In what still ranks among Tarantino's most inventive, simple set pieces, Orange learns and performs an elaborate "amusing anecdote about a drug deal" gone almost disastrously bad. Tarantino compresses Orange's evolution into one, long, uninterrupted sequence: rote memorization of the monologue, rehearsal, and, finally, performance before the gang. But Tarantino also shows us the almost-botched deal as Orange recounts it for the lowlifes—even though it never actually happened:

The sequence shows us Orange's knack for this kind of unglamorous, dangerous work—that he's a God-fearing professional. The frantic, gangly Mr. Pink, played by a perfectly neurotic Steve Buscemi, desperately urges his colleagues to remember that grappling with the unpredictable is something they do. They, too, are supposed to be professionals.

Mr. Blonde is an entirely different sort of professional. Played by a terrifying Michael Madsen, he arrives at the warehouse with a captured cop stuffed in his trunk, and shrugs off his culpability for sparking the shootout back at the heist that led to the crew's predicament. They had figured Blonde for the sane, balanced type. Why else would he be on the job?

Loyalty. Blonde is a lost boy looking to come home. In another flashback, gangster boss Joe and son Nice Guy Eddie, played by the late Chris Penn, welcome a just-back-from-prison Blonde with playful wrestling, a stiff drink, and the promise of steady work. He's family, the sort of son or brother that tortures cops and burns them alive (tries to, at least), to the tune of Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle With You." (The less said of the scene, the better. Its power to horrify has not diminished.) His penchant for gruesomeness and an unrequited zeal to do horror on men in uniform is what makes Joe value and love him, perhaps. But it's that same tendency that spells the crew's demise.

The film concludes with a Mexican standoff that goes poorly for everyone. Only when a shot-up, dying White takes Orange in his lap—a distinctly Tarantino-y version of the pietà—does he learn his protégé's secret identity. The destroyed White, who risked it all to try to save Orange, raises his gun to Orange's blood-sodden temple as the cops bust in, and pulls the trigger. In a pantheon of stories and characters that includes the revenge of Shoshanna Dreyfus, the wasted life of Budd (a.k.a. Sidewinder), and the love of Jackie and Max, for my money, the end for White and Orange is Tarantino's most painful, simple moment.

And so from the start, we see that Tarantino was as interested in humans as he was in kitsch and gore. Rather than just becoming a splatter artist forever worshipping at the altar of camp, Tarantino has long wanted us to know whether his cartoonish killers and tragic heroines prefer crunchy or creamy, how the bad guys wile away the flaccid hours between jobs, and the names of their go-to karaoke songs. He dares to invest buffoons and killers, with an interior, frequently mundane life and in doing so, dares us to invest in those same buffoons and killers. To ignore his fascination with thugs and vigilantes in crisis is to ignore something fundamental.

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