Grindhouse
Directed by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino
Rose McGowan’s one-legged stripper with a rapid-fire machine-gun prosthetic is the emblematic heroine of Grindhouse. This double-feature release directed by Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino pays tribute to the ’70s exploitation films shown primarily in 24-hour urban grindhouse theaters (and drive-ins, too). In these places, déclassé movies pandered to low instincts, alienation and anxiety—feelings that get vented in McGowan’s lurid exhibition of sex and violence. So Grindhouse is also a cultural statement: R.R. and Q.T. mean to reverse movie aesthetics by reclaiming the mindlessness of their adolescence. Oblivious to the desolation—the cultural dead-end—that grindhouse fare represented, their two features provide an avalanche of kitsch (R.R.’s Planet Terror revives the gory zombie flick, Q.T.’s Death Proof revives the exploitation skin and action flick). The entire experience is a throwback to Neanderthal
cinema—not Pauline Kael “trash” or Manny Farber “termite” movies but worse: films without social responsibility, that are extravagantly disreputable—a decadent, rich culture’s wallow.
There’s no way around this film’s junky, self-annihilating compulsiveness except to meet it head-on, call it crap and defy it. That means resisting McGowan’s flamboyantly tasteless image as a female killing machine. Her lipstick smirk as she tries to right herself after spinning round like a Gatling gun, seems funny but is actually destabilizing. She is commercialism itself. The Planet Terror plot is full of careless non sequiturs (and a “Reel Missing” gimmick that R.R. and Q.T. use when imagination fails or to skip straight to gore). It’s about a government conspiracy to cover-up wartime casualties that leads to mass infection and hysteria. If one made sense of it—as geeks did when attempting to justify ’70s exploitation movies—the distrust of authority is mixed with outright paranoia. McGowan’s is not a routine erotic image of female power, but of fear of women turned bizarrely phallic. In other words, a formerly disempowered group is commercially rehabilitated into the very figure of aggression that once oppressed it.
Q.T.’s Death Proof is similarly revanchist. Its story of a psychotic male (Kurt Russell) who mows down groups of women in his muscle car, appears to celebrate female empowerment like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill. But Q.T.’s mainstream position makes Meyer’s low-down humor no longer subversive; now it’s the excess of privilege. Q.T.’s women are a repulsive bunch of lip-flapping magpies. The first victimized group includes a black radio DJ named Jungle Julia—a racist taunt purposely doubled by casting Sydney Tamiia Poitier (daughter of the legendary Civil Rights-era actor) in a role best described as Samuel L. Jackson with tits. In the second group, Tracie Thoms plays a gun-toting black Hollywood gear-head whose constant “Nigga, please!” expostulations urge-on her clique of female avengers. Q.T. miscalculates his pandering to feminist hipsters, because all characters are so foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, dishonest and obnoxious that they’re unsympathetic. Their big chase scene remains an exercise in shrill excitation.
Alas, Grindhouse is also a watershed event; a big-ticket capitulation to Hollywood’s constant chase after the youth market, validating teens’ lack of discretion as the prevailing cultural standard. And here R.R. and Q.T. are right: Grindhouse’s frenzy of vengeance indicts all of American pop culture. It’s an Abu Ghraib action extravaganza.
