Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy by Richard Greene, K. Silem Mohammad

Orange slowly sliding down the warehouse ramp into a pool of his own blood, the ever-widening circumference of which measures out the real-time cinematic minutes of his approaching death, Tarantino makes a similar claim: “Tim Roth is lying there saying, ‘please hold me.’ That scene makes people uncomfortable. They say, ‘why don’t you move on. You’ve made your point.’ But it ain’t about making points! This guy is shot in the stomach and he’s begging to be taken to the hospital. You can’t deal with that in one or two sentences, and then move on” (Brunette, p. 32). Well, if we take Tarantino at his word and accept his claim that the violence is meant neither to provide a puerile, voyeuristic thrill nor simply to make a point about violence, then what is its function? And how is the violence related to the music?
    Music typically functions in an American film either by “Mickey-Mousing” the action (imitating it in perfect synchronization) or by reinforcing—or just forcing , in less artistic
films—an emotional response to other cinematic elements, like dialogue and images. In Reservoir Dogs the music is scored in a different way entirely. Tarantino’s own take on the music is this:
    I liked the idea of using pop bubblegum music, rock ’n’ roll for 14-year-olds. That’s what I grew up with as a teen in the ‘70s. And I thought it’s a great ironic counterpoint to the roughness and rudeness and disturbing nature of the film to have this ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ music playing along with it. In some ways it takes the sting off, in some ways it makes it more disturbing. (Ciment and Niogret, p. 21)
    He’s right. The music in his films is a major factor in shaping ironic rather than reactionary emotional responses to characters and events. Usually the music he chooses is happy, familiar, and satisfying, the melodic equivalent of comfort food. This is precisely why it can serve as such an effective counterpoint to the incongruent violence with which it is often paired. Our eyes are telling us, “you shouldn’t like this, look away.” Our ears are telling us, “yes, you should like this, keep listening.” During the famous helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now! Francis Ford Coppola achieved a similar effect by pairing Richard Wagner’s rousing and exhilarating “Ride of the Valkyries” with images of indescribable horror and sadness. This makes us feel on a visceral level that something is terribly wrong. It creates dissonance, rather than harmony. A dissonance we feel in our gut, not our head.
    But in addition to pairing the music with incongruent images, Tarantino employs music to structure Reservoir Dogs from within. This is a highly unusual and artful way to construct a film. An analogue to Tarantino’s opening credit slo-mo sequence, where each character is introduced within an allotted screen time equal to two measures of “Little Green Bag,” might be the way director Fred Zinneman and film editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad (who won an Academy Award ® for their work) cut the climactic scenes in High Noon in beat to the Tex Ritter music, increasing the tempo of the edits, measure by measure, to keep pace with the tension-building melody.
    Later in Reservoir Dogs , Tarantino uses music in yet another way to structure the entire torture scene temporally, as he explains: “what makes [the scene] work is that it unfolds in real time (the time it takes to play a song) and you can’t cheat, it has
to be played out to the end.” 21 But in addition to affecting irony and structuring the syntax and frequency of his cuts, scenes and shots, Tarantino uses music in his films (and this is especially true of Pulp Fiction ) to provide the tonal core around which the entire film is constructed. It is as if on some deep level the images are dictated by and added to the music, rather than the reverse. So, contrary to what Tarantino himself says above, it’s not so much that the