Quentin Tarantino and Freedom

January 18, 2013 - 9:04am -- fraser

After I saw Django on Christmas night, I got to thinking about how it compared with other Tarantino movies. What hit me was how the theme of freedom or liberation runs through them, and as the mark of good art, how much could be said about any of them.  A lot of what I like about his movies is the nuance and subtlety that runs in the background of the over-the-top violence.  It's intriguing to me how prevalent the theme is.  For example, The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill not only has to live and survive despite seemingly insurmountable odds (buried alive is intense!), but she then seeks the freedom to be a mother freed from her own violent past, the threats of those who would never allow her to live, her grief over a failed relationship, and, almost as an artificial motivation, her desire for vengeance.  In Pulp Fiction, though, every main character is chasing some kind of liberation, but it's the three main characters (Vincent, Jules, and Butch) who show the contrast:  Vincent cannot follow Jules on his chosen, miracle-inspired path of liberation (because he likes bacon too much?) and remains in the same dog-eat-dog world, though alone and without Jules; Butch pursues his liberation through the deaths of two people, but then finds that, after a bizarre accident of fate, his true liberation comes on a Harley-Davidson FXR named "Grace."

Our freedom is so hard to gain, partly because we aren't always sure what we need liberating from until something happens that jars us enough that we have, in the words of Jules, "what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity." The beauty of the Tarantino versions of liberation is that his main characters have to find their liberation internally, though they from time to time have to deal with external constraints: some chosen, some imposed, some chosen to get used to. But riding off on a Harley called Grace certainly implies something that all the violence and coercion in the world cannot achieve, but something that we could never have gotten on our own or without the journey that led up to it.  

The idea that liberation may be our desire in a world that has an agenda for us is not new, nor is the idea that our true liberation requires help; in fact, in real life as well as Tarantino's films, it comes with the help of others and in ways that were out of our control.