"I'm hungry. Let's get a taco." –Harvey Keitel, Reservoir Dogs
Earlier this year, I started The New Cult Canon with Donnie Darko, arguably this generation's only genuine midnight-movie phenomenon, so it seemed appropriate to end the year with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, without question a major touchstone in today's cult cinema. Before Reservoir Dogs premièred at Sundance in 1992, the festival–and the arthouse scene in general–had seen very little of its kind. The independent world was supposed to be cordoned off from the violent, profane genre fare that littered the multiplex. While the great unwashed were off watching Steven Seagal shatter forearms like twigs, Joe Bordeaux-Sippers could flee for safety in tucked-away cinematic oases, where they found the comfort of earnest, socially progressive, values-affirming indie films, stuffy Merchant-Ivory costume dramas, or a host of middlebrow French imports. (Rumor has it that Reservoir Dogs' mysterious title comes from a mispronunciation of one of those middlebrow imports, Au Revoir Les Enfants, while Tarantino was working at a video store.)
Granted, that may be stating things a little broadly. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to call independent film pre-1992 toothless, or mainstream movies vulgar, or to claim that Tarantino was somehow the savior of an ineffectual, irrelevant arthouse scene. But Reservoir Dogs was nonetheless a defining moment, because it lent artistic legitimacy to what would have otherwise been dismissed as genre trash. It didn't make much money in its theatrical run–old viewing habits die hard–but along with Pulp Fiction two years later, it legitimately transformed the scene. Even now, low-budget genre films still have a tough time getting the support they need, but Reservoir Dogs did an awful lot to make them viable by finding a previously nonexistent audience that craved unvarnished visceral excitement without the attendant Hollywood stupidity.
Sixteen years and five films later (not counting Four Rooms, and counting Kill Bill as one), Tarantino has become a polarizing figure, swept along uneasily by the undulating waves of "cool" he helped create. Too often, he's looked upon less as a filmmaker than as a cultural phenomenon, subject to the "hot or not"/"in or out" fickleness of trend-spotters, who don't always consider the merits of his work. Detractors don't like his acting. (Okay, they have a point.) They don't like his obnoxious public persona. They don't like the drooling fanboys who congregate on Ain't It Cool News, or the legions of imitators who've clogged screens and video-store shelves in his wake. But all these things are just a distraction, because they're mostly in response to Tarantino the phenomenon, and not to what happens in the narrow hours when the lights are down and his formidable skills as a writer and director are on display.
Reservoir Dogs opens with what would become a Tarantino signature: The idea that bad guys, in the time between jobs, blab about the same banal shit the rest of us do, albeit in a much more colorful way. Sitting over breakfast with a table full of gangsters, there's Tarantino himself as Mr. Brown, theorizing (convincingly) that the Madonna hit "Like A Virgin" is not about "a sensitive girl who meets a nice fella" (that's "True Blue"), but about a John Holmes-type making a promiscuous girl feel the sweet pain of virginity all over again. That segues into an argument over tipping, prompted by the sniveling Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), who refuses to throw in a buck like everyone else, because he doesn't believe waitresses deserve extra money just for doing their jobs. Mr. Pink is obstinate in the face of reason until bossman Lawrence Tierney, with his gravelly voice and hulking frame, brings him in line: "C'mon, you. Cough up a buck, you cheap bastard."
Nothing said in the opening scene figures in later, not even in some obscure metaphorical way. Tarantino does make the most of an opportunity to introduce his characters, who have convened on a day leading up to a jewelry heist, and won't be seen together again until they meet at a warehouse rendezvous after the botched robbery. But the film would still make sense without the scene, which is just as much about Tarantino delivering a statement of intent that's carried him through to this day. Having these gangsters riff on Madonna and tipping establishes his characters and films as products of popular culture, reflections more of a movie-addled brain than of the far-less-exciting world outside of it. Some tag him as a rip-off artist, but he's really a collagist, cutting and pasting phrases, references, and styles from the past into something new, infused with his own distinct sensibility and unmistakable voice.
Made for just over $1 million, Reservoir Dogs is a classic example of turning budgetary liabilities into creative assets. A heist movie without the heist, the film takes place mostly in one location, the warehouse, and deals alternately with the lead-up and the aftermath. The limited space gives it the intensity of theater, and the interweaving of flashbacks and present-day confrontations make the robbery itself come together in the imagination better than it might have had Tarantino splurged on a Michael Mann setpiece. As with much of Tarantino's work, the heist-without-the-heist conceit isn't unprecedented, nor is the structure–Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, also a model of low-budget resourcefulness, was his acknowledged influence–but he always manages to stay on the right side of the line between homage and rip-off.
Here's what we know right away about the robbery: It didn't go well. Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are the first back to the warehouse, with the older White desperately trying to keep the gutshot Orange from bleeding to death. Mr. Pink comes in next, declaring his certainty that they were set up; with their daytime smash-and-grab job, they knew they only had minutes after the alarms went off, but the cops seemed to be waiting for them, and a bloody mêlée ensued. The question then becomes, "Who's the rat?" Could be Mr. Brown, who died in the frantic escape, or Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker), who never materializes, or maybe Michael Madsen's sadistic Mr. Blonde, who just started shooting bystanders at will once the job went sour. Tarantino takes his time with that and other revelations, and fills in the blanks by giving the key players–Mr. White, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Blonde, specifically–the introductions they deserve. And while everyone's in limbo, he also gives us Blonde torturing a uniformed cop in this career-making NSFW sequence, which forever repurposes the Stealers Wheel bubblegum-Dylan hit "Stuck In The Middle With You":