Death Proof (2007)

2 years ago

Death Proof (2007)

I DIDN’T SAY THAT I WASN’T A WOLF

by Letitia Trent

I first saw Death Proof in its original form, as the second part of the Grindhouse double-feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, so allow me to begin with a brief comparison of the two. While Planet Terror is over-the-top and plays the B-movie zombie movie genre for laughts, Death Proof, as you might expect from Tarantino (an unabashed lover of pop culture), takes its characters and revenge-exploitation movie plot seriously - or as seriously as Tarantino ever takes anything. The queasy mishmash between Tarantino’s hyper-articulate characters, perfectly filmed Southern nights and days, and the exploitation-flick excesses of graphic violence make it one of Tarantino’s most interesting and hardest to pin-down films to date.

Like many of the low-budget B-movies to which it pays homage, Death Proof takes its time getting started. The first half of the movie focuses on three “girls” (as Tarantino bills them in the credits): Arlene (or Butterfly), played by Vanessa Ferlito with a winning mixture of toughness and vulnerability; Jungle Julia, played by Sidney Tamiia Poitier with a swagger and confidence reminiscent of Pam Grier; and Shanna, played by horror movie staple Jordan Ladd. For a while, not much happens aside from Tarantino’s rat-a-tat dialogue and long shots of the women’s legs, hair, and especially feet (I guess he has a thing for feet). We see the girls argue about who will buy weed; we see them talk about men and obscure music; we see them lounge around a Texas dive bar on a humid night, long legs stretched out on the crumbling porch railing. Unlike Tarantino’s (in my opinion, far inferior) Kill Bill movies, Death Proof starts out slow, sultry, and realistic. We can all relate to the young women in this movie, all waiting to be noticed and excited, all waiting for something to happen and for the right men to offer them a drink.

If it wasn’t for the prescence of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), you might first mistake Death Proof for a coming-of-age dramedy. Russell’s character hangs at the edges of the first half of the movie in a silver jacket, a scar from forehead to chin, and a strange mix of good humor and danger. At first, Tarantino makes Stuntman Mike an object of scorn: he’s clearly over-the-hill and somewhat disgusting as he slurps an unappetizing plate of nachos and wears a jacket with the Icy-Hot logo emblazoned on the back. He seems more smarmy than scary. He seems to be following the group of women, but it’s hard to see exactly what kind of danger they might be in.

Russell’s performance is one of the best parts of the movie. He plays Mike with a low-level anger throughout. Even as he flirts with the younger women, who show absolutely no interest in him, you can see he has a grudge: he isn’t relevant anymore, not in his job (in a fairly long scene, he recounts the classic television shows he’s been in to blank-faced young women—they weren’t even born when the television shows had aired), and certainly not as a sexual object.

At the climax of the first half of the movie, when we suddenly realize exactly how dangerous Stutman Mike really is, I found myself, for the first time in a long time, truly shocked and stunned by a violent act in a movie. After so much time with Tarantino’s loving camerawork and sweetly foul-mouthed dialogue, it’s difficult to view what happens to the first three women when stuntman Mike catches up to them. All the more troubling is the way that Tarantino approaches this scene—the editing and film choices are so impressive and arresting that it’s hard not to keep your eyes on the action, even when it is depicting something almost unbearable to watch.

By the second half of the movie, which changes location and characters completely, the viewer is hip to Stuntman Mike’s game, and this last set of “girls” are much more equipped to meet the challenges of a madman in a stuntcar. Unlike the first group of girls, who seemed to be waiting for something interesting to happen to them, Zoe (played by Zoe Bell, a real-life stuntwoman Tarantino also used for his Kill Bill movies), Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), and Kim (Tracie Thoms) have their own agendas. Zoe and Kim are movie stuntwomen, which gives Tarantino the opportunity to film one of the most terrifying and nail-biting car-chase scenes I have ever seen. Bell, Thoms, and Dawson throw themselves into the physicality of their parts with the kind of glee that women don’t usually get to have onscreen, and the last few minutes of the movie provide the same mix of horror and guilty satisfaction as a film like I Spit on Your Grave - by the end of the movie, you almost feel bad for Stuntman Mike.

Although Tarantino plays the move straight, he can’t help but go meta in a few scenes. When a slow-talking southern Sheriff explains the psycho-sexual meaning of Stuntman Mike’s death-proof car, you can’t help but hear Tarantino letting the viewer know that he knows exactly what he is doing. The fake “missing reels” and momentary loss of color in the film are also unnecessary and gimmicky.

It’s impossible to talk about a Tarantino movie without talking about how he depicts women. This movie in particular, which has more female main characters than any of his previous movies, begs the question of how feminist his vision is. Sure, the women get to “act like men” and take revenge, sure they get to take up the majority of screen-time, and sure, Tarantino seems to give them a much more dynamic role in the action than other filmmakers do, but one has to wonder exactly what kind of women Tarantino hopes to meet in real life.

The women who know about cars, guns, and how to wield a lead pipe are the heroines; the women with traces of vulnerability end up the victims. In some ways, the character of Stuntman Mike reminds me of Tarantino as a director — they both like long stretches of voyeurism culminating with a huge, violent smash-up. There’s something strange about a director who can lovingly linger on his characters for a full forty-five minutes before destroying them.

Despite my hesitations about this movie, Death Proof is still my favorite Tarantino film. He finds a way to mix the best things about b-movies (the rawness and realism, willingness to actually show what is horrifying) and the benefits of having a bigger budget (better actors, better cinemetography, etc). Death Proof’s strange mix of female empowerment, gore, and meandering dialogue leaves the viewer feeling exactly how one should feel after an exploitation movie: confused, exhilerated, and a little bit guilty.

Letitia Trent is a writer, poet, and teacher living in Vermont. Her chapbook, The Medical Diaries, was recently published by Scantily Clad Press. She keeps a baking blog here.