A brushstroke of blood against pure white snow. A baseball bat signed by Jews poised to crush a Nazi’s skull. A plantation mansion blown to bits and shot to shit. Quentin Tarantino once said that violence in the movies is “just another color to work with,” and his palette is, well, vibrant. Big Biblical feelings of betrayal and vengeance drive his characters’ interactions and actions, the intensity of these emotions transmuted into physical violence on screen. And this violence and the morally “flawed” characters who execute it or suffer it, along with Tarantino’s abiding love for them, define his cinematic universe.

Since Tarantino’s first feature Reservoir Dogs, critics have claimed his movies have “more style than substance,” that they’re “showy but insubstantial,” as if stylishness and extreme violence somehow preclude a deeper meaning. And this weird assumption, that Tarantino’s movies lack depth and humanity, has haunted criticism about them ever since. His movies are dismissed by some as amoral, sadistic, nihilistic, with nothing redemptive about them. One headline even read: “The Terrible Moral Emptiness of Quentin Tarantino Is Wrecking His Films.” These people argue that Tarantino’s world is one of artifice, pop-culture references, and ironic detachment. Even some fans believe it, loving Tarantino’s movies without ever examining them.

Though a few of Tarantino’s characters are psychopaths, most have the capacity for deep love. In Reservoir Dogs, a connection forms between a thief and undercover-cop-masquerading-as-thief, Mr. White/Larry (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange/Freddie (Tim Roth). The movie begins with these two men in the aftermath of a heist gone wrong, with Freddie bleeding all over the backseat of a stolen getaway car while Larry holds his hand. Against this bloody backdrop, the warmth between these men is unexpected, more poignant. Larry becomes vulnerable with Freddie, divulging his real name and hometown to him, opening himself to imprisonment, or worse.

Larry defends Freddie through a Mexican standoff with Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) and Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn), who know it's Freddie who fouled up their operation. “He’s a good kid. I know this man, he wouldn’t do that,” Larry insists. The standoff doesn’t end well and a wounded Larry crawls to Freddie to cradle him like a blood-soaked Pietà. Freddie admits that he’s a cop, and Larry weeps and groans, his pain is animal. He pushes his gun into Freddie’s jaw and hesitates, then shoots, and is shot himself by the police.

The brutality of Reservoir Dogs brings the sudden bond between Mr. Orange and Mr. White into sharp focus. There’s no release, no redemptive moment — only a brief connection between 2 men before they, and every other character involved in a heist we don’t even see, are winked out.

More blood is spilled by the vengeance-seeking Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill. At its heart, though, Kill Bill is about a woman reclaiming her child from the man who nearly killed them both, and the violence is as extreme as the emotions involved. It’s been said that Tarantino’s movies happen in a bubble, but Kill Bill is rooted in reality: it’s an homage to single mothers — to any mother who’s done whatever it takes to keep her child safe. It plays out like a domestic drama, and the physical damage done is as brutal as the emotional damage wrought when relationships end. Beatrix kills Bill with the five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique, killing him by literally breaking his heart.

If revenge defines Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, then it’s redemption that ties Pulp Fiction’s three stories together. Flannery O’Connor once said that her fiction was about “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” and the same could be said of Pulp Fiction. O’Connor was a devout Catholic whose physically and spiritually ugly characters endure violence resulting in a moment of grace. Unlike O’Connor, Tarantino doesn’t judge his characters, but they are as unlikely candidates for grace. After being shot at six times, a miraculously unharmed Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) explains to the sublimely greasy Vincent (John Travolta), “What is significant is I felt the touch of God. God got involved.” Jules doesn’t know why, but he can’t “go back to sleep.”

Joyce Carol Oates wrote that in Flannery O’Connor’s world, there is “nothing to be recognized — there is only an experience to be suffered.” In Tarantino’s and O’Connor’s worlds, grace does not come with twenty Hail Marys, but three bullets to the chest, a cosmic shock treatment. Jules finds God when he’s unloaded on at close range, yet none of the bullets make their mark. Vincent saves himself from certain death at Marsellus Wallace’s (Ving Rhames) hands by saving Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) after an overdose. And, given the opportunity to escape a pawnshop nightmare or walk back into the heart of it to help the man who wants him dead, Butch (Bruce Willis) chooses to save Marsellus. Once Butch frees them both from the “hillbilly rapists” Zed and Maynard, Butch flees on a stolen chopper with the name GRACE airbrushed on its side.

Jules has partly fabricated Bible passage Ezekiel 25:17 memorized. He didn’t understand it at first, he just thought it was a “cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass”: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children…” At Pulp Fiction’s end, Jules explains that he once believed he was the righteous man, and now he knows he’s “the tyranny of evil men” but he’s “tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.” Jules has reimagined himself in light of his own salvation.

Though these characters are capable of great violence, they aren’t without principles. Vincent and Jules argue whether Marsellus throwing Antwan off a balcony was fair punishment for giving Marsellus’s wife a foot massage. Pumpkin (Tim Roth) recounts a story about a bank stickup carried out without a gun: a man walks in with a phone, someone on the other line informs the teller he’s got the man’s little girl, and no one has to “lift a finger.” Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) — the same woman who later threatens to execute every patron in a diner — asks Pumpkin, “Did they hurt the little girl?” When Beatrix Kiddo unintentionally kills former associate Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) in front of Vernita’s child, Beatrix tells her, “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” And Bill decides it would “lower” him and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) if they killed Beatrix while she’s comatose. They do have a moral code, though it might be a little different from ours.

These characters’ identities are layered, and they are often forced to play roles with a different set of rules, like Freddie the undercover cop, who is told that he’s “gotta be a great actor” to do his job and convincingly act like a crook. Jules and Vincent have to “get into character” to kill for Marsellus. When Bill explains his thoughts on Beatrix marrying another man under an assumed identity, he compares her to Clark Kent and Superman: “[Clark Kent]’s weak, he’s unsure of himself, he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race. Sorta like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plimpton. [ . . . ] You would’ve worn the costume of Arlene Plimpton. But you were born Beatrix Kiddo.” It’s fitting that cinematographer Robert Richardson quoted this passage of The Bhagavad Gita in his Kill Bill journal: “…even as worn-out clothes are cast off and others put on that are new, so worn-out bodies are cast off by the dweller in the body and others put on that are new.” Sometimes Tarantino’s characters are good, sometimes they’re bad, and like actors or superheroes, they slip into and out of these roles and respective moral codes like costumes.

If Django Unchained is Tarantino’s revenge fantasy about American race relations, then The Hateful Eight depicts the nightmarish reality, a horror movie as much as it is a western. Violence shifts its meaning within Tarantino’s films, and The Hateful Eight is no exception — it’s sometimes comic, sometimes horrific. When Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gets punched repeatedly, it’s meant to elicit our sympathy, as the movie’s John Wayne caricature John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is exposed as an abusive bully; but we can laugh when Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) gets shot in the balls. Telling the difference may seem confusing when monstrous characters are likable at times — or when we watch the movie with the Beavises and Buttheads that sometimes populate Tarantino’s audience who laugh at everything.

The moral of The Hateful Eight is that there is no moral. Marquis and Mannix (Walton Goggins) hanging Daisy together is not justice, not redemption. It’s another moment meant to evoke horror. In this movie, white men kill and replace the women and the people of color who were there before them at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a white woman looks down on a black man, and two men team up to murder a woman. As Kathryn Bigelow once said: “Depiction is not endorsement.” This is a movie with no hero, no antihero, no redemption, only the truth of America as Tarantino sees it, which is muddled, ugly, hateful.

The most human stories aren’t always the most moral ones. Quentin Tarantino once said, “I try to have morality not even be an issue at all when it comes to my characters,” and his movies show us that good characters don’t have to be good people. Tarantino’s work concerns humans who act on emotion, who are allowed to be themselves without judgment, who obey a moral code unique to their world — a world where emotions are writ large in gouts of blood, betrayal is a life-and-death situation, and vengeance can be an act of love.