money
toward Butch and asks Butch with thoughtful aplomb, Are you my
nigga? In Pulp Fiction the n-word clearly telegraphs the power to con
trol the actions of otherseven white men. This point is subsequently
reinforced after Vincent and Jules arrive at an empty strip club to de
44 Race on the Qt
liver a mysterious briefcase to Marsellus. Marsellus welcomes Vincent

with the hearty exclamationVincent Vegas in the House? My nigga!
Get your ass over here. The use of the n-word in Marsellus salutation
is markedly distinct from how it is later deployed by Jimmie Dimmick
(Quentin Tarantino).
For Marcellus, the n-word is not meant to insult and is clearly
meant to communicate something entirely different than degradation.
Malik D. McCluskey makes explicit the elastic use of the n-word when
he writes:
From its Latin origin niger, meaning black, the particular develop
ment of this word [nigger] highlights the plasticity of language. Yet, a
great deal of the current debate over the n-word fails to consider the
critical distinction between meaning and reference that is central to
the philosophy of language. What we mean to convey or communi
cate by the use of a termmeaningrelies upon a system of reference,
with certain rules governing proper use. It is often claimed that what
[African Americans] mean by the n-word is something quite different
from what many or most non-blacks mean or could mean.9
In this regard, much has been made of the use of the n-word in Pulp
Fiction. Rightfully so, but rather than the black characters use of the
word, it is Jimmie Dimmicks n-word tirade that distracts most from
the jagged and byzantine cultural politics of race that Pulp Fiction
strains at times to articulate. Jimmies use (or misuse) of the n-word
clearly resonates with a long history of white supremacy in which the
word is a term of dehumanization. But given the scenes setting and
cause for the use of the word, it is quite possible that the reference and
the meaning are one and the same.
The gratuitous, insulting use of the n-word occurs shortly after Jules
and Vincent arrive at Jimmies house with a dead black man in the
backseat of their car. While Jules is driving, Vincent unintentionally
discharges his gun as he is talking to Marvin (Phil LaMarr), a young
black man sitting in the backseat. Marvin is shot in the head, causing
blood and brain matter to splatter throughout the interior of the vehicle.
Needing to immediately get out of sight, Jules drives over to Jimmies
home to hide the car. What follows in Jimmies suburban kitchen is a
depraved discussion over how to handle this turn of events. The scene
is drenched with racial hostility as all three men wrestle with what has
just happened.
Knock it off, Jules . . . I dont need you to tell me how fucking good my
coffee is, okay? Im the one who buys it, I know how good it is. When
Bonnie goes shopping, she buys shit. Me, I buy the gourmet expensive
stuff because when I drink it, I want to taste it. But you know whats
on my mind right now? It aint the coffee in my kitchen, its the dead
nigger in my garage . . . No, I wanna ask you a question. When you
came pulling him here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house
that said Dead Nigger Storage? . . . Did you notice a sign out in front
of my house that said Dead Nigger Storage? . . . You know why you
didnt see that sign? . . . Cause it aint there, cause storing dead niggers
aint my fucking business, thats why! . . . No, no, no, no, no, dont you
fucking realize, man, that if Bonnie comes home and finds a dead body
in her house, Im gonna get divorced? All right? No marriage coun
seling, no trial separation, Im going to get fucking divorced, okay?
And I dont want to get fucking divorced! Now man, you know, fuck, I
wanna help you, but I dont want to lose my wife doing it, all right? . . .
On one hand, any theoretical analysis rooted in authorial intent is sure
to draw attention to Tarantino as the sole source of this creepy conver
sation and to distill the racial offensiveness of the scene down to his
personal beliefs and motives. Perhaps Tarantino writes and feels com
pelled to act out such racist dialogue because he holds racist attitudes.
On the other hand, there is a more referential explanation for Tarantino
cropping up in such an odd manner, an explanation that arguably says
more about his aesthetic tendency to poach from other films than any
deep-seated personal racism.
Tarantinos abrasive appearance in Pulp Fiction resonates with
Martin Scorseses awkward cameo in Taxi Driver as a racist passenger
sitting in the back of Travis Bickles cab. Scorsese plays a cuckold who
insists Travis look at the silhouette of his wife in a distant apartment
window and then rhetorically asks him, in an uncomfortably self
conscious cadence, You know who lives there? A nigger lives there.
He embarrassingly drones on about the type of damage he would like
to impart to her genitals with a gun. For me, Tarantinos cameo appear
ance in Pulp Fiction and Scorseses in Taxi Driver are attempts to in
voke melodramatic or shocking discourse about race, but both perfor
mances suffer most from poor acting, which undercuts their attempts
at racial derision and ruptures the unerring command both directors
respectively exhibited in each film. For Tarantino in particular, limited
acting chops hamstring the cameo and make Jimmies dialogue laced
46 Race on the Qt
with the n-word sound all the more affected. The interaction between
Jimmie, Jules, and Vincent becomes an unnatural, unbelievable, and
painfully gawky exchange. Moreover, no amount of pontification about
artistic freedom or the nonexclusivity of the n-word, including some
facile rejoinder about deracializing race, negates the failure of his ap
pearance in Pulp Fiction or effectively deflects the offensive use of the
n-word in his scene.10
Much like Michael Richards tirade, when he directed multiple
n-words toward black hecklers during a comedy routine, Jimmie Dim
micks racist rant in the Bonnie Situation is a disturbing performance
misfire. Ideologically, however, the exchange between Jimmie and
Jules is more than a simple example of bigoted banter; it functions as
a powerful articulation of American racism and its erasure of black
people. The inordinate time the trio spend literally cleaning away proof
of Marvins existence is a brilliant metaphor for the disposability of
young black men, a theme sadly reiterated in real life in 2012 with the
fatal shooting of an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American
teenager named Trayvon Martin. Only after community protests and
national media coverage occurred was the perpetrator charged with
murder, and this prosecutorial reluctance created the perception that
the local police and district attorneys office in Sanford, Florida, were
trying to cover up the murder.
In Pulp Fiction the facts and their meaning are considerably clearer.
Marvins death and the energy devoted to the disposal of his body sig
nify the institutional mechanics and hostility of racism that has his
torically worked to erase black folks presence and agency in American
society.11 Ultimately, the gratuitous use of the n-word in the Bonnie
Situation makes the scene more accurately titled the Racial Situa
tion. But as a form of racial realism, however, the Bonnie Situation
fully exemplifies its acronymB.S.12
Upon close inspection, though, Pulp Fiction is not grounded in
realism. To begin with, are we to believe that Jules Winnfield, one of
the meanest and most verbose hitmen in American cinema, is going to
let Jimmie, an unarmed civilian, pose any threat to him on the chance
that Jimmies wife might come home before they deal with the body?
Clearly, Pulp Fiction rejects any serious sense of verisimilitude. Be
sides, only in the fairytale world of Pulp Fiction does a white man mar
ried to a black woman talk matter-of-factly and unflinchingly to his
black friend about dead niggers in his garage.
Pulp Fiction resounds with make-believe, with its mysterious brief
47
case and its glowing contents (an homage to Kiss Me Deadly [Robert
Aldrich, 1955]); a dotted square sketched onto thin air; the demonic
numerology of the briefcase combination (666); Marsellus use of medi
eval to characterize his preferred form of violent revenge; titled
vignettes that mirror the novella form found in the Brothers Grimm;
and a character named Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) who is fearfully charis
matic and endowed with special abilities of deception. Indeed, the film
is a morbid fairy tale, a postmodern Brothers Grimm cautionary moral
spectacle. Accordingly, as with most fairy tales, the underlying mes
sage is more important than the actual characters. In this case, the mes
sage concerns race and racism in American society. Consequently, only
taking to task the Bonnie Situation scene for the misappropriation
of the n-word overlooks how Pulp Fiction cautions us that racism in
America is always lurking behind the next scene or at the start of a new
sentence or in any apparently benevolent setting. Jimmietraipsing
around in his suburban kitchen, wrapped in a bathrobe with a coffee
cup in hand, delivering harsh racial admonishments about where black
folk do and do not belongsignifies the run-of-the-mill, domesticated
racism circulating in American society.
Take, for example, an earlier scene in the film when Vincent barters
over the potency and price of heroin with Lance (Eric Stolz), Pulp Fic
tions friendly neighborhood drug dealer. Surprisingly, a lighthearted
haggling between friends abruptly shifts into a discussion that high
lights how geography and white privilege intersect. After Vincent ex
presses slight skepticism over the intoxicating vigor Lance claims his
array of heroin offers, Lance asks Vincent, Am I a nigger? Are we in
Inglewood? No. Youre in my home. Now white people who know
the difference between good shit and bad shit, this is the house they
come to . . . . Given a previous scene with Marsellus in which Vincent
is symbolically constructed as a nigger, it is interesting that Vincent
stands stoically as Lance delivers his harsh admonishment concerning
the racial politics of purchasing dope. Much like Jules lack of response
to Jimmies racial chastisement, Vincent has no emotional reaction,
either pro or con, to Lances comments. Clearly, Pulp Fiction articulates
that racial prejudice is as commonplace as the natty robes that Lance
schleps around in when dispensing sage consumer advice concerning
top-shelf heroin or that Jimmie wears when receiving compliments for
his taste in gourmet coffee. Racial prejudice is couched as a matter of
taste, a quality that Lance symbolizes when situating his house, and by
extension the white occupants in it, as good.
48 Race on the Qt
Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) is a symbol of power and control as his wife, Mia
(Uma Thurman), approaches in Pulp Fiction.
As a point of contrast, the home of Marsellus Wallace is a space where
black taste is affirmed, a visual point underscored when Vincent ar
rives at Marsellus home to take his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) to dinner
as requested by Marsellus. Marsellus decor stands in stark contrast to
the cluttered Craftsman home of Lance. The entranceway is tastefully
landscaped and stylishly accented with Africanesque statuettes. The
African art motif is repeated inside the home and highlighted again
when Mia tells Vincent to use the statues as a signpost for locating
the intercom. The home is spacious as well as chic and contains high
end surveillance cameras and monitors. These visual signs clearly
code Marsellus as economically successful, and although Mia ful
fills the trope of the bored white trophy wife, the African art motif
found throughout signifies black culture and suggests the house is a
self-consciously black space. The glimpse the audience is given into
Marsellus domestic space is important because it establishes his cul
tural sophistication and material attainment as a black man. In com
parison, Lances homespun domestic space mirrors his everyday racist
attitudes.13 The racial discrimination of Lance and Jimmie emerges in
everyday domestic settings and dramatically disrupt the pleasure that
white, oddball characters often offer in Hollywood films (such as The
Royal Tenenbaums [Wes Anderson, 2001]) that indulge in the comic
likeability of irreverent white characters. In contrast, beneath the feel
good giddiness of eccentric characters like Jimmie, Lance, and Lances
kooky wife, Jody (Rosanna Arquette), Pulp Fiction constructs such fig
ures with a harsh racial undercurrent.
But Pulp Fiction also tempers its critique of whiteness and com
municates that racism is a mindset that whites must forcefully object

to, even if it means risking their well being. Marsellus rape scene is
the morbid centerpiece of this general point, a disturbing spectacle of
sexual degradation that doubles as an overtly telegraphed, albeit crude,
symbolic nod to the economic, cultural, and spiritual mechanics of
white racism in America.14 Make no mistakeButch and Marcellus are
adversaries. Butch doubled-crossed Marcellus by not taking the dive he
was paid to take. But their animosity toward one another quickly dis
appears in the wake of being knocked unconscious and finding them
selves bound and ball-gagged in a dingy pawnshop basement that serves
as a sex-torture chamber. Marcellus is chosen first and is promptly es
corted into another room where he is sodomized by Zed (Peter Greene)
as Maynard (Duane Whitaker) ogles in tense anticipation for his turn.
The setting is a lurid makeshift dungeon that even includes a man
called the Gimp who is swaddled in a black leather body suit and
tucked inside a locked trunk. Butch escapes from his restraints and is
poised to leave the pawnshop but decides to return and vanquish Mar
sellus assailants despite his death feud with the mob boss.
A strong case can be made that when Butch returns to save Marsellus
from his attackers, he fulfills the classic Hollywood trope of the reha
bilitated white male hero, who, no matter how flawed, ultimately as
sumes the mantle of moral authority in a film.15 Indeed, in this vignette
Butch does fulfill this Hollywood clich, but only by confronting big
otry. Because the entryway of the pawnshop is decorated with a large
makeshift Confederate flag, and the pawnshop workers are constructed
as a pair of urban hillbillies, Pulp Fiction emphasizes that Marsellus
The African art found throughout Marsellus home signifies a self-consciously black
space in Pulp Fiction.
50 Race on the Qt
Marsellus and Butch are bound captives in Pulp Fiction.
rape does not concern sexual release. Indeed, the Confederate flag is
one of the most racially charged, iconic representations of American
racism for many African Americans, and it dredges up deep trepida
tion as an affirmation of black enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and
white nationalism (rather than the modest display of Southern heritage
that its defenders often claim).16
Admittedly, a cursory reading situates Zed and Maynard as red
neck rapists whom the film uses as symbolic shorthand to comment
on the role of racism in manhandling, exploiting, and abusing black
folk in America. Marcellus sexual assault is also filmically influenced
by the male rape scene in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), a film
that presents white hillbillies as the perpetrators of sexual violence. I,
however, view the sexual violence in the back room of the pawnshop
as having much more meaningful resonance with the film The Pawn
broker (Sidney Lumet, 1964) than with the gruesome rape presented in
Deliverance. In The Pawnbroker, the pawnshop is also presented as a
site of sexual trauma and serves as an emotional mausoleum for Sol
Nazerman (Rod Steiger), containing the anger, shame, and guilt he ex
periences after surviving a concentration camp where his wife and chil
dren perished. In one scene, a black prostitute (Thelma Oliver) con
fronts Sol in the back room of his pawnshop and bares her breasts to
him hoping to arouse him to have intercourse with her for money she
desperately wants. Instead of viewing the seminude black woman as a
source of sexual arousal, Sol experiences a definitive eyes wide shut
moment that elicits in him feelings of sickening humiliation, conveyed
through a series of rapid intercut flashbacks that show Sol as a prisoner
in the Nazi concentration camp.
51
The Nazi officer directs him to peer through a window, eventually

shoving his head through it when he refuses to look. Inside he wit
nesses his wife coercively prostituted for the sexual gratification of
Nazi soldiers. In this sense, the shadowy space of the present pawnshop
is transcoded with the makeshift Nazi brothel as a site of sex slavery,
psychological trauma, and hidden depravity. I argue that the sexual ex
ploitation of Marsellus as a bound and gagged captive in a back room is
more attuned to the wretched world of The Pawnbroker than the rural
Gothic ambiance established in Deliverance. Admittedly, sadomas
ochistic fetishistic sex is conflated with racism in Pulp Fiction, which
draws its imagery from the bondage subculture of sex clubs and pornog
raphy and conflates the props of sexual fetish with racial animus. The
result is a rape/sodomy in the dingy back room of a pawnshop by a pair
of white men against a captive and compromised black man as a form
of racial perversion.
A conventional reading of Marcellus victimization and Butchs deci
sion to save him, along with their subsequent truce, easily suggests an
expression of white masculine morality.17 Moreover, the victimization
of a black character who until his rape represented a figure of power and
prestige without peer in American cinema invites interpretation that
his victimization is symptomatic of a racist film industry. The demise
of his prestige is merely an alternative expression of the tired film con
vention that the black character always dies first in a Hollywood film.
Nevertheless, a more complex and ideologically provocative analysis
also exists. Given all the literal and symbolic signifiers of power that
Marsellus is invested with throughout the film, his rape clearly sym
bolizes an overt engagement with longstanding racial fissures in the
American body politic.18 In this case, having a black man victimized in
an act of racialized sodomy in an institution that represents the buying
and selling of goods is an unflinching, symbolic nod to the economic,
cultural, and spiritual mechanics of white racism in America.
Moreover, Butchs return to stop Marcellus ritualistic rape suggests
that even if intense antagonisms exist between blacks and whites, in
the face of racism whites are morally compelled to act against racial dis
crimination and exploitation. Thus, Marsellus rape and Butchs behavior
operate within a critical racial frame that symbolizes and advocates
racial reconciliation and mutual respect between blacks and whites.
Pulp Fiction as a whole defies the convention in traditional Holly
wood films of only privileging white men by having Jules Winnfield, a
black character, achieve the moral high ground amongst all the despi
52
Race on the Qt
cable characters presented in the film. Jules is a contemplative char

acter rife with contradictions, a figure rarely presented among the
scores of morally unambiguous, typecast magical negros who save
the white protagonist of a film from destruction. Even though Jules
symbolizes the supernatural after bullets are fired at him from a point
blank range and miss, he does not save his partner, Vincent Vega. Jules
acknowledges he is the benefactor of a miracle and tries to convince
Vincent of the validity of his assertion. Vincent refuses to accept the
miraculous implication of this event and does nothing to change his
behavior. For Jules, this event is the catalyst for declaring his retire
ment as a hitman. As a result, Jules is able to fulfill a role rarely ceded
to a black character in mainstream Hollywood moviesa redeemed
and empowered figure who lives to the end of the film.
Despite the antiracist articulations and symbolism outlined above,
Pulp Fiction suffered severe criticism as proof that Tarantino harbors
racist views towards blacks.19 For the most part, the radical racial poli
tics of Pulp Fiction were obscured by cinematic showpieces like Tra
volta dancing the twist and by the gratuitous use of the n-word. For aca
demics, some of the most obscure elements of the film became sources
for deconstruction; for instance, scatological implications were drawn
from the multiple bathroom breaks shown in the film.20
taRantinoS next film, however, would make it increasingly diffi
cult to engage in kneejerk criticisms or look for answers in the psycho
analytic deconstruction of the subconscious and psychic mechanisms
of the director. After the rousing success of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino
adapted the screenplay and directed Jackie Brown (1997), a film that
features a down-on-her-luck middle-aged black woman as the main
protagonist. This film clearly signals that Tarantino is not only an un
orthodox director and filmmaker, he also firmly roots his mounting
body of work in the radical exploration of black life in America.
Not since Diahann Carrolls Academy Awardnominated perfor
mance as a welfare dependent, hard working single mother of six chil
dren in Claudine (John Berry, 1974) has a Hollywood picture chronicled
the everyday struggle of a mature black woman as a principal point of
interest. Claudine presents an inner-city working-class narrative that
breathes life into a range of ghetto-life clichs concerning black poverty
and premarital sex while deftly critiquing white institutional racism.
Jackie Brown evokes a similar sociopolitical relevancy. In this case,
the growing incarceration of black women who act as drug mules is
Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), the confident flight attendant in the film Jackie Brown.
underscored with the films namesake and main character Jackie Brown
(Pam Grier), a black woman fast approaching middle age. While she is
struggling with a low-paying job as a flight attendant, she is caught
smuggling cash out of Mexico for a low-level gunrunner named Ordell
Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Unbeknownst to her, the package she is
delivering carries a small amount of cocaine that is meant for a friend
of Ordells.
In this sense, Jackie Brown is a powerful precursor to the film Maria
Full of Grace (Joshua Marston, 2004), a cautionary tale that explicitly
chronicles the costs of becoming a courier in the illegal drug trade.
The film follows a poor seventeen-year-old Colombian girl who flies
to New York City after swallowing nearly sixty-five packaged pellets
of heroin. Maria Full of Grace fully expresses the perils and stark eco
nomics of disenfranchised women of color as drug mules that Jackie
Brown suggests.
The film begins with Jackie confidently walking through lax (Los
Angeles largest airport) dressed for her job as a flight attendant. Soon
after the opening credits roll, the confident and competent black
woman leaving the airport dramatically recedes when she is faced
with two white law enforcement officers, laPd detective Mark Dargus
(Michael Bowen) and atf agent Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton). They
stop her and search inside her purse to find a large sum of money and
a small amount of cocaine. Jackie Browns detention, arrest, and sub
sequent introduction into the American prison-industrial complex as
54
Race on the Qt
a middle-aged black woman underscores the ideological contours the

film constructs around race, gender, and economic disempowerment.
During her subsequent interrogation, detective Dargus hammers home
a series of bleak observations.
Lets take a look here at the file on Jacqueline Brown . . . In 1985 while a
stewardess for Delta you were busted while carrying drugs for a pilot?
. . . He did time; you did probation. So you get off with a slap on the
wrist but all this criminal activity fucks up your shit for good with the
big airlines. Cut to thirteen years later, youre forty-four years of age
flying for the shittiest little shuttle-fuckin piece of shit Mexican air
line that there is where you make what, $13,000 a year? . . . You been
in the service industry nineteen years, and all you make is $16,000
plus benefits? Didnt exactly set the world on fire, did you, Jackie? . . .
Look, Miss Brown, we dont give a fuck about you. You know who we
want. If you cooperate, tell us what we want to know, well help you
get out of this. If you refuse to cooperate, continue to cop a shit atti
tude like youre doing now we will give you to Customs and they will
take you to court. With your prior, the judge will give you two years.
Now, youll probably only end up serving a year and some change but if
I was a forty-four year-old black woman desperately clinging on to this
one shitty little job I was fortunate enough to get, I dont think that Id
think I had a year to throw away . . .
Hence the stage is set as Jackie tries to salvage her life and escape the
legal predicament she finds herself facing. If Jackie fails to cooperate as
an informant against Ordell, she is in all likelihood courting a convic
tion. Unfortunately, Jackies filmic predicament is similar to those of nu
merous real women of color. Notably, in the 80s and 90s black women
were increasingly snared in the American criminal justice system by
the U.S. war on drugs. For example, in the five-year period between 1986
and 1991, the number of black females incarcerated for drug offenses
increased 828%, more than three times the increase in the number of
white females.21 Furthermore, because of mandatory sentencing stipu
lations, drug mules faced significant amounts of time for their non
violent offenses, even though their involvement in the drug trade failed
to come close to that of a kingpin.22 Against this dire backdrop, where
low-level drug offensives meet high-wire consequences, becoming an
informant is an attractive alternative to reduce ones sentence, a pre
Jackie caught in the prison-industrial complex in Jackie Brown.

dicament Jackie Brown is forced to consider in the face of detective
Dargus haranguing threats over her economic vulnerability.
Certainly, Jackie Browns decisions are propelled by her drive for self
preservation, but given how the film effectively brings into sharp relief
race, gender, and age as points of bias, Jackies choice to trick Ordell and
double-cross law enforcement agents also operates on a grander ideo
logical level. The undercurrents concerning her symbolic status in the
film are revealed in an exchange between bail bondsman Max Cherry
(Robert Forster) and Ordell over a $10,000 bond for Jackies release. To
this point, Ordell admonishes Max that he should show compassion
for a forty-four-year-old, gainfully employed black woman falsely ac
cused of possession with intent to sell cocaine. Max retorts, Is white
guilt supposed to make me forget Im running a business? Maxs reply
echoes well-worn conservative debates that view claims of racial dis
crimination as a ploy used by African Americans (the race card) to
excuse reckless choices and receive unmerited concessions.23 Despite
the conservative overtones articulated in Maxs disparaging comment
concerning white guilt, he abandons his cynicism after escorting Jackie
from jail to her apartment. Smitten by Jackies down-to-earth openness,
Max finds himself quickly entertaining the possibility that the personal
hard-knocks narrative of a mature, working-class black woman out
weighs the negative sanctions that come from bad choices in bad situa
tions. Eventually Max decides to aid Jackie in a cat-and-mouse game
56 Race on the Qt
of double-crosses and emotional feints that dupe the law enforcement

officials into accepting her alibi, allowing her to walk away free with
close to a half a million dollars of Ordells money and all her former ac
complices/adversaries dead.
Maxs shift away from his conservative condemnation of Jackies pre
dicament is a central development because it validates Ordells advo
cacy for sympathy toward Jackie, a gainfully employed and respectable
black woman, regardless of Ordells transparent, self-serving motives.
Moreover, the one-hundred-eighty-degree pivot in Maxs receptiveness
toward Jackies plight, a stark contrast to the hardnosed bail bondsman
presented earlier in the film, suggests a more complicated, multiper
spective, and holistic approach is required to accurately assess the tri
umphs and travails of being black in America.
What also makes Maxs evolution, and the film as a whole, spe
cial is that it signals that Jackie is not just another generic Hollywood
film floosy with some deep-seated pathological need to trick her male
counterparts. Instead, Jackie Brown resembles the African American
trickster figure found in the rural folklore of Brer Rabbit, a character
that represents enslaved Africans who adopt guile and intellect to
outwit their stronger and more powerful opponents in order to mitigate
their oppressive conditions.24 Jackie is not cold or cruel by nature but
by necessity, a point signaled when Jackie tells Max why she has kept
her old albums rather than purchase CD versions of her favorite music.
She simply states, I cant afford to start all over again. By focusing
on an older black woman with limited financial means, Jackie Brown
smudges the ideological demarcation between right and wrong, a point
that is validated by Maxs empathetic stance and increasing emotional
longing directed toward Jackie as the film progresses. Jackies Machia
vellian disposition, however, is increasingly ratcheted up to ruthless
precision by the ominous adversity she faces in the form of Ordell
Robbie, a manipulative and willful killer. In contrast to Jackies sym
pathetic frugality and nostalgia stands the captivating cruelty of Ordell
Robbie.
Ordell epitomizes the figure of the scary black man, a cinematic
figure first given hyperbolic life with the frighteningly brutish black
masculinity of Gus (Walter Long) in D. W. Griffiths racist masterpiece
The Birth of a Nation (1915).25 The figure still crops up in contempo
rary Hollywood films from dramas to comedies like John Landis classic
frat house farce Animal House (1978). The film predictably exploited
blackness for nervous laughter when a group of white college students
The menacing blackness of Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) in Jackie Brown.

stumble into a bar filled with black patrons. The same themes of white
dread and menacing blackness are presented with Bill Dukes perfor
mance as Leon in American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980), Morgan Free
mans rendition of the pimp Fast Black in Street Smart (Jerry Schatz
berg, 1987), Don Cheadles turn as Mouse in Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl
Franklin, 1995), and Terrence Howards performance as DJ in Hustle
and Flow (Craig Brewer, 2005). Arguably, only the King Kong films of
the past (1933, 1976) have presented more grotesque imaginings of black
masculinity as frighteningly dangerous, even though Denzel Wash
ingtons crooked cop Alonzo Harris in Training Day (Antoine Fuqua,
2001) claims, King Kong aint got shit on me! Admittedly, Washington
playing against type as a menacing black man provided a unique, tour
de force performance; nonetheless, Jacksons exacting performance as
Ordell Robbie is the most outstanding and complex version of ominous
black criminality to date.
Rarely does a Hollywood film portray the pathos and charm of the
black hustler in such a convincing and complex manner. Noted cul
tural critic Stanley Crouch makes a similar observation:
Samuel L. Jackson plays Ordell and brings enormous repositories of
detail to one of the best roles the great actor ever had . . . Going far be
yond Elmore Leonard, Tarantino made him into one of the most per
fectly conceived monsters we will ever come across . . . Ordell is the
real thing and just as ruthless, and he is also funny, very funny, espe
58 Race on the Qt
cially when explaining something to his slow-witted white crime

partner or threatening and dominating his blonde surfer girl . . .26
For the most part, Crouchs observations are accurate concerning the
complexity of the portrayal. I differ, however, with the crux of Ordells
character. For all of Ordells charismatic pimp-like swagger, he is an ex
tremely insecure, self-hating, and derivative black man caught in the
social and psychological Gordian knot of a black inferiority complex.
Ordell displays internalized racial hatred, self-loathing, and a patho
logical adoration of whiteness. Admittedly, Jackie Brown is not unique
in providing a black character that is overly invested in the wellbeing
of whites. Hattie McDaniel brilliantly immortalized black servility as a
faithful retainer to Scarlett OHara (Vivien Leigh) in the Civil Warera
period piece Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939). Certainly the
saccharine The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) qualifies for reanimating
moribund racial dynamics with its depiction of a black man gleefully
investing all of his life energy into the success of the white protagonist.
Surprisingly, such retrograde representations are not anachronistic
cinematic period pieces. Even a racially progressive film like Out of
Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998) that offers a refreshing mix of white,
black, and Latino characters settles into a traditional representational
groove when it comes to the benevolent black chaperone trope. Al
though in Out of Sight Jack Foley (George Clooney) and Buddy Bragg
(Ving Rhames) share a meaningful criminal friendship, Buddy fulfills
the traditional Hollywood role of black chaperone to Jack, seemingly
out of some benevolent and almost saintly sensibility directed at pro
tecting the principal white character from harm.27 Jackie Brown rejects
this type of cloying representation of blackness and constantly signals
that Ordells commitment to appropriating whiteness is foolhardy and
ultimately self-destructive.
Ordell first signals his racial self-hatred when he shows the crumpled,
bullet-ridden body of Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker) lying in the
trunk of his car to Louis Gara (Robert De Niro), a former cellmate and
bank robber. Ordell pontificates to Louis about the life and death stakes
of being his partner in gunrunning:
Now Louis, if you gonna come in on this thing with me you have to be
prepared to go all the way. Now I got me so far a half-million dollars in
a bank down in Cabo, San Lucas. I make this delivery, Im gonna have
me over a million. Hey, you think Im gonna let a little cheese-eatin
Louis (Robert De Niro) is made symbolically black by Ordell in Jackie Brown.

nigga like this fuck this up? You best think again. Before I let that
happen Ill shoot this nigga in the head and ten niggas that look just
like him. Understand what Im saying?
Ostensibly, Ordells caveat to Louis communicates the level of violence
Ordell is willing to deploy if his interests are threatened. In the wake
of Beaumonts murder, Ordells threatening assertion to Louis and his
aborted effort to murder Jackie create the impression of a shrewd, take
no-prisoners criminal. But his comments also reveal an intense de
valuation of black life and foreshadow Ordells pathological privileging
of whiteness with Melanie (Bridget Fonda), Ordells little white surfer
girl.
Ordells psychological fault lines become increasingly apparent
as Jackie and Ordell plan to smuggle half a million dollars into the
country. Because of Melanies rising resentment that she is not included
in the scheme, she tries to convince Louis to join her in stealing the
money from Ordell. Later, Louis tries to warn Ordell about Melanies
intentions.
louiS: But you trust Melanie around your business?
oRdell: Oh! She trying to play your ass against me, aint she?
louiS: Yeah. Uh-huh.
oRdell: See, I knew it . . . I knew it. I knew it! See, you didnt have
to say nothing. I know that bitch.
60 Race on the Qt
Ordells little white surfer girl Melanie (Bridget Fonda) in Jackie Brown.
louiS: I dont understand why you keep someone around your busi
ness and you cant even trust em.
oRdell: I aint gotta trust her. I know her.
louiS: I dont know what that means, man.
oRdell: Well, you cant trust Melanie . . . but you can always trust
Melanie to be Melanie . . .
louiS: Well, I dont understand why you keep her the fuck around.
oRdell: I told you, man. Shes my fine little surfer girl. You know,
she aint pretty as she used to be and she bitch a whole lot more than
she used to . . . but she white. [emphasis mine]
The film clearly illustrates that Melanie is, at best, ambivalent about
Ordell, but most likely despises him, a point indicated by her dispar
aging remarks concerning Ordells intelligence and her obstinate re
actions to his requests. Moreover, Louis is rightfully baffled by Ordells
tolerance for Melanies treachery in light of Ordells murderous actions
and stated commitment to kill ten niggas that resemble any other
cheese-eatin nigga that threatens his business. Yet Ordell insists on
keeping Melanie around. Why? Because Ordell Robbie uses Melanie
as an accessory to affirm and bolster his self-esteem even though it is
quite clear he cannot trust Melanie and is well aware of this fact.28
Similar to how in the 1980s Mr. T. (Laurence Tureaud) virtually
smothered himself in gold chains and rings to bolster his status as a
black man of value and significance, whiteness is the most precious
element and effective accessory for Ordell to enhance his value, a point
skillfully underscored when Ordell purchases Louis new clothes to up
grade his appearance and announces that Louis will no longer have the
Salvation Army look when hes around him. Moreover, Ordells toler
ance for Melanie suggests an adoration of whiteness that is extremely
neurotic. Edward Gallafent makes a similar observation in his book
simply titled Quentin Tarantino:
Ordell wants Louis to admire his arms dealing, and he wants Melanie
to be admired as a trophy. Like the beach house itself and its fittings,
he considers that her presence is expressive of his success in life. He
expects Melanie to act uncomplainingly in roles that spring, in his
mind, from her being his possession. When she is reluctant or un
cooperative his only response is mute appeal, or direct aggression. He
cannot see that the charm that he exercises on, say, Max or Beaumont
has any relevance to dealing with Melanie, and assumes that her be
havior will be controlled adequately by violence, or the threat of it. He
is conscious of her sexual desirability but mainly in that her attractive
ness, and whiteness, is felt to increase her value as a trophy. [emphasis
mine]29
Without a doubt, Ordell is committed to appropriating whitenessso
much so that even if it threatens to undermine his livelihood he must
possess it. Melanie functions similarly to a trophy wife, wherein a
combination of attractiveness and youth confers upon the husband
an elevated status amongst his peers. Hence, Melanies whiteness dic
tates desire for Ordell even though her presence knowingly threatens
the success of his plans. Ordells choices call into question his ratio
nality and expose his pathological attachment to and racial fetishism
of whiteness, a point further signified toward the end of the film when
Ordell shoots Louis and subsequently asks, What the fuck happened to
you man? Your ass used to be beautiful. Ultimately, Ordells degraded
status (real or imagined) as a black man (not as criminal or former con
vict) in relationship to having a white woman dependent on him (and
to a lesser extent, having Louis as an accolyte) underscores his contra
dictory sense of pride and achievement. Melanie threatens Ordells
criminal enterprise and demonstrably shows less loyalty to him than
any of the black characters who work for him such as Beaumont, Jackie,
Sheronda (Lisa Gay Hamilton), and Simone (Hattie Winston). Yet Ordell
accepts from Melanie behavior and a sensibility he would deem com
62
Race on the Qt
pletely unacceptable if she were any of the black characters he employs.

Accordingly, Ordell articulates an irrational and counterproductive jus
tification of Melanies presence merely because, as Ordell confesses,
she white. Ordell is a brilliant character study of a black man whose
bragging and boasts are in reality overcompensation for a terribly inse
cure self-concept that has strident racial overtones.
Other films may capture the tone of such sensibilities when black
and white folk are paired, but motivational intricacies and underlying
tensions often fail to go beyond some mundane representation of black
and white camaraderie or racial animus. Certainly, a saccharine film
like The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011) qualifies for interpreting racial dy
namics and the interior subtleties of black cultural repartee through
a pair of cokebottlethick rose-colored glasses. With Ordell in Jackie
Brown the intricacies, motivations, and underlying tensions of race are
articulated in a more precarious and meaningful manner, making the
character the most complex and penetrating display of black crimi
nality in American mainstream cinema to this date. Unfortunately,
while the heartiest analyses of Jackie Brown devoted considerable at
tention to the privileges, responsibilities, and correct cultural cues re
quired for saying the n-word, they overlooked this brilliant aspect of
the film.30 Jackie Brown became a lightning rod for controversy con
cerning the repeated deployment of the n-word rather than being cele
brated for its deft character studies regarding race.
Regardless of the criticism for the regressive racial language inter
spersed throughout the film, Jackie Brown is in reality a progressive
film; the audience is steered to identify with and champion the cause of
a middle-aged working-class black woman struggling to salvage her life.
Sure, the sting operation appears to be the centerpiece of Jackie Brown,
and the bag of money is the desired object that costs several characters
their lives. Nevertheless, the crime-caper aspect of the film is more
of a narrative ploy in the spirit of a MacGuffin, a term popularized by
Alfred Hitchcock to describe a plot device whereby some goal or object
is desired and pursued but later proves tangential to the plot. The real
action revolves around the typologies of the characters and their re
sponses to dire circumstances and risky opportunities.31 In this sense,
the film had more to say about economic sand traps than the debatable
use and faulty application of a racial epithet.32 For example, Jackies eco
nomic reality is tied to eking out a living as a permanent member of
the service economy; the bulk of Ordells fortune is beyond his grasp;
Max Cherry operates near the bottom of the multibillion dollar prison
63
Jackie as Ordells female doppelganger in Jackie Brown.

industrial complex as a bail bondsman; Melanie is a former sex worker
past her prime; and Louis is a burned-out bank robber. All of these
characters are examples of thwarted and failed economic advancement.
What makes Jackie Brown such an important contribution across
Tarantinos film oeuvre to date is the way class is shown to racialize
whiteness. In other words, as whites increasingly find their economic
options stymied and experience economic disenfranchisement, their
racial status begins to dwindle and they become, in the cumbersome
words of Cornel West, niggerized and experience niggerization.33
These terms are debatable and by extension so are the conceptual va
lidity and reductive implications they have for what it means to be
black in America. Yet Jackie Brown tacitly affirms such a process for
whites by picking up where Pulp Fiction left off. After Louis, a white
man, agrees to join Ordells criminal enterprise, Ordell closes his con
versation with Louis by declaring him my nigga. Whereas Cornel
West appears to assign whites as niggers as a function of political
violence in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, garden-variety
racial-message films like James Tobacks Black and White (1999) and
Catherine Hardwickes Thirteen (2003) position black popular culture,
especially hip-hop, as the culprit for turning white people black. Taran
tino convincingly suggests its economics in Jackie Brown, a notion re
inforced by the films ostensible theme song, Bobby Womacks gritty
classic soul single Across 110th Street (from the Blaxploitation film
Across 110th Street, Barry Shear, 1972) about the hard hustle, trials,
64 Race on the Qt
Jackie symbolizes the multiple burdens of being a middle-age, working-class black

woman in Jackie Brown.
and temptations of trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. Conse
quently, Jackie Brown is most noticeably invested in the intersection of
race and economics and frames much of its racial dynamics within the
limitations of frustrated class aspirations.
Certainly, the n-word is a prominent element in Jackie Brown, but
the film has more to say about the economic hardship of being a black
woman of meager means. By focusing on a middle-aged working-class
black woman struggling to salvage her life, by showing her traversing
the criminal justice system from prison intake to trial date hearing to
eventually making bail, this montage of misfortune clearly intimates
the dire options black women face as drug mules. Situating its lead in
the morass of the prison-industrial complex makes Jackie Brown more
than a narrative about duping institutional authority and conning a
con. Although the crime caper element of the film provides a sense
of action and appears to be the centerpiece of the film, the dramatic
tension in Jackie Brown really resides with the emotional valences
displayed by all of the hard-scrabble characters. Unfortunately, the
critical reception of the film and its racial subtext was hamstrung by
Pam Griers association with Blaxploitation cinema of the past. For cul
tural critics like Mia Mask, Jackie Brown is a perfect example of post
modern nostalgia . . . As homage to Griers most famous role, Foxy
Brown, Tarantino changed the characters name to Jackie Brown. Jackie
Brown not only reanimated the myth of the phallic woman striving for
revenge, it also reinvented Griers former persona.34 Hence the racial

critique imbedded in having a black female working-class character as
the principal lead of a major Hollywood film was muted, and Jackie
Brown was received as a nostalgic film that paid homage to a Blaxploi
tation icon and revived a fallen stars career. Its comments on the inter
section of race, gender, and class in an America on the cusp of entering
the new millennium were largely missed. Despite the regressive racial
language interspersed throughout the film, the fact that the audience
is steered to identify with and champion the cause of a working-class
black woman struggling to salvage her life makes Jackie Brown quite a
progressive film. In fact, Jackie Brown subversively highlights the in
creasing role of women as drug mules and characterizes the destructive
powers unleashed in the quest for economic stability and upward social
mobility through the prisms of race, gender, and age.
Admittedly, the film delivers mixed signals: Jackie Brown can be
viewed as a noir crime caper film; an accomplished homage to Blax
ploitation; a fanboys tribute to Pam Grier; or a subversive, complex,
and compelling representation of race in America. Regardless of the
bellicose use of the n-word interspersed throughout the film, Taran
tino delivered a sensitive film that dares its audience to follow the char
acters through various emotional registers. Ultimately, Jackie Brown
announced that Tarantino was a big league Hollywood director with
a maverick sensibility, similar to Sam Peckinpahs, devoted to ex
ploring the trials and tribulations of down-on-their-luck characters and
bad-guys-heroes.35
What further added an air of intrigue to the Tarantino mystique was
the racial dimension to his work. Here was a successful white Holly
wood director who had shown he was not afraid to incorporate black
folk in his films and who openly courted controversy concerning race
and black racial formation in America. Interestingly, just when it ap
peared that Tarantino was heating up to deliver a film career dedicated
to exploring the racial landscape of America vis--vis black culture and
black people, his next cycle of films was a radical departure from this
pattern. Tarantinos next three films were the action-drama mash-ups
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), and the lurid Death Proof
(2007). Compared to his earlier films that were steeped in black race re
lations, these three films appeared to be escapist fare that jettisoned the
controversies of black racial representation. Yes and no.
chaPteR 3
kill Bill: vol. 1, kill Bill: vol. 2, and

DeaTh PRoof
Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords.

o-Ren issii, kill Bill: vol. 1 (2003)
neaRly anytime eaSt meets West in American cinema, clichs
abound that paint Asians as inherently sinister, as comic relief, as an
unassimilated horde, as people who are absurdly odd in their names,
mannerism, and affect. In no field is Asian representation more clearly
articulated than in filmic martial arts, specifically, and in popular cul
ture more generally. Both fields converge with the iconic figure of Bruce
Lee: His cinematic representation of kung fu as it appears within his
films ... [has] had a massive and ongoing impact upon what was known
(or rather, believed) about kung fu and Oriental martial arts across the
world.1 The Big Boss (Lo Wei, 1971), Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 1972), Way of
the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 1972), Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973),
and The Game of Death (Bruce Lee, 1973) became worldwide calling
cards for martial arts: they created a popular interest in the practice;
and they established Bruce Lee as a celebrity trailblazer in Asian repre
sentation as a nonwhite bona fide action film hero. For over forty years,
as of this writing, the legacy of Bruce Lee can be traced in the main
streaming of martial arts in American sports culture, as well as in the
spectacular fight choreography in Hollywood action films, in pay-per
view fight competitions, and in after-school activities across scores of
suburban communities.2 Films like The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen,
1984; Harald Zwart, 2010), Rush Hour (Brett Ratner, 1998) The Matrix
(Wachowski Brothers, 1999) and Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson and
Mark Osborne, 2008) confirm the mainstream popular appeal and
imagery of martial arts in America.
Tarantinos fourth film, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003, hereafter abbreviated
68 Race on the Qt
as KB:V1) may invite similar comparison as just another karate flick.

Nonetheless, KB:V1 is less concerned with capitalizing on the popu
larity of martial arts than it is focused on paying cinematic homage to
the Hong Kong kung fu film industry that has churned out scores of
films and made myriad innovations in film fight choreography. Without
a doubt, in terms of cinematic import KB:V1 is a self-indulgent fanboy
of a film. To this point, Tarantino drafted venerable martial arts chore
ographer and film director Yuen Woo-ping to help choreograph various
fight scenes, and he recruited renowned martial arts actor Sonny Chiba
to work in front of the camera. The result is a grand display of kung
fu pulp artistry and a successful film homage to Hong Kong martial
arts cinema from the 1970s and early 80s. Given the amount of effort
invested into meticulously duplicating and enhancing various effects
that defined Hong Kong martial arts cinema of the past, I am sure if
there was a version of Smell-O-Vision that worked Tarantino would
have used it. Nevertheless, the visual pyrotechnics that Tarantino em
ploys are compelling in their own right: anime, crisp black-and-white
photography, glossy color-saturated cinematography, fantasy fight
scenes in which combatants defy gravity with uncanny gracefulness,
and copious amounts of blood. In the broadest sense, KB:V1 is a surreal
martial arts action flick that is as sincere a love letter to a film genre
as they come.
As far as the narrative goes, KB:V1 is a fractured tale about Beatrix
Kiddo, aka The Bride, code name Black Mamba, a white female as
sassin and martial arts expert. At her wedding, she is shot down by
Bill (her boss and the father of her unborn child), and several other key
members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (dvaS). The entire
wedding party is slaughtered and Bill leaves her for dead. Four years
later, she awakens in a hospital where she begins her quest to hunt
down and kill those responsible for the attack. The film follows the
Brides first steps toward vengeance, which involve coaxing preemi
nent sword maker Hattori Hanz (Sonny Chiba) out of retirement
to forge her a samurai sword that is so sharp that, in the words of its
maker, If on your journey, you should encounter God, God will be cut.
On first blush, given that Uma Thurman is the female star of KB:V1,
the film appears exclusively bound to issues concerning gender. Be
cause its lead character is a professional assassin, a former bride out for
revenge, and a mother (she was pregnant at the time of her attack and
in the sequel she will discover her daughter is also alive) the film ex
presses several dueling feminist archetypes: the professional woman,
kill Bill: vol. 1, kill Bill: vol. 2, and DeaTh PRoof 69
the avenging Amazon, and the socially accepted role of mother. But it
also confronts enduring issues concerning the cultural representation
of women in Hollywood action films. The Bride stands in stark contrast
to the staid representation of women in Hollywood films as romantic
interests or sexual props for the male gaze.3 In this regard, little is left
to the imagination to ideologically decode in KB:V1. The film is satu
rated with signifiers regarding the sexual politics of gender and female
objectification.
For example, when the Bride wakes from a four-year coma after being
shot in the head by Bill, she discovers a male nurse has been pimping
out her comatose body for sex acts in exchange for money. Before she
fully awakes, a shabby Vaseline jar is tossed to a john as a source for
lubrication. The grimy residue on the jar signals that this sickening act
has occurred numerous times over several years. The image is a grue
some representation of the abrasive nature, destructive power, and de
praved quality of sexual exploitation of women by men. The sexual
abuse the Bride has endured was a surreptitious act, but the film will
establish how it represents the broader normalization of sexual degra
dation of women in a male-dominated society (and world) by having
the Bride commandeer a truck with the words Pussy Wagon printed
in bold pink lettering splayed across the tailgate. The fact that such an
offensive vehicle openly occupies public space as an everyday form of
transportation signifies the common, daily gender objectification that
drives sexual politics in American society.
In addition, sexual molestation is presented as a perverse action
deserving of death. First, the Bride kills the male nurse who profited
from her serial rape, a point further rendered with another morbid ex
ample of female objectification. Later in the film, there is the death
scene anime flashback of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) as an eleven-year-old
girl straddling the pedophile Yakuza boss responsible for murdering
her parents. Before he can commence with his predilections, she slays
him by puncturing his abdomen with a sword, and the wound releases
a geyser of blood that literally fills the frame. Such a blatant visual
scheme clearly signals that KB:V1 is willing not only to critique sexual
violence against children but also to drench the viewing audience with
blood like the unsuspecting prom queen from the film Carrie (Brian
De Palma, 1976). Despite the subversive gender politics present in the
opening portion of KB:V1, the sexualized imagery and language the film
openly employs and the sexual raunchiness it exhibits unquestionably
invite criticism that the film is exploitative and its sexual content gra
70 Race on the Qt
The Bride (Uma Thurman) faces the gender politics of sexual objectification in Kill Bill:
Vol. 1.
tuitous. But just as jarring as the symbolic overtones of sexism, sexual
violence, and gender politics circulating in KB:V1 are significant racial
undertones that dredge up longstanding issues surrounding racial rep
resentation in Hollywood martial arts films.
Without a doubt, KB:V1 invites criticism with its casting of Uma
Thurman, a blonde Nordic vixen, as the principal martial arts master
in the film. In this way, KB:V1 perpetuates a trend whereby Asian char
acters are stereotyped and/or displaced by white characters. Emblem
atic and patently problematic articulations of these tropes are rampant
in the Charlie Chan films of the 1930s, and more examples can be found
in Sean Connerys deplorable disguise in You Only Live Twice (Lewis
Gilbert, 1967); in the hyperbolic violence in Michael Ciminos The Deer
Hunter (1978); in the racially paranoid cityscape in Ridley Scotts bril
liant Blade Runner (1982); in the malignant typecasting in John Hughes
Sixteen Candles (1984); in the banal stereotyping present in Year of the
Dragon (Michael Cimino, 1985); in the peevish white American snob
bery found throughout Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003); in the
science-fiction Orientalism of Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon
franchise (19361940, 1980); and in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom
Menace (George Lucas, 1999).
Another notable example of how Asian representation is frequently
situated in American pop culture places white and Asian characters
alongside one another within a predominantly Asian context. In such
constructs, Asian people primarily function as background for the
charismatic white protagonist. Some of the most egregious examples
of the above practice are found in the pop music performances of Gwen
kill Bill: vol. 1, kill Bill: vol. 2, and DeaTh PRoof
71
Stefanis four Japanese backup dancers, the Harajuku Girls, who feign
fondness and devotion to Stefani across several music videos. Katy
Perrys adoption of traditional geisha attire to perform her hit song
Unconditionally at the 2013 American Music Awards drew criticism
from Asian Americans, as did Asian representations in the films The
Last Samurai (Edward Zwick, 2003) and The Last Airbender (M. Night
Shyamalan, 2010).4
Yet, on an ideological level, KB:V1 is as messy and disconcerting
as the floor at the House of Blue Leaves, littered with scores of limbs
lopped off by the Bride in the wake of her confrontation with the Crazy
88s, a masked Yakuza gang. On one hand, the film clearly articulates
the tendency of the Hollywood film industry to engage in racial appro
priation by featuring white protagonists in martial arts films.5 More
over, by casting David Carradine as Bill (whose name looms large in
the title and who becomes a key figure in the second installment of
the film), Tarantino clearly signifies racial appropriation in the form
of yellow face, in which whites pretend to be Asian. For a genera
tion of baby boomers (and their children, who grew up on television
reruns), David Carradine is most notably known for starring on the
popular television series Kung Fu (19721975) as Kwai Chang Caine, a
half-Caucasian half-Chinese Shaolin monk. Caine flees from China to
the American West after killing the Emperors nephew in retaliation for
senselessly shooting a revered Shaolin monk. The television show pri
marily consisted of showing Caine applying the philosophical lesson he
had learned in the past as a monk to the trouble he presently encoun
ters while protecting innocent lives. What made Carradine so problem
atic was that as a white male he came to symbolize yellow face: white
appropriation and the marginalization of Asian actors.6 Moreover, like
James Browns exclamation on the song Payback (1973), I dont know
karate but I know crazy, Carradine was not even trained in the form of
combat that lent its name to the title of the show.7 Carradine was a mar
tial arts poser, but slow-motion fighting effects similar to those used in
the cult classic Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1971), combined with seam
less editing, made Carradines amateur hand- and footwork come off as
deft, deadly, and sublimely cool. Consequently, by casting Carradine as
Bill, Tarantino insured that white appropriation and anxiety over Asian
authenticity looms large across the ideological landscape of KB:V1.
Paul Bowman, in Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through
Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, cites Brian Prestons astute ob
servation on the meaning of Kill Bill:
72 Race on the Qt
In Bruce Lee and Me: A Martial Arts Adventure (2007), Brian Preston
interprets Tarantinos two Kill Bill films as amounting to Bruce Lee
finally getting a kind of symbolic revenge on Carradine. In these
films, Uma Thurman plays a character who rides a motorbike to the
theme music from The Green Hornet, wearing an updated version of
the yellow outfit Bruce Lee wore in his unfinished Game of Death
(1973/1978). She seeks to exact revenge on Bill, who is played by David
Carradine, andjust to be sure we get the referencesBill even plays
the long wooden flute his character carried in Kung Fu. But Preston
also notes that in the choreography of Kill Bill we can also see the tri
umph of Bruce Lee in a wider sense. Its a triumph owed to Bruce Lee,
he asserts: the triumph of Asian sensibilities in world culture, specifi
cally in the worlds number one universally appreciated art form, the
action movie.
In this symbolic manner, white appropriation is addressed, and Bruce
Lee lives as a symbolic presence in the film, a presence that is visually
underscored by the yellow jumpsuit the Bride wears when she performs
her climatic fight scenes. But such symbolic nods to Bruce Lee do not
close the circuit of meaning concerning issues of cultural appropriation
and authenticity. At the most KB:V1 challenges the cultural appropria
tion circulating in the film, and at the least it attempts to placate critics
who take it to task for placing whiteness in the center of a martial arts
film. In either case, the challenge is best understood and appreciated as
a symbolic discourse.
The symbolic discourse between authenticity and co-optation
is ever present in KB:V1 and is fully registered with the character of
O-Ren Issii, a biracial figure who represents anxiety over authenticity
vis--vis race. The Brides expository narration about O-Ren describes
her as a half-Chinese, halfJapanese American army brat. The second
account of her racial hybridity follows after O-Ren consolidates her
power as the head of a Japanese crime syndicate, and this account dra
matically underscores how KB:V1 is not just a platform to demonstrate
showy martial arts choreography but engages the cultural politics of
race.
The troubling role that race plays in the film emerges as various
crime heads pay their respects to O-Ren Issii as their new boss. The
men are gathered around an immense table and appear to be delighted
by the shift in leadershipexcept for Boss Tanaka (Jun Kunimura). He
vehemently condemns her elevation as the leader of the crime council,
73
defiantly laments the perversion of the council with O-Ren as the boss
of all bosses, and concludes his rebuke by condemning the council for
making a Chinese Jap-American half-breed bitch its leader. O-Ren
responds to Tanakas ethnic chauvinism by decapitating him, leaving
a headless corpse gushing blood from the neck like a broken sprinkler.
In the wake of her carnage, O-Ren delivers a scolding speech to the re
maining crime bosses, who are repulsed and recoil in fear around the
immense table:
. . . and I promise you right here and now no subject will ever be taboo.
Except, of course, the subject that was just under discussion. The price
you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a
negative is, I collect your fucking head. Just like this fucker here. Now
if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say nows the fucking
time! I didnt think so. Gentlemen, this meeting is adjourned.
The hyperbolic blood-spattered hostility that punctuates O-Rens vio
lent reaction and her promise to decapitate anyone that critiques her
ethnic/racial orientation represent more than a strident response to an
ad hominem attack: it signals the vulgar absurdity of using biological
determinism along with fictive notions of racial and/or cultural purity
as legitimate sources to evaluate human potential. Similar to films like
The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982),
and Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998), in which blood is a potent sig
nifier of racial anxieties about assimilation and contamination by the
mongrelized Other, the violence that punctuates O-Rens declara
tion reveals a film also fully dialoguing with notions of racial and bio
logical determinism. The gratuitous display of blood signifies this ten
sion, and the debate over purity and lineage that Tanaka espouses is
delegitimized by his decapitation. The ongoing references to O-Rens
background, combined with the scene described above, reveal how
a film ostensibly dedicated to martial arts action critiques the facile
logic of racial categorization. Unfortunately, in the wake of Tanakas
beheading, this point is blunted by the films embrace of Orientalist
fantasy in which O-Ren Ishii is patently constructed as symbol of tra
ditional Eastern culture and authenticity.
Before the Bride finally confronts O-Ren, the new Yakuza boss is
shown holding court with her criminal underlings while dressed as an
ersatz version of a traditional Geisha. With her white kimono, white
split-toe stocking feet, customary clogs, timid gait, and pantomiming
74 Race on the Qt
O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), a symbol of traditional Eastern culture and authenticity, in
Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
demure gestures, O-Ren fulfills the Orientalist trope of the sexually

alluring subservient woman. Of course, O-Ren is a vicious killer, but
this does little to mitigate the stifling visuals that construct her in such
a stereotypical manner. These visual signifiers of the Asian Other take
on more ideological resonance during the climatic showdown between
O-Ren and the Bride. The contrast between the two is striking. A snow
filled backdrop and O-Rens white ceremonial kimono signal an un
sullied spiritual tradition. In contrast, the Bride wears a soiled, blood
stained yellow jumpsuit that signifies the hyperviolence of the West.
During their epic fight, O-Ren delivers what appears to be a lethal blow
to the Bride and tops off her maneuver by calling the Bride a silly Cau
casian girl [that] likes to play with samurai swords. O-Rens overdeter
mined representation of Asian authenticity combined with her com
ments racializes their struggle. As a result, the Brides race appears to
have doomed her for eventual defeat.
But the Bride is no cultural dilettante, and she severely wounds
O-Ren in sword combat. Interestingly, O-Ren offers an apology for
racially ridiculing her as an unworthy opponent right before the Bride
delivers the coup de grce that affirms that the Bride is a valiant and
worthy opponent. On the surface, O-Rens retreat from her racial as
sessment of the Bride is further refutation of the racial chauvinism ex
pressed earlier in the film by Boss Tanaka. However, given the criti
cisms leveled at Tarantino for appropriating blackness for his own
self-absorbed filmic assemblages, O-Rens concession that the Bride is
a worthy white opponent may serve more to provide ideological cover
for Tarantinos aesthetic choices when it comes to race.8 Arguably, the
75
Brides triumph over O-Ren also affirms that Tarantino is not just some
silly Caucasian boy who likes to play with cultural representations of
the racial Other. From this ideological vantage point, when it comes to
racial representationand most specifically black racial expressivity,
style, and character typesTarantinos whiteness does not negate the
accomplished engagement and honest expression of black culture and
black representation across his films.
Despite the apparent ideological cover that KB:V1 suggests regarding
Tarantinos artistic entitlement and ability to truthfully present
people of color in his films, it has not shielded him from criticism.
For example, the manner, style, and ultimate demise of Vernita Green
(Vivica A. Fox), the only significant black character in KB:V1, has been
a source of criticism for not respectfully representing black folk in the
film.9 Vernita is an upper-middle-class homemaker with a doctor for
a husband, a family dog, and a four-year-old daughter named Nikki
(Ambrosia Kelly) living an incredibly picturesque domestic lifestyle in
Pasadena, California. Vernita is also a former member of the dvaS who
participated in the slaughter of the Brides wedding party. After coming
out of her coma, the Bride tracks down Vernita. A knife fight com
mences right in the middle of Vernitas Craftsman-style home, brutally
disrupting her suburban American dream. The former hitwoman, now
homemaker, trades kicks, blows, and throws with the Bride until Ver
nitas daughter, Nikki, enters the room upon returning from school.
Immediately, the two women suspend their claustrophobic confronta
tion. The awkward tension between the women is accentuated by their
verbal exchange after they agree to a temporary truce to protect Nikki
from their vicious altercation and violent intentions.
The Bride as a symbol of the tainted West in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
76 Race on the Qt
the bRide: Just because I have no wish to murder you in front of

your daughter doesnt mean that parading her around in front of me
will inspire sympathy. You and I have unfinished business. And not a
goddamned thing youve done in the subsequent four years including
getting knocked up is going to change that.
veRnita: So when do we do this?
the bRide: It all depends. When do you want to die? Tomorrow?
The day after tomorrow?
veRnita: How about tonight, bitch?
the bRide: Splendid. Where?
veRnita: Theres a baseball diamond where I coach Little League
about a mile from here. We meet there around in the morning [sic]
dressed all in black. Your hair in a black stocking. And we have us a
knife fight. We wont be bothered. Now I have to fix Nikkis cereal.
the bRide: Bill always said you were one of the best ladies with an
edged weapon.
veRnita: Fuck you bitch. I know he didnt qualify that shit. So you
can just kiss my motherfucking ass, Black Mamba. Black Mamba. I
should have been motherfucking Black Mamba.
A strictly conventional reading of their heated conversation ostensibly
views their verbal confrontation as animus fueled by a professional
rivalry telegraphed by the Brides gendered qualification of Vernita as
an accomplished knife-wielding lady assassin. An equally compelling
and practical account of the scene situates Vernitas hostility toward
the Bride as being driven by the fact a white woman deprived her of her
rightful racialized moniker. As the only black member of the assassina
tion squad, the Black Mamba moniker was arguably more appropriate
for Vernita than for the flaxen-haired Bride.
Certainly, popular convention dictates the code name Black Mamba
would be a moniker more likely befitting the only black woman in the
film. Film titles such as Blacula (William Crain, 1972), Blackenstein
(William A. Levey, 1973), Black Samson (Charles Bail, 1974), Black Lolita
(Stephen Gibson, 1975), Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (William Crain, 1976), and
Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006) use the word black to signify
race in a very transparent and conventional manner. Accordingly, when
Vernita chastises the Bride over the Black Mamba code name, her pal
pable hostility signifies a racial undercurrent between the two women
and indicates the privileged position of whiteness when compared to
black attainment and expertise. Like Vernita Green advocates, she
The Bride and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) confront one another in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
should have been motherfucking Black Mamba. But the exchange im

plies that her race was used against her. Admittedly, Vernitas extremely
contemptuous and belligerent recriminations of the Bride weaken the
scene; her use of obscenities and her melodramatic attitude animate the
trope of the angry black woman.10 Nevertheless, there is a sophisticated
racial sensibility at work that signifies tensions in white-black power
relations and challenges the privileged status of whiteness to appro
priate blackness. Although not fully articulated, Vernitas lament over
the code name also suggests a casual form of racial awareness at the
least, and at the most reveals a strong sense of racial pride concerning
blackness as a form of identity construction and defiant self-worth in
the face of perceived white devaluation of her personhood.
Of course, despite agreeing to the time and place for their death
match (after Vernita has dispensed with all of her remaining domestic
duties), she dies in the kitchen right in front of her daughter. When
Vernita tries to kill the Bride by shooting her with a gun concealed in
a cereal box, she pays with a knife lodged deep in her chest. Noted film
critic Armond White calls attention to Vernitas demise and makes a
caustic observation of the callous and obtuse presentation of her death
scene as a form of detached pop violence.11 First, Vernitas death is a
harsh reminder of how black characters are often eliminated in a grisly
fashion and their narrative relevancy is often truncated across a variety
of Hollywood films.12 Second, because Vernita is slain in front of her
daughter, the death scene is unsettling and appears quite morbid. Yet in
actuality, Vernitas death scene is quite solemn and reflective.
What humanizes Vernita the most is the excessive time spent dis
playing her corpse along with the subsequent shot of her little daughter
78 Race on the Qt
staring blankly at the killer yanking a knife out of her mothers chest.
By including Vernitas four-year-old child in the gruesome death scene,
KB:V1 presents a disturbing reminder of the emotional weight depic
tions of death on screen can have. Having Vernitas daughter bear wit
ness to her killing is a harsh reminder of the consequences of death be
yond just perpetrator and victim. This scene stands in stark contrast to
the cartoon carnage presented at the House of Blue Leaves, where the
Bride lops off numerous legs and arms of the Crazy 88s gang. Rather, the
murder of a black woman in front of her young daughter contains more
gravitas and counterbalances the cold spectacle of mayhem, murder,
and mutilation in the House of Blue Leaves fight scene. Vernita is no
longer just an enemy vanquished, but a mother whose maternal bond
between her and her daughter is destroyed along with the family she
cares for, a point clearly highlighted by the blissful suburban setting
established before Vernita is killed. Consequently, the demise of Ver
nita clearly communicates a death not detached from tragedy.
Despite the serious gender issues and subversive racial thematics
woven into the fantasyscape of KB:V1, the tone of the film often veers
toward the comedic and the outlandish. The outrageously excessive
violence presented and the copious amount of blood shown with each
death at the House of Blue Leaves are in fact dependent on audience
detachment for the scene to work as a source of any enjoyment. In its
excesses, KB:V1 comes dangerously close to qualifying as a better exe
cuted and acted version of John Carpenters manic misfire Big Trouble
in Little China (1986), a cartoonish kung fu action flick heavy on special
effects and light on character arc.
In comparison, KB:V2 jettisons the hyperstylized violence that pre
vails in the first film and strains for solemnity with more grit and grime,
less combat, longer conversations in cramped spaces, and more char
acter development. This shift in tone registers in the character of Budd
(Michael Madsen), Bills brother. In KB:V1 the audience is granted a
fleeting glimpse of Budd (as a member of the assassin squad that slaugh
ters Beatrixs wedding party) wearing a black suit and tie that makes
Madsen appear the facsimile of his Mr. Blonde character from Reser
voir Dogs (1992).
In KB:V2 this fleeting figure becomes a fully formed character who
has traded in his suit and tie for the flagrant tropes of redneck white
ness to convey bad intent harbored in the good ol boy persona that
Budd exudes. Budd now wears white tank tops, sports a gauche cowboy
hat wherever he goes, has an updated twist on the frequently ridiculed
79
mullet hairstyle, lives in a cluttered trailer, drives a beat-up pickup

truck, spits tobacco, uses ethnic slurs like Japs, and deploys deroga
tory phrases like I dont Jew out of paying my comeuppance. The
total effect of these various cues makes Budd a bad man and an obvious
symbol of backwoods racial chauvinism, but Budd is also a constructed
symbol of crude American gender bias, a sensibility clearly communi
cated when he shoots Beatrix with a shotgun full of rock salt and sub
sequently buries her alive. On the whole, this is a rather obvious use of
predictable cultural cues to mark a white character as tasteless at the
least and disturbingly dangerous at the most.
In contrast to Budd, Bill is draped in signifiers of corruption and deca
dence that are more complex and sophisticated. As Bill, the ringleader
of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, David Carradine provides a
tour de force performance of white masculine creepiness. Although Bill
is a restrained figure compared to Budds overt racial symbolism, he
clearly expresses white pathology. For example, the pantomimed gun
play between Bill, Beatrix, and their daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine)
suggests a perverse notion of the white nuclear family, a point sub
sequently punctuated when Bill confesses to B.B., like a lighthearted
bedtime story, that he shot her mother in the head. Parenthood cannot
provide a transcendent space for Bill to inhabit, even as doting dad to
the daughter Beatrix thought was dead. Ultimately, Bill appears to be
pathological by nature and Beatrix by environment; they are parents
who produced a sick offspring. Case in point: B.B. confesses to taking
a goldfish out of the fishbowl, placing it on the carpet, staring at it
as it gasps for water, and summarily stomping the life out of it. With
this example the film indicates the child is a heartless killer similar to
both of her parents. Certainly, the film tries to recuperate Beatrix from
her pathological status by showing her token display of bereavement
after killing her mentor and lover, the father of her child. Notwith
standing the narrative ploy of making Beatrix a mother and showing
her snuggling her daughter in a hotel room while watching television,
she remains a fallen figure, drained and devoid of compassion, only
able to deploy her training for killing. It is quite fitting that at the con
clusion of the film, Beatrix and B.B. are watching the cartoon magpies
Heckle and Jeckle and enjoying how they trick and comically assault a
hapless farmer with an oversized mallet. Violence is not only normal
ized as comedic but populates every nook and cranny of Beatrixs social
ecology.13
Admittedly, as in KB:V1, gender bias is a significant point of analysis.
80 Race on the Qt
Master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
Yet alongside the strident gender dynamics, American whiteness is also

foregrounded, albeit in a fragmented and symbolic manner. Despite
Beatrixs status at the conclusion of KB:V2 as a righteous avenger and
lioness reunited with her cub, she is ultimately a symbol of American
whiteness, a point underscored in KB:V1 when the Bride confronts
O-Ren Ishii, and echoed again when Beatrix first meets her martial
arts teacher Master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu). Under Master Peis tutelage,
Beatrix is repeatedly berated, beaten, and humiliated because Pei Mei
hates Caucasians, despises Americans, and is said to have contempt for
women.
Without a doubt, the sadistic and humiliating punishment inflicted
onto Beatrix in KB:V2 appears overdetermined by gender and repre
sents a feminists nightmare and a misogynists wet dream. Indeed,
gender bias is a significant driving force behind Pei Meis sadistic and
humiliating training program. But stark racial overtones are also articu
lated and symbolically represented as well.14 The visual scheme used to
construct Pei Mei in relation to Beatrix functions as a racial signpost.
Master Pei, with his long white beard and coiffed eyebrows, creates a
striking, exotic, and ominous Orientalist symbol juxtaposed against
the cut-off blue jeans and sneakers worn by the all-American blonde
Beatrix. As a racial signifier, Master Peis punishing instruction sym
bolizes retribution for white appropriation and cultural encroachment.
On one hand, KB:V2 resumes the Hollywood film industrys ten
dency to crown whiteness as the superior version of another cultures
most challenging and creative expressions.15 On the other hand, de
spite the apparent continuation of this sensibility in KB:V2, the film
registers a palpable awareness of, and, most significantly, a simmering
hostility toward, white appropriation with the figure of Beatrix as an

abused martial arts pupil.16 Eventually her training with Master Pei is
successful and yields a mastery of secret martial arts methods such as
punching a hole through a thickwooden board from an extremely close
position. But the technique is acquired at considerable cost, as Beatrix
endures pain and punishment under Master Peis sadistic instruction.
Her time with Master Pei also signals she is moving toward spiri
tual transcendence, a point often reinforced by showing Beatrix com
mencing her arduous training by trekking up a steep mountain. Toward
the end of the film, when she finds herself buried alive in wooden coffin
with little room to maneuver, Beatrixs fully signifies a fallen, drained,
and lifeless figure, a point indicated by showing Beatrix puncture a
hole in her coffin and crawl out from a grave like a zombie that refuses
to die. For those willing to take the aesthetic bait, the above scene pro
vides an ideological twist on racial diversity in American film. Because
the Kill Bill movies exist in an imaginary world and are fantasy films,
they are not required to articulate some form of racial verisimilitude.
Of course, the staged artificiality of the opening credits of KB:V2,
with Beatrix driving a convertible Karmann Ghia against a motion
backdrop, arguably signals the entire film is a constructed fantasy.
Consequently, as an imaginary world the film offers several arguments
concerning racial representation that contribute significantly to dimin
ishing criticism of the Kill Bill films as expressions of white appro
priation. First, to require that only an Asian character could, would, or
should accomplish what Beatrix does as a vengeful white martial arts
expert unfairly impinges on the imaginational latitude that a fantasy
Pei Mei hates Caucasians, despises Americans, and is said to have contempt for
women, in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
82
Race on the Qt
realm supposedly provides. Second, the mutilation of scores of Asian

men by a Nordic-looking white woman is merely a staged spectacle that
does not reflect or symbolize cultural subjugation. Third, what might
appear to be white appropriation in the Kill Bill cycle can be read as
just an expression of genuine homage that does not reflect cultural sub
jugation. However, KB:V2 is a bit more ideologically subversive than
can be explained by adopting an imitation is the sincerest form of flat
tery viewpoint. Fourth, the Kill Bill franchise differs from numerous
American martial arts movies in which benevolent whites adopt Ori
ental culture and customs with a great deal of success, such as the star
vehicles of Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Segal
and films like The Last Samurai (Edward Zwick, 2003), 47 Ronin (Carl
Rinsch, 2013), and, to a lesser extent, Avatar (James Cameron, 2009).
The Kill Bill films reject romanticizing white characters as the hon
orable heirs to or noble practitioners of another ethnic/racial groups
culture. To the contrary, in the Kill Bill franchise, all of the white char
acters are refreshingly corrupt. In this manner, the appropriation issue
that is present throughout the two films is subverted. Whiteness in this
instance may co-opt Asian-based martial arts, but the standard Holly
wood trope of white moral superiority is diminished. Beatrix Kiddo
may be somewhat rehabilitated, but any moral authority is invested in
Vernitas daughter Nikki. After pulling her knife out of Vernitas chest,
the Bride (Beatrix) explains to Nikki that, It was not my intention to
do this in front of you. For that Im sorry. But you can take my word for
it. Your mother had it coming. When you grow up, if you still feel raw
about it, Ill be waiting. Consequently, if there is a third installment
of this franchise a young black woman will be the star of Kill Kiddo.
like both Kill Bill filmS, Tarantinos next film, Death Proof (2007),
is also an exercise in self-indulgent fandom, a point repeatedly articu
lated by the director and telegraphed by the excessive energy directed
at duplicating the grindhouse aesthetic in the film.17 But even more
than paying homage to exploitation films of the past, Death Proof dis
plays the range of Tarantinos fetishistic proclivities all in one film. The
first five minutes of the film offer a barrage of voyeuristic kink perfectly
scored by Jack Nitzsches sleazy guitar riff, taken from the go-go dance
scene (noted for actress Joy Harmons slow-motion shimmy) in the cult
classic film Village of the Giants (Bert I. Gordon, 1965). Visually, Taran
tinos apparent attraction to female feet dominates the opening credits.
The viewer is forced to gaze, for an extended duration, at a pair of pedi
83
cured feet with bright red toenail polish resting on the passenger side of
a car dashboard. The subsequent shot is just as fetishistic, a prurient ex
amination of the bottom of lead character Jungle Julias (Sydney Tamiia
Poitiers) feet followed by a voyeuristic peek-a-boo panty-shot of her
traipsing around her apartment, a scene which concludes with Julies
bare feet propped up on her couch. Death Proofs in-your-face foot
fetish quickly shifts from soft-core voyeurism to seedy kink when the
ensuing frame focuses on Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito) as she contends with
an urgent need to urinate. The camera follows Arlene running from the
passenger side of a car to Julies upstairs apartment, then changes to an
extreme close-up of Arlene pressing her index and middle finger deeply
against her vagina as she dashes up a flight of stairs and scampers down
the hall desperate to relieve herself. Like virtually all films of this ilk,
whether original or imitated, the titillation factor is cranked up to the
max and sexual promiscuity is a recurrent theme. In this regard, Death
Proof is an excellent knockoff of the sexploitation-horror film genre
Tarantino aches to imitate.
In Death Proof, nonexplicit sexuality is the dominant visual cue, un
like true sexploitation cinema where gratuitous nudity is the stock-and
trade of the genre. In this regard, Death Proof proves itself rather chaste
in its lack of female nudity. Instead, the explicit discussions between
Julia, Arlene, and Shanna (Jordan Ladd) about their dating exploits and
the power of their feminine wiles to seduce men signals their overt
sexual promiscuity. Moreover, given that in the genre corrupt ingnues
are chronically killed as a form of symbolic punishment for their sexu
ally liberated attitudes, it is no surprise that Julia, Arlene, and Shanna
all perish horribly in this film.18 Yet in between Death Proofs sexist
imagery, fractured narrative, and feet-and-leg show are noteworthy
ruminations on race, sex, and gender woven into a film that revels in
indulgences of tone and look. Without a doubt, casting a black actress
to play a character named Jungle Julia clearly conveys that Death Proof
welcomingly treads on problematic racial terrain. At first glance the
Jungle Julia moniker appears not only as an obnoxious form of allitera
tion but also as a name that dredges up the representational exotifica
tion of black women as primal sexual beings in American pop culture.19
A lengthier examination of how Jungle Julia is situated throughout the
film, however, reveals a more subversive intersection of the moniker
with American pop culture, history, and racial representation in film
and television.
First and foremost, the archetype of the jungle girl is most often a
84 Race on the Qt
white woman scantly clad in an animal-skin bikini placed in the center

of a jungle or lush rainforest. In other words, the figure is a female ver
sion of Tarzanan attractive, heroic white male figure created by Edgar
Rice Burroughs who roams the African jungle in a loincloth making
sure natives, nature, and adventurers keep safe. Such a setup easily
suggests racist undertones when a lone white man is constructed as a
demigod in a black geographical space, whether real or imagined. Ac
cordingly, the fusing of female sexuality with a jungle narrative that re
volves around whiteness as beautiful and possessing extraordinary tal
ents suffers from a similar racial critique.20 Comic books such as White
Princess of the Jungle (1951) explicitly called attention to a multitude of
dubious racial implications: a white woman who represents a force for
order, attractiveness, and intelligence is juxtaposed against a jungle full
of black savages. Alongside the tropes of white supremacy, the jungle
girl character represents a real mainstream pinup sensibility that also
undergirds this racial fantasyscape in terms of American sexual poli
tics. In particular, for decades the American film and television indus
tries have contributed to constructing white female sex symbols out of
the jungle girl motif with figures such as Frances Gifford in the Jungle
Girl serial (William Witney, 1941); Irish McCalla from the television
series Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (19551956); Bo Derek in Tarzan, the
Ape Man (John Derek, 1981); Tanya Roberts in Sheena (John Guillermin,
1984); and Gena Lee Nolins reprisal of the jungle vixen in the short
lived syndicated television version of Sheena (20002002). In addition,
the iconic cheesecake image of Betty Page as Jungle Betty and the art
istry found in the works of Frank Frazetta, Frank Cho, and, to a lesser
extent, Antonio Vargas, has affirmed a nearly mythic rendering of the
white pinup model as attractive Amazonian female.
Against the mythic backdrop of white Amazonian sexuality, Jungle
Julia, the exotic barefoot beauty with long, billowing, curly black hair,
approximates an updated and more urbanized version of the Hollywood
jungle girl. The strikingly tall and attractive Sydney Tamiia Poitier is
Jungle Julia, the six-foot baby giraffe. In Death Proof she is a sexu
ally enticing black female counterpoint to the preponderance of white
Amazonian imagery from Hollywoods past. Death Proof subversively
signifies this point by having Julia, with her short-shorts and tight tee
shirt, sit right in front of a Tarzan poster adorning the wall of one of the
bars she and her friends patronize as they hopscotch their way from
cantina to cantina. Despite serving as the symbolic counterpoint to de
cades of white Amazonian sexuality as the attractive norm, Jungle Julia
85
Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier), approximates an updated and more urbanized
version of the Hollywood jungle girl trope in Death Proof.
is also a problematic figure in the film. Although scopophillic reverence
is given to Jungle Julias looks, the type of voyeuristic scrutiny given to
her face, legs, feet, and butt seems more about objectification than any
type of representational outmaneuvering on behalf of black women.
For example, the first bar scene in Death Proof has Marcy (Marcy Har
riell) playfully impersonate a man trying to make a move on Arlene. In
the course of the conversation Arlene randomly asks Marcy if Jungle
Julia has a big ass. Marcy replies with a goofy southern accent, Naw
man. I like her ass that way. She got a black girls ass. Jungle Julia scolds
Arlene: For your information, skinny bitch, black men and whole lot
of motherfuckin white men have had plenty of fun adoring my ass. I
dont wear their teeth-marks on my butt for nothing.
Metaphorically speaking, so marked was the Hottentot Venus, a
black woman who became a freak show exhibit due to the bulkiness
of her buttocks.21 She ended her life destitute and was dissected like
a specimen after her death. Consequently, Arlenes dissonant query
about the size of Julias ass, Marcys racialized response, and Jungle
Julias embrace of her sexual objectification ring hollow. Their com
ments evoke tired tropes surrounding the racial physiognomy of black
women, tropes that hark back to the scientific racism of nineteenth
century Europe. Too much history and sexual exploitation have passed
to make Julias wisecrack work as a convincing display of racial agency.
By fixating on her particular body parts repeatedly, to the exclusion of
nearly everything else about her character, the film visually hacks Julia
into pieces and ultimately is an expression of her sexual dehumaniza
tion. Oddly enough, however, Death Proof wages war against the very
86 Race on the Qt
Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) breaks the fourth wall in Death Proof.
objectification it sets up so aggressively with Jungle Julia in the repul

sive death scene that punctuates the films midpoint.
Death Proof signals a literal critique of the white male gaze in the
guise of Stuntman Mike McKay (Kurt Russell), a murderous stalker.
Stuntman Mike is shown surreptitiously watching Julia and her friends
exiting a bar while sitting in his black muscle car. He then fixates on a
snapshot of Julia stuck to the car visor and subsequently removes the
photo from the visor to reveal a mirror that frames his eyes staring
back at him. Stuntman Mike proceeds to tilt his head back and use an
eyedropper to administer some type of solution in both his eyes. Later,
Stuntman Mike breaks the fourth wall with a wicked grin that com
pels the audience to make eye contact with him. Finally, the head-on
collision between his car and the vehicle carrying Julia and her three
female friends punctuates the destructive energies of the male gaze.22
In case the message of the scene is somehow missed, the crash is re
peated several times to show how each woman in the car was killed.
Moreover, in each case, Stuntman Mikes headlights are shown flashing
on (read: eyes opening) just prior to impact. This exaggerated focus on
the eyes is meant to symbolically emphasize the male gaze as obses
sively misogynistic and deadly by implication. Although the car crash
is a grotesque spectacle of body horror, it also effectively demonstrates
the logical conclusion and pathological climax that all sexual objectifi
cation eventually leads to; it fragments the female body into detached
lifeless body parts.
Because Jungle Julia rides in the front passenger seat of the car with
the window down and a significant portion of her leg hanging outside
the vehicle, the crash causes her leg to sever at the hip, float through the
87
air and eventually land with a dull thud on the black pavement. As a
consequence, Julias long leg[s] and feet become a source of revulsion,
revealing the visual violence that is integral to the sexual objectifica
tion of its striking black Amazonian figure. Unlike David Cronenbergs
disturbing psycho-sexual drama Crash (1996), which explores the world
of people who derive sexual gratification from being in car crashes, the
crash in Death Proof subversively critiques the sexual objectification
of Jungle Julia, and, by extension, black women in general. Admittedly,
the symbolic agency I ascribe to Jungle Julia, as a constructed figure
playing against type, is strictly a postmortem analysis. Unfortunately,
the character is not in any significant manner self-reflective.23 For the
most part, Jungle Julia appears unaware of herself as an object of voy
euristic desire. Neither is she self-aware of her sexual symbolism as a
counter-image to the traditional white jungle girl trope.
Instead, Jungle Julia wanders around in Death Proof harping about
scoring marijuana, complaining about boy troubles, and extolling
her taste in lead singers. These vacuous conversations may provide a
semblance of the everyday experience of the character, but they en
tirely neglect the more interesting racial dimension of Jungle Julia as a
local celebrity and black female sex symbol in a predominantly white
southern city. Neither is Jungle Julia allowed an opportunity to engage
the audience as a sexually savvy and complex black female performer
in the tradition of Josephine Baker, who co-opted notions of the jungle
primitive, the black body, and voyeuristic pleasure in a way that ex
pressed a form of visual politics.24 Instead, the audience is served an
image of Jungle Julia left literally in pieces on the road; by extension, so
is her persona. Consequently, no matter how strikingly exotic and sym
bolically provocative a construct Jungle Julia is, her character comes off
as flat as the cheesy Jungle Julia billboards scattered throughout the
Austin, Texas, setting of the first half of the film.
Ideologically, Death Proof is most successful in conveying the per
versity and patriarchal power of the white male gaze to mutilate the ob
ject of sexual desire and yet remain virtually untouched by the release
of these destructive energies. The second half of the film confronts
this theme with a trio of empowered women when it picks up four
teen months later in Lebanon, Tennessee. In particular, the character
of Abernathy Ross (Rosario Dawson) functions as a more empowered
expression of the barefoot, exotic Jungle Julia trope presented in the
first half of the film. Again, soft soles and pedicured toes are a beacon
for Tarantinos camerawork. Only this time they belong to Abernathy,
88 Race on the Qt
and the visual justification for focusing on her feet is displaced onto
Stuntman Mikes sexual penchants. Stuntman Mike drives into a con
venience store parking lot, views Abernathys bare feet hanging out
the back window of another car, and is immediately drawn to them.
Enamored of Abernathys feet, Stuntman Mike surreptitiously exits his
car to closely stare at and pantomime kissing her toes before touching
them with his fingers. The fetishistic disavowal Tarantino puts in place
is pitifully transparent; nevertheless, the foot show signals that Aber
nathy is the symbolic reincarnation of the deceased Jungle Julia.
In sharp contrast to the screen time used to peruse Jungle Julias
lower extremities, the inordinate amount of time the film spends fo
cused on Abernathys feet eventually has a plot payoff that clearly
communicates a more defiant image. When Abernathy recoils from
Stuntman Mikes feathery touch, she removes her sleeping mask and
promptly sits up in the backseat of the car. By doing so, Abernathy af
firms that her body is not for voyeuristic consumption and defies be
coming a symbol of exhibitionistic exploitation. Consequently, Aber
nathy leaves the comfort of the backseat to sit on the hood of the car
and put on a pair of cowboy boots. She then directs a grimace toward
Stuntman Mikes car as it screeches off. Later, Abernathy, as Julias
symbolic doppelganger, will perform her best interpretation of Nancy
Sinatras pop ditty These Boots Were Made for Walking (1966) by de
livering a skull-busting axe kick to Stuntman Mikes head as he lies
semiconscious on an asphalt roadway. With Abernathy, Death Proof
tries to compensate for the savage and visually fragmented construc
tion and destruction of Jungle Julia by having Stuntman Mike pay for
his unwanted foot fondling (and by implication Julias and her friends
murders) with a death blow to his head enacted by the very objects of
the films fetishistic construction, the leg[s] and feet of a woman.
Although the second half of Death Proof clearly draws on and cri
tiques, vis--vis Abernathy, the earlier objectification of Julia, this seg
ment of the film primarily revolves around the interracial camara
derie between Kim Mathis (Tracie Thoms) and Zo (Zo Bell), and their
friendship highlights the racial import of Death Proof. Certainly, the
real-time daredevil stunts, death-defying driving sequences, and chase
scenes are central to the second half of the film. Much of the excite
ment in Death Proof involves watching Stuntman Mike use his black
1969 Dodge Charger to repeatedly sideswipe a classic 1970 white Dodge
Challenger while real-life stuntwoman Zo Bell hugs the hood for
dear life. However, the deeper tension stems from how race drives the
89
Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) wearing her killer boots in Death Proof.
action alongside the captivating car chase. Admittedly, the exaggerated

schoolgirl rapport between Kim and Zo feels particularly forced, most
likely a function of Zo Bells limited acting chops and Traci Thoms
overly animated delivery. Despite the artificiality between the women,
their exchanges unmistakably articulate racial overtones. For example,
white privilege and American history are invoked when Zo pleads to
Kim, while Im here [in America], Ill be your back-cracking slave,
after Kim balks at driving with Zo perched on the hood of the car to
fulfill her desire to perform this type of stunt.
Zo continues, imploring Kim, Whenever you want it, youve got
it. You dont even have to ask for it. You just order me to do it, just be
like, Bitch get over here and get busy. Zos odd proposal plays as a
crude race reversal, whereby a white woman will be a black womans
slave. It also invokes the harrowing history of American slavery as well
as deploying the turnaround-is-fair-play racial mechanics that Taran
tino is notable for utilizing when race is the topic. Against this racially
charged setup, Kim literally and ideologically occupies the drivers seat
for the remainder of the film. Later, after Kim accepts Zos proposi
tion to be her stunt driver, Zo jubilantly yells, Faster, you black bitch!
Faster! With this joyful exclamation, a dangerous trick is transformed
from a harrowing stunt into a racialized joyride with the image of a
black woman driving a white car with a white woman splayed across
the hood.
Eventually, Stuntman Mike falls in behind the women and begins
rear-ending their car while Zo frantically clings to the hood. With
Stuntman Mikes reappearance, the destructive sexual objectification
he symbolized earlier in the film fully resurfaces. Yet Kims skill behind
90 Race on the Qt
Kim (Tracie Thoms) contemplates what life would be like if Zo (Zo Bell) was her
slave in Death Proof.
the wheel matches Stuntman Mikes destructive force, and the women
he just terrorized chase him down and turn the tables. In Death Proof a
vengeful black woman returns the white male gaze as a masculine ex
pression of female sexual and political energies. Kim certainly fits that
ideological bill with her symbolic sodomizing of Stuntman Mike.25 As
Kim rear-ends Stuntman Mikes Charger with her car, she exclaims,
Oh, dont like it up the ass, do you, you rednecklunatic bastard? ... Oh
yeah, gonna bust a nut up in this bitch right now. Oh, Im the horniest
motherfucker on the road. On one hand, a conventional reading of this
sexually saturated dialogue is that it articulates (and confuses) a juve
nile and obscene attack on white hegemonic masculinity as a form of
female agency. On the other hand, the scene is also racially problem
atic by offering a stock representation of black femininity as vulgarly
hypersexual and, oddly enough, masculine, a stigma foreshadowed
earlier by Pam (Rose McGowan), the blonde at the bar in the first half
of the film, when she snidely remarks to Stuntman Mike about Jungle
Julia, Sorry, Im built like a girl, not a black man.26 Accordingly, the
masculine makeover of black femininity implicit in Pams comment
is made explicit by Kims tirade likening herself to a punishing phallic
symbol as she repeatedly revs her car engine and rams Mikes car from
behind. Kims symbolic sodomy of Stuntman Mike is a clumsy, crude,
and lopsided articulation of black female agency when contrasted to
the Beatrix Kiddo character in KB:V2 who shoulders both the role of
vicious killer and loving mother, or when compared to Jackie in Jackie
Brown, a film that methodically builds on the double burden of gender
and race for black women. Despite these limitations, Death Proof is
91
most ideologically surefooted when it asserts that the white male gaze
is habitually a perverted and totalizing point of view.27
Not only does Stuntman Mike embody this theme, so do all white
men in general, if the film is to be believed. For example, a sore spot
amongst all the female characters in the film is the ulterior motives of
the men they are intimate with. Early in Death Proof, Julia, Arlene, and
Shanna critique their boyfriends, compare notes about them, and de
bate if any men should accompany them to the lake house during their
weekend getaway. Shanna also jokingly comments about her fathers
proclivity to show up at the lake house when his daughters girlfriends
are sporting bikinis. Later their male companions prove they are no
less predatory, duplicitous, and dishonest than Stuntman Mike, who is
clearly marked as a sexual degenerate. Dov (Eli Roth) and Omar (Michael
Bacall) conspire to get Julia, Arlene, and Shanna drunk in order to make
them more malleable, at the least, and possibly oblivious, at the worst,
to their sexual advances. Clearly, in Death Proof white men are con
structed as problematic, bothersome, and devious, and even fathers are
leering old men on the prowl.
The second act of Death Proof is no more sympathetic to white males
than the first. For example, when Zo, Kim, Abernathy, and Lee (Mary
Elizabeth Winstead) show-up at the backwoods residence of Jasper
(Jonathan Loughran) to test-drive the pristine 1970 Dodge Challenger
R/T car he is selling, Jasper greets them with What do you horny gals
want? He only agrees to permit an unaccompanied test-drive after
incorrectly assuming the girls are there filming a porno movie. Aber
nathy plays along with the falsehood and suggests he talk to Lee about
it while she and her friends test-drive the car. The scene concludes with
Zo takes a ride while Kim drives fast in Death Proof.
92
Race on the Qt
a final shot of Jasper standing in front of Lee, who is semi-slouched in

a chair having just awakened from a nap, as he delivers a raspy piglike
chortle. The nature of this scene is quite disturbing, as it suggests an
impending sexual assault. Arguably, it is only surpassed by the creep
quotient of Stuntman Mike (or quite possibly by Tarantinos exces
sive fixation on Julias legs and feet along with Arlenes pouty lips and
flush behind). Jaspers friendly greeting and loutish behavior toward
Lee unambiguously signal that the sexualization of young women in
threatening pornographic terms is so run-of-the-mill that it manifests
as an affable greeting to make when meeting a woman for the first time.
Ultimately, white men in Death Proof are presented as phobic, hostile,
and sexually deviate, a point underscored with the campy song Hang
Up the Chick Habit playing over the end credits, which admonishes
predatory men to end their obsession with women.28
Clearly, the Kill Bill films and Death Proof fashion a revenge motif
for three compelling versions of women as warrior heroines. While race
is a meaningful element in these films, it is not overtly telegraphed.
Nevertheless, the films mine racial anxieties by posing unpractical and
unreasonable visions of black reprisal: the hyperaggressiveness of Ver
nita Green when she confronts Beatrix Kiddo in KB:V1, and Kims ar
ticulation of black bravado in Death Proof. Kim accepts a white woman
as her willing slave, takes Zos jacket to wear for herself, and then re
fuses to part with any of her own clothing articles (her belt) in the face
of Zos request. In the end, the racial politics expressed by Kim in
Death Proof do more to demonstrate how the film suffers from a Tou
rettes syndromelike racial aesthetic, whereby the n-word, derogatory
remarks, phallic symbolism, and racial non sequiturs all seem to hap
hazardly pop up throughout the film. When these racial intrusions are
taken individually, at best they appear idiosyncratic. At worst, they re
veal a film that is unsure about its use of the racial repartee so effec
tively on display in Jackie Brown. The dialogue feels forced and sounds
affected, and the black characters function as disjointed textual ele
ments. In the end, Death Proof proves the limitations of Tarantinos
ability to make a superior film from a genre known for manufacturing
mediocre movies. Tarantinos next two films would ditch the cinematic
preening and meandering filmic self-indulgence that the Kill Bill films
and Death Proof offer. In these films, race once again takes center stage,
with Inglourious Basterds (2009) as alternative-history fantasy and
Django Unchained (2012) as a Gothic horror film.
chaPteR 4
inglouRious BasTeRDs and

DJango unchaineD
What shall the history books read?

hans landa, inglouRious BasTeRDs
Im here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot
worse shit actually happened.
QUentin taRantino, commenting on DJango unchaineD
the hollyWood WaR film is a staple in American pop culture, re
flecting the extent to which war has become, in the Orwellian sense, a
permanent fixture in the perpetuation of American geopolitical inter
ests. Countless films have projected the battle cry of war onto the silver
screen, and any attempt to enumerate these films and their unique ele
ments would be an encyclopedic endeavor, at the least. What all war
films do have in common is that they make a political statement, and in
this sense Inglourious Basterds (2009) makes good on that truism. How
ever, deciding just what political statement the film makes depends on
what type of war film Inglourious Basterds is in the first place. Besides
being one of the most off-kilter of all of Tarantinos movies to date,
Inglourious Basterds is a cinematic Rorschach test that invites critics
and audiences to come to various and sometimes conflicting conclu
sions about the film. As a war film, Inglourious Basterds easily invites
twisted comparisons to films like The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich,
1967), Kellys Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970), Force 10 from Navarone
(Guy Hamilton, 1978), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), and
The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014). Like Inglourious Bas
terds, these films base their narratives around a motely crew of unlikely
characters corralled together to accomplish some virtually impossible
goal while killing numerous Nazis along the way. As a satire, Basterds
94 Race on the Qt
is similar in tone and style to the satirical good guys and twisted villains
found in films like Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), Dr. Strange
love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick,
1964), Catch22 (Mike Nichols, 1970), and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman,
1970). In particular, the eerie Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), with his
excessive, calculating intelligence, strikes a chord similar to the charis
matically villainous Nazi colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) of In
glourious Basterds.
With regards to its treatment of history, Inglourious Basterds spurred
war
of words over Tarantinos aesthetic responsibility (or lack thereof)
a
for thoughtfully balancing the tension between history and poetic li
cense: the film has Adolf Hitler and his top officials mowed down by
machine guns.1 In other words, Inglourious Basterds takes place in an
alternate reality, an extremely disconcerting and perplexing choice
for a film concerning Nazism, Hitler, and the Jewish Holocaust. John
Reider makes this observation about the unconventional chronology
found in Inglourious Basterds:
The entrance of altered history into the narratives generic mix comes
in the form of a surprise ending: the storys departure from its appar
ently realist (if not very realistic or plausible) World War II setting
to an entirely different fictional world where Hitler, Goebbles, and
Goering died in a theatre in Paris. . . . The move into altered history is
the move that enables the climatic revenge fantasy itself to succeed.
And that is all it does. The tropes of altered history in classic examples
such as Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Kim
Stanley Robinsons The Lucky Strike (1984) involve tracing the com
plex and profound ramifications of a localized change in the fabric of
history . . .2
Of considerable note is that Philip K. Dick is one of Americas pre
mier science fiction writers and The Man in the High Castle (1962) is
an alternate history novel concerning Nazi Germany. Correspondingly,
Inglourious Basterds is more than ahistorical; it presents something
more akin to an alternative world that exists in a parallel universe.
In fact, this alternative-world sensibility is signaled even in the films
title by the misspellingsor more fittingly, alternate spellingsof the
words inglorious (inglourious) and bastards (basterds). Although
admittedly a contentious proposition, I believe the film is best catego
rized as a form of science-fiction fantasy, because Inglourious Basterds
inglouRious BasTeRDs and DJango unchaineD
95
constructs an entirely new history with its alternate World War II his
torical timeline.3
Within the genre of science fiction, history can be fluid, specula
tive, and flexible, all elements at play in Inglourious Basterds. Further
more, in science fiction related genres like the superhero comic book
and graphic novel, alternate realities and parallel or divergent universes
are common tropes in which revered historical events are given un
conventional outcomes. Certainly, DC Comics has used the trope of
the multiverse as a means to explore and write alternate versions of
character histories and events without contradicting the continuity
of other narratives. A few standout examples of this what if alterna
tive reality trope are Watchmen (Alan Moore, 1986), which has the U.S.
winning the Vietnam War; Ex Machina (Brian K. Vaughan and Tony
Harris, 2004), a sci-fi graphic novel meets political drama where one of
the Twin Towers remains standing; to a lesser extent, the film Another
Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011); and my favorite episode from the original
television series Star Trek (19661969), Mirror, Mirror, whereby a
transporter malfunction delivers Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to an
alternate universe where Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) has a goatee. Not
only is the notion of an alternate universe a cornerstone of the science
fiction genre, Hitleresque figures frequently appear who symbolize evil
incarnate, a convention periodically used in the original Twilight Zone
television series (19591964), the long running British show Doctor
Who (1963to date), several episodes of the original Star Trek television
series, sci-fi schlock like They Saved Hitlers Brain (various, 1969), the
original Star Wars films (George Lucas, 1977, 1980, and 1983), and the
sci-fi thriller The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) in which
multiple Hitler clones are created.4
Inglourious Basterds is not an attempt at historical fiction, since
the film clearly exists beyond the threshold of plausibility. Rather, In
glourious Basterds fully exploits the considerable leeway allowed in
science fiction for (re)presenting various historical figures and his
torical events; and, like virtually all science fiction, whether good, bad,
or mediocre, the film indulges in metaphoric rhetoric and imagery to
examine some current ethical dilemma by means of social or political
allegory.5 Inglourious Basterds is less about World War II and more
about critically deconstructing the political pathology of racial vio
lence.6 The result is a film that is not merely an outlandish war movie:
it is also an elaborate ideological set piece for exploring the perversity
of discrimination as belief and behavior, as corrupted and corrupting,
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Race on the Qt
by institution and individual. In this sense, Inglourious Basterds osten

tatiously calls attention to the destructive madness of racism and in
vests considerable visual energy signaling the pathology of racism
by rendering various characters that populate the film in a distorted
and almost cartoonish fashion. Inglourious Basterds is not interested
in replicating the Nazi regime through a docudrama aesthetic; its re
jection of this style is clearly recognizable with the Nazi officer nick
named the Jew Hunter.
The gut-wrenching opening of the film introduces the nefarious Jew
Hunter, Colonel Hans Landa, and signals the type of visual rhetoric
the film will continue to employ to convey the grotesque dimensions of
subjugation. Colonel Landa arrives in the picturesque French country
side to interrogate the dairy farmer LaPadite (Denis Menochet) con
cerning the whereabouts of a Jewish family Landa is trying to locate. It
quickly becomes apparent that Landa is aware that the family is hiding
under the floorboards of the farmers cottage and that he has horrible
intentions for them, yet the farmer and Landa initially trade poker faces
as they sit at the table. Their conversational confrontation plays out as a
suspenseful and excruciatingly somber real-time exchange until Landa
unveils a smokers pipe of obscene proportions. Like a sight gag from a
Bugs Bunny cartoon, Landas pipe visually disrupts the foreboding ten
sion of the scene.7 On one hand, the disproportionately sized smokers
pipe functions as a visual prop that shatters the solemn atmosphere
the scene has diligently created. On the other hand, Landas Sherlock
Holmeslike pipe overtly calls attention to a defining element of insti
tutional subjugationspectacle.8
As a film, Inglourious Basterds is most accomplished and artistic
in deploying visual metaphors to convey the pathology of racism.
Landas flamboyant pipe signifies the type of exaggerated, excessive,
and narcissistic displays of spectacle employed by all oppressive and
totalitarian regimes and institutionsand by their agents of repres
sionto manufacture an intimidating aura of superiority. Later in the
film this same point is restated by showing Hitler as a peevish dandy
sitting for a literally larger-than-life mural portrait. However, in the
world of Inglourious Basterds even the protagonists are warped. For
example, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is a caricature, a twisted
take on the larger-than-life filmic figure of the American military
man in the style of John Wayne in the The Green Berets (various, 1968)
or George C. Scott in Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970). Lieutenant
Raine, the leader of a Jewish American assassination squad sent be
inglouRious BasTeRDs and DJango unchaineD 97
The outlandish pipe of Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) signals the grotesque
dimensions of subjugation in Inglourious Basterds.
hind German lines to kill Nazis, delivers inspiring speeches to his men
with an exaggerated vocal delivery reminiscent of Looney Toons Fog
horn Leghorn. Furthermore, he admonishes the men on his team to
scalp hundreds of Nazi soldiers to strike fear in the enemy, and he rel
ishes his ability to carve near-perfect swastikas into the foreheads of
his enemies with his oversized Bowie knife. Given that in the alternate
world of Inglourious Basterds the final atrocities of the Holocaust are
averted with the murder of Adolf Hitler and virtually his entire cadre of
high-level Nazi henchman, the metaphoric setup becomes increasingly
clear. Extreme conditions require extreme responses, and heroic figures
are constructed in proportion to the grotesque articulations of abomi
nable inhumanity epitomized by the various Nazi officers presented in
the film. Without doubt, the annihilating impulse of racism is repre
sented by showing Landa ordering the soldiers under his command to
execute the Jewish family hidden under the dairy farmers floorboards.
But Inglourious Basterds is not content to just fixate on Nazism: the
film also indicts American racism by optically invoking the striking
imagery of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), a classic American film with
widely acknowledged racist overtones.9
In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), an ex-Confederate
soldier, learns that his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), was captured by
Comanche Indians and vows to bring her back. As he labors to find
her, his hatred of Native Americans mounts and his anxiety that his
niece has assimilated with the Comanche people grows; it becomes in
creasingly uncertain whether Ethan intends to save Debbie or kill her.
The Searchers concludes with a stunning image of Edwards ending his
five-year quest by delivering Debbie to the doorstep of her fathers (his
98 Race on the Qt
brothers) home, his lone figure silhouetted against a bright and empty
landscape.
Inglourious Basterds restages this iconic conclusion from The
Searchers, except that the point of view is from inside LaPadites cot
tage and the doorway frames the fleeing figure of Shoshanna Dreyfus
(Mlanie Laurent), a young girl running in terror across a picturesque
knoll as she barely escapes the death sentence just meted out to her
family. Visually, the scene functions as a brilliant optic reversal of The
Searchers and transcodes the redemptive racism of Ethan with the
virulent racism of Landa by substituting the triumphant homecoming
of Ethans adolescent niece with a fleeing teenage Shoshanna.
The subversive mirroring of The Searchers is not the only visual
scheme implemented in Inglourious Basterds to underscore the racial
import that Shoshanna represents. In The Searchers racial miscegena
tion is a potential death sentence for Debbie, a young white woman.
Inglourious Basterds further inverts The Searchers by presenting inter
racial intimacy between Shoshanna as an adult woman and her theater
projectionist Marcel (Jacky Ido), a black man. Although they are in
volved in a clandestine relationship, it is a loving one that in due course
functions as a basis for righteous retribution. Their pair-bonding is piv
otal in bringing to bear Shoshannas plan to incinerate Hitler and the
Nazi high command during the premier of a highly anticipated German
propaganda film: Marcel must lock the exits of the theater and set it
ablaze.
Besides the figure of a victimized Jew, Shoshanna also stands proxy
for a variety of other oppressed groups. For example, when she is
shown applying Indian war paint to her face during the climactic fire,
she signifies Native Americans. When she fends off the repeated un
wanted romantic advances of a Nazi war hero, she symbolizes sexually
harassed women. In addition, her intimate relationship with a black
man signals her alliance with blackness, a marginalized presence and
discredited identity in the film. With these visual cues Shoshanna sub
versively demonstrates how Inglourious Basterds operates on several
ideological levels.
But Shoshanna is not just a conflated symbol of oppression; she also
conveys the power of the oppressed to enact retribution. Before Marcel
is cued to light a pile of highly flammable nitrate film stock, guaranteed
to set the entire theater aflame in a short time, the image of Shoshannas
head is projected onto the screen. Shoshannas disembodied Giant
Face declares, I have a message for Germany. That you are all going
Shoshannas lover and theater projectionist Marcel (Jacky Ido) in Inglourious Basterds.
to die, and I want you to look deep into the face of the Jew who is going
to do it . . . She then ominously cackles over the death scene as Hitler,
his various high level henchmen, and other Nazi supporters are burned
alive and later riddled with bullets by two members of the Basterd
team. The visual pyrotechnics Tarantino skillfully deploys to create
such a disturbing death scene clearly challenge conventional film aes
thetics concerning the display of World War II Jewishness beyond the
genocidal destruction and victimization of German Jews at the hands
of Nazis.10 The image of Shoshannas head projected continuously onto
the screen as the fire consumes everyone in a hellish conflagration re
mains in the minds eye long after the film is over, a stubborn reminder
of the disruptive power of film.11 Even after the screen has burned away,
Shoshannas giant face appears hovering in the air on wafts of billowing
smoke. Although the last image of Shoshanna is visually similar to the
disembodied head of the magician in the Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming,
1939), the visceral effect of Shoshannas uncanny spectral image is un
nerving and strange. In this regard, the image recalls the gigantic flying
stone-godhead from the cult sci-fi film Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974), in
which a menacing figure makes ominous declarations about death and
spews guns and ammunition from its mouth. Ultimately, Shoshanna
brazenly rejects representation as a tragic Jewish figure and creates a
chilling image of revenge. She also signifies the radical confrontation
and destruction of institutional sources of oppression: by loving a black
man and refuting the notion of miscegenation, by becoming a symbolic
Native American warrior, and by confronting and destroying the Nazi
who sexually harassed her.
As visually self-conscious, cathartic, and racially subversive as In
100 Race on the Qt
glourious Basterds is in deploying various semiotics concerning race,

the film also deploys discursive strategies to critique racism, particu
larly as it pertains to American race relations. The first discursive ex
ample involves a scene where Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) is
dining with a cadre of sycophants and pontificating on the racial poli
tics of American sports. Goebbels comments, Its only the offspring
of slaves that allows America to be competitive athletically. American
Olympic gold can be measured in Negro sweat. Goebbels passing re
marks about black folks sweat equity in American sports is a tele
graphed reference to Jesse Owens gold medal success at the 1936 Berlin
Olympics that undermined Nazi propaganda about the superiority of
an Aryan master race. Moreover, these filmic comments draw atten
tion to and speak to a broader racial discourse that advocates a crude
biological determinism that reductively translates black racial identity
to that of the athlete or casts blacks as dupes of the sports industry.12
Consequently, Goebbels superficial comments about black folks sweat
equity accentuate the nagging issue of race in America.
A subsequent scene further underscores how Inglourious Basterds
engages not just Nazi subjugation but also American racial oppression.
The scene takes place at a tavern table where several members of the
Basterds, disguised as Nazi officers, are seated. Before the Basterds
can leave the pub with their clandestine contact, Bridget von Ham
mersmark (Diane Kruger), an SS Officer (August Diehl) invites himself
to sit with them. At the overbearing insistence of Officer Hellstrom
all five begin playing a card-game version of charades in which partici
pants deduce, through a series of clues, the name of a famous person
written on a piece of paper stuck on their foreheads. Certainly, the un
invited table guest dilemma is a clever way to ratchet up the tension
for the audience as the Basterds struggle to stay in character as Nazi
officers in the midst of real Nazi soldiers. However, the opening round
of the guessing game also serves as a subversive commentary on the
cultural politics of American race relations in a setting far removed
from the United States. The conversation proceeds as follows:
majoR dieteR hellStRom: Now, gentlemen, around this time you
could ask whether youre real or fictitious. I, however, think thats too
easy, so I wont ask that yet. Okay, my native land is the jungle. I visited
America, but the visit was not fortuitous to me, but the implication is
that it was to somebody else. When I went from the jungle to America,
did I go by boat?
101
bRidget von hammeRSmaRk: Yes.

majoR dieteR hellStRom: Did I go against my will?
majoR dieteR hellStRom: On this boat ride, was I in chains?
majoR dieteR hellStRom: When I arrived in America, was I dis
played in chains?
bRidget von hammeRSmaRk: Yes!
majoR dieteR hellStRom: Am I the story of the Negro in
America?
cPl. Wilhelm Wicki: No.
majoR dieteR hellStRom: Well, then, I must be King Kong.
Film essayist William Brown accurately notes what the game ideologi
cally articulates in Inglourious Basterds:
In guessing that he has been given King Kong, Hellstrom recasts the
story as being an allegory of slavery in the USA. Carried across the
ocean in chains, where white Americans use the savage King Kong
for profit, Hellstroms reading of King Kong as allegorical of the slave
experience in the USA also reminds us of the ideological nature of
cinema: cinema does not just tell us entertaining stories, but these
stories also have hidden meanings, that, in the case of King Kong,
reveal the capitalist and racist ideology of the United States.13
Hence, Hellstroms accurate assessment of his celebrity identity within
the context of the game articulates a striking racial allegory that also
derives its racial resonance from a long history of equating blacks as
subhuman and simian in appearance and behavior.14 Within the context
of Inglourious Basterds, the reference to King Kong does double duty as
racial analogy and as an analogy.
The racial subtext of the King Kong film franchise (1933, 1976, and
2005)and that of other ape-centric films like the Planet of the Apes
film cyclehas been thoroughly deconstructed for its allegorical re
imagining of American race relations, sexual politics, and the popular
articulation of African Americans as animalistic, primitive, and, ulti
mately, a threat to American culture, law, and order.15 Consequently,
the comments in Inglourious Basterds concerning King Kong as a
whole articulate and represent allegorical meaning that operates be
yond the strict narrative and plot devices employed to deliver a thrilling
102
Race on the Qt
moment of comic relief in a fictional film about Word War II. Certainly,
Inglourious Basterds is toying with the historical relationship between
film and violence and with the inversion of historical terror whereby
German Nazis are burned to death instead of German Jews during
the Holocaust.16 Nonetheless, Inglourious Basterds has ideological
meaning(s) culled from a range of variegated racial references. In this
case, the iconic image of a giant ape dragged out of the jungle and placed
in chains for economic exploitation and the entertainment of whites
easily dovetails with the reality of the U.S. slave trade, whereby cap
tivity and enslavement are fundamental experiences that inform black
racial formation in America. In this regard, the hidden meaning of
Inglourious Basterds suggests the pathology of German Nazism is the
ideological cousin to American racism.
Although films like the George Lucasproduced Red Tails (Anthony
Hemingway, 2012) and Spike Lees Miracle at St. Anna (2008) appear
to be leading contenders as contemporary examples of antiracist films
that tackle World War IIera racial prejudice, these films are less about
making a compelling critique of institutional racism and more fo
cused on establishing the dignity of black folk in a discriminatory en
vironment. To this point, Red Tails and Miracle at St. Anna are racial
underdog narratives with a Horatio Alger twist, much like conventional
Hollywood race-message movies of the past such as Home of the Brave
(Mark Robson, 1949), A Soldiers Story (Norman Jewison, 1984), Men of
Honor (George Tillman Jr., 2000), and Antwone Fisher (Denzel Wash
ington, 2002). These films are unlike Inglorious Basterds, which signals
destruction as a remedy for racism, a point brazenly presented with
the death of a theater full of a fascist and racist audience members.17
Rather, these race-message movies express strong assimilationist im
pulses that end with lasting images of triumphant black achievement
in the face of white racism, instead of focusing on the destruction of the
institutions that are the source of disenfranchisement. In this sense, In
glourious Basterds compels inclusion within the ranks of radical anti
racist films that filmically destroy the source of racism, either literally,
as in Ivan Dixons militant The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973); hy
perbolically, as in the racial satire Putney Swope (Robert Downey, Sr.,
1969); metaphorically, as in Samuel Fullers White Dog (1982); or opti
cally, as in Scott McGehees and David Siegels psychological horror
film Suture (1993). Most important, as an antiracist film, Inglourious
Basterds stakes out critical ideological territory by rejecting the Holly
wood impulse to rehabilitate white racists and to give the impression
that racism is a personal issue, such as the jerry-rigged racial ideology

found in films like American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998) and Crash
(Paul Haggis, 2004) that make racism an individuals choice, driven by
ignorance or situational circumstances, respectively.
In American History X a committed neo-Nazi forsakes his racism
after encountering a nice black man in prison, and Crash shows a racist
white laPd officer transformed after pulling a black woman out of her
wrecked car before it explodes, an act of heroism that is designed to
negate the emotional trauma he inflicted on her when he sexually mo
lested her weeks earlier under the pretense of a pat-down. Inglourious
Basterds stands in sharp contrast to these mealy-mouthed attempts to
recuperate white racists. The conclusion of Inglourious Basterds de
livers a powerful message that racism can be made invisible, and that
advocates of white supremacy like Hans Landa are not only indis
cernible but can accrue political power, social acceptance, privilege,
status, and real material gain in America.18 This point is clearly signaled
when Landa brokers a deal with Allied military elites absolving all his
crimes; he is promised U.S. citizenship and secures assurances for his
financial security once he is relocated to America. Landa is on the verge
of parlaying his participation in a racist system to his benefit, in and
out of the Nazi party, until Lt. Aldo Raine intervenes in the Faustian
deal. Raine caves in to his compulsion to carve swastikas on the fore
heads of captured Nazis, and in graphic detail he engraves a swastika
on Landas forehead with his bowie knife. Permanently scarred, Landa
remains marked as a racist, and his ability to effortlessly assimilate into
the American backdrop as a modestly wealthy and upstanding citizen
is ruined. Inglourious Basterds refuses to allow Landa to disappear into
American society as a recuperated racist, an unconventional ending by
Hollywood standards. Admittedly, Inglourious Basterds did play to con
ventional box-office wisdom and courted critical acceptance by muti
lating Nazis and cinematically slaying Adolf Hitler, one of the most
detested figures in modern history.19
Not surprisingly, Inglourious Basterds was successful financially
and garnered multiple Oscar nominations from the Academy of Mo
tion Picture Arts and Sciences, despite depictions of extreme violence
and grisly visuals such as scalps ripped off of dead Nazi soldiers, the
bloodied skull tops of several Nazi soldiers strewn amongst leaves like
human litter, bullet-ridden Nazis convulsing in a manner similar to the
notable death scene at the end of Arthur Penns Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
and the morbid bashing of a Nazi officers skull with a bat. Other simi
104 Race on the Qt
larly radical antiracist films such as White Dog, a film about a canine
trained to savagely attack and kill black people at sight, and The Spook
Who Sat by the Door, which ends with images of America on fire, not
only evaded commercial success and critical accolades but were actu
ally suppressed from public viewing.20 Inglourious Basterds, with its
wanton destruction of numerous Nazis, signaled that revenge by the
oppressed was just, either as institutional destruction or permanent
condemnation (e.g., Landa with a swastika carved into his forehead).
Despite the successful execution of the revenge motif in Inglourious
Basterds, a motif previously established in the Kill Bill films, racial re
venge in Tarantinos next film would prove more problematic. Django
Unchained (2012) explicitly tackles antebellum slavery in America.
Without a doubt one of the most enduring shibboleths of American
racism is the enslavement of black folk, a cornerstone of American
history, politics, economics, and culture. Typically, at best Hollywood
films have advanced a rather trite view of black enslavement; at worst
the films are racist masterpieces like Griffiths The Birth of a Nation, a
film that not only presented the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, but also pro
vided Hollywood with the appropriate film grammar for the modern
movie. Following Birth of a Nation, subsequent Hollywood films were
guilty of imagining Southern slavery as socially benign, with nearly an
entire Hollywood genre built on this ideological conceit. Film scholar
Ed Guerrero judiciously captures this racial dynamic:
[T]he film industry began to conceptualize and produce the Old
South as an escapist vehicle, a panacea for depression-era anxieties
. . . During Hollywoods classic period (1930 to 1945), there was hardly
a plantation film made that did not contain some sort of sentimental
ized musical interlude performed by devoted slaves on the plantation
or the black slaves of the postbellum years . . . In most of these films,
if blacks labored at all, they did so while singing happily; thus music
masked or softened the historical reality of black folks stolen labor;
along with the parasitism of the master class. Plantation life was re
produced in romantic, nostalgic scenes of splendorous wealth, clichs
such as white-columned porticos, mint juleps, and white ladies in
lavish formal gowns . . . Nowhere do these slave masters give much at
tention to what must have been a very demanding businessthe pun
ishment, torture, and exploitation involved in the day-to-day affairs of
running a slave system.21
105
Films like Gone With the Wind (1939) and Song of the South (Harve
Foster and Wilfred Jackson, 1946) stand as paradigmatic texts for my
thologizing Americas institution in their portrayals of blacks as grati
fied slaves and whites as benevolent slave masters. But this type of one
sided rendering of historical racial tensions is not unique to African
Americans. I would argue that Native American representation has ex
perienced the most one-dimensional interpretations throughout the
history of American cinema. Without question, a multitude of west
erns that explored the lives, times, tragedies, and triumphs of white
frontierism litter the American filmscape at the expense of Native
Americans.
In contrast to the established history of Hollywood films advancing
trite and racist presentations of black enslavement, a wave of militant
black slave films did crop up during the high tide of Blaxploitation films
in the 1970s, having appropriated the last vestiges of political verve
from a waning Black Power movement. Films such as Slaves (Herbert
Biberman, 1969), The Legend of Nigger Charley (Martin Goldman, 1972),
The Soul of Nigger Charley (Larry Spangler, 1973), Mandingo (Richard
Fleischer, 1975), Drum (Steve Carver, 1976), and The Slavers (Larry
Kent, 1977) transformed Black Power threats of an impending black
revolution into film clichs of abhorrent enslavement, vengeful vio
lence against whites, and gratuitous scenes of interracial sexual inter
course.22 The low point of this aesthetic makeover is the practically
unwatchable Goodbye Uncle Tom (Gualtiero Jacopetti, 1971), a gonzo,
exploitative slave film of unmatched luridness. Goodbye Uncle Tom
ostensibly chronicles the epic dehumanization of enslaved Africans
as they make their way from the African continent to the antebellum
South. In reality, however, the film itself is a virtual exercise in enslave
ment, given that the Italian film crew shot the film in Haiti under the
approval of Franois Papa Doc Duvalier, one of the Caribbeans most
despicable dictators. Most surprising, the most provocative aspect of
Goodbye Uncle Tom is not the gratuitous nudity or spectacles of torture
but the use of science fiction to jumpstart the narrative: a time machine
appears to transport present-day documentarians to the past in order
to record atrocities and interview various agents of black enslavement.
Unfortunately, the fully restored film print of Goodbye Uncle Tom is
a pornographic smorgasbord of sick and sickening imagery where poor
Haitian peasants are given the worst possible direction in recreating
nauseatingly vivid representation of racial oppression as a Technicolor
spectacle. The most mainstream and successful challenge in American
106 Race on the Qt
pop culture to such propagandistic examples of black enslavement is

Roots (1977), a 1970s television miniseries about American slavery.
Roots recast the epic plantation film that was Hollywoods vision
of slavery as a narrative about reluctant immigrants. Although the in
dignities of subjugation are included in particular installments of the
saga, the overarching tone of the groundbreaking miniseries is saccha
rine. It is a story predominantly about blacks on a quest for dignity, a
perspective still present in many of the recent Hollywood films that
tackle the topic of racial discrimination. By the early 1980s, the militant
Black Power politics of the late 1960s had waned, and not surprisingly,
so had the overly formulaic Blaxploitation film fad of the 1970s. As a
result, filmic representations of American black enslavement virtually
disappeared, only to periodically crop up in historicized film interpre
tations such as Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), Amistad (Steven Spielberg,
1997), the bizarre Ill Gotten Gains (Joel B. Marsden, 1997), and Beloved
(Jonathan Demme, 1998). Interestingly, science fiction tropes are used
in several films that address African American enslavement. In science
fiction films, the legacy of black enslavement and its attendant cul
tural anxieties are experienced as racial, political, and social allegories
and as aesthetic disavowals all collapsed into a singular dreamscape of
visual spectacle, as seen in the original Planet of the Apes (Franklin J.
Schaffner, 1968), The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984),
Brother Future (Roy Campanella II, 1991), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott,
1982), Alien Nation (Graham Baker, 1988), and The Matrix (Wachowski
Brothers, 1999).23 Most important, the science fiction staging of black
enslavement clearly indicates that filmic representations of African
American enslavement are remarkably malleable, a viewpoint also em
bodied in Tarantinos Django Unchained.
Fittingly, much has been made of Django Unchained as a black spa
ghetti western that fashions its cowboy style out of Sergio Leones
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
and Sergio Corbuccis original Django (1966). Django Unchained draws
its racial swagger from a collage of dubiously titled films like Boss
Nigger (Jack Arnold, 1975) and Mandingo (1975).24 Although consider
able signifiers of the western are present in Django Unchained, such
as sweeping shots of men riding their horses against expansive vistas
and cowboy campouts around a fire, the film is something altogether
different. A closer and more rigorous examination reveals that Django
Unchained is less al dente than first impressions suggest. In fact, the
vocabulary of the Gothic is a significant presence in the film, even
107
though upon first glance Gothic tropes appear to be at extreme odds

with the self-proclaimed spaghetti western aesthetic pushed by the
director and credulously accepted by critics.25 But with Django Un
chained, the sightlines for viewing an Italian subgenre of the western as
a statement about black enslavement are obscured. The film clearly has
more in common with the Gothic horror aesthetic found in films like
The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), Beloved (1998), and The Skeleton Key
(Iain Softley, 2005) than any spaghetti western. To this point, Django
Unchained begins with a conventional Gothic motif, a man metamor
phosing in the deep dark of night. The staging for this transformation
occurs after several shackled black male slaves are shown marching
barefoot across blistering, sun-scorched terrain as two white slave
traders on horseback escort them, until nightfall when they eventually
reach a dark, wind-chilled woodland.
Their solemn trek under a moonless sky is interrupted by the ap
pearance of a giant molar bobbing back and forth on top of a riding
coach. The driver of the coach is Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a
dentist cum bounty hunter who is looking to purchase a slave named
Django to identify a trio of notorious sibling bandits called the Brittle
Brothers. Earnest negotiations between Schultz and the two slave
drivers conclude abruptly when Schultz shoots one captor dead and
the others horse in the head. As a result of his ruthless tactics, the
mare collapses on the slave-driver and crushes his leg. Schultz sub
sequently frees Django, who immediately flings a flimsy blanket from
around his shoulders and emerges from the dark a transformed figure.
The scene is extraordinarily eerie as Django sheds the trappings of en
slavement yet literally remains scarred by it: a collage of whip marks on
his back are distinctly visible. The scene becomes increasingly evoca
tive of a horror film with the actions of the remaining shackled slaves.
Like zombies from George A. Romeros classic horror film Night of the
Living Dead (1968), they trudge forward like the walking dead to kill the
white slaver trapped underneath his horse. As they plod forward, their
bondage chains rattle until they close in on the hapless man and shoot
him in his head. This uncanny display of violent licentiousness fore
shadows the Gothic excesses woven throughout the rest of the film,
and Django Unchained doles out a liberal number of them: fanciful,
ambivalent absurdity; fantastic displays of the grotesque; and perverse
and diabolical exploits.
The fanciful is first signaled in the style and speech of Dr. Schultz, a
ruthless bounty hunter with aristocratic flair and magniloquent speech
108 Race on the Qt
Django (Jamie Foxx) in full Little Boy Blue Gothic splendor in Django Unchained.
patterns. Arguably, the character is a symbolic nod to the image of the

white abolitionist as an erudite social reformer of tastes and traditions
somewhat distinct from American common folk. Yet, the full-fledged
expression of the fantastic registers when Django self-consciously de
cides to don an electric Blue Boy Little Lord Fauntleroy costume to
play the role of Schultzs valet. This costume officially marks Django
as mythic character, and as the narrative progresses he increasingly be
comes a figure who exceeds the logic, rules, and requirements of realism
and historical fact but who definitely meets the demands of a Gothic
aesthetic. The imaginaryor, more accurately, the Gothicstatus of
Django is suggested not only by the absurdity of the valet costume but
is also clearly signaled by the deployment of another classic Gothic de
vice, a mirror to show a character is enchanted or cursed. The mirror
effect is used when Django confronts one of the Brittle Brothers on the
verge of whipping Little Jody (Sharon Pierre-Louis), a young female slave
tied to a tree with her back exposed. When Little Jody catches a glimpse
of Django in a discarded full-length mirror set to one side of the tree,
his face and hands are unnaturally indiscernible. Only the Victorian
costume casts a reflection. The effect, in that moment, works to desta
bilize Django as a human representation and places him in the realm of
living myth, a specter of righteous retribution. He is able to intercede
in the public torture of the innocent and as an enchanted figure, Django
is imbued with the power to whip a white man and then subsequently
shoot him to death without any white reprisals.
Django Unchained employs superstitious elements only offered
in the Gothic aesthetic, elements that are repeated with the figure of
Djangos wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who appears as a ghost
to him, a specter that is not a mere memory or an image of longing.26

From this point forward the film fully embraces the other paradigmatic
feature of the Gothic: fusing terror with laughter.27 This fusion makes
Django a film of emotional effect rather than an accurate historical ren
dering. Case in point, the audaciously burlesque depiction of Klansmen
squabbling over the size of the cutout eye holes of their homemade
hoods (re)presents antebellum enslavement as the interplay of sadistic
horror and absurdist comedy. The result is a perversely entertaining and
comically grotesque interpretation of one of Americas most notorious
racist organizations and staunchest supporters of racial hatred and vio
lence against black folk. The Gothic effect is further evident as Django
and Schultz embark on their epic journey into the Deep South to rescue
the films maltreated heroine, Broomhilda.
After Schultz and Django discover that Broomhilda was sold to
Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a plantation owner known for
having the best bare-knuckle fighting slaves, the pair decide to pose re
spectively as a buyer and a talent scout interested in purchasing slaves
fit to fight to the death for entertainment. Under this elaborate ruse
they also plan to purchase Broomhilda. But before they make good on
their plan, Schultz and Django must meet the epitome of the Gothic vil
lain in Calvin, a decadent aristocrat and the perfect picture of internal
moral decay, intimated by the incestuous tone that he adopts whenever
his widowed sister, Lara (Laura Cayouette), is present.28
Calvin is the harbinger of the many excruciating episodes of carnage
and chilling displays of body horror experienced by various enslaved
African American characters populating the film and witnessed by
the audience. The first brutal set piece occurs shortly after the bounty
Django as a spirit of revenge (he casts a partial reflection) in Django Unchained.
110 Race on the Qt
Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) as a spectral figure in Django Unchained.
hunting pair meet Calvin in an upstairs sitting room where two black
male slaves are engaged in a bloody battle of fisticuffs to the death in
front of a warm and inviting fireplace. With frightful aplomb Calvin
provides the victor with a hammer to finish off the incapacitated
fighter, completing the death scene. Although the historical reality of
slave fights to the death as a form of white entertainment is more myth
than reality, as a racial metaphor, however, the Mandingo fight per
fectly articulates the fusion of dread and delight, abjection and desire
that underscores the appetite for violence and erotic sadism that was
black enslavement.29 The repulsive viciousness of American slavery
is further symbolized when Calvin and various business subordinates
caravan to the foreboding Candyland plantation. On their way to the
plantation they encounter DArtagnan (Ato Essandoh), a slave who was
caught running away. He is perched in a tree begging for his life while
slave catchers with leashed dogs surround him on the ground. DArta
gnan subsequently declares he no longer has the will to bludgeon other
black men to death as a Mandingo fighter. In response, Calvin coaxes
him down from the tree only to direct the slave trackers to unleash
the dogs that spring on him and begin to rip at his flesh. The absurdist
ambiance established earlier in the film with bungling Klansmen,
anachronistic background rap music, and witty punch lines delivered
by Django is shattered by the death shrieks of a black man clawed and
bitten to death by dogs. When it comes to (re)presenting black enslave
ment as torturous and terrifying, Django Unchained is deadly serious.
Only when the audience is introduced to Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson),
the faithful house slave, do the absurdist tendencies of the Gothic im
pulse present in Django Unchained reemerge with results that are

simultaneously sinister and an exercise in utter hilarity.
When Schultz and Django eventually arrive at Candies Missis
sippi plantation mansion, they meet Stephen, Candies most loyal and
trusted slave. Stephen is the consummate Uncle Tom, a derisive and
colloquial title African Americans have used to define a black person
who despises black people and acquiesces to the whims and wishes
of whites for material gain and a sense of self-worth. The animosity
Stephen expresses toward Django as a free black man is brilliantly sig
naled by Stephen almost having an apoplectic fit upon seeing Django
riding a horse onto Calvins plantation. Moreover, when Stephen and
Django occupy the same cinematic frame, they symbolize, albeit reduc
tively, an ongoing and strident ideological divide within black political
discourse over whether accommodationism or militancy is the most
effective approach toward gaining racial justice in America. However,
the sell-out racial politics Stephen symbolizes are more complex than
the caricatured performance of Stephens front-stage persona. Later,
in an interesting reversal of power, the habitually servile Stephen is
shown cavalierly sipping brandy while instructing his master, Calvin,
that Schultz and Django are there to get Broomhilda.
This pivot in power suggests that Stephen also epitomizes the
sophisticated guile and misdirection needed for African Americans
to survive enslavement and possibly outwit whites, for better and for
worse. Deception as a survival mechanism of enslavement is further
signaled in the climactic confrontation between Stephen and Django
when Stephen abandons his walking cane, affected limp, and elderly
Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), the loyal slave in Django Unchained.
112
Race on the Qt
A momentary reversal of power between Stephen and Calvin Candie (Leonardo

DiCaprio) in Django Unchained.
mannerism, stands straight, and walks over to the bottom of the stair
case to show his contempt for Django, who is peering down at him.
By shedding his veneer of feeble subservience, Stephen communicates
that Django may think he is above him but he is not better than him.
Despite these symbolic nods to the nuances of black agency in the most
oppressive of contexts, Jacksons performance as a faithful house slave
makes him arguably the most loathsome figure in the film. It is a per
formance that straddles the line between method acting genius and rep
rehensible caricature. Ultimately, history will be the definitive judge as
to which interpretation has the most merit. Of course attributing such
a servile character to Samuel L. Jackson as an exceptional source is an
absolutely specious critique. The prototype for Jacksons debatable per
formance is Griffiths Birth of a Nation, a film that provided the para
digmatic black caricatures (played by white actors in blackface) of the
Uncle Tom, Mammy, Buck, and Coon characters for later generations
of black actors to imitate or attempt to discredit.30
Although much has been made of Django Unchained as a unique ex
amination of American enslavement in the form of a spaghetti western,
rather the aesthetic excesses of the Gothic are employed to address the
conventional horrors of black subjugation in antebellum America. The
film is a Gothic text. How else are we to understand the considerable
screen time given to such props as a slaves skull used to deliver a so
liloquy about phrenology at a dining room table, or to account for the
scenes of Broomhilda pouring a full glass of water on the floor, then
passing out and collapsing after seeing Django at Calvins plantation?
Skulls and fainting heroines are staples in the Gothic production,
113
and they play to true melodramatic affect in Django Unchained. Fred

Botting maps numerous stock elements of the Gothic:
In Gothic fiction certain stock features provide the principal embodi
ments and evocations of cultural anxieties. Tortuous, fragmented
narratives relating mysterious incidents, horrible images and life
threatening pursuits predominate . . . Specters, monsters, demons,
corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns, fainting heroines,
and bandits populate Gothic landscapes as suggestive figures of imag
ined and realistic threats.31
Likewise, Django Unchained includes bandits, skeletons, evil aristo
crats, specters, fainting heroines, faces that do not cast a reflection,
corpse-trading, and nocturnal transformations.32 Consequently, given
the aforementioned aesthetic rubric, Django Unchained is quite con
sistent with the Gothic aesthetic in its wholesale use of various Gothic
tropes, and it invites a rereading of the film as a Gothic production that
frenetically articulates and signifies the ridiculous, absurd, sublime,
and profoundly nightmarish conventions of life as an enslaved black in
America. Django Unchaineds aesthetic approach is exceedingly radical
when compared to various other films that have addressed Americas
peculiar institution but which fail to lay bear how peculiar it actually
wasa sentiment embodied in Django Unchained in toto.
For example, the films The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and The
Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) focus on fugitive slaves fending off attacks
from white authorities while catering to the ham-fisted politics of Blax
ploitation films. In Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Boss Nigger
black sheriffs take overracist small towns, a reversal of racial polarities
of power. Within these films, enslavement is used as a historical plat
form to symbolize Black Power politics as both militant revolution and
community control. In succeeding decades the overall impact of these
representational valences around the depiction of African American
enslavement in American cinema was a political mixed bag. Undoubt
edly, the Hollywood films of the present that engage the institution of
slavery have abandoned the Old South mythology of black enslave
ment as a former paradise. Nonetheless, films like Glory, Amistad,
and Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012) tend to present only fleeting and
episodic expressions of black agency against whites. Amistad and Lin
coln in particular are invested in exploring the bureaucratic burden of
black enslavement on notions of American democracy. Certainly, both
114 Race on the Qt
The Gothic aesthetic on full display in Django Unchained.
film productions are more responsive to demystifying the Old South

mythology with images and narratives that depict the mechanisms of
American enslavement as violent and dehumanizing. Yet both films
dwell primarily on the existential angst of Americas political elite as
they try to reconcile the differences between what America espouses
as its political ideals and what it actually practices concerning life, lib
erty, justice, and human dignity. In Amistad, the black protagonists
climatic moment is a mangled declaration for freedom. In the epic Lin
coln, a formerly enslaved house worker quickly glosses over the fact
that she was beaten with a shovel as a child as she rushes to attend
to the president; it appears as a verbal footnote in relationship to the
grand discourse on American slavery that the film represents. For the
most part, both films predominantly present black folk as dignified but
silently suffering figures. Only 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) is
a serious testament to the mental and physical trauma of enslavement
from the perspective of the racially oppressed.
Similar to Django Unchained, the main character in 12 Years a Slave
is on a quest to reunite with his family after being enslaved for more
than a decade. But the tale told by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor)
is a true adaptation of this harrowing portion of his life. Northup is a
free man with a wife and two children living in New York. He works as
a carpenter and musician until he is tricked, kidnapped, labeled a run
away slave under a false name, and sold into southern bondage. From
here, the film explores the daily struggles of enslavement for black folk.
At times poetically uncompromising, it visually logs the type of violent
dehumanization of the body, mind, and spirit that enslavement entails.
Despite the pitch-perfect performance turned in by Ejiofor as a man
struggling to maintain hope, the film veers into uneven terrain in its
portrayal of the punishment and discipline suffered by Patsey (Lupita
Nyongo), a young female slave. Her repeated beatings and rape become
a spectacle of depravity visited upon a black body meant to represent
in toto the violence visited upon black bodies, from slave ship to public
lynching. Moreover, the continuous unedited shots showing a black
slave being beaten highlight the sadistic voyeurism that is inimical
to 12 Years a Slave, and they invoke a cinema of cruelty that borders
on horror and invites comparison to torture porn.33 Yet, despite the
psychosexual depravity that is the currency of 12 Years a Slave, it is less
a horror film than Django Unchained. Rather 12 Years a Slave relies
more on the emotional valences of loss, shame, and despair, an emo
tional triad that has more in common with Paul Schraders film Hard
core (1979) than any other film about black enslavement to date. Hard
core is without doubt a destructive work, in which death and film are
grafted together as a father, Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott), searches for
his daughter who has disappeared into the unseemly world of porno
graphic snuff films.
In 12 Years a Slave, Northup wants to reunite with his family, a desire
made all the more poignant by showing Northup with his family, confi
dent, accomplished, and fully dressed in the style of the period. But as
a slave, the foundations of his previous world erode; he is later shown
stripped down to the dingy attire of slavery, isolated, insecure, and con
fused as despair begins to slowly seep into his being. A similar decon
struction is apparent in Hardcore with VanDorns methodical unrav
eling as a parent, person, father, and religious follower, after he sees his
daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) manhandled in a pornographic film while
sitting in a seedy porno theater. In order to find and save his daughter,
VanDorn must pose as a pornographer. He must become what he de
spises and witness deplorable acts of dehumanization to reunite with
his child. Similarly, Northup, a free man, must adopt the ways of a slave
so that he can live long enough to find a way to reunite with his family.
In trying to reunite with their loved one(s) both characters are exposed
to sadistic violence, sexual exploitation, and senseless death as the
price of doing business. In this sense, the moral despair wrought from
kidnapping and subsequent exploitation is the most arresting emo
tional theme, palpably visceral in Hardcore and poignantly captured in
12 Years a Slave. Perhaps, like Hardcore with its seedy mise-en-scenes,
12 Years a Slave is guilty of the very sins it earnestly attempts to revile.
Given the tortuous ordeals the characters and the audience must en
116 Race on the Qt
dure, the film successfully humanizes black folk, but the cost is a visual
barrage of dehumanizing depictions of psychological abuse and sick
ening physical punishment. Arguably, 12 Years a Slave is as problem
atic as it is progressive in presenting a serious filmic treatise on black
enslavement. But to the films credit, 12 Years a Slave labors to tran
scend the physical and sexual degradations of slavery that are the voy
euristic bread and butter of a film such as Goodbye Uncle Tom.
In startling contrast, Tarantinos Django Unchained makes black
romantic love the focus of the film and fulfills the conventional cul
tural work of Hollywood films to affirm individualistic heroism. Con
sequently, the forbidden love story of an enslaved couple is played out
against the epic horror of slavery in America. In the end, the black
protagonist gets the girl, vanquishes all of his enemies, and rides off
into the proverbial sunset. Yet as a metaphor of racial agency, Django
Unchaineds traditional Hollywood narrative, spliced with black en
slavement, carries a much more radical message than the paint-by-the
numbers plot points just covered. Surprisingly, Django Unchained is a
stirring assertion of the commitment and courage of black folk to love
one another, despite the most callous of environments and under the
most oppressive institutions. In this sense, Django and Broomhilda are
similar to the defiant love symbolized by the character Sixo in Toni
Morrisons Pulitzer Prizewinning novel Beloved, who treks across
treacherous landscape risking limb and lynching just to see his Thirty
Mile Woman for a few precious moments.
Moreover, Django Unchained insists on highlighting the sado-erotic
subjugation of African slaves, a point repeatedly signaled by flash
backs of Broomhilda being tortured by branding, whipping, and being
stripped of her clothes; by passing shots of bondage irons that encase
black bodies; and by the repeated threats of castration made against a
captive Django. The beatings that the black bodies endure in 12 Years a
Slave are in many ways a response to American cinemas sanitized and
often lopsided presentation of American slavery as mere discomfort.
But in Django Unchained the spectacle of physical degradation, epito
mized by Mandingo fighting competitions, functions as a powerful
racial metaphor for the fetishized black body of today, a potent signi
fier of the relationships between black professional athletes and team
owners, a vast majority of whom are white men.34 In this sense, Django
Unchained works on a broader ideological scale than does 12 Years a
Slave. Most specifically, Django Unchained is a trenchant reminder of
Americas racial legacy and its relationship to the racial politics of the
117
Django as a cowboy dandy in Django Unchained.
present era, a point perfectly underscored by the anachronistic use of

contemporary rap music in the film.
Admittedly, the final forty minutes of Django Unchained are more
cowboy clich than Gothic love story given how Django finally dis
penses of all his enemies with a six-shooter. Moreover, the closing
image of Django decked out in oval sunglasses, a flamboyant vest, and
three-quarter-length jacket, and shown smoking a cigarette from a
skinny cigarette holder fulfills the role of a black dandy cowboy similar
to Toller (Sidney Poitier) in Duel at Diablo (Ralph Nelson, 1966), Jesse
Lee in Posse (Mario Van Peebles, 1993), and Jim West (Will Smith) in
Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999). Later, after the plantation is
blown away by dynamite the film succumbs to an insipid conclusion by
having Django perform a series of horse tricks for Broomhildas delight,
a poor imitation of Roy Rogers riding his famous horse Trigger. On one
hand, maybe the ending has more to do with paying homage to the ob
scure black cowboy films of the past that were targeted to black audi
ences and often made outside of the traditional Hollywood film system
like Harlem on The Prairie (Sam Newfield, 1937) and Bronze Buckaroo
(Richard C. Kahn, 1939). On the other hand, it is quite reasonable the
Django trick show is a feeble tribute to Woodrow Strode, a pioneering
black actor who played black cowboys in traditional Hollywood films
and a few spaghetti westerns. Nevertheless, the ending of the film feels
tacked on, looks corny (the last thing I expect from a Tarantino film),
and comes off more as parody than tribute.35
Despite its allusions to the spaghetti western, Django Unchained
is not the western revenge narrative promoted and popularized in the
wake of the films initial box office opening. In the long run and overall,
118 Race on the Qt
Django Unchained is a Gothic horror film, and like all Gothic produc
tions the film reflects historical discontinuities and contemporary cul
tural anxieties.36 Make no mistake, howevereven as a Gothic pro
duction Django Unchained is not a perfect film. It is flawed. The film
overreaches in its length by clocking in at two hours and forty-five min
utes; it exhibits uneven pacing, has too many underdeveloped ancillary
black characters, and relies too much on flamboyant, evil white plan
tation owners and degenerate henchmen to coax the viewing audience
into cheering their destruction. But as a Gothic horror film, the ideo
logical motif of Django Unchained expresses fears American society
has difficulty directly confronting.37 Django hints at collective racial
fury on the part of enslaved black folk of the time: when Schultz tests
the idea of becoming a bounty hunter, Django quips, Kill white folks
and they pay you for it? . . . Whats not to like? In this case, Django Un
chained functions as a blatant example of the return of the repressed
and expresses a sensitivity to the real possibility of black revolt in
America given its history of real racial rebellion with Nat Turner in
1831, the Watts Rebellion in 1965, Detroit in the 1960s, Miami in 1980,
and Los Angeles in 1992.38 This anxiety around armed rebellion against
whites is present in Django Unchained, but for the most part it is as
suaged by the overly subdued performances of the other black slaves
that populate the film. Besides Django, all the other enslaved black folk
are static figures. Although Django Unchained adopts the classic Holly
wood template of heroic triumphant individualism as the most effec
tive expression of problem solving (rather than an organized and col
lective response to oppression), it leaves open an alternative reading of
this expression of individualism.
Allegorically, with the figure of Django, the film crudely articulates
the notion of the exceptional black person. Most important, Django
Unchained seems to suggest that exceptional blacks are more mili
tant and most likely to oppose white subjugation, a point signaled by
Calvins theory that Django is a one in ten thousand type of Negro.
But the one in ten thousand typology also dovetails with a more radical
idea formerly articulated by the profound and prolific intellectual and
activist W.E.B. Du Bois. He coined the term the talented tenth to de
scribe the loose statistical extrapolation, if not desire, that at least one
in ten black persons would become leaders and commit themselves
to social change to improve the conditions of black folk in America.
This sentiment is refracted in Django Unchained when Calvin Candie
119
pontificates as to why Django is defiant, so unlike the other enslaved

Africans:
Where I part company from many of my phrenologist colleagues is I
believe this is a level above bright, above talented, above loyal that a
nigger can aspire to. Say one nigger that just pops up in ten thousand.
The exceptional nigger. But I do believe that, given time exceptional
niggers like Bright Boy [Django] here become if not frequent more fre
quent. Bright Boy, you are that one in ten thousand.
Here the crude articulation of racial exceptionalism overlaps with Du
Bois belief that exceptional African Americans, the best and brightest
of the black race, will lead the masses of black folk out of social decay.
In this sense, the extended pseudoscience that Calvin Candie drones
on about at the dinner table and the triumphant heroism of Django
work as metaphors for the real politics of racial uplift and social change
that have their place in African American history. Certainly numerous
African American women and men can claim the assessment as excep
tional, but often their extraordinary contribution to black freedom oc
curs within the context of a community or possibly within some form
of organized response to oppression. But this perspective is a double
edged sword that cuts against notions of social and political advance
ment as well. Implicit in the logic of the exceptional black person as a
statistical anomaly is the proposition that the overwhelming majority
of black folk are mediocre at best. This type of thinking lays the foun
dation for the type of scientific racism found in the discredited eu
genics movements of Americas and Nazi Germanys pasts, along with
more debatable scientific pretentions found in racialized notions of
the Bell Curve.39 From this standpoint various modes of oppression ap
pear as mere manifestations of the statistical reality of supposed black
inferiority.
Nevertheless, Django Unchained is an interventionist film that at
tempts to confront the purposeful discontinuity surrounding the his
tory of the portrayal of racial oppression in American cinema. As a
grisly Gothic horror film with comedic touches, Django Unchained is
a masterfully disconcerting film original in style, depth of racial pathos,
and breadth of filmic influences. It is also provocative and visually pro
fane, similar to the early films of David Cronenberg that engage in dis
turbing displays of body horror and sexual violence, themes found in
120 Race on the Qt
Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). On the one hand, the represen
tation of American slavery in Django Unchained stands in stark con
trast to make-believe imagery found in classic and canonized Holly
wood films such as Gone With the Wind, which presented racial tropes
whereby black slaves seemed like trained pets comfortable in their en
slavement and happily obedient to their masters. On the other hand,
the successful revolt of an imaginary black man played out against a
Gothic fantasy backdrop is apolitical at best and regressive at worst. Ar
guably, until Hollywood makes a multi-million-dollar film about Nat
Turner, a real African American slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831
in Virginia, Django Unchained will have to suffice.
coda
Unlike Black music, Black cinema could find no authentic place in the
Black community . . . As a commodity, its function is finally that of
every other industrial film, every other exploitation film.
david James, allegoRies of cinema
much of the cRitical diSdain for the racial politics of black rep
resentation in Tarantinos films is rooted in the ideological vice grip of
black respectability that has shaped so much of American race rela
tions. Black folk have a long history of trying to prove their humanity
to a dismissive white social order, and that struggle has often included
a fight against over-employed stereotypes and degrading images of
black folk that justify discriminatory beliefs and practices.1 In this
sense, the concern over how black people represent themselves and
are represented by others is warranted. The criminal, sexually promis
cuous, lewd, street-life loving, and physically aggressive black person
is deemed problematic because he/she has been and is repeatedly used
to validate racist constructions of black folk for political purposes. Con
sequently, black folk have had the added responsibility of being judged
individually as representative of an entire race of people. Because of
that burden, black folk have in various eras tried to be a credit to their
race. Given this historical backdrop, it is not surprising that vocal
critics such as black filmmaker Spike Lee, noted essayist Ishmael Reed,
and television talk show host Tavis Smiley view black enslavement as
a mismatched subject for the spaghetti western genre, and they con
sider the comedic flourishes interspersed across Django Unchained as
inappropriate.2 Most likely, what these Tarantino naysayers take issue
with are the aesthetic choices used in the film that apparently compro
mise the solemnity of black peoples epic struggle in America to regain
122
Race on the Qt
their humanity. In stark contrast to Tarantinos films are films such

as Sounder (Martin Ritt, 1972), Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were
Colored (Tim Reid, 1996), and Beloved, which allow for the dignity of
black people and exemplify the tonal and narrative gravitas expected
when the topic is Jim Crow racism or enslavement.
Black racial representation in American cinema, or in films by and
about black people, has historically been charged with the task of af
fecting public opinion concerning eliminating racial discrimination
and/or bringing attention and a sympathetic awareness to some deplor
able socioeconomic conditions facing African Americans. Certainly,
classic social-problem films like Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), Raisin in the
Sun (Philip Rose, 1961), Black Like Me (Julius Tannenbaum, 1964), or
A Patch of Blue (Guy Green, 1965) were made to evoke concern over the
plight of the racially unfortunate in American society. To counteract
the negative images of black people and characters, racial progres
sives often expressed the urge to censure (or more accurately, to create
films that are more acceptable and less disruptive) when presenting
material addressing racial inequality in America to mainstream white
audiences. This burden of positive or respectable black racial repre
sentation has very conservative overtones and is informed by the main
stream rhetoric of the civil rights movement.
In addition, the anxiety over the types of racial representation pre
sented in Tarantinos films is rooted in a rather traditional media effects
perspective whereby filmic images are seen as stirring emotional,
sexual, and cognitive responses in the viewer.3 Given the popular suc
cess of Tarantinos films, a rambling paranoia endures that imagines
the effects of his racial representations of blackness as quite possibly
shaping the popular memory regarding race in America with negative
images of black people, normalizing derogatory language directed at
African Americans, and recuperating whiteness as a racially privileged
identity.4 Tarantino films become racist texts that extend the racism of
the periodparticularly with the recuperation of the n-word as a nor
malized term that whites can now feel comfortable using, or at least
enjoy hearing when deployed.5
But before we decide whether or not a given film is affecting a viewer
or declare how it is psychologically impacting a viewer, let us be as
clear as possible about the meaning of the content, or, more specifi
cally, the cultural work that a film performs, before turning the con
versation to the effect of a film on attitudes, beliefs, or social prac
tices. If the point of analysis begins with how a film makes a particular
coda
123
viewer think or feel about an event, real or constructed, and includes

literal and simplistic notions of positive and negative, the analysis
of race becomes extremely stunted. Take, for example, a film like Pre
cious (Lee Daniels, 2009), whose visual and narrative currency trades on
its heavy-handed sociological sermonizing. The black teenage protago
nist possesses a laundry list of traumatic shortcomings: she is illiterate,
abused, morbidly obese, a victim of molestation, a mother of two in
cestuous children, and a welfare stooge for her mother. This tangle of
pathology was the catalyst for former First Lady Barbara Bush to spark
a nascent national debate about the importance of literacy in the wake
of the special screening she was privy to, and to subsequently admon
ished others to see the film.6
A film like Precious could easily be categorized as a positive social
message film or a cautionary tale concerning how a lack of literacy
and an abundance of abuse warps the human spirit and stymies poten
tial and motivation. Yet a critique of the cultural work the film per
forms operates beyond positive vs. negative tropes and yields a more in
sightful set of conclusions. Precious also courts criticism for its cultural
work as yet another form of racial exploitation: a particular form of
black racial commodification whereby chronicling black inner city life
as docudramatic dysfunction is good entertainment.7 Certainly debates
concerning racial representation are important. But the cultural work
of a film like Precious (and this is true of Tarantinos popular cinema,
or any film for that matter) must be examined not in terms of literal
and simplistic notions of positive and negative but decoded for the
cultural meaning and ideological currency the film generates. As far as
the cultural politics of race are concerned, Tarantinos pop art films ap
pear to be most interested in exploiting urban criminal underworld de
pictions of blackness. Such a focus makes Tarantino and his films easy
targets to condemn for perpetually constructing stereotypical, patho
logical black characters, or as bell hooks posits, promoting a new style
of primitivism.8
One of the major ideological takeaways concerning race in the films
of Tarantino is that the representation of racial friction on film is not
solely inside the mind of the director. Rather than stabilizing white
ness, Tarantinos films home in on the mounting anxiety around black
masculinity, interracial sexuality, and racialized violence in American
society. Moreover, although Tarantinos films are indicative of par
ticular ideological themes, the strident reaction and multiple anxi
eties stirred by the use of the n-word, f-word, and graphic violence9
124 Race on the Qt
allude to a broader and more troubling ideological impulse operating in

American society today: a desire to deny or erase history. In this new
millennium of mainstream racial politics, the current hegemonic norm
exhibits a troubling tendency to overtly erase elements of American
history that are reminders of and testaments to a disturbing past and a
unfair present. This ideological and cultural drift is best captured by the
representational practices of Hollywood filmmaking in the post 9/11
era, a development cogently observed and examined in Aviva Briefel
and Sam J. Millers edited volume Horror after 9/11. Concerning Holly
woods growing role in shaping reality after 9/11, Briefel and Miller
posit:
The faith that cinematic representations could rewrite the real was
also apparent in smaller-scale operations of filmmakers who edited
the towers out of films such as Serendipity (Peter Chelsom, 2001), Zoo
lander (Ben Stiller, 2001), and SpiderMan (Sam Raimi, 2002), all of
which, produced before 9/11, included the World Trade Center in the
New York skyline. This strange impulse to alleviate trauma through a
technological repetition compulsion conveys the fantasy or nightmare
that the towers were never there to begin with.10
The position taken for granted by Hollywood is that removing dis
turbing elements, expressions, and images that are out of sync with
the prevailing norms, practices, and worldview is a mark of societal,
cultural, and even political progress. Yet these alterations are not
value neutral, and they remain particularly problematic when viewed
through the lens of race relations in America. The film Ghost World
(Terry Zwigoff, 2001) touches on this when Enid (Thora Birch) uses a
promotional picture in her art class of a caricatured black man from the
fictitious chicken restaurant franchise Cooks Chicken Inn, formerly
called The Coon Chicken Inn. Her art teacher places it on display
as a social critique of American racism. Later the art judges deem the
poster racially offensive and demand its removal. Here the critique of
racism becomes an act of racism. Even though the art officials charges
of racism on the part of Enid are incorrect, the more disturbing element
is the repressive political and cultural implications of their demand.
The visual censorship of a stubborn fact is reminiscent of the totali
tarian government of the former Soviet Union, which habitually en
gaged in altering images or erasing people from pictures in an attempt
to change public memory.11
coda 125
Even in the most innocuous cases of historical alteration, such ac

tions have a repressive dimension whenever images and ideas that are
not of the social and political moment are erased to deny history and
to articulate the new idea, the new aesthetic, and the new reality as the
only reality. Arguably, George Lucas theatrical re-release of the Star
Wars (1977) franchise in 1997 best exemplifies this insipid sensibility in
American film. The Star Wars films were ostensibly altered to improve
the films, a trend that became a staple for the subsequent re-release of
various special edition DVDs touting how the color and sound have
been upgraded from the originals and the low-fi special effects im
proved to reflect present expectations. It is easy to write off the proces
sion of altered Star Wars films that continue to crop up in special edi
tion packaging as merely a function of George Lucas neurotic fixation
on his films. In addition, the backlash against the alterations is easily
viewed as an expression of excessive fandom that for devotees of the
original films plays out as personal anger toward George Lucas.
For a moment, however, ignore the irritating creative control and
artistic overindulgence the creator of the epic space opera exhibits and
disregard the fanatical fan base that has expressed hostility toward
Lucas for ruining films they became attached to as children. Instead,
let us consider another question. Are Lucas alterations really driven
by personal obsessions with digital filmmaking and with perfecting
various special effects, or are they in answer to the political realities of
the time? Admittedly, the ideological implications of the latter are most
intriguing given how Star Wars was a response to and emerged from
the post-Vietnam, American mythic landscape.12 Moreover, because of
the alterations of actual filmic events and the digital erasure and re
placement of original actors, the original Star Wars (1977) now exists
as ephemera and the current Star Wars franchise exists as a capitalist
consumer text that primarily meets the demand for the entertainment
industrial complex it helped spawn.13 With the multiple revisions, pre
quels, ancillary revenue streams, merchandising, and planned reboots,
the franchise is now in an economic galaxy far, far away from the trau
matized post-Watergate, recession weary, and post-Vietnam America
that the original Star Wars trilogy was ideologically addressing. In this
sense, erasing past mistakes in the Star Wars trilogy, eradicating the
Twin Towers from Hollywood films, airbrushing Soviet-style visual
censorship, and suppressing racist imagery from Americas past are all
a part of the same continuum.
Of course on the spectrum of Orwellian totalitarianism and po
126 Race on the Qt
litical oppression, the doctored Star Wars films do not rank alongside
the pictorial eradication that Joseph Stalin used to consolidate his rule.
Nevertheless, in the postcivil rights and possibly postracial world of
America signified by the election of a black president and the presence
of a black family in the White House, the erasure of Americas racial
history of mistakes keeps cropping up in American cinema. With this
mode of revisionism, racism is required to disappear in order for the
past to properly mesh with the racially enlightened and technologi
cally advanced society that presently exists. Correspondingly, in the
case of the representation of racism, film as an artistic and commercial
apparatus that articulates the American public memory demonstrates
an impulse toward erasure.14 Often, depictions of a racialized American
society are removed and racial discord is scrubbed from films depicting
an era where blatant racism was part and parcel of the sociopolitical
and cultural landscape of the time. This revisionist impulse is clearly
registered in films like Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988), The Pa
triot (Roland Emmerich, 2000), and Gangs of New York (Martin Scor
sese, 2002), and it is fully expressed in Americas post-racial Obama era
with a spate of Hollywood films such as XMen: First Class (Matthew
Vaughn, 2011), The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011), and Captain America: The
First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011) that have sanitized racial animus in
American society by presenting colorblind white worlds during his
torical periods of acute racism and racial unrest.
Even the bizarrely amusing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
(Timur Bekmambetov, 2012), a film that covers the American Civil War,
the most direct and widely known racial confrontation in American
history, obscures the real racial politics of the war for Southern seces
sion. The film brazenly redirects the reality of American slavery as insti
tutional racism rooted in the ideology and practice of white supremacy
and settles for explaining slavery as the brainchild of vampires that re
quire unfettered access to blood. Admittedly, as a radical political meta
phor, the film could appear as a shrill indictment of Southern slave
owners as inhuman, parasitic capitalists and the Confederate Army as
a soulless militia. But by focusing on thwarting a collection of vampires
from turning America into a Nosferatu nation, Abraham Lincoln: Vam
pire Hunter severly mutes the racial politics of a nation struggling to
abandon its most brutal commitment to white supremacy as expressed
in the enslavement of black folk. Instead, a Malthusian catastrophe
is designated as the true source of the Civil War, whereby the living
dead are only content because black slaves are their source for sus
coda
127
tenance, and if they remain satiated these vampires will not prey on
the American white population. In Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
black people are literal fodder in this genre mash-up.
A more obvious example of the euphemistic approach to addressing
racial oppression is Rachel L. Swarns American Tapestry: The Story of
the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama. The
book traces the first ladys lineage to an enslaved woman named Mel
vinia.15 In detailing this ancestors story as a slave, the book abounds
with racial euphemisms: corporal punishment, servitude, discipline,
masters who pursue sexual relations, and creative conjecture as to
whether an enslaved black girl was fond of her enslavers paint a bit
tersweet up from slavery narrative. The result is a quintessentially
American story that avoids vividly situating American slavery as a
perverse institution of white privilege predicated on the abuse and ex
ploitation of black folks bodies for labor, economic gain, and sexual
release. Too often, as in the film Jefferson in Paris (James Ivory, 1995),
the sexual relationship between the white master and his black female
slave is reimagined as a forbidden love story sans sexual imposition.
In such films, the everyday threat of violence and the use of violence
to coax conformity from black slaves are conveniently concealed.
Whether filmmakers deploy historical revisionism or genre mash-up,
erasing racial trauma or altering antagonistic racial undercurrents by
replacing them with sanitized representations are problematic proposi
tions. It is as if not seeing racism on the big screen means that racism
does not exist or that no one will remember that it did. The depiction
of a world not impacted by racism is a type of idealistic representa
tion, and such a portrayal became a source of ridicule during the phe
nomenal success of the Cosby Show (19841992), a television sitcom
about a black upper-middle-class family that failed to deliver a treatise
on racial discord.16
Tarantinos films stand in stark contrast to such sanitizing of the
intersection of power, race, and sexuality. For example, in Pulp Fiction
the rape of a black man by white men and the erasure of the bloody
remnants of Marvins black body from the white backseat of a vehicle
are vivid testaments to the way QT films invoke racial histories in
American society and occupy critical space in American pop culture.
Certainly, Django Unchained self-consciously responds to the often
glossed-over aspects of African American enslavement as a form of so
cial death.17 All of Tarantinos films are racially insurgent; they function
as cultural signposts hailing American society through the medium of
128 Race on the Qt
cinema. As a director and writer he has an uncanny ability to trans

late stylistic nods from the Blaxploitation genre and, most of all, to in
corporate 1970s Hollywood cinemas infatuation with explicitness in a
manner that appeals to a generation of filmgoers who are likely unfa
miliar with the cultural milieu, political urgency, socioeconomic pres
sures, and racial tensions of that decade. Admittedly, QT films forego
the sexual explicitness that was also a hallmark of 1970s cinema, seen
in films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970), Klute
(Alan J. Pakula, 1971), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), The
Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), Last Tango in Paris (Ber
nardo Bertolucci, 1972), and Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978). Instead,
gory violence, explicit sexual dialogue, and racist rhetoric are his nods
to the insurgent cinema of the 1970s. In this sense, the Tarantino touch
is of the past, yet tailor-made for a generation of American moviegoers
who have come of age in the postmodern moment where strident aes
thetic demarcations have given way to fluid and porous boundaries,
where heterogeneity has usurped homogeneity. Hip-hop, the pop music
of this particular cultural moment, is most emblematic of this sensi
bility as a cultural and commercial expression.18 Against this backdrop,
Tarantino is less an auteur, in the nomenclature of conventional film
studies, and more a cinematic DJ, given his mash-up, sampling aes
thetic.19 QTs directoral style has much in common with DJ sampling
in hip-hop, a point I made in Super Black: American Pop Culture and
Black Superheroes:
In hip-hop music the producer/DJ will take a preexisting sonic arti
fact such as a saxophone riff, a funky baseline, or a catchy hook from
a recognized melody, harmony, or vocal phrasing and use it as a sonic
platform to build upon and create something strikingly fresh. For ex
ample, a signature refrain from the Broadway musical Annie is used on
Jay-Zs Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life (1998). The song Its the Hard-Knock
Life was sampled and transformed from a happy-go-lucky show tune
into a hip-hop bass-heavy banger that shot up the music charts. These
sampled reinterpretations provide the listening audience the ability
to aurally experience the rebirth of a familiar tune in a refreshingly dis
tinct manner.20
Similarly, Tarantinos films are well-crafted mlanges of intertextuality
that synthesize various filmic references in ways that modern audi
ences respond to and appreciate. Django Unchained demonstrates the
coda 129
sampling aesthetic by drawing from various genres such as Blaxploita

tion, spaghetti westerns, buddy flicks, historical dramas, period pieces,
and comedic satires. The final result is a compelling, Gothic-infused
horror film that is being consumed by audiences generations removed
from the institution of American enslavement at a cultural moment
when America openly flirts with the idea of being a postracial society
in the wake of electing a black president for two terms of office.
Of course other directors have strained to introduce contemporary
relevancy in a film firmly rooted in Americas past. For example, Baz
Luhrmanns The Great Gatsby (2013) is a lavish 3-D film adaptation of
F. Scott Fitzgeralds 1925 novel that uses the Roaring Twenties Jazz Age
as the backdrop for a cautionary tale about the American dream of up
ward social mobility. Although contemporary hip-hop and pop soul
music are integrated into Bazs Gatsby, for me the overall effect culti
vates a sense of acute dissonance rather than resonance. Just as it is a
mistake to view Jackson Pollocks paintings as confluences of random
drips virtually anyone could duplicate, so too is it misguided to view
Tarantinos cinematic pastiche as a mechanical suturing of past and
present that is easily reproduced for effect. Despite having a filmic sen
sibility clearly rooted in the past, QT films resonate with the techno
logical and cultural zeitgeist of todays society. This postmodern pas
tiche is perfectly underscored in Death Proof when Jungle Julia pulls
out a cellphone and begins sending text messages in a film that feels
firmly rooted in a 1970s setting.
Moreover, the films of QT engage Americas past every time the
n-word is uttered. In previous decades the n-word was simply nigger,
an everyday racial slur. An erstwhile publication like Mark Twains
classic American novel the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) fre
quently uses the n-word. Though by many critical accounts the novel
was a critique of nineteenth-century American racism, the book re
peatedly has been taken to task as a vulgar and stereotypical portrayal
of black folk.21 Sound familiar? QT cinema constantly underscores race
in America, and his use of language has incurred critical scorn similar
to that heaped on Twain.22 One critical difference is that QT has an
audience of paying adults, while the Twain text is often presented as
required reading to children and young adolescents in school settings.23
Nonetheless, irrespective of the appropriateness of the setting or the
age of the intended audience, Tarantinos filmic body of work remains
up for debate concerning the racist or antiracist message it presents.
If eloquent and insightful theorization about American race rela
130
Race on the Qt
tions is the expectation, then Tarantino the talk show guest, award
show speechmaker, and press junket orator is a tongue-tied jester on
his best day. Although it is easy to see that race matters to Tarantino,
he is not Cornel West. At the end of the day QT is a filmmaker, not a
race philosopher, and whatever mangled explanation of race politics he
offers will play out like those of most Americans who have not dedi
cated their intellectual lives to the topic of black racial formation. Hit
and miss. The films are where the real poststructural action resides,
because they do dialogue with real structures of racial marginalization
and engage the ideological justifications used to legitimize these struc
tures and the unequal relations they produce. To what degree the films
of QT edify these structures or call them into question remains debat
able. A reasonable, if superficial, critique is that QTs films use race to
pique interest and attract attention. But I argue that this exploitative
formula is best applied to mediocre, low-budget films that would not
garner any attention if not for their lurid material or graphic nature.
Tarantinos films are also permeated with elements of pop schlock, a
filmic sensibility inherited from the low-budget exploitation film genre.
However, his films are viewed as artistically accomplished and they are
well financed, so the exploitation label is not a good fit. The QT aesthetic,
however, pilfers from that genre for mood and tone, and black charac
ters have figured prominently as signifiers of the subversive politics of
cool. For as much as blackness signifies coolin QT films, the characters
and conversations concerning blackness also deliberately remind the
viewing public of the vulgar, absurd, and messy ideological place that
race continues to occupy in American society. In this manner, Taran
tinos films are transgressive works that refuse to allow American pop
culture to function as a safe haven for the fantasy of reality television,
mindless boy bands, mtv video divas, Walt Disney rappers, and ubiq
uitous zombies. Claims of an American postracial culture in the wake
of Barack Obamas reelection are presumptuous and pass. The outrage
generated by Django Unchained demonstrates how racial anxiety still
remains active in this nation. In my mind, this is possibly the greatest
strength concerning the body of Tarantino films to date.
QT films compel attention at the least; at the most they serve as
catalysts for discussions around black racial formation across the public
sphere. Numerous articles and analyses are generated when Taran
tino brings out a new film. Certainly this was the case for Django Un
chained. Print and Internet media outlets fixed on the racial issues cir
culating throughout the film, and a range of cultural critics, scholars,
coda
131
liberals, conservatives, radicals, entertainment personalities, college

students, black barbershop clientele, and Facebook pagesalong with
entrenched, new-school and circumspect pundits alikeweighed in
on the meaning and importance of Django Unchained as it relates to
African American life and Americas racial politics. Here was a mo
ment for the intellectual admirers of Jrgen Habermas to feel buoyed
by this nascent resurgence of social awareness in the public sphere.
Although the marketing buzz around Django Unchained was most
suited to evoke racial debate, all of QTs prior films to date are dialoguing
with the cultural politics of race. QT films embrace this political situa
tion, whereas other directors have acknowledged the cultural politics of
race in their work only in order to blunt criticism concerning black rep
resentation. Take, for example, Woody Allen. He habitually presented
a New York City devoid of black folk as the setting for his films, and
when he eventually acquiesced to the reality of black peoples urban
existence and included black characters of any significance, he went
retro with a sassy black maid in Bullets over Broadway (1994) and a
black female prostitute in Deconstructing Harry (1997). Only Melinda
and Melinda (2004) offers anything interesting regarding black repre
sentation with the character of Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as
an elegant piano player who happens to be black. In stark contrast to
the racially reticent films of Woody Allen, Tarantinos films are jubi
lant forays into racially taboo territory such as American slavery, black
female sexuality, white racism, interracial relationships, and racial
revenge.
There is, however, an area in which QT lags far behind in cinematic
genius when compared to notable directors such as Woody Allen, John
Cassavetes, John Huston, Roman Polanski, and Sydney Pollack: the
ability to act. Quite frankly, Quentin Tarantino cannot act his way out
of a paper bag. Nonetheless, QT has accrued a string of cameo film per
formances that are both wooden and unconvincingly animated, from
his first bit part in Reservoir Dogs to his latest part to date as an Austra
lian miner in Django Unchained. Even when he does not exert his con
siderable directorial license by placing himself in his own films and in
stead performs in someone elses, the results are similarly dreadful. To
this point, directorial friend and partner in crime Robert Rodriguez has
played the part of enabler for QT to try and satiate his acting bug. The
hokey horror film From Dusk till Dawn (1996), directed by Rodriguez,
has QT playing a sociopathic bank robber who lumbers from one scene
to the next as a supporting actor to George Clooneys leading-man cha
132 Race on the Qt
risma. From Dusk till Dawn is a seedy, exploitative messan aesthetic

that is repeated for better or for worse with Planet Terror (2007), the
first half of the self-indulgent Grindhouse (2007), a sleazy double fea
ture Rodriguez and Tarantino felt compelled to make (of which the
second half is Death Proof, discussed in chapter four).24 For the most
part, Tarantinos acting chops remain underdeveloped compared to the
innovative and provocative films he has written and directed. Clearly,
the most dynamic aspect of Quentin Tarantinos talent is his films, not
his ability to disappear inside a character.
I admit the relationship between Tarantinos films and the white
audience remains problematic despite the provocative representational
engagement with race across the films. As an African American male,
in Django Unchained I found the shuffling subservience of Samuel L.
Jacksons Stephen and his incessant use of the n-word laugh-out-loud
funny. I wonder, however, what is it about Jacksons quintessential por
trayal of a house slave that makes white audiences erupt with laughter?
For me, along with other African American friends and professional ac
quaintances Ive talked to about the film, the comedic import of Jack
sons performance and his strident interpretation of the character appear
to be drawn from Malcolm Xs scathing critique of the house Negro, a
black slave who fulfilled duties inside the plantation home rather than
laboring in the field. In his notable 1963 speech Message to the Grass
Roots, Malcolm X explains how the slave mentality of a house Negro
is preoccupied with identifying with his master to such an extent that
if the master becomes ill the house Negro will ask, Whats the matter
boss? We sick? In comparison, the field Negro is constructed as the
polar opposite in psychic orientation, a theme symbolized by Djangos
militancy and constant challenges to white authority.
In this sense, Jacksons front-stage house Negro performance ap
pears to embody all of the pejorative qualities Malcolm X designates
concerning black people and leaders who appear more concerned with
the interests of whites than benefits for blacks. The contemporary col
loquialism for this type of black person is sellout, and within the pri
vate sphere of various black cultural institutions a broad swath of black
folk are aware of this terminology and the racial politics involved in its
usage. In my mind, knowledge of that historical and cultural backdrop
is paramount for interpreting and appreciating how Jackson perfectly
articulates the type of tomfoolery that white oppression cultivates and
that a variety of blacks have engaged in. Given the long history and
legacy of white audiences laughing at black folk as minstrel carica
coda
133
tures and as various incarnations of comic buffoonery too numerous

to list, the popularity of Tarantino films with whites raises concerns.
In Django Unchained, the house Negro archetype is deployed for sub
versive comedic effect, but the distinction as to whether whites are
in on the joke and laughing with black people or at black people is
undetermined. The answer to the dilemma described above will rely
on media studies social scientists to deliver with their surveys, inter
views, and questionnaires. There must be some form of data to sort out
conjecture from fact. Nonetheless, as Stanley Crouch has insightfully
noted: Whether Tarantinos films or screenplays are good or bad, race
and crime and what they reveal to us about society are always what
his work is about, which is why he is important. He seems to have
no other subjects and, given what the ones he focuses on can provide,
there is no need for them.25 At their worst, QT films invite consider
ation as racial schlock that is transgressive but crudely conceived when
the topic turns to black representation, a point epitomized by Ralph
Bakshis ill-fated attempt at racial satire with the live action/animated
film Coonskin (1975).
Contemporary critics have tried to rehabilitate Coonskin as an anti
racist film that uses grotesque stereotypes to show the racism of the
system that created these images in the first place.26 But the stereo
typical depictions of male homosexuality and the blatant sexual ob
jectification of women in Coonskin undercuts this facile reasoning.
Neither of these gross caricatures is cast as a triumphant statement
against homophobia or misogyny. At the end of the day, it is difficult to
critique pornography by creating pornography. In contrast, what serves
QT well when he embarks on the slippery slope of representing black
people as killers, criminals, sex symbols, and slaves is a reverential
sensibility regarding blackness as the arbitrator of cool.27 For example,
even though Pulp Fictions Jules Winnfield is a foul-mouthed, odd
looking black killer, he is also the man with the wallet inscribed with
the words Bad Motherfucker in big block letters, a disposition com
municated in a fully drawn character who is given the juiciest dialogue
in the film. In this sense, QT films lack the overt stereotypical disdain
toward blackness present in films like Coonskin, The Jerk (Carl Reiner,
1979), White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004), and Soul Plane (Jessy
Terrero, 2004), and in the animated television shows The PJs (1999
2001), which adopt dubious imagery of black folk for comic effect or to
make some stilted point about race in America.
Admittedly, Tarantino is most associated with displaying hyper
134 Race on the Qt
violence in films and harboring a Cronenbergesque sensibility when it

comes to body horror, with the depictions of an ear sliced off a tortured
police officer, limbs chopped off scores of Asian men, scalps ripped
from the tops of Nazis heads, exploding bodies, and decapitations. A
closer look, however, reveals that lurking beneath the adolescent gid
diness of Tarantinos gratuitous displays of violence and fetishistic film
gaze are articulations about race that challenge myriad racial taboos,
cultural expectations, and power dynamics concerning race relations
in America. Most specifically, his films constantly implicate Americas
historical angst over race and invite the viewing audience to confront
blackness as a source of optic, political, and cultural anxiety. While
Django Unchained is easily categorized according to the racial thematic
that drives the narrative, it makes conspicuous what all prior Tarantino
films were in deep dialogue withracial blackness. Certainly, in his
films QT has also provided an image of American race relations that
appears to owe its outlandish dimensions and distortions to the artifice
and affect he wields. But that is the easy analysis. The obnoxious ex
pressions of black racial representation and the lewd language dealing
with race in the films of Quentin Tarantino are not merely the func
tions of one director. In the final analysis, the carnivalesque, fun house
mirror representations of race in Tarantinos films might be the unadul
terated likenesses of the real toxic beliefs that dominated this nations
historical past, that exist in our pop culture present, and that possibly
may prevail in Americas social future.
noteS
intRodUction
1. Adrian Wooten, Quentin Tarantino on Adapting Rum Punch, Moving the
Story to LA, Elmore Leonards Opinion, in Gerald Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino:
Interviews, Revised and Updated (University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 110.
2. James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Holly
wood (Faber & Faber, 2007).
3. Todd McCarthy, Review: Reservoir Dogs, Variety, January 26, 1992. Mc
Carthy says Tarantinos first film is filled with racist colloquialisms.
4. Wooten, Quentin Tarantino on Adapting Rum Punch, in Peary, ed., Quentin
Tarantino: Interviews, 110.
5. Erik Bauer, The Mouth and the Method, in Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino:
Interviews, 116.
6. Ibid., 116.
7. Mali Elfman, Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds Interview, in Peary,
ed., Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, 151.
8. Jim Smith, Tarantino (Virgin Books, 2005), 102106.
9. Jordan Zakarin, Tarantinos Django Unchained Reignites Debate over
N-Word in Movies, The Hollywood Reporter, December 15, 2012.
10. Aaron Barlow, Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes (Praeger, 2010), 136.
11. Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood
Films (Duke University Press, 1997).
12. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
(Temple University Press, 1993).
13. See the chapter Moulanyans, Medigahns, and Wonder Bread Wops: Race and
Racism On-Screen and Off, in George De Stefano, An Offer We Cant Refuse: The
Mafia in the Mind of America (Faber & Faber, 2007), 231294.
14. H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die: A Political Autobiography (Dial Press, 1969).
15. Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the
1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
16. Sean Tierney, Quentin Tarantino in Black and White, in Michael Lacy and
Kent Ono, eds., Critical Rhetorics of Race (New York University Press, 2011), 8197.
17. Armond White. See Quentin Kill, Africana, October 14, 2003. http://www
.africana.com.
18. Stanley Crouch, The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity (Basic
Civitas, 2004).
chaPteR one
1. See Jeff Dawson, Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool (Applause Books,
1995), 9093.
2. Jeff Chang, Cant Stop Wont Stop: A History of the HipHop Generation (St.
Martins Press, 2005).
136 notes to Pages 1528
3. See Paul Gormleys theoretical and supercharged use of film studies nomen
clature that links hip-hop gangster bravado to Reservoir Dogs in The NewBrutality
Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Intellect Books, 2005).
4. Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds., Quentin Tarantino and Phi
losophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Open Court,
2007).
5. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive
History of Blacks in American Films (Continuum, 2011). The coon caricature came
to prominence as a cornerstone character of the American minstrel theater tradition
of the late 1800s. Also see Camille F. Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork,
Broadway, and the Story of Americas First Black Star (Basic Civitas Books, 2008).
6. See Gormley, The NewBrutality Film, 142.
7. See Gormley, Trashing Whiteness: Pulp Fiction, se7en, Strange Days, and Ar
ticulating Affect, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6:1 (April 2001):
160.
8. See Stephen Weinberger, Its Not Easy Being Pink: Tarantinos Ultimate Pro
fessional, Literature/Film Quarterly 32(1): 50.
9. Certainly an argument can be made that Holdaway is reckless and jeopar
dizes innocent civilians and costs several bystanders and police officers their lives
by allowing the robbery to actually occur before trying to stop it. In this sense, Hold
aways method could read as a mark of unrestrained unprofessionalism that fulfills
Mr. Pinks racist edicts about blacks and professionalism. I argue, however, that
Holdaway represents Malcolm Xs by any means necessary approach to destroy
Cabot and the white bigots he employs.
10. See Bruce Bawer, The Victims Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and
the Closing of the Liberal Mind (HarperCollins, 2012).
11. See Deirdre A. Royster and Stephen Steinberg, Race and the Invisible Hand:
How White Networks Exclude Black Men from BlueCollar Jobs (University of Cali
fornia Press, 2003).
12. Gormley, The NewBrutality Film, 142.
13. Chris Vognar, He Cant Say That, Can He? Black, White, and Shades of Gray
in the Films of Quentin Tarantino, Transition 112:2331.
14. Sean Tierny, Quentin Tarantino in Black and White in Michael Lacy and
Kent Ono, eds., Critical Rhetorics of Race (New York University Press, 2011), 8197.
15. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black
Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
16. Norman Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the White Hip
ster, Dissent (Fall 1957). Alternatively, see John Leland, Hip: The History (Harper
Collins, 2004), for a more measured analysis of Mailers take on white emulation of
black expressivity in America.
17. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (Oxford University Press, 1993).
18. See Greg Tate, Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking
from Black Culture (Broadway Books, 2003). Despite the bombastic title, the insights
and analyses of one of Americas best cultural critics on race and pop culture are
thoughtful, shrewd, provocative and concise when mapping out the interplay be
tween appropriation and the commodification of blackness in America.
notes to Pages 2940
137
19. See Deborah Shaw, You Are Alright, But . . .: Individual and Collective
Representations of Mexicans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans, and African-Americans in
Steven Soderberghs Traffic, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(3): 211223.
20. See Caroline Jewers, Heroes and Heroin: From True Romance to Pulp Fic
tion, Journal of Popular Culture 33(4): 3961.
21. See Stanley Crouchs colorful essay, Eggplant Blues: The Miscegenated
Cinema of Quentin Tarantino, in The AllAmerican Skin Game, or The Decoy of
Race (Vintage, 1997), 229236.
22. See Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of White
ness (Duke University Press, 2006); Stanley Crouch, The Artificial White Man: Essays
on Authenticity (Basic Civitas Books, 2004); and Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray,
White Trash: Race and Class in America (Taylor & Francis, 1996).
23. See Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Nar
ratives of Gender and Race, 19031967 (Princeton University Press, 2005), 204. She
makes an insightful analysis of how masculinity, race, and the use of the mirror all
converge to convey a sense of failure/power for a white male figure.
24. See Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010
(Crown Forum, 2013), for a rigorous academic lament on the decline of American
white male orthodoxy as the ruling paradigm of an era.
25. Ruby Tapia makes a similar observation concerning True Romance in the
astute analysis found in Volumes of Transnational Vengeance: Fixing Race and
Feminism on the Way to Kill Bill, in Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Fer
guson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative
Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011), 134.
26. See Richard Dyer, Whites Are Nothing: Whiteness, Representation, and
Death, in Isabel Santaolalla, ed., New Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Con
struction of Otherness (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2000); Gormley, The NewBrutality
Film; and Nicola Rehling, ExtraOrdinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity
and Contemporary Popular Cinema (Lexington Books, 2009), 215219.
27. Gerald Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Uni
versity Press of Mississippi, 2013), 42.
chaPteR tWo
1. See Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (British Film Institute, 2008).
2. In 2013, the United States National Film Registry selected the film for pres
ervation for being culturally, historically, and/or aesthetically significant. See
Pulp Fiction, Roger & Me, Mary Poppins Join National Film Registry, Variety,
December 12, 2013.
3. See noted intellectual Henry Giroux, Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal
Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies, Social Identities 1:2 (1995): 333
354; and Pulp Fiction and the Culture of Violence, Harvard Educational Review 65
(Summer 1995): 299315.
4. Gerald Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Uni
versity Press of Mississippi, 2013); and Cynthia Fuchs, ed., Spike Lee: Interviews (Uni
versity Press of Mississippi, 2002).
Films (Duke University Press, 1997). She leans heavily on black cultural critic Todd
Boyd to take Tarantino to task for his indulgent use of the n-word.
6. Stanley Crouch scribed a dramatic manifesto, Premature Austopsies, about
the life-affirming and death-defying powers of Americas classical music, Jazz,
spoken by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., on Wynton Marsalis award-winning
album The Majesty of the Blues (1989).
7. See John Leland, Hip: The History (HarperCollins, 2004); Susan Fraiman, Cool
Men and the Second Sex (Columbia University Press, 2003); the chapter Miming
Blackness: Reservoir Dogs and American Africanism, in Paul Gormley, The New
Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary American Film (Intellect Books,
2005), 137158; and Jeff Dawsons celebratory expos, Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema
of Cool (Applause Books, 1995).
8. See Ruby Tapia, Volumes of Transnational Vengeance: Fixing Race and Femi
nism on the Way to Kill Bill, in Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson,
eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racializa
tion (Duke University Press, 2011), 134.
9. See Malik D. McCluskey, . . . And Its Deep Too: The Philosophical Comedy
of Richard Pryor, in Audrey Thomas McCluskey, ed., Richard Pryor: The Life and
Legacy of a Crazy Black Man (Indiana University Press, 2008), 100.
10. See Willis, High Contrast, 209213.
11. Edward Gallafent, Quentin Tarantino (Pearson, 2006), 79.
12. See Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005).
13. See Gallafent, Quentin Tarantino, 7273.
14. See Stanley Crouchs verbose and rigorous riffing on this point from Blues in
More Than One Color, in The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity (Basic
Civitas Books, 2004), 170174.
15. Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of
Whiteness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
16. See Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate
South (Princeton University Press, 2004).
17. See Randall E. Auxier, Vinnies Very Bad Day: Twisting the Tale of Time in
Pulp Fiction, in Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds., Quentin Tarantino
and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Open
Court, 2007), 139.
18. See Crouch, Blues in More Than One Color, in The Artificial White Man,
170174.
19. See Jonathan J. Cavallero, Hollywoods Italian American Filmmakers: Capra,
Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino (University of Illinois Press, 2011), 140143.
20. See Paul Gormley, Trashing Whiteness: Pulp Fiction, se7en, Strange Days,
and Articulating Affect, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6:1 (April
2001): 160; Samuel Kimball, Bad-Ass Dudes in Pulp Fiction: Homophobia and the
Counterphobic Idealization of Women, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 16(2):
171192; Devin Anthony Ogreron, Scatological Film Practice: Pulp Fiction and a
Cinema in Movements, Post Script: Essays in Film & the Humanities 19(3): 29
40; and Caroline Jewers, Heroes and Heroin: From True Romance to Pulp Fiction,
Journal of Popular Culture 33:4 (Spring 2000): 3961.
21. See Stephanie R. Bush-Baskette, The War on Drugs as a War on Black
notes to Pages 5471
139
Women, in Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa J. Pasko, eds., Girls, Women, and Crime:
Selected Readings (Sage Publications, 2012), 175184.
22. Bush-Baskette, The War on Drugs, in Chesney-Lind and Pasko, eds., Girls,
Women, and Crime.
23. Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race
Card against Americas Poor (Routledge, 2001).
24. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after
Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009), 160167.
25. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from
Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 2002).
26. Crouch, Blues in More Than One Color, 184.
27. K. Anthony Appiah, No Bad Nigger: Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the
Movies, in Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., Media
Spectacles (Routledge, 1993).
28. Nicola Rehling, ExtraOrdinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity and
Contemporary Popular Cinema (Lexington Books, 2009), 213.
29. Gallafent, Quentin Tarantino, 3334.
30. See Fuchs, ed., Spike Lee Interviews, 150153.
31. See Aaron Barlow, Jackie Brown: Music, Metadiegesis, and Meaning, in
Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes (Praeger, 2010), 93.
32. See Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the
Rise of Independent Film (Simon and Schuster, 2005), 319. The author sees Tarantino
presenting films in which class is a significant source of meaning.
33. Cornel West, Niggerization, The Atlantic, November 1, 2007.
34. Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film (University of
Illinois Press, 2009). The observation about the revenging phallic woman is more
accurately applied to the film Death Proof with the black female characters symbolic
sodomy of Stuntman Mike when her car rear-ends his vehicle.
35. Laurent Bouzereau, Ultraviolent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin
Tarantino (Citadel Press, 2000), 13.
chaPteR thRee
1. Paul Bowman, Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Phi
losophy, and Popular Culture (Wallflower Press, 2013), 1.
2. See Bowman, Beyond Bruce Lee.
3. See Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: Politics and Ide
ology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Indiana University Press, 1990), 136; Martha
McCaughey and Neal King, eds., Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies
(University Texas Press, 2004); Jennifer K. Stuller, InkStained Amazons and Cine
matic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (I.B. Tauris, 2010).
4. See Motoko Rich, Land Of the Rising Clich, New York Times, January 4,
2004.
5. See Nicola Rehling, ExtraOrdinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity
and Contemporary Popular Cinema (Lexington Books, 2009), 194.
6. See Kent A. Ono and Vincent Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Polity,
2008).
7. See Bowman, Beyond Bruce Lee, 4.

8. See bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies (Routledge,
1996) for a discussion of racial representations, notions of artistic vision, and notions
of purity as stereotypical distortions. Armond White, in See Quentin Kill, Africana,
October 14, 2003, offers a caustic analysis of what makes Tarantino tick as a film
maker and outlines the types of racial gimmickry he employs to trick audiences to
applaud his trash cinema.
9. White, See Quentin Kill.
10. Another competing explanation for the animus in the scene is Vivica Foxs
proclivity to excessively emote when doing almost any rendition of an offended
black woman. See films Set It Off (1996), Soul Food (1997), and Two Can Play That
Game (2001).
11. White, See Quentin Kill.
12. See Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror
Films from the 1890s to Present (Routledge, 2011).
13. Edward Gallafent, Quentin Tarantino (Pearson, 2006), 112113.
14. See David Kyle Johnson, Revenge and Mercy in Tarantino: The Lesson of
Ezekiel 25:17, for an insightful, offhanded quip that the entire Kill Bill saga can be
interpreted as a symbolic story of Bruce Lee getting revenge for the Americaniza
tion of Asian culture. In Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds., Quentin
Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch
(Open Court, 2007), 59.
15. See Greg Tate, Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking
from Black Culture (Broadway Books, 2003).
16. See Stanley Crouch, The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity (Basic
Books, 2005).
17. See Aaron Barlow, Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes (Praeger, 2010),
123137; and Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse: The Sleaze
Filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature (Weinstein Books, 2007).
18. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ide
ology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Indiana University Press, 1988), 185186.
19. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender,
and the New Racism (Routledge, 2005); and Jeffery A. Brown, Panthers and Vixens:
Black Superheroines, Sexuality, and Stereotypes in Contemporary Comic Books, in
Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, eds., Black Comics: The Politics of Race
and Representation (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 133149.
20. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in
Cinema (Suny Press, 1999).
21. Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British
Culture (University of California Press, 2009).
22. Aaron C. Anderson, Stuntman Mike, Simulation, and Sadism in Death
Proof, in Greene and Mohammad, eds., Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy, 18.
23. See Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (McFar
land, 2012), specifically the chapter Paybacks a Bitch! Death Proof, Planet Terror,
and the Carnivalization of Grindhouse Cinema, 107142.
24. See Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface
(Oxford University Press, 2011).
notes to Pages 9096 141
25. See Barlow, Quentin Tarantino, 129.

26. See the chapter Sexual Disguise and Cinema, in Annette Kuhn, The Power
of the Image: Representation and Sexuality (Routledge, 1985), 4873, for the coded
way that cross-dressing works to affirm the spectacle of difference, a point that
is salient to the unstable representation of black sexuality in light of the various
trends that present black women as masculine, including Flip Wilsons Geraldine;
the cross-dressing films of Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, and Tyler Perry; and
various films like Hes My Girl (1987), Stir Crazy (1980), High Risk (1981), Risky Busi
ness (1983), Crying Game (1992), To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar
(1995), Holiday Heart (2000), Woman on Top (2000), Juwanna Mann (2002), and Kinky
Boots (2005).
27. See Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium, Paybacks a Bitch!, 107142.
28. Ken Garner, Youve Heard this One Before: Quentin Tarantinos Scoring
Practices from Kill Bill to Inglourious Basterds, in Arved Ashby, ed., Popular Music
and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MtV (Oxford University Press,
2013), 171.
chaPteR foUR
1. See Robert von Dassanowsky, ed., Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds:
A Manipulation of Metacinema (Continuum, 2012). Devoted to deconstructing the
film from a range of viewpoints, the book shares a consistent topicality across chap
ters: A broad range of scholars and critics examine how the Jewish Holocaust is pre
sented in the film.
2. See John Rieder, Race and Revenge Fantasies in Avatar, District 9, and In
glourious Basterds, Science Fiction Film and Television 4.1 (2011): 4156.
3. See John Hoberman Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds Makes Holo
caust Revisionism Fun, Village Voice, August 18, 2009; Kim Newman, Inglourious
Basterds, Sight and Sound 19:9 (September 2009): 73; and Todd Herzog, What Shall
the History Books Read? The Debate over Inglourious Basterds and the Limits of
Representation, in von Dassanowsky, ed., Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds,
271296.
4. Elizabeth Bridges, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Daniel H. Magilow, eds., Nazi
sploitation!: The Nazi Image in LowBrow Cinema and Culture (Continuum, 2011).
5. See Richard Hodgens, A Brief, Tragical History of the Science Fiction Film,
Film Quarterly 13:2 (1959): 3039; J. P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 2001); Vivian Sobachack, Screening Space: The American Science Fic
tion Film (Rutgers University Press, 2004); Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Dis
aster, in Sean Redmond, ed., Liquid Metal: Science Fiction Film Reader (Wallflower
Press, 2004), 4047; and Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fic
tion Film (University Texas Press, 2008).
6. Rieder, Race and Revenge Fantasies, 52.
7. See Srikanth Srinivasan, The Grand Illousion, in von Dassanowsky, ed.,
Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, 113. The chapter makes specific reference
to Landas pipe as a sight gag and describes all of the films characters as cartoonish.
8. Eric Kligerman views the oversized pipe as a bit of comic relief meant to
show the artifice of cinema. Kligerman, Reels of Justice: Inglourious Basterds,
142
notes to Pages 97103
The Sorrow and the Pity, and Jewish Revenge Fantasies, in von Dassanowsky, ed.,
Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, 147162. I read the excessiveness as more
than sight gag and see it as political symbolism (see Guy Deboard, Society of the
Spectacle [Black & Red, 2000]), a symbolism that encompasses the Third Reichs use
of spectacle as a cornerstone of its death-cult political order, which is embodied in
its uniforms, mass public parades, architecture, mass exterminations, blitzkrieg war
strategy, and propaganda films.
9. Sharon Willis, Fire! in a Crowded Theater: Liquidating History in In
glourious Basterds, in von Dassanowsky, ed., Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious
Basterds, 163192; Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Under
standing Hollywood Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 86110; and Glenn Frankel,
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (Bloomsbury, 2013).
10. See Michael D. Richardson, Vengeful Violence: Inglourious Basterds, Allo
history, and the Inversion of Victims and Perpetrators, in von Dassanowskys
Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, 93112; Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holo
caust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (Con
tinuum, 2011); and Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Di
lemma of American Jewry (Basic Books, 1990).
11. See Jason Haslam, Inglourious Criticism, Basterd Fantasies: Rancire, Taran
tino, and the Intellectual Spectacle of Hope, in Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam, eds.,
The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2013),
178202. A classic example of theoretical film studies analysis at work, the chapter
relies heavily on the nomenclature of the field to explicate the meaning and optic
power of the film.
12. A dubious perspective that still garners legitimacy in books with stilted
titles like Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why Were Afraid to
Talk about It (John Entine, PublicAffairs, 2001); and Darwins Athletes: How Sport
Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (John Hoberman,
Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
13. See William Brow, Counterfactuals, Quantum Physics, and Cruel Monsters
in Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, in von Dassanowsky, ed., Quentin
Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, 247270.
14. See Marlon Riggs compelling, Emmy-winning documentary Ethnic Notions
(Signifyin Works, 1987).
15. See James Sneed, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side
(Routledge, 1994); and Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Poli
tics, and Popular Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
16. See Kligerman, Reels of Justice, in von Dassanosky, ed., Quentin Tarantinos
Inglourious Basterds.
17. See Haslam, Inglourios Criticism, in Faflak and Haslam, eds., The Public
Intellectual and the Culture of Hope, p. 189.
18. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: ColorBlind Racism and
the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); and
Deirdre A. Royster and Stephen Steinberg, Race and the Invisible Hand: How White
Networks Exclude Black Men from BlueCollar Jobs (University of California Press,
2003).
19. See Rieder, Race and Revenge Fantasies.
20. Lisa Dombrowski, The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, Ill Kill You (Wes
lyan University Press, 2008); and Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010).
(Temple University Press, 1993), 2021.
22. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 3035.
23. Guerrero, Framing Blackness; and Nama, Black Space.
24. See Todd McCarthy, Django Unchained: Film Review, Hollywood Reporter,
December 11, 2012.
25. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Tarantino Unchained: Django Trilogy, in Gerald
Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, Revised and Updated (University Press of
Mississippi, 2013), 184198.
26. See Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present
(Continuum, 2010), 112127.
27. Fred Botting, Gothic (Routledge, 1996), 168.
28. Ibid., 5.
29. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self
Making in NineteenthCentury America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 2250.
30. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpre
tive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (Continuum, 2001).
31. See Botting, Gothic, 2.
32. See Bloom, Gothic Histories, 4.
33. See Andr Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty from Buuel to Hitchcock (Arcade
Publishing, 1982); and Armond White, 12 Years a Slave Uses Sadistic Art to Patronize
History, CityArts, October 16, 2013.
34. William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemp
tion of the Black Athlete (Broadway Books, 2007).
35. See the chapter, Django Unchained: How Not to Do Screen Violence, in
Gregory Desilet, Screens of Blood: A Critical Approach to Film and Television Vio
lence (McFarlad, 2014). He also views Django Unchained as a poorly executed parody.
36. Bloom, Gothic Histories.
37. See Wheeler Winston Dixon, History of Horror (Rutgers University Press,
2010).
38. Walter C. Rucker, Jr., and James N. Upton, eds., Encyclopedia of American
Race Riots (Greenwood Publishing, 2006).
39. See Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Eugenics (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Russell Jacoby and Naomi
Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (Crown
Publishing, 1995).
coda
1. Certainly, the Willie Horton political attack ad used in the 1988 presidential
campaign epitomizes how black representation in the media is a potent cultural
force. The George H. W. Bush campaign attacked the governor of Massachusetts,
Michael Dukakis, for being soft on crime with the mug shot of a disheveled black
man convicted of murder who was allowed to take part in a weekend furlough pro
gram. While out one weekend he repeatedly raped a white woman and assaulted her
fianc. The attack ad is credited for turning the tide in favor of Bush Sr. in the cam
paign, and it easily evoked the representation of black men as overt sexual savages,
an image first popularized in the film The Birth of a Nation.
2. Tavis Smiley Slams Django Unchained, Calls it Spoof of Slavery, TheGrio,
http://thegrio.com/2013/01/08/tavis-smiley-slams-django-unchained-calls-it-spoof
-of-slavery/; and Ishmael Reed, Black Audiences, White Stars, and Django Un
chained, Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2012.
3. See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes (Vintage,
1973).
Films (Duke University Press, 1997), 211.
5. In Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other
Visual Tragedies (Social Identities 1:2 [1995], 333354), Henry A. Giroux does an ex
cellent job of reductively takingTarantino to task as a filmmaker who epitomizes the
racist excesses of America.
6. Barbara Bush: Go See Precious, Newsweek, December 12, 2009.
7. Ishmael Reed, Hollywoods Enduring Myth of the Black Male Sexual
Predator: The Selling of Precious, Counter Punch, December 46, 2009.
8. bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies (Routledge, 1996), 8.
9. John Berra, Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Par
tiality of Independent Production (Intellect Ltd., 2008), 168178.
10. Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (University of Texas Press,
2011), 6.
11. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and
Art in Stalins Russia (Holt Paperbacks, 1999).
(Temple University Press, 1993), 118.
13. See Adam Bresnick, The Birth of the Entertainment-Industrial Complex,
Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1999.
14. Jason Sperb, Disneys Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the
Hidden Histories of Song of the South (University of Texas Press, 2012).
15. Rachel L. Swarns, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and
Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (Amistad, 2012).
16. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences,
and the Myth of the American Dream (Westview Press, 1992).
17. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard
University Press, 1985).
18. Charles Aaron, What the White Boy Means When He Says Yo, in Raquel
Cepeda, ed., And It Dont Stop!: The Best American HipHop Journalism of the Last
25 Years (Faber & Faber, 2004), 211237.
19. Jason Bailey, Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantinos Master
piece (Voyageur Press, 2013), 123.
20. Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes
(University Texas Press, 2011), 92.
21. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, eds., Satire or
Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Duke University Press, 1991).
22. Kevin W. Saunders, Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us

about Hate Speech (New York University Press, 2011), 159.
23. Leonard, Tenney, and Davis, eds., Satire or Evasion?
24. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse: The SleazeFilled
Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature (Weinstein Books, 2007).
25. Ibid, 140.
26. John Strausbaughis, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult, and Imi
tation in American Popular Culture (Penguin Group, 2007); and Michael Gillespie,
Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin and the Racial Grotesque, in Mia Mask, ed., Con
temporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies
(Taylor & Francis, 2012), 7686. For a more contextualized and astute ideological de
construction of the use of Coonskin to fit a conservative discourse around race, see
Sperb, Disneys Most Notorious Film.
27. Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (British Film Institute, 2008); and Manthia Diawara,
In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 2000), 271272.
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index
Film characters are alphabetized by first name; film stills are denoted by f following
the page number.
Abernathy Ross (Rosario Dawson,
Death Proof), 8788, 89f, 91
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
(Timur Bekmambetov, 2012), 126127
Across 110th Street (Barry Shear, 1972), 63
Adjustment Bureau, The (George Nolfi,
2010), 43
Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke, Inglouri
ous Basterds), 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,
103
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark
Twain, 1885), 129
African Americans, 105; in Birth of a
Nation, 28; and Confederate flag,
4950; and criticism of Django Un
chained, 131; in Django Unchained,
109; and exceptionalism, 119; in
Falling Down, 35; in Hollywood
films, 113; in Inglourious Basterds,
8; mimicry by whites, 27; and the
n-word, 40, 44; and the race card,
55; and racial subtext of King Kong,
101; and rendering of historical
tensions, 105; in Reservoir Dogs,
8; and science-fiction tropes, 106;
and socioeconomic conditions, 122;
in Spike Lee films, 7; in Tarantino
films, 127128; and Uncle Tom trope,
111. See also black characters; spe
cific films
Afrocentricity, 25
Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette,
True Romance), 26, 28, 29, 3234, 32f
Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, Inglourious Bas
terds), 96, 103
Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004), 36
Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore
(Martin Scorsese, 1974), 6
Alien Nation (Graham Baker, 1988), 106
Allen, Woody, 7, 131

Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington,
Training Day), 57
alternate history, 9495. See also
revisionism
American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980),
57
American history: and Abraham Lin
coln: Vampire Hunter, 126; and
Death Proof, 89; and Django Un
chained, 11, 119; erasure of, 124; and
slavery, 104
American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998),
43, 103
Amistad (Steven Spielberg, 1997), 106,
113114
Animal House (John Landis, 1978), 5657
Annie (Broadway musical), 128
Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), 7
Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011), 95
Antwone Fisher (Denzel Washington,
2002), 102
Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999),
36
Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito, Death Proof),
83, 85, 91, 92
Arquette, Patricia, in True Romance,
26, 32f
Arquette, Rosanna, in Pulp Fiction, 48
Asian representation: in American pop
culture, 7071; in Kill Bill saga, 11,
140n14; in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 74; in Kill
Bill: Vol. 2, 8182; in martial arts
films, 67
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), 82
Baker, Josephine, 87
Ballot or the Bullet (Malcolm X,
1964), 5
156 Race on the Qt
Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000), 7

Baywatch (19891999), 14
B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine, Kill Bill:
Vol. 2), 79
Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman, Kill
Bill), 7982, 81f, 90. See also Black
Mamba; Bride, the
Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker,
Jackie Brown), 5859, 61
Beguiled, The (Don Siegel, 1971), 107
Bell, Zo, in Death Proof, 88, 90f, 91f
Bell Curve, 119
Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998), 106,
107, 122
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ
Meyer, 1970), 128
Bicentennial Nigger (Richard Pryor,
1976), 40
Bickle, Travis (Robert De Niro, Taxi
Driver), 27
Big Boss, The (Lo Wei, 1971), 67
Big Trouble in Little China (John Car
penter, 1986), 78
Bill (David Carradine), Kill Bill: Vol. 1),
69; Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 79
Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1971), 4, 71
Birch, Thora, 124
Birth of a Nation, The (D. W. Griffith,
1915), 28, 56, 104,112, 143144n1
Black and White (James Toback, 1999),
29, 63
black characters: in Death Proof, 92; in
Django Unchained, 118; in Holly
wood films, 41, 4243, 77; in Jackie
Brown, 6162; in Pulp Fiction, 43
44; in Tarantino films, 37, 123, 130;
in Woody Allen films, 131. See also
African Americans; specific charac
ters; specific films
Blackenstein (William A. Levey, 1973),
76
blackface minstrelsy, 2728, 133, 136n5
black female sexuality, 11, 131
Black Like Me (Julius Tannenbaum,
1964), 122
Black Lolita (Stephen Gibson, 1975), 76
Black Mamba (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill),
68, 7677. See also Beatrix Kiddo;

Bride, the
black masculinity: in athletics, 142n12;
in Birth of a Nation, 56; in King
Kong films, 57; in Pulp Fiction, 41; in
Tarantino films, 123; in Traffic, 28.
See also white masculinity
blackness, 23; in Hollywood films,
5657; in Inglourious Basterds, 98;
in Jackie Brown, 57f, 58; in Reservoir
Dogs, 11, 1617, 2324; in Tarantino
films, 10, 1213, 37, 7475, 122, 123,
130, 133134; in Traffic, 29; in True
Romance, 2526, 2832, 35; white ap
propriation of, 28, 4142, 77, 136n18.
See also race; whiteness
black power movement, 4, 22, 25, 105,
106, 113
Black Samson (Charles Bail, 1974), 76
black sexuality, 141n26
Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006),
76
black studies, 25
Blacula (William Crain, 1972), 76
Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998), 73
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 70,
106
Blaxploitation: and depictions of
slavery, 113; and Hollywood, 105106;
and Jackie Brown, 6365; and Reser
voir Dogs, 23; as Tarantino influ
ence, 36, 910, 12, 128, 129; and True
Romance, 30, 31. See also specific
films
Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974), 4,
113
Blink 182, 14
Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006),
43
Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978), 7
Blues in More Than One Color
(Stanley Crouch), 9
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967),
6, 103
Bonnie Situation, in Pulp Fiction,
4445, 4647
Boone, Pat, 28
index 157
Boss Nigger (Jack Arnold, 1975), 40, 106,

113
Boss Tanaka (Jun Kunimura, Kill Bill:
Vol. 1), 7273, 74
Botting, Fred, 113
Bowen, Michael, in Jackie Brown, 53
Bowman, Paul, 7172
Boys from Brazil, The (Franklin J.
Schaffner, 1978), 95
Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991),
1415
Brando, Marlon, 4
Brer Rabbit, 56
Bride, the (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill), 68
69, 70, 70f, 71, 72, 7375, 75f, 77f. See
also Beatrix Kiddo; Black Mamba
Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane
Kruger, Inglourious Basterds),
100101
Briefel, Aviva, 124
Bronze Buckaroo (Richard C. Kahn,
1939), 117
Brooks, Robert, in Reservoir Dogs, 17,
18f
Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, Django
Unchained), 108109, 110f, 111, 112,
116, 117
Brother from Another Planet, The (John
Sayles, 1984), 8, 106
Brother Future (Roy Campanella II,
1991), 106
Brothers Grimm, 47
Brown, H. Rap, 5
Brown, James, 71
Brown, William, 101
Budd (Michael Madsen, Kill Bill: Vol. 2),
7879
Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames, Out of
Sight), 58
Bullets over Broadway (Woody Allen,
1994), 131
Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), 35
Bunker, Eddie, in Reservoir Dogs, 16
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 84
Burton, Tim, 2
Buscemi, Steve, in Reservoir Dogs,
1314, 16
Bush, Barbara, 123

Bush, George H. W., 25, 143144n1
Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis, Pulp Fic
tion), 41, 43,44, 49, 50f, 51
Butler, The (Lee Daniels, 2013), 8
Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio,
Django Unchained), 109110, 111, 111f,
112f, 114f, 118119
Captain America: The First Avenger
(Joe Johnston, 2011), 126
Captain Kirk (William Shatner, Star
Trek), 95
Carlitos Way (Brian De Palma, 1993), 15
Caroline Wakefield (Erika Christensen,
Traffic), 29
Carradine, David: in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 72;
in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 79; in Kung Fu, 71
Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), 7, 6970
Carroll, Diahann, in Claudine, 52
Carter, Jimmy, 14
Cassavetes, John, 131
Catch22 (Mike Nichols, 1970), 94
Cayouette, Laura, in Django Un
chained, 109
Chan, Charlie, 70
Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973), 4
Cheadle, Don, in Devil in a Blue Dress,
57
Chiba, Sonny, 68
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), 6
Cho, Frank, 84
Chronic, The (Dr. Dre, 1992), 14
City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987), 13
civil rights movement, 7, 22, 25, 122,
126
Civil War, 28, 58, 126
Clarence Worley (Christian Slater, True
Romance), 26, 2930, 3233, 32f, 35
class, 25, 139n32; in Claudine, 52; in
Falling Down, 35; in Hollywood
films, 104; in Jackie Brown, 11, 55, 62,
6365; in Tarantino films, 139n32; in
True Romance, 31, 33
Claudine (John Berry, 1974), 52
Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper, True
Romance), 3031, 32
158 Race on the Qt
Clockwork Orange, A (Stanley Kubrick,

1971), 128
Clooney, George: in From Dusk till
Dawn, 131132; in Out of Sight, 58
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), 37
Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003),
36
Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis,
2002), 36
Colonel Landa. See Hans Landa
Coltrane, John, 9
Confederate flag, 4950
Connery, Sean, 70
coon, 16, 112, 136n5
Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1975), 133
Coppola, Francis Ford, 4
Cosby Show (19841992), 127
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), 87
Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), 103
Crazy 88s, 71
Cronenberg, David, 87, 119, 134
cross-dressing, 141n26
Crouch, Stanley, 910, 5758, 133, 138n6,
138n14
Crying Game (1992), 141n26
Daniels, Lee, 8
DArtagnan (Ato Essandoh, Django Un
chained), 110
Davis, Ilah, in Hardcore, 115
Dawson, Rosario, in Death Proof, 87,
89f
DC Comics, 95
Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007), 10, 11, 65,
8292, 129, 132, 139n34
Deconstructing Harry (Woody Allen,
1997), 131
Deer Hunter, The (Michael Cimino,
1978), 7, 70
Defiant Ones, The (Stanley Kramer,
1958), 43
Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), 50, 51
De Niro, Robert: in Jackie Brown, 58,
59f; in Taxi Driver, 27
De Palma, Brian, 15
Departed, The (Martin Scorsese, 2006),
56, 37
Derek, Bo, 84
Detroit, Michigan, 26, 30, 3233, 40, 118
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin,
1995), 57
D-Fens (Michael Douglas, Falling
Down), 35
dialogue: in Death Proof, 90, 92; in The
Godfather, 45; and the n-word, 37,
40, 4446; in Pulp Fiction, 39, 42
43, 133; in Reservoir Dogs, 1516; in
Tarantino films, 1, 128; in True Ro
mance, 25, 26. See also specific films
Diamond, Neil, in The Jazz Singer, 28
DiCaprio, Leonardo, in Django Un
chained, 109, 111f, 112f, 114f
Dick, Philip K., 94
Dirty Dozen, The (Robert Aldrich, 1967),
93
DJ (Terrence Howard, Hustle and Flow),
57
Django (Jamie Foxx), 108f, 109, 109f, 111,
112, 116, 117, 117f, 132
Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966), 106
Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012),
10, 127, 128129; compared to Death
Proof, 92; criticism of, 121, 130131; as
critique of race relations in America,
1112; discussion of, 104120; as
parody, 143n35; and racial blackness,
134; and white audiences, 132133
Doctor Who (1963to date), 95
Donowitz, Lee (Saul Rubinek, True
Romance), 34
Doors, The (Oliver Stone, 1991), 36
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989), 7
Douglas, Michael: in Falling Down, 35;
in Traffic, 29
Downey, Robert, Jr., in Tropic Thunder,
28
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (William Crain,
1976), 76
Dr. Dre, 14
Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman, True Ro
mance), 26, 28, 29, 3132, 35
Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford,
1989), 43
Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), 94
index 159
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(Stanley Kubrick, 1964), 94
drug mules, 5253, 54, 6465
Drum (Steve Carver, 1976), 105
Du Bois, W.E.B., 118, 119
Duel at Diablo (Ralph Nelson, 1966),
117
Dukakis, Michael, 143144n1
Duke, Bill, in American Gigolo, 57
Duvalier, Franois Papa Doc, 105
Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), 6
economics, 53, 6364, 104
Ejiofor, Chiwetel: in Melinda and
Melinda, 131; in 12 Years a Slave,
114115
Elliot Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot, True
Romance), 34
Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor,
Melinda and Melinda), 131
Ellison, Ralph, 9
Eminem, 28
Enid (Thora Birch, Ghost World), 124
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973),
67
Essandoh, Ato, in Django Unchained,
110
Ethan Edwards (John Wayne, The
Searchers), 9798
eugenics, 31, 119. See also racism
Ex Machina (Brian K. Vaughan and
Tony Harris, 2004), 95
Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993),
35
Family Man, The (Brett Ratner, 2000),
43
Fast Black (Morgan Freeman, Street
Smart), 57
female sexuality, 83, 84, 131
feminism, 25, 34
Ferlito, Vanessa, in Death Proof, 83
film noir, 23
film studies, 9, 10, 136n3, 142n11
Fistful of Dollars, A (Sergio Leone,
1964), 106
Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 1972), 67

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 129
Flash Gordon (19361940, 1980), 70
Flora (Mae Marsh, Birth of a Nation), 28
Fonda, Bridget, in Jackie Brown, 59, 60f
Force 10 from Navarone (Guy Hamilton,
1978), 93
Forster, Robert, in Jackie Brown, 55
48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, 1982), 43
47 Ronin (Carl Rinsch, 2013), 82
Foster, Jodi, in Taxi Driver, 27
Four Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997), 7
Fox, Vivica A., 140n10; in Kill Bill:
Vol. 1, 75, 77f
Foxx, Jamie, in Django Unchained,
108f, 109f, 117f
Foxx, Red, 40
Foxy Brown (Pam Grier), 6465
Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson, The
Departed), 5
Frazetta, Frank, 84
Freeman, Morgan, in Street Smart, 57
French Connection, The (William
Friedkin, 1971), 4, 7
Fresh Prince of BelAir (19901996), 14
Friedkin, William, 7
From Dusk till Dawn (Robert Rodri
guez, 1996), 131132
Fuck tha Police (N.W.A., 1988), 14
funk, 15
Gallafent, Edward (Quentin Tarantino),
61
Game of Death, The (Bruce Lee, 1973/
1978), 67, 72
Gandolfini, James, in True Romance, 33
Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese,
2002), 37, 126
gangsta rap, 1415
Gates, Darrel, 14
gender bias, 7980
gender politics, 11, 35, 6970
Get On the Bus (Spike Lee, 1996), 7
Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990), 43
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
(Jim Jarmusch, 1999), 37
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001), 124
160 Race on the Qt
Gifford, Frances, 84
Gimp, the (in Pulp Fiction), 49
Giroux, Henry A., 144n5
Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), 106, 113
Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola,
1972), 45, 7
Godfather, The, Part II (Francis Ford
Coppola, 1974), 7
Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming,
1939), 58, 105,120
Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (Sergio
Leone, 1966), 106
Goodbye Uncle Tom (Gualtiero Jaco
petti, 1971), 105, 116
Gothic fiction, 113
Gothic horror, in Django Unchained,
12, 106114, 117120, 129
Grand Theft Auto (1997), 15
Great Gatsby, The (Baz Luhrmann,
2013), 129
Green Berets, The (various, 1968), 96
Green Day, 14
Green Hornet, The, theme music of, 72
Green Mile, The (Frank Darabont, 1999),
43
Grier, Pam: as Foxy Brown, 6465; in
Jackie Brown, 53, 53f, 55f, 63f, 64f
Griffith, D. W., 28, 56, 104, 112
Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, 2007),
132
Groth, Sylvester, in Inglourious Bas
terds, 100
Guerrero, Ed, 104
Gus (Walter Long, Birth of a Nation),
28, 56
Harmon, Joy, in Village of the Giants,

82
Harriell, Marcy, in Death Proof, 85
Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba, Kill Bill:
Vol. 1), 68
Help, The (Tate Taylor, 2011), 43, 62, 126
Hes My Girl (1987), 141n26
High Risk (1981), 141n26
hip-hop, 14, 15, 40, 63, 128, 129, 136n3.
See also rap music
Hitchcock, Alfred, 2, 62
Holdaway (Robert Brooks, Reservoir
Dogs), 1720, 18f, 2325, 136n9
Holiday Heart (2000), 141n26
Hollywood, California, 3233
Hollywood films: and black characters,
2829, 5152, 5658, 65, 77, 117; and
black/white character pairs, 4143;
and Bruce Lee, 67; and explicitness,
128; and female characters, 34, 56, 69,
84, 85; and historical revisionism,
124126; and individualism, 116, 118;
and racial representation, 70, 71, 102;
and slavery, 104106, 113, 120; and
war, 93; and white characters, 48,
49, 80, 82, 102103. See also specific
films
Holocaust, in Inglourious Basterds, 94,
Homeland
97, 102, 141n1
(20112014), 37
Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949),
102
Honeydripper (John Sayles, 2007), 8
Hong Kong kung fu film industry, 68
Habermas, Jrgen, 130131

Haney-Jardine, Perla, in Kill Bill: Vol. 2,
79
Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, In
glourious Basterds), 94, 97f, 103,
hooks, bell, 123

Hopper, Dennis, in True Romance, 30
Horton, Willie, 143144n1
Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), 36
Hottentot Venus, 85
Howard, Terrence, in Hustle and Flow,
57
Howell, C. Thomas, in Soul Man, 28
141142n8, 141n7
Harajuku Girls, 7071
Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979), 115116
Harlem on The Prairie (Sam Newfield,
1937), 117
Hughes, Howard, 2
Hunted, The (William Friedkin, 2003),
36
Hurricane, The (Norman Jewison,
1999), 8
Guss, Louis, 4
index 161
Hustle and Flow (Craig Brewer, 2005), 57

Huston, John, 131
Jimmie Dimmick (Quentin Tarantino,

Pulp Fiction), 44, 48
Jim West (Will Smith, Wild Wild West),
Ido, Jacky, in Inglourious Basterds, 98,

99f
Ill Gotten Gains (Joel B. Marsden, 1997),
117
Jody (Rosanna Arquette, Pulp Fiction),
48
Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney, Reservoir
Dogs), 1623, 22f, 136n9
Johnson, Lyndon B., 14
Jolson, Al, in The Jazz Singer, 27
Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth, In
glourious Basterds), 100
Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson,
Pulp Fiction), 42, 42f, 4344, 46,
106
In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967), 6
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009),
98
interracial
8, 10, 11, pairs,
92, 93104,
42, 88,141n7
interracial relationships, 1, 7, 98, 131
interracial sexuality, 7, 105,123
In the Heat of the Night (Norman
Jewison, 1967), 8
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952), 9
Iris (Jodi Foster, Taxi Driver), 27
Irrversible (Gaspar No, 2002), 40
Jack Foley (George Clooney, Out of
Sight), 58
Jackie (Pam Grier, Jackie Brown), 11, 53
56, 53f, 55f, 59, 61, 63f, 64, 64f, 9091
Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997), 10, 11;
and black racial identity, 37; com
pared to Death Proof, 9091, 92; dis
cussion of, 5265; and the n-word,
8, 4041
Jackson, Samuel L.: in Django Un
chained, 110, 111f, 112, 112f, 132133; in
Jackie Brown, 53, 57, 57f, 59f, 63f; in
Pulp Fiction, 42, 42f
Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott, Hard
core), 115
James, David, 121
Jasper (Jonathan Loughran, Death
Proof), 9192
Jay-Z, 4041, 128
Jazz Singer, The (Alan Crosland, 1927),
27
Jazz Singer, The (Richard Fleischer,
1980), 28
Jefferson in Paris (James Ivory, 1995), 127
Jerk, The (Carl Reiner, 1979), 133
Jew Hunter. See Hans Landa
Jewison, Norman, 8
Jim Crow, 4950, 122
5152, 133
Julien, Max, in The Mack, 30
Jungle Fever (Spike Lee, 1991), 7
Jungle Girl (William Witney, 1941), 84
Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier,
Death Proof), 83, 8485, 85f, 8687,
90, 91, 92, 129
Juwanna Mann (2002), 141n26
Karate Kid, The (Harald Zwart, 2010), 67
Karate Kid, The (John G. Avildsen,
1984), 67
Kazaam (Paul M. Glaser, 1996), 43
Keaton, Michael, in Jackie Brown, 53
Keitel, Harvey: in Pulp Fiction, 47;
in Reservoir Dogs, 16, 21f; in Taxi
Driver, 27
Kelly, Ambrosia, in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 75
Kellys Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970),
93
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003), 10, 11,
65, 6778, 92, 104
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (Tarantino, 2004), 10, 11,
65, 7882, 90
Killing, The (Stanley Kubrick, 1956), 39
Killing Zoe (Roger Avary, 1993), 36
Kim Mathis (Tracie Thoms, Death
Proof), 8890, 90f, 91, 91f, 92, 139n34
King, Rodney, 13
King Kong (1933, 1976, 2005), 57, 101102
King of New York (Abel Ferrar, 1990), 29
King Schultz, Dr. (Christoph Waltz,
Django Unchained), 107, 109, 111, 111f
162
Race on the Qt
Kinky Boots (2005), 141n26

Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955),
46
Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971), 128
Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton,
1979), 7
Kristen (Ilah Davis, Hardcore), 115
Kruger, Diane, in Inglourious Basterds,
100
Ku Klux Klan, 28, 104, 109, 110
Kung Fu (19721975), 71, 72
kung fu films, 68
Kung Fu Panda (John Stevenson and
Mark Osborne, 2008), 67
Kunimura, Jun, in Kill Bill: Vol. 1,
7273, 74
Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine,
Kung Fu), 71
Ladd, Jordan, in Death Proof, 83
LaMarr, Phil, 44
Lance (Eric Stolz, Pulp Fiction), 47, 48
LaPadite (Denis Menochet, Inglourious
Basterds), 96, 98
laPd (Los Angeles Police Department),
14
Lara (Laura Cayouette, Django Un
chained), 109
Last Airbender, The (M. Night Shyama
lan, 2010), 71
Last Boy Scout, The (Tony Scott, 1991),
43
Last Picture Show, The (Peter Bogdano
vich, 1971), 128
Last Samurai, The (Edward Zwick,
2003), 71, 82
Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Berto
lucci, 1972), 128
Lawrence, Martin, 141n26
Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Death
Proof), 9192
Lee, Jesse,
Bruce,in
67,Posse,
72, 140n14
117
Lee, Spike, 78, 121; and criticism of
Tarantino, 40
Legend of Bagger Vance, The (Robert
Redford, 2000), 43, 58
Legend of Nigger Charley, The (Martin

Goldman, 1972), 40, 105, 113
Leigh, Vivien, in Gone With the Wind,
58
Leonard, Elmore, 57
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 28
Liberation of L.B. Jones, The (William
Wyler, 1970), 4
Like a Virgin (Madonna, 1984), 16
Limp Bizkit, 14
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012), 113114
Little Jody (Sharon Pierre-Louis, Django
Unchained), 108,109f
Liu, Gordon, in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 80, 80f,
81f
Liu, Lucy, in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 69, 74f
Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996), 8
Long, Walter, 28; in Birth of a Nation,
56
Los Angeles riots, 13, 118
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola,
2003), 70
Loughran, Jonathan, in Death Proof, 91
Louis Gara (Robert De Niro, Jackie
Brown), 5860, 59f, 61
Lucky Strike, The (Kim Stanley
Robinson, 1984), 94
Lynch, David, 2
Machete (Robert Rodriguez, 2010), 132
Mack, The (Michael Campus, 1973), in
True Romance, 30
Madonna, 16
Madsen, Michael: in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 78;
in Reservoir Dogs, 16
Mailer, Norman, 27, 28, 41, 136n16
Major Hellstrom (August Diehl, In
glourious Basterds), 100101
Malcolm X, 5, 132, 136n9
Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992), 7
male gaze, 33, 69,8687, 9091
Mammy, and Birth of a Nation, 112
Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975), 105,
106
Mandingo fights, 110, 116
Manero, Tony (John Travolta, Saturday
Night Fever), 41
index 163
Man in the High Castle, The (Philip K.

Dick, 1962), 94
Man on a Ledge (Asger Leth, 2012), 37
Marcel (Jacky Ido, Inglourious Bas
terds), 98, 99f
Marcy (Marcy Harriell, Death Proof), 85
Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston,
2004), 53
Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen, Jackie
Brown), 5354, 55
Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames, Pulp
Fiction), 4344, 47, 48,48f, 49, 50f, 51,
127; home of, 49f
Marsh, Mae, 28
Martin, Trayvon, 46
Marvin (Phil LaMarr, Pulp Fiction), 44,
127
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), 94
Mask, Mia, 6465
Master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu, Kill Bill:
Vol. 1), 80f, 81f
Matewan (John Sayles, 1986), 8
Matrix, The (Wachowski Brothers, 1999),
67, 106
Max Cherry (Robert Forster, Jackie
Brown), 55, 56, 6263
McCalla, Irish, 84
McCluskey, Malik D., 44
McDaniel, Hattie, in Gone With the
Wind, 58
McGowan, Rose, in Death Proof, 90
McQueen, Steve, in True Romance, 35
Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), 4
Melanie (Bridget Fonda, Jackie Brown),
5960, 60f, 61, 62, 63
Melinda and Melinda (Woody Allen,
2004), 131
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), 40
Menace II Society (Hughes Brothers,
1993), 15
Menochet, Denis, in Inglourious Bas
terds, 96
Men of Honor (George Tillman, Jr.,
2000), 102
Message to the Grass Roots (Mal
colm X), 132
Miami race riots (1980), 118
Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman, Pulp Fic

tion), 48, 48f
Micheaux, Oscar, 8
Miller, Sam J., 124
Million Man March, 7
minstrel caricatures, 132133
minstrel theater, 136n5
Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008),
7, 102
Mirror, Mirror (Star Trek), 95
Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988),
126
Monuments Men, The (George Clooney,
2014), 93
Morrison, Toni, 116
Mouse (Don Cheadle, Devil in a Blue
Dress), 57
Mr. Black, in Reservoir Dogs, 1617
Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen, Reservoir
Dogs), 16, 1920
Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino, Reser
voir Dogs), 16
Mr. Orange/Freddy (Tim Roth, Reser
voir Dogs), 1619, 18f, 21f, 23
Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi, Reservoir
Dogs), 1620, 24, 136n9
Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek),
95
Mr. T. (Laurence Tureaud), 60
Mr. White (Harvey Keitel, Reservoir
Dogs), 16, 17, 1920, 21f
Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel, Pulp Fiction),
47
Murphy, Eddie, 2, 141n26
Myers, Russ, 2
naacP, 40
narrative displacement, 25
Native Americans, 97, 9899, 105
Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone,
1994), 36
Neblett, Tour, 41
New Hollywood cinema (1970s), 6
Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn, Reservoir
Dogs), 20
Nicholson, Jack, in The Departed, 5
Niggas With Attitude (N.W.A.), 14
164 Race on the Qt
Night of the Living Dead (George A.

Romero, 1968), 107
Nikki (Ambrosia Kelly, Kill Bill: Vol. 1),
75, 7778, 82
9/11 terrorist attack, 3637, 63, 124
Nitzsche, Jack, 82
Nixon, Richard, 14
Nolin, Gena Lee, 84
Norris, Chuck, 82
n-word: as critique of racism, 129; in
Death Proof, 92; in Django Un
chained, 132; in Jackie Brown, 37, 41,
62, 63, 65; mainstream use of, 4041;
in Pulp Fiction, 37, 40, 41, 4344, 46
47, 52; in Reservoir Dogs, 19, 24; in
Tarantino films, 1, 8, 9, 122, 123124
Nyongo, Lupita, in 12 Years a Slave,
115
Obama, Barack, 126, 130
Obama, Michelle, 127
Oldman, Gary, in True Romance, 26,
27f, 28
Oliver, Thelma, 50
Omega Man, The (Boris Sagal, 1971), 73
Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were
Colored (Tim Reid, 1996), 122
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
(Milos Forman, 1975), 67
Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson,
Jackie Brown), 11, 53, 54, 55, 56, 5760,
57f, 59f, 61, 62
O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu, Kill Bill: Vol. 1),
69, 7275, 74f
Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998),
36, 58
Owens, Jesse, 100
Page, Betty, 84
Paltrow, Gwyneth, 4041
Pam (Rose McGowan, Death Proof), 90
pastiche, 10, 129
Patch of Blue, A (Guy Green, 1965), 43,
122
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957),
94
patriarchy, 25
Patriot, The (Roland Emmerich, 2000),
126
Patsey (Lupita Nyongo, 12 Years a
Slave), 115
Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), 96
Pawnbroker, The (Sidney Lumet, 1964),
5051
Peckinpah, Sam, 2, 65
Perry, Katy, 71
Perry, Tyler, 8, 141n26
Pierre-Louis, Sharon, in Django Un
chained, 108, 109f
Pinchot, Bronson, in True Romance, 34
Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), 122
Pitt, Brad, in Inglourious Basterds, 96
PJs, The (19992001), 133
Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner,
1968), 106
Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007),
132
Poitier, Sidney, in Duel at Diablo, 117
Poitier, Sydney Tamiia, in Death Proof,
83, 84, 85f
Polanski, Roman, 131
Pollack, Sydney, 131
Pollock, Jackson, 129
Posse (Mario Van Peebles, 1993), 117
postracial society, 129130
Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), 8, 123
Presley, Elvis, 28; in True Romance,
32, 35
Preston, Brian, 7172
Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978), 128
prison-industrial complex, in Jackie
Brown, 5354, 55f, 64
Pryor, Richard: as comic, 2, 40; in The
Mack, 30
Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994): and
blackness as cool, 133; discussion of,
3952; and intersection of power,
race, and sexuality, 127; and the
n-word, 3, 8, 37; and racial dynamics,
10; and white masculinity, 11
Putney Swope (Robert Downey, Sr.,
1969), 102
index 165
Quentin Tarantino (Edward Gallafent),

61
race: and American film, 910; and
commodification of blackness,
136n18; and economics in Jackie
Brown, 64; and gender in True Ro
mance, 3334; and racism in Pulp
Fiction, 47; and Reagan years, 14; in
Tarantino films, 10, 65, 127, 133134;
and white masculinity, 137n23. See
also blackness; whiteness
race card, 55
race relations: in Hollywood films, 5,
124; in Inglourious Basterds, 100
102; in Pulp Fiction, 42; in Reservoir
Dogs, 22; in Tarantino films, 11, 65,
121, 134
racial discourses, 3, 10, 12, 45,72, 100,
racial
145n26
fetishism, 11, 51, 61, 116
racial politics, 1, 12, 32, 92, 130131, 132
racial representation: in American pop
culture, 8384; in Hollywood films,
70, 122; in Kill Bill films, 8182; in
Precious, 123; in Tarantino films,
2425, 65, 75, 122, 123124, 134
racial revenge, 23, 104,131
racial violence, 95
racism: in America, 37, 41, 134; in
American film, 46, 102103, 124,
133; and Death Proof, 85; and eu
genics, 119; in Inglourious Basterds,
11, 95, 9697, 98, 100, 102; and Jackie
Brown, 5152; in Pulp Fiction, 45
51; in Reservoir Dogs, 15, 19, 2025;
and revisionism, 126, 127; in The
Searchers, 9798; and slavery, 104;
and Tarantino films, 3, 89, 122, 129,
131; in True Romance, 31. See also
Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton, Jackie

Brown), 53
Reagan, Ronald, 14, 25
Red Tails (Anthony Hemingway, 2012),
102
Reed, Ishmael, 121
Reider, John, 94
Reign Over Me (Mike Binder, 2007), 36,
43
Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992), 10, 11,
136n9; discussion of, 1325
Return of Bruno, The (Bruce Willis,
1987), 4142
reverse racism, 2123
revisionism, 126127. See also alternate
history
Rhames, Ving: in Out of Sight, 58; in
Pulp Fiction, 43, 48f, 50f
Richards, Michael Anthony, 40, 46
Riot Grrrl gender politics, 35
Risky Business (1983), 141n26
Roberts, Tanya, in Sheena, 84
Robinson, Bill Bojangles, in Shirley
Temple films, 43
Robinson, Kim Stanley, 94
Rodriguez, Robert, 131132
Rogers, Roy, 117
Roots (1977), 106
Roth, Tim, in Reservoir Dogs, 16, 21f
Royal Tenenbaums, The (Wes Anderson,
2001), 48
Rubinek, Saul, in True Romance, 34
Rush Hour (Brett Ratner, 1998), 67
Russell, Kurt, in Death Proof, 86,86f
eugenics
racism, scientific, 31, 85, 119
Raisin in the Sun (Philip Rose, 1961), 122
rap music, 1415, 25, 110, 117. See also
hip-hop
Sanford and Son (19721977), 40

satire: in Bamboozled, 7; in Coonskin,
133; in Inglourious Basterds, 9394;
in Putney Swope, 102
Saturday Night Fever (John Badham,
1977), 41
Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg,
1998), 93
Saw (James Wan, 2004), 36
Sayles, John, 8
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), 39
Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981), 119
166 Race on the Qt
Scarlett OHara (Vivien Leigh, Gone

With the Wind), 58
School Daze (Spike Lee, 1988), 7
Schultz, Dr. King (Christoph Waltz,
Django Unchained), 107,109, 111,
111f
Schumacher, Joel, 35
science fiction: in Flash Gordon, 70;
in Goodbye Uncle Tom, 105; In
glourious Basterds as, 9495; and
slavery films, 106
Scorsese, Martin, 5, 37, 45. See also spe
cific films
Scott, George C.: in Hardcore, 115; in
Patton, 96
Scott, Tony, 25, 36. See also specific
films
Searchers, The (John Ford, 1956), 9798
Segal, Steven, 82
Seinfeld (19891998), 14
Sellers, Peter, in Dr. Strangelove, 94
semiotics, 26, 99100
Serendipity (Peter Chelsom, 2001), 124
Set
sexual
It Off(1996),
objectification,
140n103334, 70f, 8587,
8990, 133
sexual violence, 50, 6970, 119
Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000), 36
Shanna (Jordan Ladd, Death Proof), 83,
91
Sheena (John Guillermin, 1984), 84
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (19551956),
84
Sheena (20002002), 84
Sheronda (Lisa Gay Hamilton, Jackie
Brown), 61
Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mlanie Laurent,
Inglourious Basterds), 9899
Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller, 1976), 28
Simone (Hattie Winston, Jackie Brown),
61
Sinatra, Nancy, 88
Singleton, John, 1415
Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), 7
Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984), 70
Skeleton Key, The (Iain Softley, 2005),
107
Slater, Christian, in True Romance, 26,

32f
Slavers, The (Larry Kent, 1977), 105
slavery, 131; and Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter, 126; and Death
Proof, 89; in Django Unchained, 110;
and historical revisionism, 127; in
Hollywood films, 104106, 113, 119
120; and Inglourious Basterds, 101; in
Lincoln, 114; in Tarantino films, 131;
in 12 Years a Slave, 115116
Slaves (Herbert Biberman, 1969), 105
Smiley, Tavis, 121
Smith, Will, in Wild Wild West, 117
Snakes on a Plane (David Ellis, 2006), 36
Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000), 36
Soldiers Story, A (Norman Jewison,
1984), 8, 102
Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger, The Pawn
broker), 50
Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12
Years a Slave), 114115
Song of the South (Harve Foster and
Wilfred Jackson, 1946), 105
Sopranos, The (19992007), 36
Soul Food (1997), 140n10
Soul Man (Steve Minor, 1986), 28
Soul of Nigger Charley, The (Larry
Spangler, 1973), 40,105,113
Soul Plane (Jessy Terrero, 2004), 133
Sounder (Martin Ritt, 1972), 122
soundtracks, 15, 41
spaghetti westerns, 112, 117, 121, 129
Speed, Carol, in The Mack, 30
SpiderMan (Sam Raimi, 2002), 124
Spook Who Sat by the Door, The (Ivan
Dixon, 1973), 5, 102, 104
Sport (Harvey Keitel, Taxi Driver), 27
Stalin, Joseph, 126
Star Trek (19661969), 95
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert
Wise, 1979), 43
Star Wars (George Lucas), 70, 95, 125126
Stefani, Gwen, 7071
Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, Django
Unchained), 110111, 111f, 112f, 132
Stir Crazy (1980), 141n26
index 167
Stolz, Eric, in Pulp Fiction, 47

Stone, Oliver, 36
Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A., 1988),
14
Street Smart (Jerry Schatzberg, 1987), 57
Thoms, Tracie, in Death Proof, 88, 90f

Thurman, Uma: in Kill Bill, 68, 70, 70f,
72, 75f, 77f, 81f; in Pulp Fiction, 48,
48f
Tierney, Lawrence, in Reservoir Dogs,
Strode, Woodrow, 117

Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, Death
Proof), 86,86f, 92, 139n34
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006),
36
16
Tierney, Sean, 89
Toback, James, and Black and White,
29
Toller (Sidney Poitier, Duel at Diablo),
117
To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything,
Julie Newmar (Beeban Kidron, 1995),
141n26
Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), 2829
Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001), 57
Travolta, John, in Pulp Fiction, 41, 42,
42f, 49f, 52
tropes: of Asianness, 70, 74; of black
ness, 27, 58, 77; of cowboy, 25; of
Gothic horror, 107, 113, 114f; and Pre
cious, 123; of racism masquerading
as common sense, 24; of science
fiction, 106; in True Romance, 3536;
of Uncle Tom, 111; of white negro,
27, 41, 136n16; of whiteness, 28, 48,
49, 84, 87
Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008), 28
Suture (Scott McGehee and David

Siegel, 1993), 102
Swarns, Rachel L., 127
Sweet, Vonte, in Traffic, 29
Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song
(Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), 4, 23
Tarantino, Quentin: as actor, 16, 44,
4546, 131, 132; as cinematic DJ, 128;
criticism of, 24, 52, 7475, 94, 121
122, 135n3, 140n8, 144n5; on Django
Unchained, 93; as executive pro
ducer of Killing Zoe, 36; and inter
section of power, race, and sexu
ality, 127128; and the n-word, 129; as
public figure, 1, 23, 130; and race as
a subject, 89; and racial role rever
sals, 89; and racial subtext, 37; and
white audiences, 132, 133; as writer,
36, 39. See also specific films
Tarzan, the Ape Man (John Derek, 1981),
84
Tarzan films, 29
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), 7,
27, 45
Temple, Shirley, 43
These Boots Were Made for Walking
(Nancy Sinatra, 1966), 88
They Saved Hitlers Brain (various,
1969), 95
Thing, The (John Carpenter, 1982), 73
Things to Do in Denver When Youre
Dead (Gary Fleder, 1995), 36, 40
Third Reich, 141142n8
third-wave feminism, 25
Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003),
63
True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993), 10;

discussion of, 2537; and white mas
culinity, 11
Tucker, Chris, in Jackie Brown, 58
Tureaud, Laurence (Mr. T), 60
Turner, Nat, 118, 120
Twain, Mark, 129
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013),
114116
Twilight Zone (19591964), 95
Two Can Play That Game (2001),
in the Valley (John Herzfeld,
2 Days
140n10
1996), 36, 40
typecasting, 70
Uncle Tom, 111, 112
Unconditionally (Katy Perry, 2013), 71
United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006), 36
168 Race on the Qt
Usual Suspects, The (Bryan Singer,

1995), 36
Van Damme, Jean-Claude, 82
Vanilla Ice, 28
Van Peebles, Melvin, 2, 4, 23
Vargas, Antonio, 84
Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox, Kill Bill:
Vol. 1), 76, 77f, 92
Vicenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken,
True Romance), 3033
Videodrome (David Cronenberg,1983),
120
Village of the Giants (Bert I. Gordon,
1965), 82
Vincent Vega (John Travolta, Pulp Fic
tion), 41, 42,42f, 4344, 46,4748, 52
violence: in Blaxploitation films, 105;
in Cronenberg films, 119; in Death
Proof, 11, 87; in Django Unchained,
110; in Falling Down, 35; and gangsta
rap, 14; in Hollywood films, 6, 36;
in Inglourious Basterds, 95, 102,
103104; in Jackie Brown, 59; in Kill
Bill: Vol. 1, 6970, 7374, 7778; in
Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 79; in Pulp Fiction,
39, 40, 42, 50; in Reservoir Dogs, 15,
1920; and slavery, 127; in Tarantino
films, 1, 12, 123124, 128, 134; in True
Romance, 34; in 12 Years a Slave, 115
Virgil (James Gandolfini, True Ro
mance), 3334
Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life (Jay-Z, 1998),
128
Walken, Christopher, in True Romance,
30
Waltz, Christoph: in Django Un
chained, 107108, 111f; in Inglourious
Basterds, 94, 97f
War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg,
2005), 36
War on Poverty, 14
Washington, Denzel, in Training Day,
57
Washington, Kerry, in Django Un
chained, 108, 110f
Watchmen (Alan Moore, 1986), 95

Watts Rebellion (1965), 118
Wayne, John: in The Green Berets, 96;
in The Searchers, 97
Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 1972), 67
Welles, Orson, 2
West, Cornel, 63, 130
West, Kanye, 4041
White Chicks
Armond,
(Keenen
9, 77, 140n8
Ivory Wayans,
White,
2004), 133
White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982), 102,
104
white male gaze, 86, 87, 9091
white masculinity, 11, 20, 2325, 29,
3132, 3335, 137n24. See also black
masculinity
White Negro, The: Superficial Reflec
tions on the Hipster, 27, 41
whiteness: in American pop culture, 14,
84; in Birth of a Nation, 28; in Jackie
Brown, 5861, 63; in Kill Bill fran
chise, 72, 7677, 7880, 82; and old
boy network in Reservoir Dogs, 11;
in Pulp Fiction, 41, 4849; in Reser
voir Dogs, 2122; and Tarantino
films, 122, 123; of Tarantino himself,
75; in True Romance, 2526, 2932,
35. See also blackness; race
White Princess of the Jungle (1951), 84
white privilege, 47, 89, 127
white supremacy, 11, 44, 84, 103, 126
white victimhood, 23, 35
Wilder, Gene, in Silver Streak, 2728
Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld,
1999), 117
Willis, Bruce, in Pulp Fiction, 4142, 50f
Wilson, Flip, 141n26
Winstead, Mary Elizabeth, in Death
Proof, 91
Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), 99
Womack, Bobby, 63
Woman on Top (2000), 141n26
womens movement, 25
Wood, Natalie, in The Searchers, 97
Woo-ping, Yuen, 68
Wu-Tang Clan, 41
index 169
X, Malcolm, 132, 136n9

XMen: First Class (Matthew Vaughn,
You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert,

1967), 70
2011), 126
Yates, Peter, 35
Year of the Dragon, The (Michael
Cimino, 1985), 70
yellow face, 71
Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974), 99

Zed (Peter Greene, Pulp Fiction), 4950
Zo (Zo Bell, Death Proof), 8890, 90f,
91, 91f, 92
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001), 124

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Blackness and the Films

Copyright 2015 by the University of Texas Press

foR tamu, SPRout, Zam-Zam, and Wah-da-da

chaPteR 1. Reservoir Dogs and True Romance

chaPteR 3. Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2,

Dont let the pigmentation fool you: it is a state of mind.

warped notion of black racial formation in America, a perspective that

in Tarantinos films. Conventional readings of Tarantino place Blax

Rather than being viewed as an example of how Coppola held dispar

ments also reveal a series of assumptions and arguments concerning

of his star personae and public rhetoric, and unabashedly proclaims

convoluted rumination on Tarantinos films from Reservoir Dogs (1992)

individual films create and engage as racial representations, ideology,

is explored along with the common aesthetic representations that film

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance

Its always best to start at the beginning.

ened bank heist sideman, Reservoir Dogs emerged as a notable counter

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 15

Brothers Menace II Society (1993), and Brian De Palmas Carlitos Way

Reservoir Dogs offers a jarring introduction. The film begins with

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance

Holdaway is dressed like a member of Mao Tse-tungs Red Guardin

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 19

the only on-screen black character in Reservoir Dogs is the central

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 21

term. Before Vega arrives, Cabot is shown ensconced in an imposing

with maintaining racial boundaries and perfectly dovetails with the

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 23

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 25

of narrative displacement used in Reservoir Dogs with the Holdaway

alarm over racial boundaries is first signaled by the frightening figure of

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 27

Drexl (Gary Oldman) in True Romance.

in Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller, 1976); Neil Diamond reprising Jolsons

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 29

Caroline Wakefield (Erika Christensen), the daughter of a conservative

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 31

scene shows Clifford sitting in his cramped trailer surrounded by sev

white masculinity that signifies the blemish of cultural miscegenation

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 33

negates her marginalization as eye candy and emancipates her from

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 35

The conclusion clearly registers a conservative impulse in which

tent, male homosexuality are all points of symbolic contestation, lit

ReseRvoiR Dogs and TRue Romance 37

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn

Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.

with knock-off films like Things to Do in Denver When Youre Dead

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 41

real) after a show in the City of Light. Or consider the conservative

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 43

dency to make black characters derivative figures who articulate their

liver a mysterious briefcase to Marsellus. Marsellus welcomes Vincent

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 45

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 49

municates that racism is a mindset that whites must forcefully object

Marsellus and Butch are bound captives in Pulp Fiction.

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn

The Nazi officer directs him to peer through a window, eventually

cable characters presented in the film. Jules is a contemplative char

PulP ficTion and Jackie BRoWn 53

a middle-aged black woman underscores the ideological contours the