Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next week, we’ll finish serializing the remaining chapters of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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A woman had stopped traffic on Ventura Blvd and was attacking the front of a Big Blue Bus with what appeared to be a Styrofoam wakeboard. They arrived together and the rest had settled out back with drinks and something was cooking in the kitchen and Mark is at the grill. There are different degrees, Jason is thinking, and different axes that trust can flow. Or not flow. There is his childhood friend Frank who he sees yearly and can share personal matters but not politics with and who he’s quite certain he (Frank) never has to worry about him (Jason) trying to shag his old lady. Whereas in contrast there’s Mark who he doubts feels comfortable with Jason being alone with his old lady (Mark’s old lady) for more than a few minutes but with whom he converses regularly on politics, current affairs and religion, in passionate terms ranging from scatological to pseudo-erudite. What he’s thinking is, there are two types of friends: those you are sure won’t try and take a run at your misses and those you are not. And you can like them both the same.
Mark is working a tri-tip on the upper deck and bone-in thighs on the bottom, a precarious mix that Jason finds fascinating Mark can seem to orchestrate with little ostensible attention and while downing can after can of Coors Lite and holding court about the biz.
When the film was released, Mark is saying, the narrative quickly became about his unreconstructed view of Hollywood, his fetishizing or what more charitable reviewers may have termed idolizing of the glory days of Tinseltown, with all the backroom deals, and principally with its unapologetic worshiping of male leads. His failure to rectify, in his revisionist telling of the Manson murders, the role of men to deprive women of their agency, Sharon Tate in particular, was evinced not only by the fact that she doesn’t save herself but instead is, not so much saved, but rather stood in for by macho male characters who proceed to exact sadistic and cathartic—at least for the audience member fluent with the real life events—violence on the family members, the Manson family members. That this represented at best a sorry missed opportunity, they said, the critics, the talking-heads said, and at worst, a second insult, another act of disenfranchisement and debasement, now on the ghost and memory of Tate, 50 years after the original crime. Additional evidence in support of this narrative was the fact that, inanely, Tate’s lines were judged by some to be too few, as though the amount of speaking one does is the only, or even ever a valid, measure of their worth.
She should have talked more. And not just been eye candy.
There’s that. Not just, at least.
There are a lot of long takes of Leo and Brad. Some subtext there.
Ok. Maybe. Who knows. A gay thing, you mean? I don’t think so. Let’s take first the general premise of male idols as problem. Fiction is art and art needn’t, shouldn’t conform to timely social norms or political trends especially if the artist desires to drive or oppose such trends in private life. In 2019, on the heels of Harvey Weinstein’s defenestration as an, apparently licensed, sexual predator and Tarantino’s professional and personal proximity to him, the urge to seek repentance from Tarantino in his first post-Harvey film was as great as it was absurd.
You think it was intentional?
Him not repenting? No. That’s the wrong way to look at it. He just doesn’t care. Tarantino doesn’t. He’s got a story to tell and he’s not trying to signal any bigger social anything.
You don’t believe the Band-Aid on Marcellus’ head story?
His soul?
And Vincent and Jules are retrieving it…
It’s fine. From the devil or whatever. 666 on the case. You can read that into it and maybe he was thinking that overly symbolic shit when writing. It seems on brand.
And the watch battery sign on the pawn shop window…
And the what now?
There’s a watch battery sign on the window of the pawn shop where Butch goes to confront Marcellus. Before they meet the gimp.
Huh. Like some kind of redemption thing for his old man’s watch.
Right. The universe throwing him a chance to scratch out some honor.
Huh. Haven’t heard that one. Anyway, pawn shops usually carry watch batteries.
Sure, sure.
Anyways, what was I saying. Right. Tarantino, like many others, and I’m talking men and women in this town, may have been in a position to be complicit in Weinstein’s shenanigans but this complicity exists and should be resolved in the real world, not through art.
I think he talked about this on Rogan. His association with Weinstein.
I think he did. I’m sure he did. I have no idea. The guy loves to talk. My point is, if he were indeed to attempt atonement in a film, that would be the actual vulgarity. That’s one point. But let’s get in the weeds here. As for Tarantino’s actual treatment of women in film, as a message to society and attempt to shape cultural mood, let’s punt for a measure. I want to linger on this idea that stories cannot be written about male relationships at the relative exclusion of women. That this is thought policing and illiberal and imbecilic in addition to just plain lazy commentary. Is what I’m saying. And let’s take a look at that relationship with some objectivity: DiCaprio’s Dalton is no cocksure leading man, bedding women, steamrolling rivals and writing his ticket. Dalton is brooding, consumed with self-doubt and defined by his insecurity…the most nakedly happy we see him is when he receives advice and then praise from an 8-year-old co-star. Pitt’s Booth is certainly more grounded and less anxious but his finest days, which, when they were here, saw him perform as a professional stand-in, paid to not look like himself, are long gone. He is content to be his friend’s chauffeur.
He’s washed up.
Dalton?
No, Booth. Pitt.
No, not washed up. He was never not, whatever the opposite, he never had anything to be washed up from.
Right.
These are not macho male characters. Their presentation indicts the common erroneous interpretation of male chauvinism and insecurity as male self-confidence rather than what it really is, which is impotence and isolation. Booth is constantly pumping Dalton up. You’re Rick fucking Dalton.
You know that was improvised?
Yeah, I heard that. Booth is protecting him on and off set, and Dalton treats him like a friend, not a servant. There is no undercurrent of disguised contempt or condescension. Clearly Dalton needs Booth at a visceral level, not just to fix his antenna and drive him around, but to remind him of his own existence and to help him realize some self-worth. Booth doesn’t need Dalton at all, he could drive or work for someone else, and this is what makes the relationship believable as a true friendship. Its inequality. A junior and senior partner, a dependent and a provider, and is durable when and only when both people are seeking to inhabit and derive value from those roles.
Booth is provider and Dalton dependent?
Hundred percent. These dudes are not some moral Pollyannas: Booth turns down a blow job because he doesn’t want to go to prison for poontang.
And because Tarantino doesn’t do sex scenes.
Good point. But it’s not because he’s not interested or because he thinks they are degrading to women. Rather, they exhibit what might be termed a baseline heterosexual male personae: nonlecherous, nonpuritanical, noneffeminate and binary. They, Booth and Dalton. They both are attractive, like women and display neither deference nor boorishness towards them.
I think Booth killed his wife.
He’s not making a moral argument. QT. Booth’s wife was being a whining bitch. It’s part of the Booth mystique in the fictional world but it doesn’t stick to the metafictional Pitt and thus doesn’t stick to the Booth that we see as audience. Even if his fellow actors, Booth’s fellow actors in the fictional world, are scared of him and this story, the wife killing thing, maybe it adds to their take on him. For us as the audience, he’s kind of a cuddly doofus.
Not sure I would call him a doofus.
He’s kind of a meathead. Anyway, he’s not overintellectualizing shit. He’s being a good friend. He’s enjoying the ride.
The whole thing.
The whole thing. The whole ride. Wherever it’s going. He’s a fatalist. He’s killing the Arab on the beach for no reason.1 But here he’s not. He invents, what did Sarture say about, choosing, inventing, with joining the war.
I dated a girl in college, she corrected me on that dude. I was pronouncing his name Sarter or Sarture and she tells me no, it’s pronounced Sart. My father was a graduate student of one of his acolytes, she said. He was at his funeral. Sartre’s. Her father. And yes I think he said something about inventing morality.2
Ok but let’s linger on the male lead thing again but across his canon. Consider the male leads and their interactions with women in his other movies. Broadly construed.
Broadly construed.
What is the method? His method. The male leads rarely interact much on screen with girlfriends…
And I don’t want to get fucking divorced.
Ok, right? But Jules Winfield shows great affection for his unseen girlfriend, Vincent Vega is a consummate gentleman to Mia, Django Freeman is a romantic showman and undying servant to his Broomhilde and so on. Butch’s terrific verbal outburst at Fabian was triggered by the loss of a family heirloom.
The watch.
Yes, the watch. And your idea about the watch battery at the pawn shop is…I don’t know it has anything to do with what we are talking about. Anyways, maybe he redeems himself and then is nice to Fabian again?
But there’s more there. He may very well be killed as a result of her forgetting the watch. It’s basically the key to his salvation. He must retrieve his father’s watch. And by doing the right thing…
Choosing the righteous path.
Choosing the righteous path, and then the universe affords him a chance at redemption. A hero’s quest.
But is it redemption? From what? He’s not a killer. I mean he kills the guy in the fight but that’s not the same. There’s a cut scene about that too, by the way. More chitchat with the cab driver. Esmerelda Villalobos.
Also barefoot by the way.
Correct. But he’s not a gangster. Is fucking over gangsters something you atone for?
What then?
It’s the universe offering him a chance to matter. To transcend.
Ok.
He’s berating her and calling her a whore, yet he never lays a finger on her and after collecting her after receiving a beating and being nearly anally raped and killed, greets her with warmth and humor, all forgiven.
True, true.
All of this is beating around the bush though. Here’s the thing I really want to say, because the real point is that what Tarantino excels at is creating strong female protagonists that are individually interesting in ways that have nothing to do with men. The Rorschach test but for women characters? What the heck is it called?
No idea what you’re talking about.3
It doesn’t matter. Ok, but here, an aside on the foot fetish: the artist must be allowed to be didactic and to seek a higher message while at the same time seeking to provoke and to titillate. To surprise and have fun.
He likes feet. Continue.
He likes feet. It’s a calling card. Ok, but like, all Tarantino’s female leads are fully formed characters, not dependent on men for their agency and whose stories, although they may involve men, do not serve them. Think first of Uma Thurman, his muse, as Mia: she is married to a mobster and happy to flirt with and torment, and maybe fuck, had he come back from the loo before she snorted his heroin, even though it would have meant his certain death by Marcellus’s hand.
Again, he doesn’t do sex scenes.
As the Bride, Thurman plays a woman wronged by men and women, and who devours more than five hours of screen time hunting and annihilating them, single handedly. Pam Greer’s Jackie Brown has a flirtation with Forrester’s Cherry, but pits Keaton’s ATF officer, the formidable Samuel L. Jackson’s Ordell, and Cherry against each other to ensure her own survival. The men who visit violence on women in his movies meet, again without exception, equally violent ends: Beatrice Kiddo’s many tormentors, De Niro’s character whatever the fuck his name was, Kurt Russell’s stuntman in Grindhouse, and of course Tate’s would-be assassins.
You’re coming to a point I imagine. Tarantino is a closet feminist. You need to pull those off, there’s almost no wiggle left.
Not closeted. And how about the treatment of Robbie’s Tate, judged by some many by how much she did or didn’t speak on camera, by how many shots of her legs and feet and hair were used to establish her character? Unlike all Tarantino’s other creations, his Tate came not from whole cloth but from alteration, done on the screen, of a real person and that real person’s life on film. Tate herself was on film. As an actor. Tate was an objectively beautiful woman, an actor and a model, professions that by definition involve cultivation of physical appearance. Tarantino’s camera lingers on Tate’s private moments, delighting in her own—at that point still new—success as an actor, relishing it despite herself and with unbridled, adolescent happiness at seeing herself in the movies, performing, being appreciated, making them laugh. When Robbie’s Tate tells the clerk, I play the klutz, we know the joke is on us. Realizing herself as a person and an actor. Tarantino’s Polanski is absent, as are other men, from these pure moments when this woman, who in real life was brutally murdered, in a new life on the silver screen is allowed to bask in her accomplishment, to smile and laugh, to be the one with agency to bestow on a male colleague passage to a new realm of not only professional opportunity but also self-worth.
She saves them.
Dalton and Booth do not save Tate in Tarantino’s revision. It is she that is empowered to save them through an unspoken brotherhood that may or may not be intended to guide a search for tolerance in the real world. Tarantino’s oeuvre is the pinnacle of film metafiction, based as it is on the director’s encyclopedic cinematic mind, and this movie is the singularity of that work, with movies within movies, actors acting like actors and the great questions of mankind, existence, self-worth, destiny, asked in the context of film within a film, complete with flubbed lines, deliberate errors, retakes.
But only if you want them to be. The questions asked that is. You need to take those off, there’s almost no wiggle, get them off of there.
You boys were getting into it out there, Jessica said to him as they walked home across the street at 12:35 am.
Mark is working again. He’s fired up.
Yeah, Sally said as much.
No reason was given as to why it was just the four of us.
The reason is they weren’t invited.
Mickey and Kevin?
She’s livid.
Ok…
He’s not that subtle.
Kevin’s not?
Mark’s not.
Ok.
Sally says it doesn’t bother her if he wants to fuck Mickey. If you want to fuck her you can go ahead and do it, she says she told Mark, and deal with all the problems that I can guarantee you come along with it. That’s not a one night rocks off and then she lets you go back to, we all go back to this, it’s just civil and everyone’s cool. She’s not about to let you off that easy. Mickey’s not. You’re signing up for something with her. But you go right ahead.
Did he say something to her?
He didn’t have to. It’s obvious, and Mickey knows it. And Kevin knows it. They both know everybody wants to sleep with her and they both think it’s great.
Ok. Some kind of fetish.
I don’t think it’s…who knows if they’re playing some game with each other but they both clearly know it. Who knows. Anyways Sally’s saying, what I won’t do, I won’t fucking sit there and watch her prance her cunt around. In my house. Sally was drunk last time. In front of all these men, she’s saying, like she’s got a cunt that smells like boysenberries and that everyone wants a piece and the rest of us women can just bow down. I don’t give a fuck she wants to do that shit and her husband is too blind or too weak to do anything, but I’m not going to watch it go down in my own living room.
What you girls talk about in there.
What did you think we talked about?
Baking brownies.
Doing the laundry.
Knitting.
I’m taking call tomorrow, she said.
Ok.
Can I ask you something?
Sure.
Do you still think about going back to school?
Well, that’s about the last thing I expected you to ask me just now. I don’t know. No, I think I don’t.
We don’t talk about it. We’ve never talked about it. I don’t want you to think it’s something I don’t care about or, if you wanted to do it, wouldn’t support you. I would support you.
I mean. I don’t.
I don’t mean financial support.
I know. I don’t.
We should be able to talk about this sort of thing. I’m just saying, what you want, whatever you want, we can, I want to, you know. I’m in.
You’re wondering what it’s going to be like me doing this for 25, 30 more years.
Don’t you wonder?
I do.
I mean I don’t know how I’m going to do this another 30 years. I’m not. I couldn’t. I’m getting out in like 10, do something else.
I guess I don’t think about it that way.
How do you think about it, Jessica said, but her tone was rhetorical.
This guy I work with, he’s a she now. Transitioned. So I asked him, her, what was the most painful part? When they, you know, chopped of your… And she said no. And I said well, was it then when they carved out, or whatever they do, when they made your, you know, down there… And she said no. And I said well, what was it then?
When they shrank his brain.
I can make you breakfast, just wake me when you get up.
It’s ok.
Mark’s allusion here misattributes the capricious killing on the beach of an Arab in The Stranger, by Camus, to Sarte. As an aside, there are radically different English translations of this book in circulation in the USA and the last few sentences of the book are particularly stark. In their difference. As another aside, it’s unclear Meursault’s actions had anything to do with fatalism as Mark is using the term. Probably what Mark means here is that Booth is capricious and not overly concerned with questions of his own free will, but one can be capricious and not fatalistic, and the reader can decide for himself whether Mark’s arguments about Booth are convincing and indicative of fatalism, caprice or just thickheadedness. To digress for a moment, Camus in fact missed an opportunity to make the murder totally capricious (say for e.g. Brando’s Paul’s wordless carnal conquest of Schneider’s Jeanne seconds after they first meet in Tango, is pure, contextless, capriciousness, along with whatever else it may be), and thereby one could argue more interesting, by instead having—Camus does—Meursault interact negatively with the Arab first. Better would have been absolutely no interaction at all and no premeditated animus towards Arabs. Just have him kill this person who happens to be Arab for no reason and understand that the way the society he’s in perceives it and the way we the readers perceive it are constructs based on our own biases and prevailing cultural norms which/that we then we map on to events to explain them and that these constructs and the resulting interpretation need have no connection to what is actually going on in another person’s mind or whatever.
What J-PS said was (in a lecture in 1946): You are free: therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. This was his advice to a grad student weighing whether to join the Free French resistance or be a Nazi collaborator in the 1940’s and whether his choice should be swayed by the desire to avenge a dead older brother or the despair of his mother at potentially losing another son.
The test neither of them can think of is the Bechdel Test, named after Alison Bechdel, which states, to paraphrase, that to evaluate the representation of women in a book or film, one should ask whether a scene features two women talking to each other about something other than a man.