Back to the Basics: Resevoir Dogs

Today on Back to Basics, I'm spending time with Quentin. Keep in mind, I haven't watched Reservoir Dogs since high school, when I was a self-righteous pacifist vegetarian.

It's 1992. Harvey Keitel is entirely tender with Tim Roth, who spends most of the film as a giant dripping blood rag. Michael Madsen, in his best role ever (Note: this is unconfirmed, as I have not yet seen "Vampires Anonymous"), is a sublime sociopath . The film is half Clue-type whodunit, half cigarette ad. Seriously. After 45 minutes of the film, I wanted to run to my nearest 7-11 to buy a pack and suck it down while making cool analysis about Madonna, and I have more than a half-dozen friends who can testify that I am completely unable to smoke an entire cigarette. (I did, however, have a zippo lighter for a spell in 1997, and I spent a good amount of time perfecting Harvey Keitel's snap-light technique).


The cursory dialog, which centers mostly on African-Americans, is pointedly unpalatable, at least when it's not culturally relevant and charmingly misogynist. The director wisely kills himself off as soon as possible. Steve Buscemi is pleasingly oily, and watching him survive until his implied death is as fun as watching a wolf spider fight to get out of a wet sink before you turn the faucet on. The standoffs are as tense as any Western. Young Brit Tim Roth has not yet perfected his precise command of English accents, and the effect is rather charming. There is a higher body count than the end of Hamlet, and the dramatic tension is on par.

There is an important feminist concept called the Bechdel Test for movies, which, while it doesn't conclusively diagnose a feminist film, does weed out some of the films that, on a given day, might not say anything interesting, relevant, or unoffensive about women. The test suggests that a film ought to:

 

      *Have at least two women in it

*Who talk to each other

*About something besides a man

 Reservoir Dogs is such a failure of this test that it is almost admirable. These cool, suited, sunglassed, and pseudonymed guys live in a world where not one woman has a single line of dialog, or even appears onscreen for more than a blink of an eye. So in lieu of getting annoyed, I will simply say thanks, Quentin, for your entirely problematic and absolutely lovely Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2.

Best of all, Dogs is a movie about crime that defies formula. It's a film that, twenty-odd years early, just screams, "Hey, Ocean's Sixteen, take note: if you have to spend so much screen time focusing on the job, it's because your characters aren't cool enough." It is a crime movie with absolutely no aspect of the job itself on film; it's all aftermath punctuated with flashback. And, like a self-cleaning oven, the movie collapses neatly in upon itself because (spoiler alert) practically every damn character gets killed by another character.

Overall, Reservoir Dogs makes me want to celebrate the fact that I am no longer that tender-hearted vegetarian pacifist anymore. It makes me want to give Steven Wright his own radio station, then ride a big fucking chevy around while blaring seventies rock. And because this film gives me more pleasure than anything I have seen since Scott Pilgrim vs the World (an entirely different kind of pleasure, I should add), I have composed it a haiku:

For Quentin and His Dogs

My heart is hardened
with pleasure and it throbs just
like an erection.