Complex Constellations: On Death Proof
I’ve found myself unable to figure it out completely, to write this film off as “bad.” Do the stylization and the splitting of the film’s narrative, telling two stories in one, guide us to read this film as a criticism of grindhouse movies?
I’ve wanted to write about Death Proof since the beginning of this column, but it’s eluded me. The film straddles genre, Quentin Tarantino bringing his characteristic bravado to something like a slasher film, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) a killer who uses his stunt car as his weapon. It was released as one half of a double-feature, and also breaks into two aesthetically and stylistically distinct acts. The cinematography evolves between Part One, a gritty opening bar sequence, and Two, a colorful, riling car chase.
The film opens with “The Girls”—Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Porter), Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito), Shana Banana—driving to the bar for Jungle Julia’s birthday. Like many Tarantino films, there are whole scenes structured around characters riffing about small things: how to score weed, hooking up, their plans for the night. The evening meanders to the bar. They order drinks, shoot the shit, put songs they like on the jukebox. This aimlessness is the sort of thing a movie shouldn’t do, yet the film simmers with tension alongside Stuntman Mike at the bar. Horror tropes—cued by spooky music, a stop en route to the bar that gives Butterfly the heebie-jeebies—drop in to remind us where this is headed.
Also deeply unsettling is the stylization; the first part of the film flaunts discontinuity edits. Blips of dialogue play twice. Distress on the film flickers onscreen. A shot of the girls passing under the last Jungle Julia billboard on their way to margaritas and Mexican at Güero’s cuts abruptly and shows the stuntman’s car following them, though we have no idea when. Their evening at the bar builds to a set piece—Butterfly and Stuntman Mike flirting, and then a lap dance to “Down in Mexico”—which, too, cuts abruptly at its end to everyone in the parking lot.
The editing and texture to this first part are so lush, supple. In a beautifully bizarre sequence set to melodramatic orchestral music from Blow Out, Julia texts this guy, “I can’t wait to see you. Hurry!!!” We watch the message transform as she clicks through characters on her tiny keypad—something that feels even more riddled with meaning today than it might have in 2007 when T9 reigned supreme. Then she watches the loading bar show its progress sending into the ether. It’s overwhelmingly earnest. It makes her ruffle her hair before returning to her group for another round of shots while awaiting his response. This reality feels a bit surreal, exaggerated, self-aware, impossible.
Part Two makes similar, bold aesthetic choices. We’ve jumped ahead in time, and into black and white. The film transitions into color abruptly while Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) smokes a cigarette, sitting on the hood of her friend Kim’s bumblebee yellow car. Once in color, the palette is sweet—bright yellows, pinks, and reds. While waiting for her friend inside the gas station, Lee sings along with her iPod to “Baby, It’s You”, which Jungle Julia danced so beautifully to in the first part. They find a copy of Italian Vogue for twenty-seven dollars at this small gas station in Tennessee and are determined to buy it. In another Tarantino wink, Abernathy’s ringtone is “Twisted Nerve,” from Kill Bill.
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Death Proof was released in 2007 as part of the double-feature Grindhouse, alongside Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a film I haven’t yet seen, about zombies and the military in Texas. Both films were created as a tribute to exploitation cinema of the seventies. In a 2007 piece following the release of the double-feature, The Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr writes, “There's nothing respectable about ‘Grindhouse’ because there's nothing respectable about the grindhouse movies from whence Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's new film takes its name and love of all things disgusting.”
So what is a grindhouse anyway? “Originally the word referred to the tatty downtown theaters that showed exploitation movies,” writes Burr. “It's an umbrella term that covers vast amounts of sleaze—films with geek-show appeal and carny-barker promotion.” Underneath this umbrella are “nudie cuties,” biker films, shockumenatries, kung fu classics, and Italian horror like that of Dario Argento.
In part, thinking about Death Proof, I think about how any prestige movie that waxes nostalgic for Hollywood is such Oscar bait (think The Shape of Water, La La Land, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Death Proof is both a genre satire and in love with the movies: Stuntman Mike is a stunt driver, and The Girls in Part Two all work in film. But Death Proof didn’t receive critical acclaim, and critics were mixed in their response. In his Guardian review, Peter Bradhsaw wrote, “Death Proof is wildly offensive, gleefully offensive, malice-aforethought offensive, with maximum gore and violence wrapped in an eerie glow of unreality,” and Roger Ebert’s two-point-five star review is titled “One double feature, two bottom halves.”
And yet, I’ve found myself unable to figure it out completely, to write this film off as “bad.” Do the stylization and the splitting of the film’s narrative, telling two stories in one, guide us to read this film as a criticism of grindhouse movies? Julia’s texting, the smart editing can point us there, but, too, the camera seems obsessed with The Girls, Butterfly and Julia in particular. Does it fixate on their sumptuous hair flips and dancing as part of its critique, or does it just resurrect the aspects of grindhouse film Burr was so set against? And how is any of this offset by its second part, when “The Girls” in that half of the film get revenge in a wild car chase? Is that a feminist revision of this history, or just more of the same? Is it feminist if their action is predicated on revenge?
Death Proof seems to be more complicated in its approach. The women in the second half have no ties to the first. Their revenge for the women of part one is only felt psychically, and also, it’s retaliation for Stuntman Mike’s pursuit of them. Significantly, it exists among a constellation of desires—drugs, sex and romance as they want it, driving stunts in cars from the movies, and Italian Vogue. It’s not so much revenge as playtime: Hell yeah let’s go after him. They get to be in one of the movies they love; and of course, we know, they’re making a movie for us.
What I’m curious about is what space we carve out for the movies we love, or for the movies that stump us and we keep coming back to. And Death Proof is such an interesting study of this, as the movie itself is mulling over a genre, at the time thirty years past its heyday. The lesson really is that it’s not worth just writing something off in absolutes, as tempting as it is. Death Proof’s legacy is complicated. The film is an homage to genre and finds new spaces within it.
