The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 13: Death Proof

Death Proof is perhaps Quentin Tarantino’s most openly fetishic movie. Which is saying an awful lot. It’s fitting that a film that hinges on a Killer’s sexual peccadilloes might as well have been titled, “Things That Turn Quentin Tarantino On”. If the opening shot of a woman’s bare feet propped up on a dash board of a vintage muscle car did not make that clear, then surely the following tracking shot of a black woman’s bare feet, which follows her to a couch where she uncurls out, and lights up a bong beneath a mural sized portrait of Bridgette Bardot, would clue you in. Tarantino’s Austin, where the film’s first half is set, is a free range museum, a world filled with Memorabilia, vintage movie art, vinyl, and jukeboxes (also known as just regular Austin) It’s Tarantino’s own garden of Earthly delights, one with a predator in its midst. One does not usually encounter a film so oddly revealing outside of a DePalma film.

Like all of Tarantino’s movies Death Proof is simultaneously a keen subversion of its genre and an ideal example of it. As Reservoir Dogs is a heist film without a heist and Inglorious Basterds a war film without battle scenes, Death Proof is a horror film that spends perhaps 75% of its runtime with friends relaxedly chatting, instead of fleeing for their lives. It’s a film that only features two stalk sequences and only one “kill” scene (though it is a doozy). And just as Kill Bill was an exploitation movie with human characters, Death Proof swaps the classic silent implacable killer with a pathetic cowardly pussy. And trades in its cast of helpless victims and virginal Final Girl, for a group of full grown women who not only survive his attacks but track him down for some retribution.

Death Proof follows a group of friends spending a weekend together in Austin. Unfortunately this group of girls have fallen under the attentions of Stunt Man Mike. A sexually dysfunctional killer who has taken the sexual fetishes of the car wreck crew in Crash on the road. Choreographing spectacular crashes in which he kills multiple women so he can, in Tarantino’s inimitable patois, “Shoot his goo.” After that storyline is resolved in rather spectacular fashion Mike moves on to Tennessee and another group of women, on to find that they are not such easy prey.

The film like all of Tarantino’s is focused on dialogue. Many have complained about the slow pacing of the film but aside from condensing three or four minor scare sequences into one epic one (with probably about the same amount of screen time devoted to it) and the bifurcated structure, Death Proof is not paced all that differently from the average slasher film. As noted in the chapter on Friday The 13^th Part 2, most slasher films sans their scare sequences are simply collections of scenes of friends having a good time. Tarantino just takes that to heart. Emphasizing the random nature of the attacks. Where the best slashers draw their power from.

Instead of playing up the tension he keeps things casual and conversational. At one point going so far as to restage his famous Diner Sequence from Reservoir Dogs. Only one of the girls in the first segment has any idea that anything is wrong, none of the others have any suspicions that anything might happen to them. They have no reason to.

There’s no urban legend of Stuntman Mike. His attack does not fall on the anniversary of the great 290 Car Wreck that happened ten years ago tonight. He is not getting revenge on the girls for some buried misdeed. There’s no warning sign at all save a kind of sad kind of creepy guy who is just a bit to old to be hanging out in his bar of choice.

Mike himself was one of those serendipitous occasions where the casting of the role significantly altered the part after writing. The role was originally meant for Mickey Rourke and it’s easy enough to imagine the kind of Mike that Rourke would have ended up making. With his guttural voice and beyond weathered looks Rourke is one of those actors who in the right role is capable of giving a performance that will make you powerfully grateful that smellovison never caught on. Rourke’s Mike would most likely have been more openly predatory, instantly recognizable as slime.

Russell on the other hand, always an actor of powerful charisma (in an early background shot his shirt from Big Trouble In Little China can be seen, just to remind us that this is Jack fucking Burton we’re talking about here.) masks Mike’s madness with a certain charm. A brittle charm to be sure. Some of the best scenes in the film are the ones in which his mask almost slips. In which Mike himself realizes that he can no longer quite pass. But for the most part he’s able keep people from seeing what he is. If you were to encounter Rourke’s Mike you wouldn’t stop looking over your shoulder, you meet Russel’s and hardly a red flag would raise. Just before he starts on his first round of killings Russell breaks the fourth wall and slips the audience a conspiratorial wink and damned if the audience is not drawn in by it.  As a result when he’s finally alone and lets his true insanity take hold it comes as much as a surprise to us as to his helpless victims. By revealing Mike’s true nature like a gut punch Tarantino turns the wind from a nod at the audience into a genuine implication of the audience. It’s Tarantino’s own “I know what you’ve paid to see.” That’s not something that Rourke would be able to pull off.

When the film moves to Tennessee it shifts focus. Becoming basically a carsploitation movie, more Dirty Mary And Crazy Larry than The Dorm That Dripped Blood. Tarantino’s longer DVD cut of the film does rebalance it slightly towards horror. Reinserting an excised scene in which Mike stalks and takes pictures of the girls set to the Goblin's theme from Deep Red, which is pretty effective. And a black and white sequence involving an a capella version of Baby It’s You and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s bare feet that takes Tarantino’s foot fetish to a level that is so far beyond unseemly that he would make Luis Bunuel blush. Tarantino also isn't afraid of using horror language in the car chase scene. In one shot during the chase the camera briefly loses Mike's car in a cloud of dust before giving a frantic pan to catch it as it speeds out of frame with a Godzilla like roar. A shot which serves simultaneously as a joke about the occasional technical incompetence of the era, a tweak at the grammar of the found footage genre, and a damn good intimidating shot. 

Yet even this shift gives the genre it’s own unique tweak. Gender issues in horror movies are complicated. And a lot of the time accusations of misogyny simply don’t stand up to any real scrutiny (Like with Hostel 2.) But at the same time if you stack up the images that the genre has given us of women being victimized versus those of women being empowered there’s no contest.

Like I said this is tricky ground (where for example does Carrie fall on that scale?) and my hackles cannot help but rise at the suggestion that it’s any work of art’s responsibility to “empower” anyone. If that’s what the artist is going for great. If it’s not then it seems like an invalid thing to criticize a film for. I’ll take art that’s honest and interesting over something empowering any day.

And yet there’s no getting around the uncomfortable fact that it is only when the movie switches genres that the girls have a fighting chance.

As I said at the beginning Death Proof is very much a movie about the surface pleasures of things. It’s tremendously tactile. It may be tempting to say that it’s all surface but that would be incorrect, like all of Tarantino’s films there’s more to find. On one level Tarantino has always been making films with one subject and that’s “Why Quentin Tarantino Watches Movies.” I would not go so far as to say that they are the reason’s of every movie lover, that’d be absurd. But I would say it’s equally absurd that any really voracious film goer isn’t going to find at least a few similarities between the experiences. Death Proof proves that he’s not always interested in providing comforting answers.