8 CREATIVE REASONS TO HATE 'THE HATEFUL EIGHT"
QT's Worst Movie Is Still Worth Talking About
[Originally published on MEDIUM 11Jan2016; Censored by MEDIUM 30June21]
One of the best things about creative genius is that even when it fails, it’s pretty interesting.
That’s why brilliant bad boy auteur Quentin Tarantino’s latest ultraviolent massacre-piece, The Hateful Eight, despite being the worst movie of his career, is also one of his most interesting, on numerous levels — for what it says about Tarantino the artist, the weird Holly Wood movie business and moviemaking, and the current state of film criticism. None of it’s much good, though.
Despite going in, eager and amped for the film’s much-hyped “Roadshow” version — presented in glorious 70 millimeter Cinemascope, complete with Overture, intermission and souvenir program — I didn’t much like The Hateful Eight when it was done 3+ hours later. Seven days of thought have made me dislike it eight times as much.
While the easily recognizable Tarantino dialog still mostly crackles with verve and wit, and there are a few flamboyant camera flourishes, there’s so much wrong with this Western murder mystery bloodbath — intrinsically, artistically wrong — it deserves detailed deconstruction. And since, as we’ll get to in a moment, too many film critics nowadays are thinly veiled fanboys, too few thinking people have taken a swing at King Quentin. But part of me thinks QT is actually looking for somebody to call him on this bullish!t — the movie’s problems are so blatant and self-regarding — so let’s give it a shot. Or eight shots.
[ This paragraph, delivered in slightly wry voice, like one of the omnipotent narrators in a few of QT’s films, is the pre-requisite warning of SPOILERS ahead. If you’ve not seen the movie and plan to, eject here. But if you’ve already seen it, or don’t care, and think QT is a genius and seen all his work (like I do and have, multiple times in several cases), climb aboard. ]
1- Despite all the buzz about The Hateful Eight being the first 70mm Cinemascope movie in half a century, it proves to be a hollow draw. Why shoot a film in Cinemascope if the vast majority of it ends up taking place inside one confined area, a large room where the octet of antagonists congregate? That creative decision seems perverse to the point of a sick inside joke. Not only because there’s so much outdoor opportunity missed, it makes what should feel like a tightly confined claustrophobic setting instead come off as a canvas as big as the state of Wyoming. It’s a critical mistake on both aesthetic and narrative levels from a guy who should know better and maybe even did. Is he punking us?
2- Though QT has repeated narrative themes throughout his oeuvre, this is the first time it really felt like he was repeating and/or remaking entire sequences from prior movies. The Hateful Eight is like a blender full of plot points from Reservoir Dogs (bad guys holed up in tight space) to Inglorious Basterds (the last 2 hours of the movie extends ad nauseam the extraordinarily tension-filled basement bar scene in IG). Sam Jackson’s tale of sick sexual abuse to drive Bruce Dern into a murderous rage is like the showdown of Christopher Walken vs. Dennis Hopper in True Romance; the race-based male-on-male sexual assault recalls Pulp Fiction; there are repeated scenes of escalating tension that build to ultraviolent release, like every QT movie ever, etc., etc.
3- While the acting is uniformly great, the characters are not consistent, and for the first time in his work seem shackled to plot twists that are forced upon them in order for QT to stubbornly chase a need to shock. There are numerous examples, but the worst — because it is so pivotal to the plot while being simultaneously absurd — takes place right before intermission. There’s a completely ridiculous and unbelievable scene where Bruce Dern’s racist Confederate General bonds with Sam Jackson’s Union Major in front of a roaring fire over a shared Civil War battle. Nothing we’ve seen has suggested this could possibly happen, and it feels completely fake and disloyal to the characters we’ve just watched develop over two hours.
4- The bond that inexplicably develops between Jackson and Dern’s characters, as it turns out, is only to set up an immediate plot twist as ludicrous as it is vile. Once he’s won Dern’s respect, Jackson launches in to a long, repellent tale of capturing and sexually humiliating the Confederate General’s son. Again, I didn’t believe it for a second: The lone black man in a room full of white men, half of whom hate him and are sworn to kill him, recounts a terrible tale of brutal homosexual dominance — was it tougher to be black or gay in the 1870s, do you think? — and nobody intercedes or shoots him.
5- It’s also as interesting as it is disturbing that there hasn’t been a peep about the sexual violence in The Hateful Eight. Presumably because it’s black-on-white, male-on-male sexual violence. If a man had done to a woman what Jackson’s character does to his male victim in this film, you’d be able to fill a week’s worth of hand-wringing Huffington Post columns, and justifiably so. If a white man had done it to a black male victim, there would be social justice warriors on every other Reddit thread decrying it. But black-on-white, male-on-male sexual assault? That’s apparently not worth even a raised eyebrow.
6- On the flip side, the movie is filled with white characters constantly using “the N word” — a word so unspeakable for a WASP like me that were I to use it in this column, even to condemn it, it would probably ruin my career — in the most contemptuous and derogatory fashion. It feels assaultive the first time you hear it and it doesn’t much lessen by the end. It’s a hateful term, I hate hearing it, and I really hated hearing it about a hundred times in three hours.
7 — Coming back after intermission, there’s a voiceover narrative to start the second act and it’s a lazy cheat, filling us in on something that could have been just as easily shown. If you come back from intermission dubious after the foul, stupid end to Act I, this creative decision — QT’s cast himself as the narrator, btw, so take that as you will — immediately starts Act II on the wrong foot.
8- Then, after about two-and-a-half hours, there’s ANOTHER narrative gimmick, a flashback to a different perspective on what’s all gone before. The story’s been holding an ace up its sleeve, which it plays way too late. Again, this feels like a cheat on the audience, a slight of hand that’s more like a slap. It was at this point that I completely checked out, an insult too far.
9- Look, I know I said there were eight reasons to hate this movie, but I only did that for the clickbait headline. There are actually more. Another is the amount of alarming abuse inflicted on women. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s (admittedly villainous) character is repeatedly punched, shot, stabbed, hung, vomited upon, and covered with brain matter when a character’s head is blown clean off, right next to her. Multiple upright female characters are shot at point-blank range; one begs for her life at length before the coup de grace.
10- Its very existence and title reveals too much of the age in which we live: Fifty years ago, a collection of big movie stars in an elite director’s epic Western was called The Magnificent Seven. Today, it’s The Hateful Eight.That’s quite a contrast and devolution, and sadly telling.
So I suppose you can call me a prude for being critical of the violence, or the language, or the sexual assault, but my point isn’t so much that these things are offensive (though they are), but that they aren’t being used for or with any narrative merit. Ridiculous plot twists and character arcs take place for the sole purpose of leading to extraordinary scenes of horrific violence, and that’s — pardon me — hateful. This wasn’t the case in other QT films, even when the violence was gratuitous (which was almost always), where events progressed via satisfying storytelling and escalating tension to what felt like inexorably destined bloodletting as catharsis. Here, the violence feels jury-rigged at the expense of story and characters, and both suffer (literally and figuratively).
The movie carries the whiff of a guy who’s lost his mojo, and its history suggests Tarantino was given the pre-emptive cosmic signs he had a stinker, and didn’t heed them. First, the screenplay was leaked early, so the story had already been ruined, in a way. Then there was a public reading of the script, organized by the writer/director himself, which should have gotten it out of his system. But it didn’t. He still went and made the movie. And it was a mistake. And I think he knows it, and I think that self-hatred reeks from the film. It has contemptuous condescension towards the audience, which it ultimately turns upon itself.
But the movie’s getting raves from film critics, sitting at a stellar 75% on Rotten Tomatoes as I type this rebuttal. This speaks to how many film critics are now merely reviewers (this happens, then this happens, then THIS happens) and/or fanboys, who will drop to their knees at the mention of QT’s name like Sam Jackson’s poor naked victim in the snow.
But what’s any one film critic worth these days, anyway? Not much, thanks to the internet and aggregation and marketing budgets that sometimes cost more than the movie-making itself. Strange times. Hateful, you could say.