On Screen

Who could’ve predicted that, 14 years on, we’d look back at Pulp
Fiction as an exercise in restraint? Or admire the infamous ear-ectomy
in Reservoir Dogs for its delicate insinuation?

Probably not even Quentin Tarantino. But since 1994, he has fallen
in love with explicitness, from directing grindhouse (Death Proof) to
producing torture-porn (Hostel and Hostel II) to playing bit parts in
Sukiyaki Western Django—a garish, gory collision of spaghetti
western, Japanese samurai drama, and splatter flick.

Two clans, the white and the red, have invaded a small mountain town
and decimated the place by fighting to a bloody deadlock. (Don’t wonder
why. It hardly matters.) A lone gunman shows up, each side wants him,
and director Takashi Miike commences painting the town red—with
blood!!! Bodies are sliced, diced, trampled, impaled on crosses, blown
up with dynamite, and shot from impossible distances (a thrilling
sequence, in which the leader of one gang uses the wind to guide his
bullets across a wide valley).

Sukiyaki Western Django is exploitation’s exploitation: excessive
strip scenes, children watching their parents die, heaping helpings of
Orientalism and Occidentalism. Cleverly, Miike directed his Asian
actors to try to imitate Western American accents. The resulting garble
is a perfect distillation of Sukiyaki‘s heterogeneous soul. It combines
real things in odd ways, producing a dizzying alternate universe, but
one that, as all alternate universes must, has a rigorous and
consistent internal logic—samurai can slice flying bullets with
their swords, but nobody can fly.

Most of the rest is goofy fun: a painted, fake-looking backdrop of
Mt. Fuji; shoot-outs; stampedes; saturated colors; double-dealing
characters; buffoons and secret agents; and a few deeply disturbing
moments (it’ll be awhile before I can scrape the grotesque sequence involving the near-rape of a fatally injured woman from the inside of
my skull).

So the movie is excessive. But is it good? No—it’s hokey
bullshit. But it embraces its hokey bullshittiness, as in this quote
from Tarantino’s character: “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of
all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to
flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a
night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust
before the wind.”

Personally, I prefer the subtlety of slicing off a man’s ear and
setting him on fire. But I’m old-fashioned.