Does the Pope Shit in the Woods?

"Is Quentin Tarantino a Great Director?" Salon asks. The piece that bears that title is a reposting of an article entitled, "Oscar Duel: Has Quentin Tarantino Produced a Legacy of Greatness?" The question wrestled with in the exchange is slightly different, and is the one to which my title responds: is Tarantino an auteur? I've always understood the word to mean a director with an identifiable style with any film he makes. To ask such a question of a director so ubiquitous that Slate included him in what-if features about Watchmen and the Super Bowl is simply ridiculous.

Anne Thomson and Jack Matthews' idea of auteurship, however, includes a message conveyed in the artist's work, based off Tarantino's self-declared auteurship whose "vision" Inglourious Basterds now clarifies. Thus the debate. It's been obvious since the beginning that anyone looking for a moral lesson in Tarantino's films would be destined for disappointment. The only constant thematic through-line in his work, besides women's feet being the sexiest part of their body, is how absolutelygoddammawesome movies are. The reason Basterds solidifies this, as he claims, is because the entire damn movie hinges on the power of cinema. Those who hated it because of its violence or makes the Jews as bad as the Nazis (which is an undercurrent in nearly all revenge literature--the problem of becoming evil in order to repay it--and which the movie's climax addresses so slyly that you don't even notice until you think about it afterward) are wasting their time: why criticize it for what it was never trying to be in the first place?

Matthews thinks there needs to be more to Tarantino's output than mere entertainment for him to have longstanding auteur status, but he's ignoring an important precedent: Hitchcock. Do we go to Psycho for what it tells us about the human condition? Rear Window? What political insights does North by Northwest or The Man Who Knew Too Much bring us? Hitchcock was of a rare breed whose tremendous ability to tell a story and manipulate an audience--'twas not for nothing he was known as the Master of Suspense--was enough to build a legacy on. And, tellingly, Basterds draws from the Hitchcockian tension well quite often.

Does this then signal a new (actual) direction for Tarantino, away from "Isn't this cool?" detachment towards drama and emotional investment in a character's predicament? Maybe, hopefully, but probably not. Jackie Brown already proved he could lower the volume on the pastiche in order to let the characters speak for themselves, which is to say it was just another part of Tarantino doing whatever the hell he wants because he can. Boy can he, and even if his future films won't all rope us in as effectively as Basterds' opening battle of wits between Hans Landa and the French dairy farmer, I'll be glad to revel in his pure cinema anyway. There's nothing else like it, and that's the real standard for an auteur.

Why is He Still In?

Perhaps I'm being simplistic, but the fact that the judge presiding over the case to overturn Proposition 8 is himself gay would seem to have potential to invalidate any ruling he makes. He has a personal stake in the outcome; he could get married if Prop 8 is stricken down. If we are to complain when the former CEO of Halliburton awards the company no-bid contracts to rebuild the nation he just leveled, what to make of a gay judge legalizing gay marriage, regardless of the worthiness of the endeavor and the manifest awfulness of the pro-discrimination side?

This isn't even an evaluation of his character, just a plea for standard jurisprudence: the arbiter should be an unbiased party. It would revive all the anguish of November 2008 to see what looks to be an airtight case be dismissed on an avoidable technicality.

EDIT: Furthermore, having a straight judge would have strengthened the hand for the pro-marriage-equality side: that a heterosexual would have nothing to personally gain or lose in this fight would implicitly vindicate the position that gay marriage would have no impact on heteros.

U.S, Soldier Waterboards His Four Year-Old Daughter...

...because she can't recite the alphabet. A true patriot.

Meanwhile, Across the Pond

It's worth noting as well the differences in public attitudes towards gay people between America and Britain. As just noted, in American sports homosexuality is still a major taboo, which should be dealt with as aggressively as possible. In the U.K., on the other hand, Wales' greatest rugby player recently came out of the closet, while straight English rugby player Ben Cohen has cultivated a gay fanbase by being an outspoken advocate and releasing a steamy calendar.

Remember, the terrorists hate us for our freedoms.

Because Queer Still Means Not Normal

Frank Rich's column this week is off-base. Certainly, Don't Ask, Don't Tell has lost favor in every segment of the American population, even amongst conservatives. But to take this as a signal of broader acceptance of gay rights is mistaken. Lest we forget, California voters passed Proposition 8 over a year ago, Maine passed anti-marriage-equality initiative just a few months ago.

More alarmingly, anti-gay attitudes have become more comfortably nestled in today's culture. Witness CBS' rejecting an ad for gay dating site, Mancrunch.com while allowing Focus on the Family to encourage women to ignore their doctors' advice on the off chance that their endangered baby might survive, not kill them in the process, and become a professional athlete.



This, after having already communicated that if two guys kiss, they need to quickly reassert their manliness because...well, just because.



I haven't heard any larger outrage about it beyond the usual political players, which would suggest it's business as usual for contemporary America.

The Recession and the Arts, Ctd.

It occurs to me that I'm probably being much to snobby in my dismissal of popular plays like Doubt, Proof, etc., although The Rabbit Hole managed to irritate me quite a bit). I will instead redirect my objection away from these kinds of plays (which I might call Pulitzer-bait, but nevermind), and not even the plays themselves, but to the theaters staging them. For these plays are by far some of the most produced in the country, and I could have guessed this just by personal experience. I was in a community college production of The Laramie Project; my high school put it on the following year; my community college did Proof the same year we went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and saw The Rabbit Hole; and last year Boise Contemporary Theater did a reading of Doubt.

The fact of the matter is there is far more to the theater world than the ten or so plays on the WSJ's list and on Broadway's marquees. Not even taking into account the neglect of new works (there was a recent study published on how financial solubility is becoming more impossible for contemporary writers, but for the life of me I can't find it), there are plenty of under-appreciated gems of old that don't try so hard to wrap themselves up in respectability. But respectability is the name of the game, as theaters are chasing what they think audiences want. Middle-class domestic melodrama.

I'm plenty cynical about it all, but I would like to think audiences are savvier than we give them credit for. Granted, the success of middle-of-the-road approaches would suggest they don't want to be pushed out of their comfort zone, but might it be that we haven't tried enough to know? I would bet audiences are willing and curious enough to take anything on, provided it's done well, and the reason they eat up the popular Tonybait plays is that we don't give them any alternatives.

Shelby's a Dick, Alright

Alabama Senator Richard Shelby is holding up 70 of Obama's appointees in order to extract a couple pork projects for his state. This from the party that screams endlessly about earmarks (which make up a pittance of our overall spending anyway). In a more ideal world (for in a completely ideal world this kind of shit wouldn't be allowed to happen in the first place) the Democrats would shout from the rooftops how Republicans are using procedural trickery to grind governance to a standstill*, but given their track record I expect them instead to curl up in the corner and cry "Stop!"

*This may sound like whining, but it's all a matter of how it's approached. Americans are supposedly pissed off about health care reform being passed through obscure, sneaky tactics, so what's wrong with pointing out that Republican chicanery is what makes this maneuvering necessary in the first place?