Reservoir Dogs at 30: Tarantino’s canny contained act of provocation

What’s left to say about Reservoir Dogs, a movie that’s all talk?

A young Quentin Tarantino’s greatest trick was to turn his audience into the same sort of discussion group that picked over the finer points of Madonna over coffee at LA diner Pat and Lorraine’s, scouring pop culture for hidden profundities. A shark in the fishpond of the fledgling American indie circuit, his auspicious feature debut piqued the interest of innumerable junior cinephiles and David Foster Wallace alike. The image of dorm room walls plastered with his posters has become a cliche, backed up by the maybe-apocryphal claims that film school professors had to ban essays on the auteur’s work just to get dazzled kids to write about anyone else. Every aspect of the film has been subjected to fine-toothed analysis: the notion of costuming as symbolic armor, the soundtrack offering redemptive cachet to one-hit wonders deprived of cool cred, the Shakespearean air to the corpse-strewn climax, the hip irony of Michael Madsen’s ear-slicing soft-shoe routine, the hidden foreshadowing of betrayal in the placement of soap bottles.

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After 30 years, the textual bones have been picked clean. In revisiting one of the most exhaustively critiqued works in the western canon, fresh insights can really only be gleaned from how the intervening years have changed its creator, and how we’ve changed along with him. It’s now an edifying point of comparison, throwing the ways Tarantino has grown – and, more frequently, refused to grow – into sharper relief for its contrast with his present, the industry’s and his audience’s. Even as the festival circuit’s boy genius has matured by leaps and bounds as a stylist, he’s remained a political arrested-development case, unable to part with the laddish glee he takes in riling up polite society.

All of this is to say that the N-word doesn’t play the way it used to. Tarantino surely knows this, recently cloaking his fondness for the taboo-teasing of bad language in period settings like the old west or antebellum south that call for it. (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood scaled back the overt bigotry, and still generated a full-blown controversy for portraying an Asian character in a somewhat unflattering light.) In the more permissive era of the 90s, however, he simply and nonjudgmentally presented a crew of crooks prone to spouting riffs of jolting racism, antisemitism, you name it. There’s a temptation to make the broad-stroked conclusion that the public views Reservoir Dogs through more enlightened eyes these days, simultaneously holding reservations about Tarantino’s provocateur tendencies along with admiration for his mastery of form. But for all the mythologizing of Reservoir Dogs as an overnight Sundance success, Peter Biskind’s definitive scene report Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film tells a conflicting story.

In the book, the festival’s founder, Robert Redford, is quoted conveying the disgust he felt during the premiere of Reservoir Dogs: “I’d gone to the theater one night during the … festival to see a few films … and I could barely eat for 24 hours because they were so loaded with violence.” Shoot-’em-up Tarantino wannabes are currently as commonplace at Sundance as feelgood coming-of-age stories, but his vicious nihilism and blood-flecked honor was totally anathema to the humane status quo in Park City at the time, a haven for heartfelt, sensitive passion projects about real people’s real struggles. Or, as Tarantino himself referred to such fare, “Merchant-Ivory shit”. Irked by attendees’ hand-wringing over two grisly crime thrillers in a single year’s program to an alleged six queer romances, he dared Redford to rename it “The Sundance gay and lesbian film festival”. (The trailer for his following film, the Palme d’Or-winning Pulp Fiction, would open with bullets blasting through the Cannes laurels as some staid piano music yields to the galloping surf-rock of “Misirlou”.)

His shoulder-chip complex about the divide between the grindhouse that raised him and the arthouse he sought to conquer seems quaint from 2022’s vantage, and not just for how he’s become a fixture at the Oscars. He won the whole damn game, disreputable genres coming to enjoy a market share and esteem equal to that of drama in the independent cinema. The culture war fought by Reservoir Dogs has been over for so long that the film is no longer legible as a rebel soldier, its sense of subversion inviting pushback today from a new, more ideologically pointed generation of taste-based watchdogs. Tarantino set out to trigger his viewers, and today he lives in a world where that’s never been easier or more fraught. There’s a certain innocence to the way he tries to get a rise out of us, refreshing in that his off-color goading is pure jimmy-rustling, rather than cover for some nastier crypto-reactionary agenda in line with, say, S Craig Zahler.

In retrospect, Tarantino’s debut serves as a reminder that you can’t go home again, not even if you’re a determinedly consistent auteur. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he took his talents to Sony and the studio system, closing the door on the indie leagues with the fall of his longtime sherpa Harvey Weinstein. That film reveled in the joy of transit, its tight-cornering car rides around Los Angeles an antithesis to the pressure-cooker containment of Reservoir Dogs’ warehouse setting. These days, his notion of a single-location picture amounts to The Hateful Eight, a 70mm extravaganza buttressed by breathtaking natural vistas of snow-blanketed mountains. By comparison, Reservoir Dogs is downright cozy, its elision of the pivotal jewel heist clear as a cost-cutting measure that Tarantino successfully passed off as narrative cojones. He’d never make such a small movie with such outsize impact again, but then, he’d never again have so much to prove, either. Not yet 30 and hungry for infamy, he ignited a scandal that never fully died down, only his targets rising and falling with time.