Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight And Gun Control

Tarantino Tackles Gun Control Debate In The Hateful Eight

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President Obama wiped back tears on Tuesday when announcing the executive actions he will institute to bypass congress and make access to guns just a little bit more difficult.

The move is a small step in the battle for gun control. But it’s a galvanizing gesture by the President, who doesn’t want the fight to be lost after the upcoming election. Though he may not realize it, the POTUS has an unlikely ally in Quentin Tarantino, the provocative director whose films are polluted with bullets.

The Hateful Eight—an opulent, bloated and incendiary Western set in the years following the Civil War—is yet another trip down the genre rabbit hole for Tarantino. But instead of disconnecting his stylized and cathartic movie violence from the tragedies occurring in America, Tarantino uses it to tackle the debate over gun control head on.

In it, Kurt Russell sports thick blonde whiskers as the craggy, opportunistic and ultimately righteous bounty hunter John Ruth. He’s on a stagecoach to Red Rock transporting Jennifer Jason Leigh’s vile Daisy Domergue, a hot commodity prisoner who will never warrant your sympathy. She’s wanted dead or alive with a pretty penny hanging over her head, which makes Ruth immediately suspicious of anyone who might want to collect that reward on his behalf.

The stagecoach first happens upon Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren, a former union soldier turned bounty hunter looking to hitch a ride to escape an impending snowstorm. Ruth’s very first commandment: leave your guns with the driver. The same goes for the next passenger and all the inhabitants of a chalet where the characters take refuge from the snow.

This claustrophobic space gets cramped with every creed and color—North, South, White, Black and Mexican—and the varying demographics can barely contain the hate that may be endemic to their country. So Ruth begins the delicate process of disarming each and every one of them, this time with Jackson’s Warren deputized as his assistant.

Tricky, suspenseful and luxuriating in Tarantino’s barbed dialogue, The Hateful Eight plays this gun-control parlor game for 90 minutes without letting a single bullet loose. It’s an intense and bravura direction to take for a Western, that most American genre where the 2nd Amendment rings loudest.

It’s also a remarkable detour for Tarantino, whose films always retreat into the past, whether through history or iconography, while rarely engaging in current politics. That’s not to say that Tarantino’s films, which regularly flaunt and subvert race and violence, have not been politicized. In the twenty plus years he’s been active, the writer/director has been taken to task for the liberal use of the N-word and the brutality that have been trademarks in his movies.

That situation came to a head three years ago when Tarantino’s revisionist antebellum era Western, Django Unchained, was set to bow in theatres. Days before Tarantino began promotional rounds, Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School—the tragic event that moved President Obama to tears.

Tarantino was pressed repeatedly about the violence in his films, this time with Sandy Hook as the immediate instigator. The irritated director repeated his stance to Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy before having a verbal spasm gone viral (“I’m shutting your butt down!”).

He also voiced his displeasure over Sandy Hook questions to NPR’s Terry Gross. “I think it's disrespectful to the memory of the people who died to talk about movies,” said Tarantino. “Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health." He took that issue to heart for his follow up, as if finally deciding that if audiences are going to politicize his work he’s going to give his movies something to say.