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

music forms an ironic counter-point to the images, as it is that the visuals, setting, dialogue and other Apollonian elements form a dissonant counter-point to the Dionysian music. But what philosophical importance can this have? Quite a bit, actually.
    Here again, Nietzsche’s analysis of tragedy provides us with an interpretive key. Under the assumption that human nature is an evolutionary outgrowth of nature in general, Nietzsche posited a state of primordial union as the origin of the Apollonian-Dionysian antagonism which animates all human life. Music as the originary artistic expression of that primordial oneness is thus the primal art (and here again, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, who believed music to be a pure expression of the will). Apollonian lyrics and dialogue are but natural responses and imagistic complements to the Dionysian music—the Apollonian dream of a Dionysian subconscious, as it were.
    Nietzsche says Schiller once confessed that his poetry always began, not with words and images, but with a musical mood. Nietzsche postulates the same origin for tragic poetry. It began with music. The tragic arts began with a Dionysian chorus musically lamenting the death of its god Dionysus, the true hero of every tragedy. The plot, dialogue, drama and spectacle all grew out of and in response to the music of the chorus, like a troubled dream grows out of the subconscious remnants of sufferings experienced in waking life. When these elements all combined artistically in such a way as to express implicitly their meaning and original significance, tragic music-drama was the remarkable result.
    True tragedies were thus perpetually painful, albeit veiled commemorations of a lost primordial unity and “divine” identity.
They were musical creation myths about the true nature of human being—myths which not only accounted for life, but changed it. The single greatest virtue of Greek art (and perhaps this was Nietzsche’s greatest insight) was its capacity to show persuasively what life could be, thereby redeeming life by transforming it for the better: “Art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for it overcoming.” 22

The End of the Leash
    Recall that Ella Taylor accused Tarantino of being cinematically intrusive during the torture scene, making it an instance of “frighteningly pure art.” Philosophically speaking, the scene in question—and the movie—may indeed be pure art, but not because the cinema intrudes upon it. In fact, the only intrusive moment in that scene is the manifestly merciful one which occurs at its climax, when Tarantino’s camera, like Hitchcock’s camera in Psycho , pans away from the actual violence, thereby excluding it from the frame and leaving the act itself to the viewer’s imagination. At least until Mr. Blonde prances back into the frame and starts talking into the severed ear.
    Reservoir Dogs ends exactly as Nietzsche would say it should: cop and criminal fuse, all the colors and individual identities run back together into a bloody mess, and everybody is rejoined in an orgy of death. The only survivor is Mr. Pink: having crawled out from under the ramp where he hid during the final shootout, Pink grabs the bag of loot and runs from the warehouse—only to be apprehended by police waiting outside. As Stephen Weinberger notes, Mr. Pink is the only member of the gang with a color alias who “remains throughout a professional, thoroughly suppressing any traces of
humanity.” 23 In other words, he is the only one who guards his anonymity to the end, who sees through the betrayal, and who feels no compassion or sentimentality or rage. Weinberger only observes this uniqueness; he cannot explain it. Nietzsche can.
    What Nietzsche would call the “intoxicated” cruelty unselfconsciously expressed by Mr. Blonde is the cruelty that hides in the heart of every character in