Kill Adolf

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Steve Sailer suggests that Quentin Tarantino’s gifts may be better suited to a different career:

Surely, for example, Tarantino would have made an ideal Artistic Director of the Roman Colosseum during its heyday under the Emperor Commodus. “I’ve got it! We’ll start with a Mexican standoff among three gladiators, 27 Christians, two Nile crocodiles, and a giant squid. They eyeball each other tensely… suddenly, all hell breaks loose!”

He would also have served admirably as the Idea Man in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department. Here’s an extract from Winston Smith’s diary that’s Tarantinoesque avant la lettre:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. First you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. Audience shouting with laughter when he sank.

Granted, if Tarantino worked for Minitrue, this bit of action would have been preceded by 17 minutes of exhaustively clever dialogue riffing on sinking ship scenes from old movies, famous and obscure. The default trajectory of Tarantino’s screenwriting is to dissipate momentum until the story lies dead in the water, only to desperately jolt it back to life via carnage.

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