Reservoir Dogs was shot on a famously tight budget, explaining why so much of the film unfolds within a warehouse a large empty space that was available to Tarantino without having to worry about outside factors intervening. To be fair, part of the issue might be budgetary. It is the story of a bunch of thieves who organise a daring robbery of a jewellery story that goes horribly wrong, but without any scenes set in the jewellery store.
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However, in terms of plot and genre, it is notable that Reservoir Dogs is a heist movie in which the heist takes place entirely off-screen. There are lots of notable things about Reservoir Dogs, from the fact that the first voice that the audience hears is that of the director through to the particulars of its relationship with the rest of Tarantino’s filmography. They are films that embody the tensions of nineties as effectively as Forrest Gump or the films of Oliver Stone or Chris Carter’s work on The X-Files and Millennium. They are stories about the breakdown of social order, and of trying to find some way to navigate increasingly turbulent and unstable times. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fictions are stories about memory and meaning, and how fleeting the human understanding of a chaotic world can be. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction speaks specifically to a collection of nineties anxieties and uncertainties that seem only to have crystalised in retrospect, as if working through an existential crisis that the decade didn’t realise it was having in real time. However, that is perhaps a debate for another time.) Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight are films that have generated a lot of polarised debate, but they also seemed very much on-the-pulse in terms of the tensions and anxieties that bubbled to the surface of American popular consciousness at towards the end of the twenty-tens. (As an aside, it should be acknowledged that Tarantino arguably had something of a similar moment towards the end of the first decade and into the second decade of the twenty-first century. (As an aside, there are a not-insignificant number of pundits who would argue that Tarantino’s best film was his third, the underrated Jackie Brown.) It seems fair to describe Tarantino, however controversial his legacy and however divisive his modern films might be, as a defining nineties filmmaker. Tarantino is a writer and director who emerged almost fully formed, to the point that many critics and pundits would argue that his first two films are the best films in his filmography Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Still, there are very few directors who were so perfectly in step with the nineties as Quentin Tarantino.
It is hard to imagine a world in which Tarantino would ever have been unable to parlay those skills into some form of success in filmmaking. Tarantino has a unique knack with dialogue, a keen understanding of genre, and a fine appreciation of the history the medium. Quentin Tarantino is undeniably determined and impressively talented. This is not to denigrate the incredible skill and talent required to be perfectly positioned “in the right place at the right time”, as any amount of sustained success requires both a great deal of determination and an incredible amount of talent. It’s always interesting to understand how much of being one of the defining artists of a cultural moment is down to understanding the zeitgeist, and how much of it is down to simply being in the right place at the right time.
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