Where ever you live in America, you're living on hidden truth. That truth is that the nation of America, the land of baseball, jazz, and the Bill of Rights, owes its existence and continued success to the extermination of one people and the enslavement of another. You can choose not to think about it, and can choose not to talk about it, but the truth is there, and you can't get away from it. Generally, we as Americans don't like to dwell on our violent history. We go about our lives, working, shopping, eating, sleeping; this is necessary. But it's also necessary that major artists should force us from time to time to confront, examine, and reckon with our history.
Over the last several years, a number of films have been released that seek to do this. Among the more successful, I'd place Terrence Malick's The New World, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and Ava DuVernay's Selma (in chronological order of era depicted). But I submit that none of these filmmakers have tackled the wretched and brutal ugliness of America's bloody history as successfully or as powerfully as Quentin Tarantino has, first with Django Unchained and now with The Hateful Eight.
That Tarantino has become one of the foremost chroniclers of America's ugly history is a curious development. For many people, Tarantino is first and foremost the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (for instance, see the 2012 Sight and Sound Poll, where Pulp Fiction received 13 votes, Reservoir Dogs received two votes, and no other Tarantino film received more than one). Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are brilliant films, but in a stylish, post-modern way. As films, they contain almost no subtext in the larger world; that is to say, they make essentially no comment on either America's history or the social, political, or economic realities of the America they were made in. The films are each basicallly a closed ecosystem, and with their digressive and circular plots, MacGuffins, and inane chatter ("the usual, mindless, boring, gettin'-to-know-you chitchat," to quote Mrs. Mia Wallace), they are essentially about nothing, in the most gloriously Seinfeldian sense.
On the other hand, Tarantino's Westerns are definitely about something. They are about the violence of America's past, and they are about as subtle as the cone of blood spewing from Kurt Russell's mouth in Hateful. In a sense this is what sets them apart from the non-Tarantino films I mentioned at the outset. All of those films try in their own way to illuminate the ugly truths of America's past. But all of them are too well-mannered, too artistic, too clean to show the worst of it all. In a word, they are too tasteful. And this level of taste shields the audience from taking the full measure of America's brutal past.
Tarantino's Westerns don't have this problem. They wallow in all that is ugly and throw it in the faces of the characters and the audience. His gunfight scenes explode in cartoonishly exaggerated volumes of fake blood. Profanities and racial slurs fly left and right. The violence is racialized and sexualized, with black and female characters taking much of the worst. Obviously movie audiences are conditioned to accept terrible acts of violence so long as they are inflicted upon villains by heroes. The Hateful Eight refuses the audience even this refuge, making each character so despicable as to deny the audience any proxy to identify with or root for.
I think Tarantino himself is well aware of the oppositional divide between his grindhouse Westerns and the tasteful arthouse and studio prestige historical fictions that have dominated critics' lists and award season. Witness the Lincoln letter that winds its way through The Hateful Eight. Fully a fiction, it cloaks the horrors of Marquis Warren's war crimes and protects him from racial violence in his life as a bounty hunter post-Civil War. As we learn in the final scene, it is full of exactly the homespun phrasing and decency of tone we've come to expect from fictional depictions of our 16th president; that it is read aloud by two dying scoundrels, each soaked in the blood and viscera of themselves and others, is no accident. I submit this is Tarantino aiming a broadside at works like Spielberg's aforementioned Lincoln, works that would seek to make centuries of dirty, nasty, hateful violence into sanitized tales of great men doing great things to make a great nation.
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