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isn’t an action movie either. Nor is it a straightforward crime drama. In fact, the closest we come to seeing anything of the actual crime is a flashback of Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink racing down a crowded sidewalk with three pistolero cops dogging his tail. Ironically, the same moments of unconventional humor and self-parody which render Tarantino’s film oddly but indeterminately comedic, also problematize any attempt to categorize it in other established genres.
    One of the more interesting Tarantino conversations I’ve read was one with Robert Zemeckis for the Los Angeles Times in which the two filmmakers mused over where Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction (which competed against each other in 1994 for the Best Picture Oscar®) should be shelved in a video store:
    QT: ( to Zemeckis ) OK. Now if you owned a video store, what section would you put Forrest Gump in?
    RZ: You know what, I can’t answer that. I don’t know. Comedy? Drama? Adventure? They should have a video store section that’s unclassifiable movies.
    QT: I was thinking, if I was working at the video store, I would imagine my boss would put it in the drama section, and I’d be making fun of him for doing that, saying, “People might look for it in the drama section, but you should make a stand and put it in the comedy section!”
    For any video store owners out there, when Pulp Fiction comes out, I want it in the comedy section! If I come in and Pulp Fiction is in the drama section, that’ll be the last time I go into your closed-minded video store!
    RZ: Well, would you put Pulp Fiction in the action section?
    QT: There’s not that much action in it!
    RZ: See, but you know, you can understand why they would put it there—
    QT: Oh, I can totally see.
    RZ: —because they would think it’s like a caper movie.
    QT: See, one of the things that I think about both of the two movies is the fact that, whether you like them or not—and both of our movies are movies you either embrace or you put at arm’s length—when you saw them, you saw a movie . You’ve had a night at the movies; you’ve gone this
way and that way and up and down. And it wasn’t just one little tone that we’re working to get right. . . . 17
    Tarantino seems here to have a real appreciation for the fact that a question like “where would you shelve it?” isn’t just an amusing exercise, but a way to begin discriminating between token art and the real deal, which captures something of the moral ambiguity and emotional variety true to life itself. As interesting as this discussion is, however, it doesn’t tell us how we should categorize Reservoir Dogs .
    Even if they didn’t entirely understand it, experienced critics and film enthusiasts who saw Reservoir Dogs somewhere along the ’92 festival circuit seemed to appreciate its strange blend of sing-along music, black humor and violent bloodletting, at least on some level. But until the DVD market revived it, the film’s violence almost beat it into cinematic oblivion: when it opened in the U.S. theatrically later in the year, whatever comedy and craft the film could boast was for most viewers overpowered by the film’s paralyzing brutality. Ella Taylor’s October 16th 1992 review for the LA Weekly provides us with a representative response. She began with lavish praise for both the film and its novice director, praise that was attuned to the very questions about style and genre that we’re wrestling with:
    The fact is that torture and all, Reservoir Dogs , opening in Los Angeles next week, is one of the most poised, craftily constructed, and disturbing movies to come out this year. It’s a fond genre movie that’s forever chortling up its sleeve at the puerile idiocy of the genre: a heist caper without a heist, an action movie that’s hopelessly in love with talk, a poem to the sexiness of storytelling, and a slice of precocious wisdom about life. All this from a first-time filmmaker whose training consists of six years