Tarantino's characters find that their redemption depends on whether there is a meaning to the word. An excerpt from The Philosophy of Neo-Noir.
Intro: >>Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Kill Bill (both volumes: 2003, 2004) are arguably the most successful (and I would say important) of the four full-length feature films that Quentin Tarantino has directed. And each is more or less explicitly about redemption. Further, Tarantino is widely recognized as a quintessentially postmodern neo-noir filmmaker. His films are postmodern in the artistic sense, insofar as they are, for example, blends of genres and highly allusive. But they're also postmodern in terms of the underlying epistemology and the position on morality and values that they take. That is, they reflect a postmodern sensibility about our ability (or lack thereof) to know and understand the world and about the value and significance (or lack thereof) that our lives and actions have. I argue here that this postmodern sensibility undermines the characters' attempts at redemption in the films. That is to say, in a postmodern world, such as the one depicted in Tarantino's films, there can be no such thing as redemption. While I include discussions of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, the arguments below focus primarily on Reservoir Dogs.<<
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
