Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 3
Part 2 of Death Proof begins with the "Psycho scene," where an "authority figure" declaims, for the audience’s benefit, the subtext of Part 1 — Ranger EarlMcGraw tells us what we’ve already grasped, that Stuntman Mike is a dangerous psychopath who crashes his "death proof" car into women’s cars for his sexual gratification. The scene is a gentle dig at Psycho‘s famously inept coda, but Tarantino adds a couple of icky layers to it: first, he includes Dr. Block, a character from Death Proof‘s co-feature Planet Terror, and gives her a weird, violent reaction to kindly, wizened Ranger McGraw, a reaction that can only be appreciated by watching the other movie (Dr. Block having her own problems with men). Then, after McGraw has finished his spiel on Stuntman Mike and his sick pathology, he announces that he’d rather follow the Nascar circuit than investigate Mike’s crimes, placing Mike’s MO in the broader context of a national malaise: there are millions of people who find some level of gratification watching stock cars smash into each other.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 2
It sounds like a strange comparison, but Tarantino, in one way, reminds me of Spielberg, in that his movies are always thematically quite dense. Death Proof, like, say, Jurassic Park, features a strong theme that resonates down to the smallest of details, from broad story outlines to the tiniest of gestures.