Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 1
Quentin Tarantino’s movies are explosions of meaning. They spew significance of many different kinds in every direction on a shot-by-shot basis. Every element of every shot is fraught with references, usually to other movies. As such, they invite multiple readings from a number of different points of view and philosophical schools. For instance, I just read a book-length monograph on Pulp Fiction that examined every aspect of the movie but one — what the characters in the movie do and say.
I am not smart enough or cool enough to catch every one of the thousands of references that give Tarantino’s movies their postmodern punch — I’ve never seen a Shaw Bros kung-fu movie, for instance. So I will limit myself in this analysis to what I do understand: characters and their motivations. And I will leave the examination of angles, design choices, costumes, hairstyles, cultural freight and songs to others.
All of Tarantino’s movies have been analyzed to death by people better qualified than me, but for some reason Death Proof has so far escaped the eye of the dissectors, so I hereby offer my thoughts — again, restricting my comments to pure script issues — character, motivation, plot — rather than the myriad subtexts, uber-texts and postmodern commentary that runs through it.
First of all, there are two basic ways of looking at Death Proof. Either it has a central protagonist, or it does not. Not having a central protagonist is not unusual for Tarantino — neither Reservoir Dogs nor Pulp Fiction has one — but Death Proof differs from those movies by presenting a highly unusual bifurcated structure: the same "plot" happens, twice, with dramatically different outcomes. I can’t think of another movie structured this way.
If one wishes to look at Death Proof as having a central protagonist, it is the story of Stuntman Mike, a dude with a dramatically fucked-up sexual existence — he drives a "death-proof" stunt car, and uses that car to hunt down, terrorize and kill women in other cars, for the purposes of sexual gratification. The parameters of Stuntman Mike’s pathology are central to to the plot structure of Death Proof — Stuntman Mike doesn’t beat women up or shoot them or stab them with a butcher knife, and he doesn’t merely run them over with his car. He must pursue his perversion in his car, and his victims must be in their car too (or, in one instance, in Mike’s car with him). The car is an imperative to Mike, his penis substitute, and it is so central to his concept of self that his victims must also be in a car before he can fulfill his peculiar pathology. That seems obvious, but Mike’s devotion to his pathology ends up being his undoing, as we will see.
As for me, I see Stuntman Mike as the antagonist of Death Proof, and I think the movie has two protagonists, serial protagonists for a serial killer narrative. The same story is told twice: two groups of women are pursued by Stuntman Mike in pursuit of his sexual pathology. The first protagonist, Arlene, represents one specific female mindset, and the other, Zoe, represents a second. Butterfly’s situation and response to Stuntman Mike lead to the violent death of Arlene and her friends, while Zoe’s situation and response lead to the violent death of Stuntman Mike. Same antagonist, same pathology, same structure, but because Zoe’s situation and response are different, the outcome is inverted.
To make things more complicated, Arlene and Zoe are not so much protagonists as "team leaders," central characters in a "posse" of females. That is to say, not only is Death Proof an ensemble picture, it’s two ensemble pictures. Arlene travels with Julia and Shanna, and briefly with Lanna, while Zoe travels with Abernathy, Kim and Lee.
So we have two quartets of women, both traveling in their cars. How are they different and how are they the same? Let’s look at some of the more obvious examples. Tarantino wants us to see how very much the same they are by giving each group four basic member functions — The Driver, The Visitor, The One In The Back Seat With Her Feet Up, and The Famous One. He assigns each group these common distinctions in order to then point out how each group is different. Lanna, the Driver in Group 1, is essentially an innocent bystander, the designated driver who takes the team out to the lake house when they’re all too drunk to drive. She has no interactions with Stuntman Mike (except for the one that happens milliseconds before her death), has no dialogue to speak of, and we barely get to know her at all before she’s killed. Group 2’s driver, Kim, is a much more forceful presence and serves as Zoe’s backup and right-hand man (so to speak). (Group 1’s first Driver, and the owner of the car, Shanna, shares with Kim her dislike of blasphemy.) Because Group 1’s Driver, Lanna, doesn’t show up until late in the narrative, the "innocent bystander" in Group 2 is also the Famous One — Lee, the co-star of the movie Group 2 is shooting in Tennesse when their part of the narrative starts. Group 1’s Famous One, Julia, doubles as The One In The Back Seat With Her Feet Up, a role fulfilled by Abernathy in Group 2. Lee, Group 2’s Famous One, is the one who gets left out of the narrative instead of Group 1’s Lanna, and she gets left out of the end of the narrative whereas Lanna gets left out of the beginning (just one of the interesting "mirror" elements of the script). Shanna in Group 1 is kind of "the one who isn’t very specific in her function," a role given to Abernathy in Group 2, who doubles as The One In The Back Seat With Her Feet Up. Both protagonists ride shotgun in their cars and are the Visitors of their narratives.
And, as I say, Tarantino draws all these parallels in order to show not so much how the groups are the same but how they are different. Both groups talk about the same things, sometimes down to the smallest details, but their personalities and origins (for lack of a better word) are markedly different, and that’s where I think the "meaning" of Death Proof comes from: one group of women behaves one way and thus fall victim to Stuntman Mike’s pathology, the other group behaves another way and best him and his predations. Women, Tarantino seems to be saying, are always the same and always completely different, and the differences he chooses to underline mean, literally, the difference between victimhood by male aggression and triumph over it.
The first difference one notices about the two groups of women is their cars. Cars are, obviously, extremely important to the narrative of Death Proof, and what one drives means the difference between life and death. Group 1 drives an utterly anonymous late-model sub-compact that never even gets its own beauty shot, while Group 2 drives a fierce looking, beautifully-detailed Mustang, and then, later, a 1970 Dodge Challenger with a powerful historical significance. Why is this important? Because Stuntman Mike doesn’t just drive any old kind of car, he drives, exclusively, 1970s Detroit muscle cars — that is part of his pathology. He sees great power in them and does not express his pathology in any other vehicle. The women of Group 1 obviously don’t think about cars very much except as a way to get around town (or out to the lake house), but the women of Group 2, Kim and Zoe at least, are extremely particular about their cars, which makes all the difference in the world about how their stories turn out.
The second thing one notices about the two groups of women is that they both talk about their experience with men, but they come at those experiences from completely different angles. Group 1, Arlene especially, sees themselves as beholden to male desire — it is something to be attracted, controlled and managed ("love" never even enters the picture). Arlene spends the whole of her story in a state of anxiety regarding her attractiveness and desirability, Julia puts up a good front but, in her private moments, pines for the big-shot movie director who doesn’t show up, Shanna is combative and argumentative with the boy who pays attention to her.
Upon a first viewing, most people find the first half-hour of Death Proof agonizingly boring and the second half dynamically compelling. That’s because the protagonist of the first half, Arlene, is a "traditional woman" who sees herself as, by definition, passive, a receptacle for male desire, worthless if not attractive to men. A passive protagonist is no fun to watch, and it takes us a long time to cotton to Arlene and begin to care about her loneliness and discomfort. Zoe, on the other hand, never mentions male desire once in her story (although all the others do) — her goal is to locate that magical 1970s Dodge Challenger and take it for a test drive.
(Incidentally, this is a good illustration of screen craft. Zoe’s goal, to test-drive a car, isn’t very interesting in and of itself, but in the context of Death Proof it’s fresh, unusual and intriguing. It just goes to show that it almost doesn’t even matter how small the protagonist’s goal is, as long as they have one and they pursue it with ardor the audience will remain hooked.)
The women of Group 2 also deal with managing and controlling male desire, but are much more savvy and joyful in their discussions. Group 1 sees men as aggressive intruders who need to be carefully dealt with, while Group 2 sees them more as innocent boys to be played with. Each group has their blind spots, but Group 2 seems to feel they have much stronger control over the situation, which allows them to enjoy their relations on a more mutually pleasurable terrain. To use a football metaphor, Group 1 seems to be constantly defending their endzone, but Group 2 is keen to play the field. To pick just one example, Group1’s Julia, we learn, has, to her rival’s mind at least, achieved her success in radio the old-fashioned way, by sleeping her way to the top — exploiting male desire for gain. Group 2’s Abernathy, meanwhile, is, like Julia, involved with a big-shot movie director, but would rather die a spinster than exploit his desire for gain.
Alas, I am now out of time for the blogging day, but when I return I will look at the narrative of Death Proof beat-by-beat and show how the smallest distinctions of personality make the biggest differences in narrative.
One concept I heard floating around the interwebs after this movie came out: the chronology is reversed. If you notice that Stuntman Mike has a scar in the first half and no scar in the second, you might come to think that the scar came from being kicked in the face in the final seconds of the movie. He then gets better and finds the group of girls from the first half.
Though I have seen the movie only once and I am not 100% about the scar issue.
I’ve heard that rumor too. I don’t think there’s any merit to it.
Here’s Stuntman Mike in part 2, his scar plain as the scar on his face.
Well that is good to know, it always put something of a pall over the extremely feel good ending of the movie for me.
I always wondered what the ‘original title’ was
“Quentin Tarantino’s Thunder Bolt”
Oh, now I see it’s up there in photos. Doh.
pic related:
Dude, THANK YOU! Death Proof is my second favorite QT film, Jackie Brown is the first, as it seems to be more mature.
the same “plot” happens, twice, with dramatically different outcomes. I can’t think of another movie structured this way.
You mean apart from Run Lola Run?
Well, but Run Lola Run sets a single protagonist in the same situation more than once, but doesn’t present different characters undergoing the same plot.
I was thinking of it more in terms of the way events play out differently each time based on what start out as small variations that grow exponentially more divergent as each iteration goes on. (I hope that sentence makes sense. I’ve reworded it about a dozen times and I don’t know how I can make it any more succinct.)
What about Friday the 13th and its myriad of sequels?
Tell you the truth, I’ve never seen them.
can it be assumed you’ll be going through all of your favourite screenplays? if so, is there an order in which you’ll be doing it, so we all know which one to patiently anticipate next?
Periodically I’ll be analyzing screenplays that have impressed or inspired me. Sometimes I know what will be coming next, sometimes I’ll just kind of think of something out of the blue. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about both The Assassination of Jesse James and Unforgiven, two movies with very little in common besides being “westerns.”
How do you feel about the idea that Death Proof is two movies with the same actor edited together into one picture? I don’t know where I heard it first, but I really like the idea of it being a Kurt Russel Shogun Assassin. Part one is clearly filled with “slasher” tropes and the second part is much more of a “chase” movie. Also I think Stuntman Mike is never referred to by name after the Michael Parks Psycho monologue.
– Sean Witzke
I don’t think it “turns into” a different movie, per se, but one of the things I’ll be talking about later is how Kurt Russell believes he’s in a slasher movie, whereas Zoe and Kim are firmly of the opinion that they are in a car-chase movie. And I’ll talk about how that’s an important element of their success.
“but Death Proof differs from those movies by presenting a highly unusual bifurcated structure: the same “plot” happens, twice, with dramatically different outcomes. I can’t think of another movie structured this way.”
I could be wrong (because it’s been YEARS since I’ve seen the original) but can’t the above be said about PSYCHO?
And never seen a Shaw Bros Kung Fu movie? Oh my … dude, they are very fun (depending on the choice one makes).
I have to say, too … I didn’t care for this as much as QT’s other work … I didn’t see it in the theatre, though, but on dvd at home (and separate from RR’d flick) which I think may affect the viewing experience … and I wasn’t clear at the end that they killed Stuntman Mike … from what I remember, they were just kicking his ass when we went to credits …
Oops, forgot to sign … the above comment was mine.
Joshua James
Psycho would be Death Proof if Marion Crane’s sister also stole a wad of cash from her employer and ran off to be with her no-account boyfriend, and also, coincidentally, ended up at the Bates Motel, rather than actively searching for her sister.
If you dashed out the door when the words “THE END” flashed on the screen, you might think that Stuntman Mike is merely beaten bloody at the end of the movie. About five seconds into the credits, however, they show Abernathy deliver a “death kick” to Mike’s head that completely caves in his skull, leaving little doubt as to his fate.
That Axe kick was amazing, both for the height that she could raise her leg, and her ability to hold it for a moment before she dropped it.
This movie gets a lot of crap for the seemingly endless scenes of dialogue about things pretty inconsequential to the movie. However, that’s one of the aspects of this film that really drew me in. I could watch movie after movie of Tarantino just writing dialogue about the detritus of our popular culture. He has this ability to write dialogue that, while being beyond the realms of reality, is still inherently recognizable as something we all partake in, just less eloquently.
I absolutely saw the twin stories though I definitely didn’t have the parallels so down like you do, but that’s why you’re a professional.
My only gripe about the second “women can kick ass” part is how that group throws the cheerleader (the Famous One in that scenario) to the guy who owns the car. Their whole enticement and his glee at having such a (seemingly) frail girl all alone gives me the fucking creeps. How do you account for this? Because it’d be okay with me if we would have went back and saw she somehow got the upper hand on him but we don’t see that.
As I write this, however, it strikes me that possibly the group that is more in charge of their relationships with men and more proactive women (as opposed to the women in the beginning half who view themselves as passive objects to be obtained) “sacrifice” or at least kick out, the one faction of their group that would fit better in the first group.
I was bothered by that too. “Sweet, you kicked Stuntman Mike’s ass! But wait, your friend’s getting raped by a hillbilly right now. Which you kind of encouraged.”
-Doctor Handsome
Please, come up with a UNFORGIVEN post. You’ll make my day. It’s my favorite movie of all time. (I think we even talked about it briefly here in the threads.)
–Dob
Just a quick comment on the cars.
The first Stunt car is a 1970 Nova with the Duck hood ornament from ‘Convoy’ (Kris Kristofferson is known as Rubber Duck in that movie)
the girls Yellow and Black 1972 Mustang (the same colors as Bruce Lee’s Track Suit/The Bride’s suit in the big fight of Kill Bill) is a Mach 1 Mustang. The exact same car (except a 1973 model) used as the original Eleanor in the 1974 Version of Gone in 60 Seconds… and the ‘sunglasses on the dash’ scene from Kill Bill Vol 2 is the sampled directly from Gone in 60 Seconds.
On a side note: if you’ve never seen Gone in 60 Seconds (the original) you’re missing the longest single car chase in movie history… and one of the best. It lasts 34 minutes… and the movie is only an hour and a half… They also only use ONE Mustang for the entire chase… it’s totally knackered at the end (and still exists in it’s final form to this day)
the second is a 1969 Dodge Charger (in FLAT black)
now, this is the somewhat interesting part to us car buffs:
the 1970 Dodge Challenger (in a beautiful pearl WHITE) was a similar car to the Dodge Charger, though slightly smaller
Both the Charger and Challenger were available with the 440ci and 426ci Hemi (though the 1970 Challenger had a 6bbl carburetter setup, where the 69 Charger only had a 4bbl)
I always viewed this chase as significant for two reasons:
The Charger was Dodge’s halo sports car from 1969-1970 and the Challenger was it’s halo sports car from 1970-1973. The Challenger basically killed off the Charger as in 1971, the Charger became a ‘luxury sports car’ (if you watch Burn Notice, that’s the kind of car the protagonist drives)
and it’s a very obvious use of the evil black car vs the pure white car.
i always assumed the black ’69 Charger was for the black ’68 Charger in Bullitt
. . . you’ve never seen a Shaw Bros. kung-fu movie?
Would you care for suggestions? Or are you just not that big on the kung-fu flicks?
Alcott
One of the most interesting analysis I’ve read in a long time. Can’t wait for number two!