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behind the counter of a Manhattan Beach video store, a stint at the Sundance Institute Director’s Workshop, and a lot of acting classes. 18
    Taylor said she was pleasantly surprised by the movie’s unpredictable but expertly realized swings in mood and tone. She
accordingly described Reservoir Dogs as a romp, “a brave, cocky, enormously self-satisfied adventure in film as manipulation . . . flipping us from laughs to sympathy to horror and back again” (Taylor, p. 42). She was also charmed by the original and compelling characters. But in the end, Taylor strongly criticized the film for its merciless excesses:
    When it pushes to extremes, it becomes an exercise in spurious, sadistic manipulation. At his most self-consciously “cinematic,” Tarantino is all callow mastery, and nowhere more so than in his favorite scene in which [Michael] Madsen, dancing around to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle With You,” gets creative with a razor and a fairly crucial part of a cop’s anatomy [his ear]. “I sucker-punched you,” says Tarantino, all but jumping up and down with glee. “You’re supposed to laugh until I stop you laughing.” The torture scene is pure gratuity, without mercy for the viewer. “The cinema isn’t intruding in that scene. You are stuck there, and the cinema isn’t going to help you out. Every minute for that cop is a minute for you.” He’s wrong; the cinema is intruding. That scene is pure set piece; it may even be pure art. That’s what scares me. (p. 46)
    While Taylor later reasoned (somewhat unconvincingly) that perhaps what was really at issue in her dispute with Tarantino was not violence per se , but artistic style and personal sensibility, she remained infuriated by the torture scene, which she thought masked the horror of real violence by depicting it with a “cool, giggly insouciance” (pp. 47-48).
    But like many critics, in condemning Tarantino’s film Taylor relies too little on careful exegesis of the artwork and too much on casual commentary by the artist (much of which—in this case, at least—reveals more about Tarantino’s naïve and forthright pleasure in simple, unguarded conversation than about the workings and meanings of the film itself). Quentin Tarantino, especially in his more substantial and artistic works to date, deals with violence in a much more ambiguous, nuanced, and yes, philosophical way than do any of the other gratuitously violent filmmakers with whom Ella Taylor subsequently compares Tarantino in her review.
    But disturbing violence and discordant, ultra-black humor weren’t the only issues audiences had with Reservoir Dogs . The casual bigotry and unnerving use of racial epithets, and the
sheer volume of profanity and crudity in the dialogue also occasioned considerable shock and awe. In sum, almost everything about the film was excessive. “Restraint,” “subtlety,” and “moderation” seemed the only words that weren’t in Tarantino’s politically incorrect vocabulary. So, any genuine interpretation of Reservoir Dogs must account not merely for the film’s genre-bending nature, but for its strange infatuation with excess as such . And thankfully, while Tarantino himself hasn’t offered us much help in this regard, Nietzsche has: what we have in Reservoir Dogs is a picture-perfect case of what Nietzsche would call the Dionysian power striving to express itself in a tragic form.
    When quizzed by critics about the questionable morality or possible social toll of its many excesses, Tarantino has been consistently dismissive. For instance, in an interview at the Montreal World Film Festival after Peter Brunette reminded him of the five hundred murders committed annually in Washington DC alone, and then wondered aloud about the ramifications of movie violence, Tarantino defended his work by claiming that an artist shouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of his art: “If I start thinking about society or what one person is doing to