Tarantino vs the Coens

Please note that due to technical issues the right-hand side of this clip is hidden on this blog. Go to this link to see full-screen.


From the title of this montage brilliantly assembled from the films of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, you might expect a kind of video-essay playing up the differnces between their styles - the first saturated with pop culture references, outrageous humour , the second rather more distanced and knowing.

Instead the clip, edited by Leandro Copperfield , tends to emphasises how much the most revered American directors of the last 25 years or so have in common. Namely an anti-realist aesthetic, a fascination with violence, and a facility for using irony and humour as a shield against emotional realism.

By that I mean not so much the naturalism or social realism of, say, a Ken Loach, as the kind of naked emotional honesty found in the work of John Cassavetes.

In other words, both Tarantino and the Coens like to present extreme situations in a way that makes them safe to enjoy. Cassavetes was more interested in confronting viewers , not with unexpected juxtapositions of violence and humour, but by pouring their emotions into a tumble-dryer.

Of the contemporary pair, though, I usually prefer Tarantino, whose sense of humour I usually glom onto without a second's hesitation, whereas the Coens' strikes me as too often sniggering and superior.

While Tarantino is a fiendishly talented but palpably non-intellectual, lower-class Los Angeleno, the Coens are inescapably middle-class.

Born in the mid-West they may have been, but nobody should be surprised to learn they live in New York and that Ethan studied at Ivy League university Princeton where he completed a thesis on Wittgensteinian philosophy, while Joel studied film at New York University. East Coast intellectual attitude drips off them - which is not the same as saying their films are intellectual.

An obvious exception is their most recent, A Serious Man, whose denial of traditional dramatic grammar I critiqued in a recent post. Fans including Scanners' Jim Emerson have defended the film by, among other things, drawing on the Schroedinger's Cat hypothesis - a famous paradox found in quantuum physics.

A commenter on this site meanwhile advised that "you just need to immerse yourself into some research on Jewish religion, history and culture. However, given your distaste for everything Jewish, you may not want to."

In other words it seems to be the fault of the movie's critics for finding dramatic flaws. Seems we walked into the cinema having failed to study theoretical physics and the history of Jewish culture and religion in sufficient depth.

That's not intellectualism, it's witheringly arrogant elitism. Somehow I dont think we'll ever find a Tarantino fan pursuing that line.