Tarantino's incarnational theology: Reservoir Dogs, crucifixions and spectacular violence (1).

Writing about Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino's 1995 directorial and screenwriting debut, Manohla Dargis observed:

      A history of American cinema could be traced on the bruised,
      besieged male body, from westerns to gangster sagas to male
      weepies to war films.... [F]ilm after film features men ... at
      risk who can only find redemption through pain, theirs or someone
      else's. (2)

Whether or not these observations about American cinema are accurate, Dargis's summary most assuredly captures the spirit of the vast majority of Christian theology. The Christian theological imaginary traces quite precisely the outlines of a particular brutalized male body and the redemptive significance of the suffering that it endured. Indeed, the theological fact may explain the cinematic one: insofar as Christianity has dominated the Euro-American cultural imagination for a millenium or so, the mystery of physical brutality, and its possible redemptive power, has been in the air, ready to be scripted, interrogated, displayed and deployed time and time again. Given that both American cinema and the Christian narrative give pride of place to brutality against the male body, it seems likely that an interdisciplinary conversation about such violence may be productive.

In this article, I will explore the ethical and erotic dimensions of physical brutality against the male body as they appear in theological discourses and cinematic texts, relying on film theory to help unpack certain dynamics related to the crucifixion. With such an exploration, I hope to accomplish two things. First, I seek to contribute certain insights to Christian theological understandings of the significance and meaning of the crucifixion. By attending specifically to the figure of the brutalized body on the cross, certain issues related to gender and eroticism open up around the space of the crucifixion. Second, I seek to make a methodological intervention in the arena of religion and film scholarship. Theological discourses can benefit from taking up film theory as a full, legitimate and independent conversation partner--a form of "worldly wisdom" which must be interwoven with the faith tradition. With this article I hope to demonstrate how a truly interdisciplinary methodology between theology and film studies is both possible and productive for constructive theological discourses. In sum, this article could be read as an essay in constructive theology, as an essay in method for the study of religion and film, or--most appropriately--as both.

This article is intended solely as a starting point for both the substantive and the methodological inquiries. As an initial gesture, it invokes concerns about the relationship between religious discourses and visual culture, the ethical and theological value of spectacular violence, the erotic dimension of physical brutality, and the maturity of method in religion and film scholarship which I will not be able to address with the depth and precision that such questions deserve.

For simplicity's sake, I will keep the scope of comparison relatively limited. To examine the dynamics surrounding representations of brutality against the male body and how they relate to narratives of the crucifixion, I will focus my attention on Julian of Norwich's Showings and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Although there are a number of reasons for decrying a comparison of these two artifacts--they are from radically different historical periods, generated for different reasons, produced in disparate mediums, by "authors" with remarkably different commitments--I hope that by the conclusion of my examination the structural and thematic similarities between the texts will be sufficiently apparent so as to justify my choice.

The theological writings of the fourteenth-century mystic and visionary Julian of Norwich are justifiably renowned for their originality, their elegance, their emphasis on the limitless mercy of an all-loving God, and their description of the maternal aspects of Jesus' character. Any reader of Julian's writings, however, will also be struck by her fascination with the gruesome details of the body of the crucified Christ. While the feminine imagery for Christ and the boundless character of God's love in Julian's writings have received much critical attention, the violence that pervades her texts has not. Here is a representative passage in which Julian describes one of her visions:

       And after this as I watched, I saw the body bleeding copiously in
       the furrows made by the scourging, and it was thus. The fair skin
       was deeply broken into the tender flesh through the vicious blows
       delivered all over the lovely body. The hot blood ran out so
       plentifully that neither skin nor wounds could be seen, but
       everything seemed to be blood. And as it flowed down to where it
       should have fallen, it disappeared. Nonetheless, the bleeding
       continued for a time, until it could be plainly seen. And I saw
       it so plentiful that it seemed to me that if it had in fact and
       in substance been happening there, the bed and everything all
       around it would have been soaked in blood. (3)

The vivid details in this passage echo throughout Julian's writings. Moreover, the majority of her visions take the crucified body as their object. In fact, the brutalized body of Jesus serves as the foundational inspiration for Julian's theological musings. Julian states clearly and explicitly that all of her writings relate back to her visions of the Passion of Jesus--to its violence and brutality, to His suffering and pain.

Just as the figure of Jesus is the brutalized body around which Julian's theological writings are organized, the wounded body of Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) lies at the heart, quite literally, of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In the second scene of the film, after its first break in temporal continuity, Mr. Orange is shown screaming and writhing in the back seat of a car, the victim of a gun-shot wound to the belly. This image of pain is magnified by the vividness and simplicity of its colors--Mr. Orange is dressed in black and white, lying on a white vinyl car seat, which forcefully propels the vibrant red of the copious amounts of his blood at the audience. The temporal discontinuity of this scene contributes to its unsettling nature. Not only is the viewer forced to watch a bleeding man writhe in pain, but the viewer is compelled to attend to this image carefully to gather clues as to what has happened and why. In this way, Tarantino combines form and content masterfully to increase the visual assault of the images he has assembled. As the movie progresses, and as the narrative jumps between present and past, Mr. Orange's body remains virtually motionless on the floor of the warehouse where the hoodlum characters are supposed to reconnoiter. Whenever the camera returns to his body, however, the amber pool surrounding it has enlarged. Throughout the movie, the actions of Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) are motivated primarily by his concern for Mr. Orange's well-being and the movie culminates in a scene of violence focused primarily on the characters' differential positioning toward Mr. Orange. In both texts, then, a wounded, bleeding, brutalized body organizes and controls the discourse.

While the gruesome details of Julian's texts often go unremarked, Tarantino's status as auteur is distinguished by the graphic character of violence in his films. In Reservoir Dogs, the body count is truly Shakespearean. By the end of the film, all of the named characters are dead. Most of these deaths have taken place on screen. In addition, at least four other characters--three police officers and a young mother--are killed on screen. Another woman is dragged through the driver's side window of her car and beaten. All of the deaths that we see are marked by intense violence, extensive gun-play, and large amounts of blood. And, most infamously, before being killed, one of the police officers is tortured, in a session that involves the removal of his ear with a straight-edge razor, to the sounds of a seventies bubble-gum pop hit, "Stuck in the Middle with You."

How does Tarantino respond to charges that this film is gratuitously violent? For the most part, flippantly.

       To me, violence is a totally aesthetic subject. Saying you don't
       like violence in movies is like saying you don't like dance
       sequences in movies. I do like dance sequences in movies, but if
       I didn't, it doesn't mean I should stop dance sequences from
       being made. (4)

So, with a smirk and a shrug of his shoulders, Tarantino justifies graphic violence as a mere aesthetic choice. In one interview, however, he lets it be known,

       For all the wildness that happens in my movies, I think that they
       usually lead to a moral conclusion. For example, I find what
       passes between Mr. White and Mr. Orange at the end of Reservoir
       Dogs very moving and profound in its morality and its human
       interaction. (5)

What does happen between Mr. White and Mr. Orange at the end of the film? After every other character but the two of them has been killed, Mr. Orange lies bleeding to death, cradled like a baby by Mr. White, and divulges that he is an undercover cop--that he is, in fact, the person responsible for most of the carnage that has taken place. Commenting on this final scene, Robert Hilferty writes, "I have never seen such tenderness between two men in an ostensibly straight crime film." (6)

While Tarantino's film blurs the line between tenderness and violence--even between comedy and violence--Julian's visions, and her theological commentary, link compassion and brutality more explicitly. Julian wrote at a time when graphic depictions of the crucified Jesus were on the rise, both in written theological reflection and in Christian pictorial representation. The assumption was that meditating on the suffering of Jesus would increase compassion in the believer. Remembering the prayers of her youth--for a sickness unto death that would draw her into a full understanding of Jesus' passion--Julian writes

       And suddenly it came into my mind that I ought to wish ... that
       our Lord, of his gift and of his grace, would fill my body full
       with recollection of his blessed Passion, as I had prayed before
       that his pains might be my pains, with compassion which would
       lead to longing for God.... I desired to suffer with him, living
       in my mortal body, as God would give me grace. And at this,
       suddenly, I saw the red blood trickling down from under the
       crown, all hot, flowing freely and copiously, a living stream,
       just as it seemed to me that it was at the time when the crown of
       thorns was thrust down upon his blessed head. (7)

Julian's goal is greater compassion; the means to this end is contemplation of the spectacle of a wounded body. Her writings, then, indicate a relationship between spectacular violence and a response in the viewer that seeks to understand, participate in the alleviation of, and overcome that violence through compassion. Reservoir Dogs, for all of its violence and male bravado, also has an ethical dimension. Tarantino's film is, on one reading, a reductio ad absurdum on the cult of masculinity. It shows a world of powerful men at its absolute, and self-destructive, worst. The film portrays a hermetically sealed, claustrophobic world of gun-loving, trash-talking, violence-prone men and the carnage they leave in their wake. The care-taking, physically intimate bond that Mr. Orange and Mr. White embody is portrayed as something alternative, unusual, and superior within this harsh world. This bond, however, is only possible given the violence enacted against Mr. Orange's body. Both Julian's and Tarantino's work, then, calls its audience to a place of compassion and empathy, but the mechanism for this ethical call is the display of a brutalized body.

Tarantino's critique of culturally dominant scripts of gender identity finds a possible echo in Julian's text. At the same time, the precise gender dynamics in the two texts are markedly different. The gender of Julian's Jesus is ambiguous. With her description of Jesus as Mother, Julian marks the body on the cross as female, while retaining male-gendered pronouns for the person of Jesus. Jesus is mother not merely because of His compassion and loving care, but primarily because He gives birth to the Church from the wound in His side and sustains believers with the blood from His wounds. The power of Jesus to love, redeem and sustain believers is related to Jesus' feminine energy; this feminine energy, however, is located in a body consistently imagined and addressed as male. Similarly, Mr. Orange and Mr. White retain their identities as male, but their behavior toward one another violates the norms of traditional masculine behavior. Specifically, Mr. Orange's emotional outbursts and Mr. White's physical tenderness lie outside traditional macho interaction patterns. Thus, both characters are feminized and rendered ambiguous in terms of gender and erotic identity. Resolving these ambiguities, articulating the precise dynamics of the allure of a wounded male body versus a wounded female body, and interpreting the meaning of wounds associated with the generation of life as opposed to those which threaten the continuation of life are tasks which lie outside the scope of this article. For the purposes of my argument, it is enough to note the fact of the fascination: desire and perceptual transformation are somehow bound up with the improper and unclean body, regardless of gender.

Both visions then--Julian's mystical one and Quentin's directorial one--use representations of the bloody, wounded, human figure as a mechanism for generating ethical critique, moral judgment and possible social transformation. Both visions, moreover, have a notion about the fluidity and instability of gender at their heart. The crucifixion, the brutalized body, spectacular violence serve as sites for interrogating and deconstructing prevailing gender norms and imaging different ways of organizing bodies, desire, and erotic attachment. Not only does physical brutality enable and generate an ethical critique, but this critique has a very specific content in both Julian's and Tarantino's work. This understanding of the relationship between the brutalized body, ethical response, and gender critique may open up very different conceptions of the salvific nature of Jesus' death.

These representations, it must also be noted, are vivid, detailed, and gruesome; the violence is significant, moving, real. Again, Tarantino discussing Reservoir Dogs:

       The reason [the film] freaks out people is that it's not
       theatrical, it's realistic. When somebody gets shot in the
       stomach that way, they bleed to death.... It's a horrible,
       horrible pain, until you get too numb to feel it. Yes, the blood
       in that scene is realistic. We had a medic on the set controlling
       the pool, saying, "Okay, one more pint and he's dead." (8)

To make an ethical demand, violence cannot be fantastic; theatrical, cartoonish violence is too easily deflected and dismissed. Realistic violence may also be a source of disgust and discomfort, but it draws us into the drama of the events represented more fully and completely.

It is interesting to note, with this observation in mind, that unlike the rest of Tarantino's films, Reservoir Dogs has no redemptive or restorative denouement. At the end of a very violent and bloody film, all the characters are dead. Fade to black. Similarly, in Julian's text, although there are fleeting references to Christ in glory, there is no explicit mention of the resurrection and no sustained attention to the post-crucifixion Jesus. If violent spectacle is capable of making an ethical demand and directing our moral attention, then what is lost when we avert our gaze from images of brutality? What is the cost when Jesus becomes a great moral teacher instead of a victim of public torture? What happens when cinematic violence is stripped from narrative, or sanitized, or moved off-screen? Without violence in our theology and our entertainment, are we left with fewer resources to deal with the violence that is very much a part of our lived reality?

What else might we miss if we avert our gaze from brutality directed against the male body? In his essay, "Masculinity as Spectacle," Steve Neale seeks to extend Laura Mulvey's work on the male gaze and to challenge her assertion that the male or male-identified spectator can never look upon the male body as an erotic object. (9) To challenge Mulvey's assertion, Neale identifies the mechanisms mainstream Hollywood cinema uses to represent the male body as erotic. One way of doing this, Neale argues, is by making the male body the target of violence. In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy--as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid's naked flesh--as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege--as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover--as long as he is riddled with bullets. Violence makes the homoeroticism of many "male" genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.

In Reservoir Dogs, this representational strategy is most evident in a scene near the beginning of the film where we first see Mr. White caring for Mr. Orange after Mr. Orange has been shot. The scene begins with Mr. White dragging Mr. Orange into the warehouse from the car. Mr. Orange is sobbing, gasping, rambling incoherently and Mr. White is doing everything he can to comfort him. Mr. White tells Mr. Orange it is okay for him to stop being brave. In addition, he cleans his face, combs his hair, and cradles him like an infant--or a lover. Here, in violation of the masculine code that controls his actions throughout the rest of the film, Mr. Orange shows his emotions, his fear, his terror. Mr. White holds him, holding him tighter and more closely after Mr. Orange desperately requests that he do so. The camera stays tight on the two men's faces, increasing the viewer's sense that there is a violation of traditional rules of appropriate physical distance. There are moments where it almost looks like the two men will kiss. In a move that would be absolutely verboten in any other context, the presumably heterosexual Mr. White unbuckles the presumably heterosexual Mr. Orange's belt and opens his trousers. All of this--the emotionality, the physical intimacy, the violation of traditional gender codes--is justified, deflected and explained by the fact of Mr. Orange's brutalization. But for the bullet in Mr. Orange's belly, none of this would be possible; because of the bullet in Mr. Orange's belly, all of this is possible and is permissibly interpreted as asexual.

This link between violence and eroticism is not as apparent in Julian's text, but it still makes an appearance. Compared to other medieval mystics who wrote about the crucifixion, Julian's writing is the least erotically charged. It is interesting to note, however, in the vast majority of her descriptions of the crucified Christ, she is quick to point out that the brutality of the crucifixion and its attendant horrors deformed and disfigured a beautiful, attractive, appealing body. Given my earlier comments about how Julian depicts the body of Jesus as a female body, the circuit of desire and contemplation in Julian's text could be described as one of female homoeroticism. Regardless, even in this text, the erotic bursts through crucified flesh to make an appearance. Violence can attempt to cover and divert erotic energy, but it can never fully extinguish it.

Although I have discovered no extended religious or theological analysis of Reservoir Dogs, several commentators on the film characterized the staging of Mr. Orange and Mr. White's bodies as strongly reminiscent of the Pieta. The figure of the Pieta is interesting for the comparison that I am making. The Pieta--the image of Mary holding the body of her dead son, Jesus--first appears in the fourteenth century, near the time that Julian had her visions and wrote her theological treatises. The pathos of this image is seconded only by its eros. Death and sensuality are bound in the smooth lines of Mary's cloak and Jesus' flesh in most examples of the Pieta. Moreover, Mary is usually depicted as a young maiden in the Pieta, ignoring the age she would be if the corpse in her arms was in its thirties; the similarity in age between "mother" and "child" works to further mark the two figures as contemporaries and lovers. Just as Julian often observed the dying Christ through the eyes of Mary in her visions, Tarantino represents the homoeroticized hyper-masculinity of Reservoir Dogs through a Pieta-like pose which invokes the figure of Mary. In all of these artifacts, then, death, broken bodies, sensuality, pathos, and eros are bound together in a complex, mutually implicated, multiply reinforcing web.

After tracing these structural and thematic relationships between these texts, trying to describe how they fit together, and offering suggestions as to the questions a comparative analysis might raise, I must stop. Partly, this is for reasons of space. Primarily, this is for reasons of theoretical acumen--or lack thereof.

It seems clear to me that a text as non-theological as Tarantino's and a disciplinary field as a-religious as film studies can provide useful analytical tools to Christian theologians. Film studies includes sophisticated work about the meaning and function of violent spectacle--how it affects spectators, how it relates to gender and sexuality. Given the centrality of a specific violent spectacle in the Christian narrative, this body of theoretical work should be of interest to those of us still contemplating the meaning and importance of that narrative. Specifically, representations of violence have an ethical import because they can focus our attention and generate our sympathy in particular ways. As Tarantino's work and Julian's writings demonstrate, the violence may need to have a certain realistic character before this ethical effect can reach fruition. Cartoon violence simply will not do. Understanding how and why and when and in what way violence can stir ethical reflection will be vital to articulations of the Christian narrative and to the work for a non-violent world. Moreover, violence both conceals and reveals something erotic at the heart of Christianity. Insofar as violent images are a strategy for camouflaging homoerotic desire, Christian theologians may need to ask: What has been covered by centuries of veneration of images of a nearly naked, badly beaten male figure? The erotic heart of Christianity does erupt from time to time in theological discourse, but this energy is too easily forgotten in moments of sexual panic.

Where I remain puzzled, however, is why these three elements--violent spectacle, ethical reflection, erotic response--are connected and how they reinforce each other. This must remain the task of future work. In addition, how the gender of the object of violence and the gender of its spectator affects these dynamics are also questions which must wait for another day.

Hopefully, what I have accomplished is to articulate how the crucifixion can be understood and appropriated as part of a very different conversation than the one in which it is traditionally situated. The conversation I have in mind is a conversation that would befamiliar to certain Christian mystics of the Middle Ages; this conversation understands the violent spectacle of the crucifixion as an erotic spectacle. What I would hope for is a re-articulation of this erotic understanding of the central event of the Christian narrative as a means to open up Christianity to those who have been excluded on the basis of their gender and erotic identities. Moreover, I hope to have demonstrated that cinematic texts and the discourses of film theory are useful conversation partners in the theological task of understanding the significance and meaning of the death of Jesus. Although the task is barely begun, for the moment, hopefully, we are left with sufficient reason to attend to those great pictorialists--Catherine of Siena, Richard Rolle, St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich--as well as those neo-theologians--Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppolla, Quentin Tarantino--as we seek to make sense of representations of violence, their nature, their value, their ethics, their erotics, their relationship to the Christian theological imagination.

Notes

1. This article is based on a conference paper presented at the 2003 SBL/AAR annual meeting. The paper has benefitted immensely from the comments and suggestions of Emily Holmes and Rick Warner.

2. Manohla Dargis, "Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blonde?," Artforum International 31, no. 3 (1992): 11.

3. Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), Long Text, chapter 12, 199-200.

4. Gerald Peary, ed., Quentin Tarantino: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1998), 60.

5. Peary, Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, 60.

6. Robert Hilferty, "Reservoir Dogs," Cineaste 19, no. 4 (1993): 79.

7. Julian of Norwich, Showings, Short Text, chapter 3, 129.

8. Peary, Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, 17.

9. Steve Neale, "Masculinity as Spectacle," in Screen, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992 [1983]), 277-87; see also Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 [1975]), 14-26.