Death Proof

Death Proof (2007) is all Quentin Tarantino. It stars Kurt Russel as Stuntman Mike, Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson as Abernathy, Vanessa Ferlito as Arlene, Syndey Tamiia Poitier as Jungle Julia, Tracie Toms as Kim, Rose McGowan as Pam and Jordan Ladd as Shanna and Mary Elisabeth Winstead as Lee. Lots of very fine looking young ladies being more or less lady-like. And Tarantino does a walk-on as Warren the bartender.

The story is a mix of pure carchase movie/revenge slasher and shameless girl oogling. Stuntman Mike drives around in his “death proof” car, rigged like a stunt vehicle, finding beautiful women to kill using his car as a weapon. The first four girls Jungle Julia, Arlene, Shanna and Pam met a messy end in act one. Stuntman Mike then targets a second quartet Abernathy, Lee, Kim and Zoe in act two, but these girls prove to be more of a challenge. There is one hell of a carchase that takes up most of this act – which brings us to the central point here.

Tarantino takes hold of a genre with both hands and goes all out to make his contribution to the canonical works of that genre. if he wants to make a car chase movie he’s going to make the biggest chase of all time. You have to respect that. He has a tendency to chose genres that are traditionally slightly to the left of mainstream (Kill Bill, for instance) and approaches them with a self-referential cool that should get on your nerves. Let’s face it, the man is a total geek. He has that almost totally exclusive film OCD you normally just get from the severly disturbed young men still living in their mother’s basement at the age of twenty seven.

Death Proof is so steeped in film references you could probably churn out a few essays about that alone. Not only does the 1970 Dodge Challenger call up Vanishing Point (1971) by Richard Sarafian, there are many, many more much more obscure references to things like The Wizard of Oz, The Getaway, Bullit, Convoy, Sin City, Gone in Sixty Seconds and so on and so fourth. Characters spout references in dialogue, wear the T-shirts, have the posters, listen to the music… It gets to be a typical postmodern simulacrum landscape you can hardly navigate because it is so cluttered with referential material, homage and ironic winks to any- and everything.

You don’t have to know about all these things to enjoy the movie. You can watch it like a tabula rasa if you like, focusing instead on the action. Far removed from any kind of reality we are looking at a world where you can actually walk away from debilitating car crashes with a limp and be just fine. And it is in this hyperreality you have to just consign yourself to the parametres of the action. Ok, so all these fast-talking, lap-dancing gorgeous beauties are going to sit around and talk trash and then go out and go after the man trying to kill them on the road. Sure. Fine. realism isn’t high on the list of things we need to concern ourselves with here.

As for exploitation… Well, Tarantino does deliver in every sense of the word. He gives us his trade mark fast-talking cool speak, this time featuring the ladies, just like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. We get the hyperviolence with bodyparts flying and some of it is cringeworthy while some of it is just plain funny. We get the girls in short-shorts doing classical “dancing in front of the jukebox with camera focusing on booty” type things. And you would like to say this is pure exploitation, but that is really a moot point with Tarantino movies. Yes, we can oogle the girls. And make no excauses for it. These young ladies end up kicking some serious butt of their own, taking out Stuntman Mike in a circle ass-kicking session towards the end. Four girls shake booty and die in bits, four girls shake booty and kick ass whilst looking gorgeous. That makes it kind of difficult to work up any kind of feminist critique if you are into that kind of thing.

I sometimes wish I didn’t like Tarantino’s stuff. But he is good at what he does. He is the equivalent of a kid who tries to hard to be cool and winds up actually pulling it off in his own geeky way. Tarantino knows his craft. He goes at it balls out. He always seems to be making two movies at once which works for some screwed-up reason. He is self-referential, indulgent and baroque and it’s fun to watch.

Mule