Analysis on Tarantino’s movies From Postmodern Thoughts
...ces.” “On the other hand, the ‘post’ in postmodern also signifies a dependence on, a continuity, that which it follows, leading some critics to conceptualize the postmodern as merely an intensification of the modern, as a hypermodernity, a ‘new’ face of modernity , or a ‘postmodern’ development with modernity.”② As one of the most colorful and dynamic fields, postmodern cinema possibly first appeared in 1962 when Alain Resnais directed a very famous film titled Last Year in Marienbad, which was regarded as the representative cinema of early postmodernism, although other film critics prefer to think that film was a culminating work of French New Wave. American postmodern cinema came into being in 1980s with two most representative films, respectively named Blade Runner (1982) and Blue Velvet (1986), which are the most often quoted examples when the postmodern cinema is considered. After almost ten years’ continuous development and perfection, these kind of American films reached another peak in 1990s, especially in 1994 when films like Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction were presented in United States and gave rise to a postmodern film fad internationally. Like its predecessor of 80s, this sort of films reveals a strong tie with the postmodern theory and embodies most of the features of postmodernism in arts, such as playfulness and the celebration of difference, the decline of the originality, the multiple interpretation of mixing codes, and the collapse of the hierarchal distinction between high and mass/popular culture. Besides that, it also differs from them in that it makes extreme use of the last feature and almost slides to simply appeal to the mass in what Fredric Jameson has called, the consumer society. In this thesis, four postmodern films, written and directed by one person, Quentin Tarantino, are chosen as the researching carrier to find out in what ways they represent the following postmodern feature, namely discontinuity, intertextuality and popularization, and what influence they will possibly generate. Quentin Tarantino, a young American director, is regarded as the master of postmodern cinema. He achieved his international fame with his masterpiece Pulp Fiction in 1994, and from that time onward, he is entitled with the most representative filmmaker of postmodern popular culture. It is very useful and necessary to take into consideration QT’s personal information and growing background before looking into his film works. Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963. His mother named him after the figure Quint, from the television series Gunsmoke(1955), which might in some degree predicates that Quentin was goning to be a “plagiarizer”. Tarantino grew up in South Bay at the southern end of the city of Los Angeles which was rich in films. Coming from a family which was broken and rebroken, Quentin showed a treacherous spirit at early age. Instead of going to school and learning, he liked watching television, going to the cinema and reading comics, which became a part of resources on which he dependent to start his later movie career. After quitting from the tenth grade, Quentin worked in a porn cinema, the Pussycat Theatre in Torrance, where he checked tickets at the entrance. At the same time, he began to take acting classes, but it turned out that he was not a good actor. Unlike many other famous directors who went into college and learned systematically on movies, Tarantino spent five years as a video clerk in a shop called Video Archives in the Californian Manhattan Beach from the age of eighteen, where he watched a lot of movies made in different countries and of different genres, including French New Wave movies, especially Godard’s, Melville’s film noir, 1960-70s Kung-fu movies of Hong Kong, Japanese Samurai film, and John Woo’s action, which generated a huge impact on his movie creation and became another resource for him to explore later. It is during that period that Quentin deepened his understanding about films, broaden his perspectives of making films and formed his own and unique theory of movie making. Besides that, it is also important to take into account the period when QT grew up in order to better understand his films. During that period, Vietnam War broke out and ended with America’s defeat and inward, American culture showed a tendency of fragmentation and the popular culture was in its critically transforming period. American pop culture had the most comprehensive affect on QT’s filmmaking. In the following analysis, it will be shown that the pop figure of 70s and 80s will keep in appearance one or another in his films. Those all had a very strong influence in QT’s later film creation. As a self-taught writer and director, QT’s success encourages a lot of youth who love to make their own works, hence more and more independent and non-academic filmmakers come forth with their unique stylish films. Before his virgin work came into being, Quentin Tarantino had written several screen scripts. Between 1987 and 1989 he wrote for True Romance (1993) by director Tony Scott. Tarantino criticized the happy end Scott added later and the glossy direction which blurred QT’s original script. Quentin was also the author of the script of Oliver S...