Seeing the expanded DVD version of Death Proof is a definitively different experience from seeing it as part of Grindhouse in the theaters (if you were one of us few who managed to make the effort). Tarantino's film — which was the bottom half of the Grindhouse double feature — is really two films in itself — and maybe more, and at least one of those is a deconstructive art film, and who wants to deal with that after the 100+ minutes of over-the-top gonzo blood splattering which is Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and assorted trailers? Even the best of early Godard, such as Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou, can be an ordeal after an hour or so, due to all their Brechtian devices keeping one from getting "swept up" in the narrative, as it were. For me at least, Godard's films are better the second or third time anyway, and the same seems true of Tarantino's Death Proof. Like the best of "cult cinema," it offers pleasures both transgressive and visceral, and like the best of "art cinema," it offers deconstruction of same, even as it's roaring along at 200 mph.
The biggest addition to the DVD "extended cut" is a scene at a rural Tennessee gas station that bridges the two halves of the film and adds enough termite art-style details to confirm Death Proof as a work of post-nouvelle vague gold. What was once just seemingly extraneous female characterization, car stunts and highway safety film gore mixed unevenly together becomes — with this scene — an edgy intellectual critique of the aging male gaze and its tenuous relationship to feminine bonding rituals that — once completed — will preclude it, in a sacrificial orobous-like snap of the neck as past and present zip past each other, eliminating the need for the male spectator, who assumed he was safe from the perspective of his death-proof viewing chair. Oh foolish vain male viewer, beware!
French theorists no doubt will love this restored gas station scene, recognizing in it a quadruple-Lolita-simulacrum: the ghosts of Baudrillard and Nabokov hang back in the empty sky, slowly filling up the film in both directions like the wave of spilled petrol in The Birds. Rather than being just a "normal" convenience store, the gas station convenience mart carries a wide array of magazines such as Film Comment, Fangoria, and Pulp Cinema. There's even Italian Vogue (which the cashier keeps "under the counter,") the mere mention of which causes the girls to perk up with desire. The mix of cineaste wish-fulfillment with consumerism-satire is a direct link to l'esprit de Godard but true to his American auteur roots, Tarantino keeps it all sun-baked and rural. The spirit of Baudrillard may be in the back seat, taking notes, but the spirit of Russ Meyer is clearly at the wheel.
This new scene fills in some important story info that was lost in the edited theatrical version: we learn these girls here are part of a location film shoot. The never-seen Christian Simonson is the director, the same guy Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamilia Poitier) was dating in the previous segment. Now the foursome is much more "professional." They are film people: Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) are the beauties, and Kim (Tracy Thoms) and Zoe Bell (playing herself) are badass stuntwomen. As the scene begins, Abernathy lounges in the back seat of their car, her feet sticking up through the rear window while Lee sits in the driver's seat, singing along to her iPod. Stuntman Mike watches them from his death car, parked a few spots away, forming his obsession (like Tarantino presumably, he has a real thing for strong women with cute feet).
The playful furor over the Italian Vogue could have ended with the girls buying and forgetting about it, burying it under newspapers or tossing it out of the car after a precursory flip-through (ala Jeff Beck's guitar neck in Blow Up); instead here comes Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), the psycho-motive maniac who spies, leers and otherwise scopes the girls in the lounging, even licking one of their toes on the sly, as he lines them up in his sights as the next target for his obscene auto-erotic Crash-collision practice. For Mike, all these girls are sweeter than Italian Vogue, all the more so for being unavailable to him at any price.
Just by being "present" in le mise-en-scene, the men in Death Proof — Stuntman Mike included — become, in effect, Bosleys (to use the Charlie's Angels vernacular). Only the men who are never on camera maintain a "Charlie"-style innocence; all the men onscreen seem to know this and cringe in the presence of these goddesses like unworthy eunuchs. Stuntman Mike, however, is the only one who does anything about it, lashing out with automotive fury, a fury born from the burden of immaturity and age in tandem. He's too old to win these girls, too young to give up gracefully. When it's hinted that Rose McGowan's character might go home with him after their evening in the Texas Chili Parlor, she turns around and whispers loud enough for him to hear, "He's old enough to be my dad!" He doesn't act hurt, then, but it's only because he's a sociopath; his revenge is already laid out. If he can't play, he will wreck the game.
With Tarantino's sly penchant for deconstruction, the Stuntman Mike voyeur scenes carry the queasy feeling of sudden proximity of the Lacanian object petit a. For my non-Lacanian readers, this translates to a loss of fixed identity in the presence of your idealized desire, which is usually sexual and is so strong that it incites panic in your average guy, and homicide in your average Norman Bates. Coming into contact with the petit a is akin to being suddenly confronted by the end credits to the film of your life when the movie is only halfway through. There are only two ways to survive this trauma: art (transformation/sublimation) or attack (elimination). The director sublimates his desire for the actress into the film, capturing the image of his chosen goddess and making her his own that way. The artist paints her, the viewer locks into her identity as a baby watching giant mommy vacuum from the safety of the playpen. Unlike us lucky invisible camera-eye viewers, the embittered stuntman can only run her over.
In real life there are straight males who can be friends with beautiful, smart women and not let feel the need to have sex with them: usually these are artists; able to harness the otherwise unbearable attraction to a nobler purpose. Nonetheless, any man who continues hanging around young hotties for more than a decade or so becomes suddenly old. He has to deal with the feeling he is a bit of a creep, living in a state of arrested development. Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark get bad reputations mooning over the hunky mid-western male skate punk set, and everyone suspects Samuel Jackson's been sleeping with Christina Ricci (above) in Black Snake Moan. The truth may be less corrupting and more positive, but it thrives on the close proximity of corruption and negativity; scandal is as foul-smelling mulch to its fragrant fruit. Sam Jackson's preacher in Moan would not have the same grace and power in our eyes if the Christina Ricci character was, say, old and unattractive. Thus the desire is always present, no matter how saintly those involved; it can't be fulfilled, only transmuted — whether it's turned to shit or gold is perhaps a matter of personal alchemical discipline.
Meanwhile, the girls your own age are getting old, man. You look in the rearview mirror and see wrinkles around your eyes; isn't this what horror movies are all about? Ask not for whom the bell tolls? Tarantino was already exploring that shit in Jackie Brown; by the time he gets to Death Proof he has found a dozen new ways to rationalize his continued role in these girls' lives: he's the bartender; he's the off-screen director; he's in the death-proof driver's seat and he's not afraid to take a punch.
Thus the new adult cinema: weathered old dudes like the Big Liebowski, Stuntman Mike, and Elvis in Bubba Ho Tep, standing at the lip of the void and making crazy surfing gestures to mask their world-weary terror. It's a terror you freeze-frame on; you play it back in slow motion in a loop of weiderholungszwang.
The only alternative to that slow, sad waste-away is the auto-erotic release, a la Ballard's Crash. Because Stuntman Mike is no longer tied to the movies and TV, he is cut out of the loop that would allow him even a cursory role in the lives of these packs of cool girls. Once inside the screen he is now an outsider, neither in nor out of the movie (re: his continual acknowledgments of the camera).
When walking out of Grindhouse last spring I felt confused and bothered by Death Proof; I loved the shock of the ending, but felt that overall its construction was slipshod. It was too sure of itself; it had too much pointless exposition for characters so casually slaughtered. But now, seeing it on its own, without Planet Terror still pulsing through my synapses, I realize Death Proof is simply another step forward for the titanic and magnificent poet whom the angels name Tarantino. The best cult films always shock us and alienate us just a little the first time; they are transgressive in that they spread our boundaries for us. But if we return for another viewing, we may find a whole new film waiting for us, one with cool new catchphrases we can add to our lexicon; the film has changed us, so seems changed itself. And so obsession creeps in to the watching process, the movie becomes a persona training manual. It's we and the eternal auteur looking at each other through an identical mirror-keyhole eye whom the angels named Janet Leigh.
The biggest addition to the DVD "extended cut" is a scene at a rural Tennessee gas station that bridges the two halves of the film and adds enough termite art-style details to confirm Death Proof as a work of post-nouvelle vague gold. What was once just seemingly extraneous female characterization, car stunts and highway safety film gore mixed unevenly together becomes — with this scene — an edgy intellectual critique of the aging male gaze and its tenuous relationship to feminine bonding rituals that — once completed — will preclude it, in a sacrificial orobous-like snap of the neck as past and present zip past each other, eliminating the need for the male spectator, who assumed he was safe from the perspective of his death-proof viewing chair. Oh foolish vain male viewer, beware!
French theorists no doubt will love this restored gas station scene, recognizing in it a quadruple-Lolita-simulacrum: the ghosts of Baudrillard and Nabokov hang back in the empty sky, slowly filling up the film in both directions like the wave of spilled petrol in The Birds. Rather than being just a "normal" convenience store, the gas station convenience mart carries a wide array of magazines such as Film Comment, Fangoria, and Pulp Cinema. There's even Italian Vogue (which the cashier keeps "under the counter,") the mere mention of which causes the girls to perk up with desire. The mix of cineaste wish-fulfillment with consumerism-satire is a direct link to l'esprit de Godard but true to his American auteur roots, Tarantino keeps it all sun-baked and rural. The spirit of Baudrillard may be in the back seat, taking notes, but the spirit of Russ Meyer is clearly at the wheel.
This new scene fills in some important story info that was lost in the edited theatrical version: we learn these girls here are part of a location film shoot. The never-seen Christian Simonson is the director, the same guy Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamilia Poitier) was dating in the previous segment. Now the foursome is much more "professional." They are film people: Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) are the beauties, and Kim (Tracy Thoms) and Zoe Bell (playing herself) are badass stuntwomen. As the scene begins, Abernathy lounges in the back seat of their car, her feet sticking up through the rear window while Lee sits in the driver's seat, singing along to her iPod. Stuntman Mike watches them from his death car, parked a few spots away, forming his obsession (like Tarantino presumably, he has a real thing for strong women with cute feet).
The playful furor over the Italian Vogue could have ended with the girls buying and forgetting about it, burying it under newspapers or tossing it out of the car after a precursory flip-through (ala Jeff Beck's guitar neck in Blow Up); instead here comes Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), the psycho-motive maniac who spies, leers and otherwise scopes the girls in the lounging, even licking one of their toes on the sly, as he lines them up in his sights as the next target for his obscene auto-erotic Crash-collision practice. For Mike, all these girls are sweeter than Italian Vogue, all the more so for being unavailable to him at any price.
Just by being "present" in le mise-en-scene, the men in Death Proof — Stuntman Mike included — become, in effect, Bosleys (to use the Charlie's Angels vernacular). Only the men who are never on camera maintain a "Charlie"-style innocence; all the men onscreen seem to know this and cringe in the presence of these goddesses like unworthy eunuchs. Stuntman Mike, however, is the only one who does anything about it, lashing out with automotive fury, a fury born from the burden of immaturity and age in tandem. He's too old to win these girls, too young to give up gracefully. When it's hinted that Rose McGowan's character might go home with him after their evening in the Texas Chili Parlor, she turns around and whispers loud enough for him to hear, "He's old enough to be my dad!" He doesn't act hurt, then, but it's only because he's a sociopath; his revenge is already laid out. If he can't play, he will wreck the game.
With Tarantino's sly penchant for deconstruction, the Stuntman Mike voyeur scenes carry the queasy feeling of sudden proximity of the Lacanian object petit a. For my non-Lacanian readers, this translates to a loss of fixed identity in the presence of your idealized desire, which is usually sexual and is so strong that it incites panic in your average guy, and homicide in your average Norman Bates. Coming into contact with the petit a is akin to being suddenly confronted by the end credits to the film of your life when the movie is only halfway through. There are only two ways to survive this trauma: art (transformation/sublimation) or attack (elimination). The director sublimates his desire for the actress into the film, capturing the image of his chosen goddess and making her his own that way. The artist paints her, the viewer locks into her identity as a baby watching giant mommy vacuum from the safety of the playpen. Unlike us lucky invisible camera-eye viewers, the embittered stuntman can only run her over.
In real life there are straight males who can be friends with beautiful, smart women and not let feel the need to have sex with them: usually these are artists; able to harness the otherwise unbearable attraction to a nobler purpose. Nonetheless, any man who continues hanging around young hotties for more than a decade or so becomes suddenly old. He has to deal with the feeling he is a bit of a creep, living in a state of arrested development. Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark get bad reputations mooning over the hunky mid-western male skate punk set, and everyone suspects Samuel Jackson's been sleeping with Christina Ricci (above) in Black Snake Moan. The truth may be less corrupting and more positive, but it thrives on the close proximity of corruption and negativity; scandal is as foul-smelling mulch to its fragrant fruit. Sam Jackson's preacher in Moan would not have the same grace and power in our eyes if the Christina Ricci character was, say, old and unattractive. Thus the desire is always present, no matter how saintly those involved; it can't be fulfilled, only transmuted — whether it's turned to shit or gold is perhaps a matter of personal alchemical discipline.
Meanwhile, the girls your own age are getting old, man. You look in the rearview mirror and see wrinkles around your eyes; isn't this what horror movies are all about? Ask not for whom the bell tolls? Tarantino was already exploring that shit in Jackie Brown; by the time he gets to Death Proof he has found a dozen new ways to rationalize his continued role in these girls' lives: he's the bartender; he's the off-screen director; he's in the death-proof driver's seat and he's not afraid to take a punch.
Thus the new adult cinema: weathered old dudes like the Big Liebowski, Stuntman Mike, and Elvis in Bubba Ho Tep, standing at the lip of the void and making crazy surfing gestures to mask their world-weary terror. It's a terror you freeze-frame on; you play it back in slow motion in a loop of weiderholungszwang.
The only alternative to that slow, sad waste-away is the auto-erotic release, a la Ballard's Crash. Because Stuntman Mike is no longer tied to the movies and TV, he is cut out of the loop that would allow him even a cursory role in the lives of these packs of cool girls. Once inside the screen he is now an outsider, neither in nor out of the movie (re: his continual acknowledgments of the camera).
When walking out of Grindhouse last spring I felt confused and bothered by Death Proof; I loved the shock of the ending, but felt that overall its construction was slipshod. It was too sure of itself; it had too much pointless exposition for characters so casually slaughtered. But now, seeing it on its own, without Planet Terror still pulsing through my synapses, I realize Death Proof is simply another step forward for the titanic and magnificent poet whom the angels name Tarantino. The best cult films always shock us and alienate us just a little the first time; they are transgressive in that they spread our boundaries for us. But if we return for another viewing, we may find a whole new film waiting for us, one with cool new catchphrases we can add to our lexicon; the film has changed us, so seems changed itself. And so obsession creeps in to the watching process, the movie becomes a persona training manual. It's we and the eternal auteur looking at each other through an identical mirror-keyhole eye whom the angels named Janet Leigh.
