The Hateful Eight

A thought struck me while watching The Hateful Eight: Tarantino is one of the great active historians of film. I say this because he so clearly loves certain films and their directors, then steals blatantly from them. People mention Tarantino in the same breath as the great “auteurs” of film’s history. But I believe he is instead one of their best disciples: a propagator, critic, and enfant terrible of their theories and practice (Auteur Theory is a whole other bag of dumb beans – movies are made by hundreds of people and yet the director is God. I get the intent of the theory but it has deified one person and erased thousands from existence). Tarantino reminds me of another of those film acolytes: Brian Depalma, who himself had pretensions to the pantheon of filmdom.

Tarantino has said that he made this film in response to his feelings in watching The Thing for the first time. in reflecting, I struggled to figure out why I love that film so much and The Hateful Eight didn’t do anything for me. I understand Carpenter’s influence on this film, how Tarantino mixed horror and macabre elements with a pitch black sense of humor. I think perhaps there is an element of goodness in Carpenter’s characters, which ennobles their struggle and makes losing them to a deadly alien parasite all the more sour; in The Hateful Eight, however, there are no redemptive qualities whatsoever in any of the characters that populate the film. When particular characters died, I didn’t care about their demise; I cared that that particular actor’s time on the screen was now over.

The actors clearly enjoyed being in this movie, reciting dialogue that you can imagine Tarantino excitedly dictating to a recorder while acting out the scene in his mirror, and that makes up for how dry the film actually is. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t care for the characters and their idiosyncrasies didn’t make up the difference. The plot is written like someone’s idea of an Agatha Christie novel if they had only seen film adaptations of her work (Hateful Eight would have probably worked better as a novel). I enjoyed watching great actors at work, but by the end of the film, I felt like I had done work to get there.

Minnie and Six-Horse Judy deserved better.