Cinema Speculation Review: Quentin Tarantino’s Wrenching Blend of Criticism and Memoir

Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation is an unprecedented collection of film criticism in that it’s written by an actual filmmaker, at a career peak no less. Filmmaking and criticism have intersected before, most famously when the critics of the French New Wave grew into the most formative directors of their generations. They brought the experience of analysis into the field, while Tarantino reverses this trajectory, bringing experience of the field into the realm of analysis. Which is to say that he has an idea of what he’s talking about. Given his reach and access, he has none of the limitations of a regular critic: no deadlines, no word count requirements, and, especially freeing, none of the pressures to be polite or to follow structural expectations.

Those last twin freedoms may render Cinema Speculation catnip for other critics, maybe even those who don’t respond to Tarantino’s films. I certainly admire and envy Tarantino’s ability to open a review of Escape from Alcatraz with a history of Don Siegel’s career without the piece losing snap or focus. Such a free-associative structure reflects how a train of thought moves, and how we often roam from one subject to another when talking about our passions. Film criticism often denies such textures, which is partially why laypeople see much of it as dry and unreflective of an essentially sensual artform.

Tarantino takes Pauline Kael’s great strengths—liveliness, recklessness, humanity, her sheer readability—and weds them with his understanding of Hollywood as a business and his rat-a-tat verbosity as a former video clerk and fashions a singular style. Tarantino says a lot of things that he doesn’t seem to mean on the talk show circuit, and I assumed that his claims of settling into writing books was similar bullshit, but Cinema Speculation and his novelization of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (which was a book of film criticism disguised as a western) show that he’s as confident writing for the page as the screen. Perhaps more so.

It’s the sense of freedom that’s most narcotic in Cinema Speculation, especially for those of us who’ve tried to get our personalities across in writing without losing gigs or getting lost in the weeds or having drafts returned awash in colored comments. Tarantino curses up a red storm, speaks in slang, and refuses to hyphen-out forbidden epithets. He doesn’t capitalize Black, even though this book is obsessed with issues of race, both in Tarantino’s own life and in the lurid 1970s-era American titles that comprise 90 percent of the volume. Astonishingly few of these indulgences feel crass. And what if they did? Would any readers melt upon encountering them?

Like the structural shagginess, the language and the unguarded grammar arise as the devices of someone saying what they fucking mean, regardless of trends or potential slaps on the wrists. Such freedom is the benefit of power, and of being grandfathered into pop culture before a potential insensitivity became a possible source of hysteria. Here, this freedom suggests white-guy entitlement, yes, but also a refusal to separate people via the borders of cautious euphemisms and manners that change with the winds anyway.

Bluntness has always turned Tarantino on, and he knows that he’s doing things here that are verboten for a younger, unestablished writer. Though he doesn’t quite spell this out, bluntness is what so enthralls Tarantino about the films of the New Black Wave of the ’70s and the various white and Black "revengeamatics" of the time, in which vigilantes wiped out scores of people. Bluntness for Tarantino suggests communal honesty devoid of patronizing, a willingness to get down with people he’s seeing a movie with, regardless of race or age or gender, and talk about what they’re seeing. A white kid who saw many Black movies in all-Black theaters in the ’60s and ’70s, Tarantino wants to belong in such places, and the first step to belonging for him is telling it like it is. Tarantino is much too hip to describe his yearning explicitly, but it’s there between the lines, adding a retrospective poignancy to the pedestal he erected for Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, and Chris Tucker in Jackie Brown.

Tarantino’s willingness to do whatever he wants leads to revelatory places. His pieces on Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder are very admiring while calling the films out for racial cowardice. The pimp in Taxi Driver who becomes the object of Travis Bickle’s vengeance is played by Harvey Keitel, a white guy, while Paul Schrader’s script originally envisioned the character as African American, or as a source of racial tension that parallels the racist bitterness of the quest driving John Ford’s The Searchers.

Tarantino gets Scorsese to admit that he didn’t want to take that on. Colombia Pictures was afraid of riots if the film ended with an elaborate act of racial warfare, and Tarantino positions that skittishness as a true source of racism. A skittishness suggesting that Black audiences couldn’t handle the film and are to be treated with kid gloves. Tarantino draws similarly persuasive conclusions about Rolling Thunder and Schrader’s Hardcore. Meanwhile, Tarantino’s brilliant piece on John Boorman’s Deliverance is simultaneously empathetic of the homoerotic relationship between the Burt Reynolds and John Voight characters and capable of admitting that a fear of "butt-fucking" defines that film for many an audience member.

The fan-boyishness that can get away from Tarantino in his writings for the New Beverly Cinema (which he owns) in Los Angeles is wielded like a scalpel in Cinema Speculation. He writes with exhilarating zeal about what makes actors like Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds so extraordinarily cool in their prime, and he complements it with his insider’s-view to give us a glimpse behind the magic show. McQueen, often portrayed by critics as a found object, is shown by Tarantino to have a shrewd sense of image that was empowering and limiting.

Tarantino positions a piece on Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller as a short story about the forgotten actor Barry Brown, who died by suicide at 27, emulating the regret that drives the film. Elsewhere, Tarantino offers a nuanced portrait of how Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood helped each other survive shifting cultural epochs (which resembles the symbiotic relationship that now exists between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio) while daring to empathize with right-wing audiences who were comforted by the lone crusade of Dirty Harry, all the while acknowledging both its astonishing filmmaking and social cynicism. This understanding of people comforted by right-wing values during times of great chaos is evident, and misunderstood by certain critics, in the film of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

Tarantino’s appreciation of Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse is memorable for a lively prologue in which he remembers seeing Hooper’s Eaten Alive in a theater with Floyd Ray Wilson, a middle-aged African-American acquaintance of his mother’s, when he was 16 or 17. They couldn’t stop laughing at Robert Englund’s performance as "Buck who likes to fuck," a line that would be spouted by the equally sleazy Michael Bowen in Kill Bill: Vol.1. This mention of Floyd Ray Wilson isn’t arbitrary, as this man was a drifter who influenced Tarantino while his mother did whatever she did, whether struggling to makes end meet or take a break from life as a single mother with a teenaged child. Wilson instilled in Tarantino a need to say what he means whether it’s fashionable or not. Wilson loved Stepin Fetchit, for instance, and he said that he saw Jim Brown movies to see the man throw motherfuckers out of buildings. Tarantino’s tastelessness, or tastelessness as defined for white dudes, attains personal gravity.

Cinema Speculation becomes a wrenching memoir, elucidating events that were already haunting many of the reviews in between the lines. Tarantino’s memories of seeing grindhouse movies alternate between Tennessee and L.A. What’s the shifting? He was raised in a permissive, unstable household and the movies represented a mythology and a soothing alternate language. Floyd—remember Brad Pitt’s name in the Tarantino-penned True Romance—was a formative figure who crystallized in Tarantino a yearning for acceptance and fear of rejection. The chapter on Floyd, Tarantino’s risqué criminal compatriot, has the most heartbreaking sentence Tarantino has ever written, offering a personal apotheosis that cuts to the core of the energy and self-consciousness and defensiveness and needs to connect and please and outrage that drive all his work: "He didn’t care enough about me to lie to me."

Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation is now available from Harper.