Notes on "The Hateful Eight"

For Jaime Grijalba

1

In the last scene of Bigger Than Life, the 1956 film dir­ec­ted by Nicholas Ray and pro­duced by its star, James Mason, Ed Avery, the middle-class teach­er played by Mason, is lying in a hos­pit­al bed after a psychot­ic epis­ode brought on, ostens­ibly, by cortisone abuse. That epis­ode was pre­vi­ously depic­ted in a scene much beloved of cinephiles, a scene in which Avery enacts the Biblical pas­sage in which God demands that Abraham sac­ri­fice his son. When Avery’s wife Lou (Barbara Rush) reminds Ed that God sub­sequently res­cin­ded his mer­ci­less demand, Ed thun­ders, “God was wrong!” In any event, Ed, now sub­dued, and hav­ing exper­i­enced what his doc­tor (Robert Simon) describes as “a deep, refresh­ing sleep,” may now see his fam­ily. A moment of truth awaits. If the psychot­ic epis­ode was indeed a defin­it­ive break with real­ity, Ed may not be the same kind and thought­ful fam­ily man he was before cortisone began twist­ing up his personality.

Ed’s awaken­ing is not ini­tially prom­ising. “Turn out the sun,” he says, refer­ring, as it turns out, to his room’s over­head lamp. Then, look­ing at his doc­tor, he asks the usu­al ques­tions and admits: “I’m disappointed.”

“About what?” asks his doctor.

“You’re a poor sub­sti­tute for Abraham Lincoln.”

The seem­ing non sequit­ur strongly sug­gests that Ed’s still loony, but no: he recog­nizes his fam­ily, he remem­bers his break­down, he grows emo­tion­al, beck­ons for his son, and says, “I was dream­ing. I walked with Lincoln. He was as big, and ugly, and beau­ti­ful, as he was in life. Abraham.”

And then he remembers.

“Abraham!” he shouts.

2

No one, save for a very will­ful per­son, would insist that Quentin Tarantino is an artist with an over­ween­ing, or maybe one would bet­ter say primary, interest in mor­al­ity. Either in the abstract or in prac­tice. Tarantino is, though, an artist who has a great deal of interest in manip­u­lat­ing audi­ences with respect to affin­ity and empathy. And as a film­maker whose biggest point of ref­er­ence is genre cinema, he owes a lot, in terms of ideas if not overt tech­nique, to the genre cinema artist non­pareil, Alfred Hitchcock. Tarantino’s affin­ity for genre cinema also ties in with a cer­tain sad­ist­ic streak (we should remem­ber that no less a fig­ure than André Bazin detec­ted a sim­il­ar streak in Hitchcock, and found it largely if not wholly objec­tion­able). This sad­ist­ic streak, more than just com­pel­ling him to depict gal­van­ic­ally hyper­bol­ic acts of viol­ence in the gor­i­est of details, also drives him to con­coct eth­ic­al conun­drums that place audi­ence in uncom­fort­able and uncom­fort­ably shift­ing positions.

So, The Hateful Eight. It opens, more or less, with a shot of sadly hanging wooden Christ in the snow, and for a long time the image seems merely gen­er­ic­ally cheeky. There’s a stage­coach, with John “The Hangman” Ruth inside, chained to Daisy Domergue, a pris­on­er for whom he intends to col­lects $10,000 for in a town called Red Rock. On a sled ahead of the stage, stran­ded in snow are piled sev­er­al male corpses. These belong to anoth­er bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren, an African-American Civil War vet­er­an who prefer­sto kill his prey before bring­ing them in for his reward. These three, and the exempted-from-hatefulness stage driver O.B., are the first char­ac­ters the view­er meets in the film.

While they are played by movie stars who are expert at turn­ing on the charm, and they par­ti­cip­ate in sev­er­al exchanges that peg them as intel­li­gent, artic­u­late, and even ingra­ti­at­ing, Kurt Russell’s John Ruth and Samuel L. Jackson’s Marquis Warren are not “good” guys, or “good guys,” except in the con­text of their cir­cum­scribed and mutu­ally agreed-upon worlds. These men are killers; they make their liv­ing at it. I think one has to take Tarantino’s word with respect to his title—these and the char­ac­ters to come are indeed hate­ful, regard­less of how the movie will con­tin­ue to under­mine that fact. As for Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue, she does not charm, not in a con­ven­tion­al sense—her greet­ing to Warren is an dryly perky “Howdy, nig­ger!” about which more in a bit. She is unusu­ally cheer­ful for a woman chained to a man who con­tinu­ally elbows her in the face and smites her with the butt of his hand­gun. Tarantino’s film, like sev­er­al of his oth­ers, is divided into des­ig­nated chapters, and the chapter right after is inter­mis­sion is called “Domergue’s Got A Secret.” But Daisy acts as if she has a secret very early on, giv­ing Warren insinu­at­ing looks, and even a wink at one point. Could be she’s crazy—her wild eyes and seeth­ingly inap­pro­pri­ate grin sug­gest as much. As it hap­pens, she is not, at least not in the sense of being delusional.

On the ride to Minnie’s, Ruth and Warren revive an acquaint­ance that had begun some months before, and but­tress their affin­ity via the shar­ing of what they refer to as “the Lincoln let­ter,” that is, a let­ter to Marquis from Abraham Lincoln that the Major keeps as a par­tic­u­larly proud souvenir.

Just as the view­er may have begun to cozy up to Major Warren, who is one the one hand a bounty hunter, but on the oth­er hand isn’t per­sist­ently punch­ing a defense­less woman in the face, a new stage pas­sen­ger, Walton Goggins’ would-be Red Rock sher­iff Chris Mannix, tries to pour cold water on any cozi­ness. After Mannix recounts the tale of just how Warren escaped from a Confederate pris­on. Warren shrugs at Mannix’s indig­na­tion. “The whole damn place was made out of kindling…so I burnt it down,” he notes. Everybody in the stage laughs except Mannix, who points out that the fruits of Warren’s labors, his escape aside, were “47 men, burned to a crisp.” He then raises on his hand, so to speak, claim­ing that those men included more Union cas­u­al­ties than rebel. “You joined the war to keep nig­gers in chains,” Warren says with no small irrit­a­tion. “I joined the war to kill white south­ern crack­ers.” John Ruth finds this amus­ing enough.

The inter­ac­tions between the four male char­ac­ters that turn out to not be in cahoots with Daisy are all about, as it hap­pens, over­turn­ing whatever pos­it­ive impres­sions the view­ers may have formed. A basic know­ledge of Civil War his­tory will enable one to con­nect the dots between “Mannix’s raid­ers Marauders” and “Quantrill’s Raiders,” and the res­ult­ant pic­tures a view­er may derive from that are not pretty. Marquis Warren’s grudge against con­fed­er­ate gen­er­al Smithers extends bey­ond the gen­er­al fact that Smithers was a lead­er of white south­ern crack­ers and harks back to a spe­cif­ic incid­ent suffered by Warren. So, the guys we are offered as pos­sible her­oes (I’m includ­ing Smithers in this bunch not because it’s par­tic­u­larly logic­al, but because you nev­er know, espe­cially up until five minutes or so before the film’s inter­mis­sion) are, to recap, a bounty hunter who’s espe­cially metic­u­lous about mak­ing sure his cap­tives are sub­jec­ted to a grisly and sad­ist­ic meth­od of exe­cu­tion; a man who shrugs off the indis­crim­in­ate slaughter of nearly 50 souls that res­ul­ted from his delib­er­ately under­taken actions; and two out-and-out war crim­in­als at least.

This is not, I would have to argue, insig­ni­fic­ant. These really are not good people. But the audience’s sym­path­ies and their manip­u­la­tion rely on some of them being con­sidered at some point in time to be less non-good than some of the oth­ers. And then, more. The twists in the mor­al dynam­ic do bring to mind the action of a cork­screw, but by the same token the movie’s nar­rat­ive is so dis­pers­ive and discursive—such a splat­ter, eventually—that anoth­er meta­phor might be that of a ping-pong game in which the ball very fre­quently gets banged far away from the table. Whatever the meta­phor, one is obliged to admit that even the char­ac­ters cap­able of behav­ing in a charm­ing, ingra­ti­at­ing, sym­path­et­ic way all lack a cer­tain, shall we say, emo­tion­al matur­ity. (This may also be true, as seems to be a par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar line these days, of the man who wrote these char­ac­ters. But let’s not get car­ried away, either; Tarantino, as far as I know, has nev­er actu­ally killed anyone.)

Given these cir­cum­stances, it’s only prop­er in a cer­tain scheme of things that these char­ac­ters all behave in ways that ulti­mately doom them. The crit­ic Armond White has astutely poin­ted out that in this film Samuel L. Jackson’s char­ac­ter serves as an alter ego for the dir­ect­or him­self. This con­clu­sion can be bolstered via exam­in­a­tion of some of Tarantino’s more osten­ta­tiously ful­some inter­views, in which he’s claimed expli­cit forms of iden­ti­fic­a­tion with African-American men. Inasmuch as Warren can be seen as the ulti­mate “hero” of The Hateful Eight, it is also note­worthy that he’s the char­ac­ter who solves, at least in part, its cent­ral mys­tery; he’s the Hercule Poirot of what Tarantino’s called, more than once, his “Agatha Christie mystery.”

But he is ulti­mately a self-defeating char­ac­ter. The big scene that ends the first half of the movie shows Warren at first (seem­ingly) caught in a lie, and then, hav­ing ration­al­ized his lie, shows him set­tling, rather arbit­rar­ily, a very per­son­al score. It’s here that the movie, which up until this point has been so nar­rat­ively straight­for­ward as to seem not just con­ven­tion­al but stage bound and poten­tially stag­nant, starts to break out of its shell. Tarantino’s man­ic declared “hatred” of John Ford not­with­stand­ing, it’s also here that the iron­ies of Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance rel­at­ive to truth and fable start to res­on­ate in a rather ghastly register. After the authen­ti­city of the “Lincoln let­ter” is very cred­ibly dis­mantled by Mannix, Warren seems genu­inely crest­fal­len, but rather than dis­miss his inter­locutors in a huff, he deigns to ration­al­ize his choices. He seems par­tic­u­larly unhappy to have dis­ap­poin­ted John Ruth. (“Guess it’s true what they say about you people. Can’t trust a fuck­ing word that comes out of your mouth,” spits a dis­gus­ted Ruth, and per­haps the word he’s look­ing for is “shifty?” Polite but defiant—and obvi­ously try­ing to main­tain rela­tions out of a cer­tain self-interest—Warren coun­ters, “I know I’m the only black son of a bitch you ever con­versed with so I’m gonna cut you some slack.”) But, he insists, he has his reas­ons, and they are, he insists, good. The man whom every­body in the cab­in save Ruth, stage driver O.B., and the Mexican Bob call “nig­ger” over and over says ““The only time black folks is safe is when white folks is dis­armed. And this let­ter had the desired effect of dis­arm­ing white folks.” As for his ulti­mate jus­ti­fic­a­tion, he reminds John Ruth that the Lincoln let­ter was, in a very real sense, the thing that got him on to the stage­coach with Ruth. Saved his life, in oth­er words.

After which Warren starts right in on General Smithers. While it may well be “true” that Warren did meet and kill Smithers’ son, the evid­ence that Warren is mak­ing up the story of tor­ture and sexu­al abuse is strong indeed. It’s in the visu­al lan­guage: not so much the “flash­back” visu­al­iz­ing the incid­ent in the tale Warren tells (which, like the soon-to-come nar­ra­tion, are bold strokes of meta-directorial inter­ven­tion), but the close-ups of Smithers’ eyes when Warren’s tongue rolls out anoth­er par­tic­u­larly juicy detail. “Big black peck­er out of my pants,” say, and then that near-avuncular smile as Warren explains “it was full of blood so it was warm.” This leads up to what is cur­rently and will likely remain the films most fam­ous and quot­able line: “You’re start­ing to see pic­tures, ain’t ya?” Indeed he is, as is the audi­ence, lit­er­ally, because Tarantino’s put­ting the improb­able images up there. In a recent inter­view in the Guardian, the poet Claudia Rankine said “Blackness in the white ima­gin­a­tion has noth­ing to do with black people” and con­tin­ued  “When white men are shoot­ing black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of black­ness in their minds. Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked ‘like a demon.’ And I don’t dis­be­lieve that.” When Smithers goes for his gun, Warren looks even more like a demon to him than he did when he first entered the cab­in. Warren was, of course, count­ing on that. It enables him to get the drop on the guy, and blow a hole right through his chest.

But this ulti­mately will prove a pyrrhic vic­tory. Consider: when Marquis Warren arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, he notices that Bob’s a Mexican, he notices that the chair that only Sweet Dave is allowed to sit in is occu­pied by anoth­er per­son, he notices that a jelly­bean is on the floor. But rather than try to get any of this sor­ted right away, he indulges in a diver­sion that ends with him killing a man who, as it turns out, is of no mater­i­al threat to him. And he does so in a way that cre­ates a suf­fi­cient dis­trac­tion for one of Daisy Domergue’s cronies to pois­on the cof­fee. (Or, as Tarantino’s in-need-of-a-copy-edit nar­ra­tion puts it, “some­thing equally as import­ant happened.” Oy.)

3

“Domergue, to you this is MAJOR Warren,” John Ruth says as he’s about to let Warren on the stage­coach. Daisy gives a droll little wave and says “Howdy nig­ger,” imply­ing a bit of unspoken know­ledge: here, she sees, is someone a rung or two, or three, below her on the social ladder—despite her being both a woman and a des­pised criminal.

Nevertheless, up to the point when Warren kills General Smithers in “self defense,” as Tarantino’s nar­rat­or (who is Tarantino him­self) tells us was the gen­er­al con­sensus of the cabin’s inhab­it­ants at the time of the shoot­ing, Daisy Domergue has been the only per­son on the receiv­ing end of stag­ger­ing phys­ic­al viol­ence, which she almost invari­ably grins at once the smart­ing stops. In an art­icle for Variety by Kris Tapley, about the notion that the film is miso­gyn­ist, Tarantino insists, “You’re sup­posed to say, ‘Oh my God. John Ruth is a bru­tal bas­tard!’” Okay, but by the same token, most of John Ruth’s shots at Daisy are per­formed and timed like gags in a Three Stooges short, par­tic­u­larly the bit where he tosses a bowl­ful of stew in her face. You don’t have to be a woman-hater to laugh, because the brutality—its real­ism in a cer­tain dimen­sion notwithstanding—is played for comedy.

Tapley’s piece also quotes crit­ic Stephanie Zacharek to the effect that Daisy’s con­tin­ued defi­ance in the face of her abuse registers as the “tri­umphant oppos­ite” of misogyny.

But is Daisy’s tri­umph, if you want to call it that, really worth cel­eb­rat­ing? For me the most stag­ger­ing sequence in The Hateful Eight is its Chapter Five, “The Four Passengers.” It rep­res­ents one of the most auda­cious and effect­ive uses of flash­back struc­tur­ing I’ve seen in a Tarantino film, and if you know Tarantino’s films, you know he does a lot of flash­back struc­tur­ing. The chapter shows just what happened at Minnie’s Haberdashery pri­or to the arrival of Warren, Ruth, Domergue, and O.B.. It intro­duces the audi­ence to the only good, and only truly likable, char­ac­ters in the film: The coach drivers Ed and Six-Horse Judy, and the crew of Minnie’s Haberdashery: Minnie, Gemma, Sweet Dave, and a day laborer named Charlie. These folks are total inno­cents, kind, wel­com­ing, good-humored. And giv­en what the audi­ence knows at this point in the film, the audi­ence now also has to know that it is about to see them die.

It is kind of droll that Tarantino cast Channing Tatum, the Prom King of Gawker Nation (this is through no fault of his own, I feel com­pelled to note), in the role of what is in fact the movie’s most loath­some char­ac­ter, the ringlead­er of the killers “Mobray,” “Joe Gage,” and “Bob.” Tarantino even obliges Tatum to utter the phrase “pile of nig­gers,” which is close to Pulp Fiction’s osten­ta­tious and per­petu­ally dis­taste­ful “dead nig­ger stor­age” on the objec­tion­ab­il­ity scale, not once, but twice. (Discussing the sup­posedly rampant use of the racial epi­thet at a recent pan­el, Jackson amusedly spec­u­lated that pri­or to hav­ing to say her first line in the film, Jennifer Jason Leigh had prob­ably nev­er uttered the word “nig­ger” in her life. He con­tin­ued: ““It’s not disin­genu­ous, it’s hon­est, and it’s com­ing out of char­ac­ters’ mouths from an hon­est place, espe­cially in that par­tic­u­lar time. People are just get­ting past a war that divided a coun­try, that freed a bunch of people that a bunch of people didn’t want freed, and they’re run­ning around free, so who are we talk­ing about? Oh those ‘free colored people?’ Um, no. Nobody was say­ing that.” Discussing the sup­posed pre­pon­der­ance of the word in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown in 1998, the nov­el­ist Elmore Leonard said, ““Spike Lee said the word was used 38 times. I wondered how many would be accept­able. Maybe 19? If that’s the way the char­ac­ter talks, if that’s his sound, you gotta go with it. You can’t say, ‘Oh, he has to stop at 20.’”) This is really not very nice at all. But noth­ing in this scene is nice or com­fort­ing. The viol­ence isn’t cho­reo­graphed or played out for the least comed­ic effect, as it has been and will be a little later.

“Mobray” and “Gage” and “Bob” dis­patch their vic­tims with brisk rel­ish; it’s par­tic­u­larly awful to see Tim Roth’s impass­ive Pete/“Mobray” put a second bul­let into Brenda Owino’s Gemma. And then to watch Michael Madsen’s “Joe Gage” do the same to Zoe Bell’s Judy. (It has been noted that Tarantino, fond of what are likely first-draft nomen­clature in-jokes, gave Madsen’s character’s ali­as the name of a dir­ect­or of all-male porn; sim­il­arly, Marquis Warren is a gloss on Charles Marquis Warren, a real-life Western movie and TV dir­ect­or.) It makes all the male bond­ing stuff Tatum’s Jody and his gang engage in play as mas­culin­ity at its most tox­ic. And the viol­ence is so imme­di­ate that it’s easy to for­get, I sup­pose, that it’s all being executed for Daisy’s sake, and in Daisy’s name. And noth­ing she says or does in the actu­al dieges­is sug­gests that she has any objec­tions what­so­ever, which fact could lead a view­er to infer that she’d have no prob­lem doing it her­self. This per­haps opens up the ques­tion as to wheth­er any of the viol­ence done to her, or her grisly final moments, were “deserved.” Like the man in Unforgiven (the Western in which no single char­ac­ter even com­men­ted on the fact that the main character’s companion/hunting part­ner was African American) said, “Deserve’s got noth­ing to do with it,” and he may have been right. But if he was right, it’s cold com­fort for the vic­tims of the mas­sacre in this movie. 

4

Like Bigger Than Life, a film many crit­ics have inter­preted as being about a very par­tic­u­larly American kind of gran­di­ose mad­ness, The Hateful Eight ends with an invocation/evocation of Abraham Lincoln. As the prob­ably mor­tally wounded Mannix and Warren hang Daisy Domergue, Mannix reads aloud Warren’s “Lincoln letter.”

Previously decried by Mannix as a fake, it’s at his request that Marquis Warren retrieves it, for what the audi­ence has every reas­on to believe is its last read­ing any­where. For some reas­on, Mannix now wants to believe. “Nothing can bring togeth­er a black man and a white, a young man and an old, a coun­try man and a city man, than a dol­lar placed between them,” the crit­ic and his­tor­i­an Nick Tosches. But what’s bring­ing Mannix and Warren togeth­er at the end is…a thirst for ven­geance? Well, sure, but one ought to remem­ber that unless he really is lying, Mannix is the duly appoin­ted sher­iff of Red Rock, and by put­ting in with Warren and execut­ing Daisy Domergue, the fel­lows form

one nation under God per­pet­rat­ing the oppos­ite of “fron­ti­er justice.” But deriv­ing great per­son­al sat­is­fac­tion from their work non­ethe­less. Regardless of how you inter­pret what they’re up to, what they’re up to is very nasty indeed (the hanging fig­ure of Domergue does come to per­versely resemble the hanging wooden Christ of the movie’s open­ing), and part of this film’s cine­mat­ic jolt, if it car­ries any power for you at all, derives from the sens­ib­il­ity dis­son­ance in which a grind­house eth­os is moun­ted in an over­blown “dis­tin­guished” present­a­tion. The UltraPanavision, the over­ture, the inter­mis­sion; the second-rateness and claus­tro­pho­bia of Ice Station Zebra do not quite provide pre­ced­ent for the Italian zombie-movie gore and Euro-redolent extremes of pess­im­ism and cyn­icism that dis­tin­guish this movie’s vis­ion. (By the same token, much Euro-sadistic cinema doesn’t have the visu­al clar­ity and fluid­ity that Tarantino brings to this largely in-close-quarters nar­rat­ive; in terms of mak­ing every space a cine­mat­ic space, Tarantino is not Kubrick, it’s true, but he gets the job largely done.) Said pess­im­ism and cyn­icism has sent more than one writ­ing view­er of the film to the Good Liberal Fainting Couch, and I can’t say that’s not under­stand­able. Tarantino’s approach does have, undeni­ably, more than a touch of “gig­gly vicious­ness.” I think “gig­gly vicious­ness” is Martin Amis’ phrase, and if I con­tin­ue to remem­ber cor­rectly he coined it as a descrip­tion of some­thing he’s proud to have grown out of. Some people, some artists, nev­er do. It’s an open ques­tion as to wheth­er unex­amined self-righteousness is the most apt response to an artist who does not.

I don’t think it’s par­tic­u­larly con­struct­ive to spend a lot of time spec­u­lat­ing as to wheth­er the cyn­icism and pess­im­ism of The Hateful Eight is “earned” or not. One recol­lects Sam Fuller’s ori­gin­al end­ing for his 1957 Western Forty Guns. This would have showed his ostens­ible hero, Griff, as a guy who would actu­ally kill the woman he pro­fessed to love in order to then gun down the foe who shot his broth­er. This was not per­mit­ted, so Fuller con­cocted a ridicu­lous but ulti­mately very pleas­ing com­prom­ise: he made Griff so good a shot that he could plug the woman he loved so accur­ately that the woman he loved would fall but not suf­fer per­man­ent or even vaguely life-threatening injury, clear­ing the way for him to then kill the foe who was hold­ing her as a shield. Had Fuller been per­mit­ted to go with his ori­gin­al end­ing, could he have been said to have “earned” it?

Whatever Tarantino’s inten­tions or aspir­a­tions, the cyn­icism and pess­im­ism of the movie is, I think, inar­gu­ably per­tin­ent. Because Tarantino argu­ably rev­els in a mess rather than even try­ing to offer a solu­tion, does that make him part of the prob­lem? The extent to which this is or is not genu­inely troub­ling would depend on the extent to which you rely on film and film cri­ti­cism to be “problem”-oriented.

But let’s go with it a little. If Aretha Franklin’s per­form­ance of Carole King’s “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors in December can be seen as the most inspir­ingly optim­ist­ic vis­ion of race rela­tions in America in 2015/2016, The Hateful Eight can be seen as a pur­pose­fully rebarbat­ive night­mare vis­ion of same. This ought not sur­prise. As an indi­vidu­al, Tarantino may well have a social con­science, and even a social con­scious­ness, but there’s no way that he’s ever been what you could call a socially respons­ible film­maker. A few years ago, in a “State of the Cinema” address at the San Francisco Film International Festival, Steven Soderbergh, with mord­ant facetious­ness, advised young film­makers, when seek­ing fin­an­cing, to “in the pro­cess of telling [your] story, , stop your­self in the middle of a sen­tence and act like you’re hav­ing an epi­phany, and say: “You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.’” One ought give cred­it where it’s due, finally: Tarantino, cinema sen­sa­tion­al­ist non­pareil, has made a movie entirely not about hope, for what it’s worth.