THE HATEFUL EIGHT: America's Secret Sin

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Channing Tatum
Runtime: 187 mins.
2015

I take pains to keep my reviews here as substantive as possible while providing the fewest number of plot and story details I can get away with. The lowest form of film criticism is by-the-numbers plot recap. I admire film reviews that can give me an idea of the movie while skirting any information that might influence my experience of the story.

However, I don't feel like I can give a proper review of The Hateful Eight, one of Tarantino's more controversial works, without digging into heavy spoilers. So I'm going to split this post into Spoiler and Non-Spoiler sections.

Non-Spoiler Review of The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino's eighth movie is nasty to its core. There are no heroes. Nobody comes out unscathed, not even the audience. His previous two features may have been wet dream power fantasies for the disenfranchised, but The Hateful Eight does not follow that mold. The secret sins of our nation are the festering wound at the center of this horror western, and people do not like to be confronted with their secret sins.

The story is that of a group of outlaws, passersby, and bounty hunters who are forced to occupy the same small space during a blizzard: Minnie's Haberdashery. Race, gender, class, and occupation all clash in an ideological warfare that eventually, as it must in any Tarantino film, turns bloody.

The Hateful Eight is not nearly as flashy as Tarantino's other films. Shots linger, the pace crawls, and dialogue reigns. The narrative refuses to sweep you along, instead forcing you to live every single tense exchange in real time. Nobody in this movie wants to be in this movie, but there is no escape. These characters are trapped in the roles that were built for them, just as we are.

Tarantino's cast is typically brilliant, only upstaged by a soundtrack arranged by Quentin but primarily composed by Ennio Morricone, famed scorer of countless spaghetti western films. Apparently a great portion of the soundtrack is comprised of music made but not used for John Carpenter's The Thing, a movie that The Hateful Eight consciously resembles and remixes. The fit is uncanny. The opening snow white establishing shots take on sinister, hellish features as the soundtrack burbles beneath them.

I would not be at all surprised if ten people who watched this film came up with ten different favorite characters. Tarantino never rushes his work; this screenplay has been germinating for years. It shows. These people are real and lived in. The surprising thing is that, despite the long development time, the film couldn't be released at a more pertinent moment regarding its take on the racial politics of America.

The Hateful Eight is not going to be the favorite of a lot of Tarantino fans. That's because it is in many ways less compromising and more mature than his other work. In the moment it didn't grab me as aggressively as Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, or Inglourious Basterds, but I can't think of any other of his movies that have stuck with me so persistently in the days after. This is Tarantino with a darker edge and more social consequence. If that sounds appealing to you, you're in for a terrible treat.

I give it 9/10 Racist Old Coots.

Spoiler Review of The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is a parable. The defining shot of the film is a long, slow reverse zoom out from a black wooden crucifix as a dark stagecoach grimly approaches. The stagecoach contains Kurt Russell's John Ruth, who is escorting Jennifer Jason Leigh's Daisy Domergue to the hangman. But they are not the first character we see. The coach's progress is halted by Samuel L. Jackson's Major Marquis Warren, and the first lines of the film are spoken: "Got room for one more?"

This movie is all about progression versus progress. It's about the original sin of America. Our nation was founded on the bedrock of racism and sexism. The white men of America just want to continue on with their dirty capitalist exclusionary business (in this case the execution of Woman), but every once in a while social change forces them to stop and include one more on the stagecoach. John Ruth isn't happy about it at first, but he softens to Marquis Warren once he produces the Lincoln Letter: a personal correspondence from Lincoln himself to Major Warren. The letter takes on a mythological importance in Warren and Ruth's relationship; Ruth can only comfortably allow a black man to share his stagecoach once that black man bears the personal mark of the most respected white man of all.

Yet we later discover that the letter is a fake, a ruse constructed by Major Warren to get white people to let down their guard, a bit of self-regulated affirmative action. In this moment, and in the closing moments of the film, we see the letter for what it is. The letter is a lie. The letter is a bandage meant to stay the bleed of foundational racial inequality. The letter is the Emancipation Proclamation.

The letter is cast aside in a moment of bonding between Major Warren and the young racist Confederate freedom fighter Sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) at the close of the film. But this is no happy ending, as it becomes clear that there is only one thing in the world that can truly bring the white man and the black man together: their mutual hatred of Woman. Warren and Mannix can agree on nothing in the world, other than that Daisy Domergue needs to hang. (Remember that even as this country conceded to let black men vote, women were not yet granted that privilege.) As they hoist her up, bloody and laughing, the camera alternately shows us Domergue's witchlike boots, and the angelic crisscrossed snowshoes on the wall behind her back. Domergue is both above and beneath these cackling men, in this bloody and horrific staging of the Madonna/whore complex.

Folks have complained about the way Domergue gets casually slapped around in this film, just as they've complained about Tarantino's heavy use of the n-word. Both are integral to the story he's telling; neither are pleasant to watch. Domergue and John Ruth have a fascinating relationship. They spend most of the film chained together, for one. Ruth is incredibly polite and cordial to Domergue--until she says something he doesn't like, at which point he lambastes her across the face. Tarantino has staged the foundational sexism that our country suffers. Within the patriarchal system, women have always been seen as empty vessels for men to fill with whatever they please--blank canvasses for men to project onto. If a woman tries to assert her own agency, she is put back in her place, often with violence. Sometimes she is the locus for violence even when she has minded her own business; perhaps a man is feeling insecure, or feels the need to make a demonstration of his power in front of other men, as is certainly the case in this film. Yet when a man is not beating a woman, he treats her with decorum, respect, propriety. He gazes upon her with loving admiration, as when Ruth allows Domergue to play a song on the guitar. That is, until she plays something he doesn't like, at which point he smashes the guitar to bits.

Every single piece of the Hateful Eight puzzle is meaningful, essentialized, metaphorical storytelling about the seedy underbelly of the American id. The fact that the casting and writing of these characters fits into this schema metatextually is no accident. By that I mean that Tarantino has manipulated our expectations by redefining his cast of regulars. We imagine Samuel L. Jackson as the self-righteous arbiter of death and justice, as we remember him from Pulp Fiction. That image is ripped to shreds when Major Warren emotionally tortures the Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) until he picks up a gun, at which point Warren kills him for it. We know Kurt Russell as the no nonsense uncompromising outlasting hero from movies like John Carpenter's The Thing, but here he gets outfoxed and killed halfway through the movie. We certainly don't expect him to be outlasted by Walton Goggins, a no name actor in comparison, but this racist little whelp becomes in many ways the central figure of the movie. Then there's Tim Roth, doing what many have observed to be his best Christoph Waltz-in-Django Unchained impersonation. Waltz's Django character was also an impartial killer, one whose impartiality allowed Django the social mobility he required to enact his revenge. At first it appears Tim Roth's Oswaldo Mobray might fulfill a similar function--until he is revealed to be yet another member of the malicious gang. There are no white saviors in this world. In the later scenes, when Oswaldo's posh accent drops into something lower class and less approachable, we realize that he was only pretending to be a Manic Pixie Dream Waltz. His accent and prissy mannerisms were his version of the Lincoln Letter, a song and dance routine that every person who is different in America must stoop to.

Thus The Hateful Eight retroactively complicates Tarantino's previous two features, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Those movies sought to right historical wrongs by presenting an alternate reality in which oppressed minorities were able to rise against their oppressors. The message in both films is complex, but arguably undercut with a sense of, "Screw it, this is a movie, we're having fun." There is no such compromise in Hateful Eight. If those two movies were fantasies about how history might have gone, this film is an unflinching, uncompromising, accusatory look at the deep dark truths about our shared history. That's why The Hateful Eight is less flashy and, in many ways, less enjoyable than Tarantino's other work. It's too real. This event at Minnie's Haberdashery might not have literally happened, but as two dying men hoist a woman to her death, we can't deny that we've seen such hatred before.

Tarantino's film takes place after the Civil War, but the subtext rings as true today as ever. No matter how many planks of wood we use to nail the door shut, it will always burst open again to reveal a swirling maw of death, discrimination, and the deep cold of a midwestern snowstorm.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS

Addendum: About an hour after I wrote this, I found a Devin Faraci piece at Birth.Movies.Death that deals with the same subject matter, focusing on the Lincoln Letter. Well worth a read:

The HATEFUL EIGHT's Lincoln Letter and the Lies of DJANGO UNCHAINED