Death Proof, 2007

Death Proof is Tarantino's 7th film in his filmography and one that received the most amount of criticism. It even led to the world-renown filmmaker disregarding it as “his worst film” in an interview. But Death Proof is the film that I think is the most personal to Tarantino and it is his first attempt at writing a love letter to the bygone era of cinema. Tarantino joins the filmmakers of his admired youth by making a film that pays reverence to the Exploitation era of cinema.

Exploitation film came about in early 1920 featuring explicit sex, drug use, nudity, gore, and mayhem. It wasn’t regarded as cinema by the “Clean” Hollywood and didn’t get much attention till the 60s and 70s. It became popular as a last-ditch attempt by large theatre owners to keep their theatre sits occupied, after the widespread of Television. These exploitation films brought people back to the theatres as they couldn’t be shown on TV due to its restrictive censorship. I am fascinated by this era as it was putting people of race and women onto the screen before any other movement. Women weren’t put there as eye candy to agree with the man, they had character, dialogue, and motive. It was amazing to see in a still racist and misogynist America this was taking place on the big screen. Because of this Tarantino's Death proof is also a personal favourite movie of mine, by an artist I admired.

The film follows a stunt driver Stuntman Mike played by Kurt Russell. The choice of casting here clearly is deliberate as we see Kurt Russell a famous actor of the 1900s in his later stages of fame. Stuntman Mike is psychotic to the extreme meaning of its word. He stakes women and kills them in all horrible sorts of ways. But we sympathize with Mike here as we see him in the bar scene in the first half of the film talking to a group of women about his glory’s past. The camera keeps on moving back and forth between a mid-shot of Mike and the group of women sitting opposite him. The acting here is spectacular, we could see from Mike’s face his delight in these stories, but the women’s face is blank of expression like someone is telling them a highly complicated topic. After a while we see Mike realise that they don’t know who he is on about and his face drops the camera stays still on him. Making the audience feel uncomfortable and feel bad for Mike. He is a forgotten piece of the past, as no one needs stunt men as CGI takes over the industry.

This character I believe to be parallel to the filmmaker himself, someone he relates to. As he has publicly announced he believes cinema is dying because of digital. He is a man who loves the old ways of cinema from shooting on 35mm film to cutting film manually by sticking and taping. You could see his admiration for this past in the production element of Death proof. There are grains in the picture because of the detreating film something that doesn’t happen in digital cinema. Added on by the settle recurrence of mismatched audio which was common in these films as the budget was low and production quality poor. Tarantino's way of solving his problem is leaving the cinema he knows after 10 films as he has made it clear after the poor reception of this film. On the other hand stuntman, Mike deals with this by getting the thrill of his past by killing women in adventure ways with his magnificent Chevy Nova (1970) and later on the Dodge Charger(1969).