Let’s play Ten for Ten! To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities. This post is presented in three installments.
“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.
In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.
And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.
It takes an unholy degree of time and stamina to write a book. Consequently, it’s advisable to have a really good reason to take a given project on—then see it through to the finish line. Before typing word one of a new manuscript, it behooves us to ask (and answer): Why is this project worth the herculean effort required to bring it into existence?
I wrote my debut novel The Dogcatcher (2023) for the most elemental of motives: I ached for the kind of bygone horror/comedies on which I’d come of age in the ’80s, an era that produced such motley and memorable movies as An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Evil Dead (1981), Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), The Monster Squad (1987), The ’Burbs (1989), and Tremors (1990). Where have those kinds of movies gone? I wondered.
Hollywood, to be fair, hadn’t stopped making horror/comedies, it only long since stopped making them with any panache. I have spent many a Saturday night over the past decade in a binge-scrolling malaise, surfing numbly through hundreds of viewing options on Netflix or Prime or Hulu or whatever, when suddenly my inner adolescent’s interest is piqued—as though I were back at the old video store and had found a movie right up my alley.
I certainly sensed the stir of possibility in Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), about a group of teenagers from my hometown battling undead gentrifiers. Night Teeth (2021), featuring bloodsuckers in Boyle Heights, seemed equally promising. And Werewolves Within (2021) is set in a snowbound Northeastern United States township already on edge over a proposed pipeline project when its residents find themselves under attack by a werewolf.
All of a sudden, I felt like that sixteen-year-old kid who saw the one-sheet for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) while riding the subway to work—“She knows a sucker when she sees one,” teased the tagline, depicting a cheerleader from the neck down with a wooden stake in her fist—and knew he was in for a good time at the cinema.
No such luck. Vampires vs. the Bronx, in an act of creative criminality, pisses away a narratively and thematically fertile premise through flat, forgettable execution.
Night Teeth, meanwhile, answers the question: How about a movie set in the same stomping ground as Blade (1998)—inner-city L.A., clandestine vampiric council calling the shots—only without any of its selling-point stylistics or visual inventiveness?
And Werewolves Within establishes an intriguing environmental justice subplot the screenwriter had absolutely no interest in or, it turns out, intention of developing—the oil pipeline isn’t so much a red herring as a dead herring—opting instead for a half-assed, who-cares-less whodunit beholden to all the standard-issue genre tropes.
Faced with one cinematic disappointment after another, it seemed the only way to sate my appetite for the kind of horror/comedy that spoke to me as a kid was to write my own.
On the subject of kids—specifically, stories about twelve-year-old boys—I haven’t seen one of those produced with any appreciable measure of emotional honesty or psychological nuance since Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body. That was forty years ago!
Storytellers know how to write credible children (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone, Room), and they know how to write teenagers (The Outsiders, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Clueless), but preadolescent boys are almost invariably reduced to archetypal brushstrokes (The Goonies, The Sandlot, Stranger Things). The preteen protagonists of such stories are seldom made to grapple with the singular emotional turbulence of having one foot in childhood—still watching cartoons and playing with action figures—and the other in adolescence—beginning to regard girls with special interest, coming to realize your parents are victims of generational trauma that’s already in the process of being passed unknowingly and inexorably down to you.
For all of popular culture’s millennia-long fixation on and aggrandizement of the heroic journey of (usually young) men, our commercial filmmakers and storytellers either can’t face or don’t know how to effectively dramatize the developmental fulcrum of male maturation. George Lucas’ experimental adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–1996) sheds light on Indy’s youth from ages eight through ten (where he’s portrayed by Corey Carrier) and then sixteen through twenty-one (Sean Patrick Flanery); the complicated messiness of pubescence, however, is entirely bypassed. Quite notably, those are the years in which Indy’s mother died and his emotionally distant father retreated into his work—formative traumas that shaped, for better and worse, the adult hero played by Harrison Ford in the feature films.
Lucas’ elision seems odd to me—certainly a missed creative opportunity1—given that twelve-going-on-thirteen is the period of many boys’ most memorable and meaningful adventures. King and Reiner never forgot that, and neither did I, hence the collection of magical-realism novellas I’m currently writing that explore different facets of that transitory experience: going from wide-eyed wonder to adolescent disillusionment as a result of life’s first major disappointment (Spex); being left to navigate puberty on your own in the wake of divorce (The Brigadier); struggling to understand when, how, and why you got socially sorted at school with the kids relegated to second-class citizenry (H.O.L.O.).
This single-volume trilogy, I should note, isn’t YA—these aren’t stories about preteens for preteens. Rather, they are intended, like The Body/Stand by Me before them, as a retrocognitive exercise for adults who’ve either forgotten or never knew the experience of being a twelve-year-old boy to touch base with that metamorphic liminality in all of its psychoemotional complexity. They’re very consciously stories about being twelve as reviewed from middle-aged eyes.
As I’ll demonstrate in “Part 2” and “Part 3,” both that WIP and The Dogcatcher take inspiration—narratively, thematically, aesthetically, referentially—from the stories of my youth, the books and movies that first kindled my imagination and catalyzed my artistic passions.
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
My own creative impulses were certainly activated by my formative influences, which led me after college to pursue a career in Hollywood. I was twenty-two when I signed with my first literary manager, unusually young for a would-be screenwriter to secure representation—and a testament to how much raw talent and commercial potential I possessed. I spent the next decade-plus touring the bungalows and backlots of L.A., honing my craft by pitching spec projects (that were mostly just impersonal X-meets-Y twists on movies I admired) and vying for open assignments—meaning, competing for some tedious work-for-hire gig a thousand other screenwriters could do just as competently.
Yet it is only now, in my forties, far from the homogenized “creativity” of Hollywood, I feel I’ve come into my own artistically—that I’m finally telling stories worth a damn. Stories only I could tell, however materially they may draw inspiration from the narrative antecedents that forged my sensibilities, what Lethem identifies as “creating out of chaos.”
But it begs the question, doesn’t it: When can you say you’ve achieved a sound or a style all your own? It’s basically when your influences have become so diverse that they’re no longer easy to trace; they’ve blended together so thoroughly as to create a stew of your own making. But that’s not enough. In my view, it requires a diversity of influences and the strength of your individual character. . . . The more influences one has that are then filtered through one’s own personality, the more one ends up with a style and a sound that one can legitimately call one’s own.
Geddy Lee (with Daniel Richler), My Effin’ Life (New York: Harper, 2023), 211–12
I learned everything I know about storytelling from my days in the Tinseltown trenches: how to pitch, how to structure, how to write actable dialogue, how to identify my genre and compose a commercial logline. All of it. But what I never understood was the secret ingredient that separates an aspirant from an artist is having a voice. The stories I’m developing these days are increasingly the product of painful soul-searching—i.e., confronting formative traumas—as opposed to commercial calculation—putting a slick “spin” on some formative influence. (“The show’s called Stranger Things, and it’s The Goonies meets The X-Files!”)
With the latter—which is, for better or worse, the screenwriter-for-hire’s stock-in-trade—all you’re really doing is sampling, remixing, and repackaging someone else’s work. It merely requires a flashy “take” on a proven concept, not a soulful perspective on the human condition. For the screenwriter, a personal POV isn’t merely unnecessary, it’s a handicap.
But, Christ almighty, if you’re not willing to rip your guts out and use them as raw creative materials—unpleasant, embarrassing, and triggering though that can be—what the fuck’s the point of being a writer? Storytelling is too much work if it isn’t at least providing some measure of therapeutic ROI. Reflecting on his own experience creating The Sopranos (1999–2007), David Chase said this:
“Network dramas have not been personal,” Chase observes. “I don’t know of very many writers who have been cops, doctors, judges, presidents—and, yet, that’s what everybody writes about, institutions: the courthouse, the schoolhouse, the precinct house, the White House.” Even though it would be a mob show, The Sopranos would be based on members of his own family. “It’s about as personal as you can get,” he continues. “How many times has that ever happened in the world of TV, where you actually wind up making your show in the little town you came from? About the people you grew up with? It wouldn’t have happened if HBO hadn’t invested in the idea of the writer’s voice.”
Peter Biskind, Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV (New York: William Morrow, 2023), 29
I recently met with a screenwriter/author friend for lunch here in New York, a former critique-group colleague from our days in L.A., during which the subject of writing with a personal touch was discussed:
“It feels different when the stories [one is writing] operate on that cellular level,” my friend observed. “All that time we spent as young screenwriters, that was always about chasing the next easy-to-pitch, this-meets-that premise, you know? But those scripts never produced the humming sensation in my gut I get now—that unnerving but definitely also thrilling molecular vibration that lets me know, ‘Shit, I’m onto something good.’ Something truthful, I mean, not just”—pantomiming air quotes—“‘marketable.’”
“You do get a bit of a ‘writer’s high’ when you write from that very personal place,” I agreed, “and that moment when you start to see—start to feel—the emotion fueling the story, and the story serving the emotion, the whole mechanism just running like a Swiss watch.”
“I just never got that when I was out there pitching ‘Collateral meets Fast and the Furious! How’s that for dope?’ That’s not telling stories. At best you’re just flipping specs.”
“You’re more of a used-car salesman than a storyteller,” I said. “You’re selling a ‘cool’ conceptual mashup, not a story from some dusty corner of the mental attic that, like, attempts to contextualize and even maybe redeem some shitty experience [that’s] left a dent in you forever.”
“And you can still do genre,” he was quick to point out.
“Absolutely!”
“The genre element—the werewolf, in [your] case—that’s the thing that hooks the reader, but it’s the, kind of, human experience that invests them.” He explained how that’s exactly what he’s doing right now with a novel spin on the demonic-possession genre he’d pitched me—how it’s really about the complicated relationship he had with his late father, and the way he’s haunted by all the unresolved conflicts they had. (“The Living Years” meets The Exorcist? Now those would be some incongruous influences!)
In “The Dogcatcher Unleashed,” I elaborated on some of my debut novel’s creative muses. Through subsequent conversations I’ve had with my readers—some who know me well, some not at all—I’ve become more sensitive to just how much my own personality and preoccupations infiltrated the text and subtext. Admittedly, much of that I was already expressly cognizant of, but when I compare The Dogcatcher to other projects, including that forthcoming Out of the Bottle bildungsroman, I can’t deny certain recurring stylistic and thematic patterns in my work.
Accordingly, when I take Geddy Lee up on his challenge to backtrace some of my sources of inspiration (of which the music of Rush ranks right up there), even I am somewhat astonished by the overt feedback loop—the symbiotic relationship—that exists between the art that once inspired me and the art I now produce. Whereas the former were passive (if undeniably potent) cathartic experiences, the latter is the active (and doggedly hopeful) enterprise of cathartic self-expression.
The ten movies discussed in “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood” and “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’90s Adolescence” reflected my experiences at the time I first saw them and consequently shaped my worldview; the stories I tell now, the “stew of my own making,” both express that worldview and pay tribute—owe a creative debt—to those formative influences. We’re going see how over the next two installments of “Under the Influence.” First—a detour into the mad, mad mind of Quentin Tarantino.
The Man with the Golden Briefcase
In Cinema Speculation (2022), arguably the most accomplished filmmaker of his generation (thirteen years my senior) takes us on a fascinating tour through the exploitation-cinema scene of the 1970s in a series of in-depth essays covering Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Getaway (1972), The Outfit (1973), Sisters (1973), Daisy Miller (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Hardcore (1979), and The Funhouse (1981).
Tarantino doesn’t merely share his enduring affinity for those formative faves and offer some truly insightful critical appraisals; in many instances, he speculates (hence the book’s title) on what those movies might have been had discarded story ideas/script drafts been used (for instance: Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Rolling Thunder before it was rewritten by Heywood Gould); had different actors been cast (Angie Dickinson or Lauren Hutton or Faye Dunaway over Ali MacGraw in The Getaway); had a filmmaker not capitulated to studio interference (the false grace note of Hardcore); how a different director might have interpreted a script, resulting in an entirely different movie (Brian De Palma, who passed on Taxi Driver—as in, literally passed it on to Martin Scorsese because it wasn’t sufficiently commercial). Tarantino has given these scenarios a lot of consideration, which he shares with enthusiasm in his first collection of film criticism.
To his credit, QT balances his fanboy enthusiasm for his chosen cinematic specimens with sober critiques of their creative shortcomings and missed opportunities, but it must also be noted his analytical readings come exclusively from a position of white male privilege. He openly delights in the bloodlust of grindhouse cinema, but never examines the social cost of that commercial exploitation—of glorifying, for the sake of entertainment, the violent one-man vendettas of white male antiheroes (many of whom are motivated by the sexual assault and/or murder of a woman, another troublesome trope). Tarantino mostly just dismisses, justifies, or explains away the motifs of vengeance or fascism or racism that underpin many of the “revengeamatics” he reveres.
For instance: He declares Dirty Harry a cathartic crime thriller made for the vicarious pleasure of aging Greatest Generation audiences who were, at the time, watching in horror as “their country” was “overtaken” by draft-dodging hippies and the Black Panther Party. Indeed, the times they were a-changin’:
The Vietnam War did much to radicalize the young after 1965. However, the young had been turning against their parents’ establishment, and inventing the ‘generation gap’, years before President Johnson escalated the war in Indochina. . . .
. . . The May 1968 uprisings, Woodstock, even the fervour with which the young threw themselves into the civil rights campaigns smacked of the rebelliousness that usually foreshadows a fin de siècle; the end of a regime and its replacement with something new.
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing), 50–51
In that context, therefore, Harry Callahan wasn’t the wish-fulfillment antidote to crime on our city streets so much as upheaval to our social order—the threat to the literally greatest generation’s hegemony (the demographic cohort to which Dirty Harry director Don Siegel belonged). Tarantino’s assessment of Dirty Harry is spot-on… but doesn’t that alone—the movie’s shamelessly fear-based exploitation of “the other”—make it socially problematic, however aesthetically brilliant it may (arguably) be?
He furthermore calls out Scorsese for being disingenuous when the director claimed to be shocked! that audiences found Taxi Driver’s climactic violence exhilarating rather than horrifying—that instead of interpreting the picture as a subversive critique of vigilante thrillers like Death Wish (1974), viewers identified with Travis Bickle’s paint-the-walls-red nihilism. I tend to think Scorsese’s social-commentary intentions were honorable, but given the ambiguity of violence in cinema, empathetic antiheroes are by nature a risky artistic undertaking: More often than not, even socially conscious storytellers wind up inadvertently ennobling that which they’d intended to censure.
Take, for example, Vince Gilligan’s Emmy darling Breaking Bad (2008–2013), which chronicles the transmogrification of sad-sack chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) into ruthless meth kingpin “Heisenberg”:
Walt chokes a man with a bicycle lock. He crosses the line that protects children, in this case by poisoning a little boy. In one particularly damning scene, he watches Jesse’s girlfriend choke on her own vomit, without lifting a finger to help her. By one count, Walt is responsible for nearly two hundred deaths. Said Gilligan, “I’ve lost sympathy for Walter White, personally.” He explained, “We want to make people question who they’re pulling for, and why.” Good luck!
Gilligan tried and failed to make Walt impossible to root for. Like the fans of Vic Mackey, Raylan Givens, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, and the Jenningses, Walt’s fans didn’t care how bad he broke; they refused to break with him. According to Robin Weigert, “Anna Gunn got a lot of hate mail from viewers who wanted her character to be a more supportive wife.”
Biskind, Pandora’s Box, 136
Holy shit! Well, I guess it’s a man’s world, huh? As Scorsese found out the hard way, storytellers like Gilligan can tell themselves all they want their intentions are noble—that depictions of violence are meant to repulse, not titillate—but they don’t get to decide how an audience reacts to their work and interprets it. Because it seems to me that viewers who are appalled by screen violence and antiheroic behavior, who haven’t cultivated an insatiable appetite for it, tend not to watch those movies and programs with any regularity or enthusiasm. They’ve already gotten the message that this shit is poisonous and should be consumed, like alcohol, in judicious moderation.
(For the record: I happily broke with Tony Soprano, bailing on the series—not for reasons of quality—halfway through its original run. My wife and I had let an entire season’s worth of episodes aggregate unwatched on our DVR queue, with interminable plans to “get to them.” Finally at one point we turned to each other and said, “Do we not want to watch this show anymore?” We summarily deleted it from our watchlist and never looked back. Unlike our old favorite Goodfellas [1990], which eventually has the mercy to let you out of its ugly, violent, paranoid, wearisome world, The Sopranos had no intention—even through its controversial final episode—of ever letting viewers off the hook. So, we made the decision for ourselves that enough was enough—and never regretted it. I don’t care how many Emmys it won, being rid of that show was a fucking relief. Same for Deadwood.)
At least Tarantino, for better and simultaneously worse, doesn’t make excuses for his addiction to cinematic slaughter. Like the bloodthirsty fans of so-called Prestige TV’s endless succession of tough-guy antiheroes, rather than interrogating the morality of B-movie violence, Tarantino reflexively stands by the unchallenged assertion that it’s fun—it’s what audiences want—and why should any filmmaker apologize for that, let alone consider (and God forbid take some measure of responsibility for) the noxious worldview they’re promulgating? It’s just entertainment, folks!
Yeah, okay—but it’s entertainment from the perspective of white male filmmakers about white male protagonists more often than not taking violent revenge (in the form of mass shootings, no less) on behalf of a brutalized (and helpless) female. That’s entertainment? Only if you’re privileged enough to be a straight white male viewer, methinks. (And I say that as a member of said demographic.) It’s more like right-libertarian propaganda—fascist fantasies packaged as “urban thrillers,” like Frank Miller’s hateful bastardization of Batman, The Dark Knight Returns (1986), itself inspired by Dirty Harry.
At no point in Cinema Speculation does Tarantino acknowledge, let alone examine, the sociocultural, -political, and/or -economic phenomena of the era—like, first and foremost, neoliberal capitalism and the systematic dismantling of the welfare state—and the role those outside forces played in seeding the very conditions (like urban blight) that created the disillusioned, hypermasculine antiheroes he so admires. He’s ultimately too smitten with ’70s exploitation cinema, its stylized carnage, to be put off by the underlying social ills those movies were either consciously critiquing or unconsciously reflecting.
Which makes one wonder: What is it about the era Tarantino finds so preeminently appealing? The book offers a window into his psyche from which an explanation can be reasonably conjectured: because these were the first movies—however age-inappropriate, by his own admission, they may have been—to which young Quentin was exposed, when he was taken to the L.A. drive-ins by his mother and his stepfather and then a succession of would-be (Black) stepfathers. (A doctoral thesis could probably be written about Tarantino on that last point.)
The movies (and books and television and music) we consume in our youth impress upon our receptive imagination in a way media experienced later in life never can. We can enjoy, admire, appreciate, and celebrate movies seen in adulthood, but they cannot imprint on us as profoundly and indelibly as those to which we were first exposed. Tarantino’s enduring passion for exploitation schlock is no different from Gen X’s obsessive enthusiasm for the juvenile ephemera of the 1980s: Star Wars and Ghostbusters and The Transformers, et al. For QT, the wantonly violent “revengeamatics” of the 1970s emblemize, however perversely, his own innocence.
And therein lies the true value of Cinema Speculation. The book finally allowed me to put my finger on something about Tarantino that has nagged at me elusively for thirty years: Whenever he talks about his own movies, he seldom if ever cites a personal experience or relationship as a creative influence; he only ever references other movies. He is demonstrably dismissive of—seems almost pathologically uncomfortable with—movies that aspire toward emotional earnestness, what he deems “middle-of-the-road successful films,” or “cup[s] of weak tea,” such as “The Big Chill, Out of Africa, Ordinary People, Diner, Gandhi, Stand by Me,”2 those saccharine studio products of what he repeatedly calls “the miserable eighties.”
[T]he curse of eighties cinema. . . . was that the complex and complicated lead characters of the seventies were the characters that eighties cinema avoided completely. Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties likeability was everything. A novel could have a low-down son of a bitch at its center, as long as that low-down son of a bitch was an interesting character.
But not a movie. Not in the eighties.
After the seventies, it seemed film went back to the restraints of the fifties. Back to when controversial novels and plays had to be drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays. As happened with 9½ Weeks, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, First Blood, The Color Purple, White Palace, Stick, Miami Blues, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. . . .
And if you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes.
Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.
How does Murray in Stripes go from being an iconoclastic pain in the ass, who deserves to get beat up by Drill Sergeant Warren Oates, to rallying the troops (That’s the fact, Jack!), and masterminding a covert mission on foreign soil?
And Stripes was one of the hip movies.
Film critics always preferred Bill Murray to Chevy Chase. Yet, more often than not, Chase remained the same sarcastic aloof asshole at the film’s end he was at the beginning. Or at least his conversion wasn’t the whole point of the movie as it was in Scrooged and Groundhog Day.
Admittedly, when you don’t give a fuck about other people’s feelings, it probably does wonders for your caustic wit. But I’ve always rejected the idea that Bill Murray’s characters needed redemption.
Yeah, maybe he charmed Andie MacDowell, but does anybody think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray?
Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (New York: Harper, 2022), 120–22
Christ, how would he have preferred Groundhog Day to conclude—with Murray gutting the groundhog and wearing its pelt as a tunic as he went postal on Punxsutawney? In Tarantino’s version of Stand by Me, does Gordie (Wil Wheaton) actually shoot Ace (Kiefer Sutherland) at the creekside climax? And presumably only after Ace’s gang has assaulted, à la Deliverance, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman), and Vern (Jerry O’Connell)? When it comes to characterization, why does Tarantino equate violence and nihilism—the antisocial values of a “low-down son of a bitch”—with complexity?
That creative sensibility is the reason, I imagine, Tarantino’s own films are undoubtedly slick and often quite suspenseful (the opening reel of Inglourious Basterds leaves me breathless), but generally devoid of anything resembling an earnest emotion. He doesn’t respond to that in other filmmakers’ movies, and goes out of his way to exclude it from his own. He seems only to make prestige genre movies inspired by grindhouse genre movies—specifically, the revengeamatics, Spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation thrillers, and martial-arts movies he devoured in his youth—not tell stories that draw from painful personal experience and/or hard-earned epiphany, like his sentimentalist hero Sylvester Stallone. (With perhaps the one-two exception of Rocky and Rocky II, which he lovingly admires in Cinema Speculation, Tarantino appears congenitally allergic to—even appalled by, certainly suspicious of—aspirational and/or prosocial storytelling.)
And then… a twist ending.
In the book’s final chapter, unassumingly labeled “*Floyd Footnote”—as though it were superfluous or optional, like an appendix—Tarantino gets deeply personal for (as far as I’m aware) the first time in a public forum: He tells the story of a vagabond Black man, Floyd Ray Wilson, who rented a room in his mother’s apartment for several years in the ’70s, and who served as an off-and-on mentor to young Tarantino—talking obscure movies with him, offering (dubious) advice about manhood, even inadvertently motivating him to become a screenwriter. (Wilson, who fruitlessly aspired to screenwriting himself, directly inspired Django Unchained.)
It’s the most moving piece of writing Tarantino has ever produced, certainly the most heartbreaking—made only more so by its inconspicuous placement as a supplemental postface, an addendum he was “obliged” to include, like endnotes you can peruse if you’re so inclined, but the book is finished now and, really, who reads the back matter anyways?
And that’s when I realized: This book—QT’s entire filmography, for that matter—is a love letter, a sincere (if surreptitious) tribute to this capricious-yet-consequential surrogate father who unceremoniously disappeared from Tarantino’s life one day, his fate and whereabouts still unknown. (A bastard but not a fucking bastard?) In Cinema Speculation, Tarantino is like that cagey patient at a therapy session—the kind that talks around what’s really bothering him for forty-eight minutes, only to “offhandedly” spill the unvarnished, uncomfortable, even painful truth juuuust as the clock runs out. Damn it—looks like our time is up!
At long last I understand Tarantino’s entire cinematic repertoire: It isn’t so much an artistic expression of some heart’s-core pain as it is a monomaniacal project of palliative nostalgia. He’s spent the entirety of his adult life and career recreating the era of Hollywood that offered him the only reprieve from his unstable, fatherless childhood. This is what makes him such a singular and polarizing talent: Unlike most other auteurs, Tarantino’s movies are in no way whatsoever intended as a means to process or share his formative traumas; rather, they are meticulous, handmade odes to those formative influences—cinematic and, in the instance of Wilson, personal—that soothed his psychic stabwounds.
Anti-sentimentalist that he is, Tarantino might very well recoil in abject horror at my takeaway from Cinema Speculation, but he finally, after three decades—and when I least expected it—made me feel a genuine tender emotion: pity.
“Under the Influence” continues with “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood.”
Footnotes
- The reason for the six-year time jump, I realize, was to allow space for the opening prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), featuring a thirteen-year-old Indy portrayed by River Phoenix. By establishing a temporal gap between each “era” of Indy’s life—childhood (Carrier), adolescence (Phoenix), young adulthood (Flanery), midlife (Ford), and old age (George Hall)—the discrepancies in his countenance could be attributed to “aging.” Creatively, it’s both an understandable decision and a missed opportunity—both things can be true. ↩︎
- Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (New York: Harper, 2022), 141 ↩︎
Great backstory to this book. I love that you wrote the book because no one wrote those stories anymore. And your friend’s comment–“the humming sensation in my gut”–I get that. Nice to read you again, Sean.
Thanks for being so supportive during my hiatus, Jacqui — and for being the first to comment on my latest post! I very much appreciate your kind encouragement.
Yes, I wrote The Dogcatcher for the 16-year-old me who longs perennially for those kinds of horror/comedies. Look: I’ll be the first to concede that maybe Vampires vs. the Bronx, certified fresh with a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Werewolves Within, which holds a fresh 86% RT score, didn’t appeal to me because they couldn’t appeal to me — that what I ultimately wanted from them was what others my age want from Ghostbusters: Frozen Earth and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Disney and Beverly Hills Cop IV: to feel like the 12-year-old boy who first saw those movies in the 1980s.
As I noted in my appraisal of Cinema Speculation above, the media we experience later in life cannot imprint on us as profoundly and indelibly as that to which we were first exposed. In that sense, I suppose, Vampires vs. the Bronx and Werewolves Within never stood a chance with me. Maybe it was unfair to impose such heavy expectations on them in the first place. (For instance: I admired, enjoyed, and appreciated Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — which I discussed with dellstories here — but it’s not a movie that will ever influence me in any way; it’s just too late for that. I appreciated D&D for what it set out to be — and absolutely succeeded in being! — but it’ll never make my deserted-island list.)
More and more, Jacqui, I’m coming around to the likelihood that no movie or book or song will ever quite capture my imagination the way they did when I was a kid. The only stories that seem to do that for me anymore are the ones I write: The Dogcatcher. Spex. The Brigadier. H.O.L.O. The Lost Boys of the Bronx. So be it. If the thrill of storytelling these days is experienced by telling stories rather than consuming them — that is, producing the kind of entertainment I want rather than searching fruitlessly for it — well, then, perhaps Tarantino and I have that in common. Maybe that’s what drives storytellers to keep creating — and to raise their artistic ambitions with each new creation?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to sharing my formative influences over the next two posts; expect the second installment in August or September. In the meantime, Jacqui, have yourself a great summer!
Of course you can’t find a movie or book that makes you feel the way you felt when you were 12 years old. You are not 12 years old
We’ve discussed adults who persist in child stories, superheroes, and the like
BTW, I just saw the Goonies for the first time a few weeks ago. It was a decent movie, but it didn’t “grab” me the way it seemed to grab everybody else. That probably would have been different if I’d seen it when I was 9-12
I actually did see Star Wars when I was 12. In the theatre. When it first came out. Before the sequels, prequels, expanded universes, TV shows… THERE was a magic that can’t be recaptured!
Indeed, Dell — I have long been critical, as you know, of my generation’s nostalgic yearning for the Day-Glo decade through endless recapitulations of its pop culture — what’s known as “commercial adolescence.” (Christ, I recently read Ready Player Two — reviewed here — and it is seriously the most cynical, misanthropic, antihumanist, pro–corporate capitalism piece of shit ever produced. If over, say, the past 50 years, geek culture has evolved from a niche subculture to a socioreligious belief system, then Ready Player Two is nothing less than its Book of Revelation. It’s an absolutely staggering piece of work… though not for the reasons it thinks.)
I suppose, upon consideration of Vampires vs. the Bronx, et al., I wasn’t looking to feel like a 12-year-old boy so much as I wanted to be wowed like one again — the way movies used to wow me. This time of year always fills me with a sentimental longing for that sense of anticipation that once heralded the start of the summer-movie season — the excitement of having a new event movie, be it a sequel or otherwise, to go see!
But summer-movie season isn’t a thing anymore, and well within a decade, movies themselves — the two-hour, closed-ended, standalone feature film, that is — won’t be, either. Cinema, like comics, is no longer cultivating a younger audience; both art forms will before too long — whenever Gen X ages out — be relegated to the same pop-culture dustbin as the radio drama.
And even if viewer preferences and presentational modes weren’t seismically shifting — which, to be clear, they absolutely are — Hollywood is moribund, anyway. What will rise from its ashes remains to be seen, but it ain’t gonna be the renaissance-like resurgence of the feature film. That’s over, same as the internal-combustion engine.
That isn’t a good or bad thing, mind you — it’s just is what it is. (The end of movies, I mean, not the end of fossil fuels, which I very much support!) But as an Xer for whom the movies meant everything — as we’ll see in the next two installments of “Under the Influence” — I mourn them sometimes. I mourn the seasonal tradition and shared experience of the movies. Who knew when I went to see Knives Out in the fall of 2019 that it would be the last theatrical experience of my life? (Christ, at least it wasn’t Last Blood, which was my penultimate theatrical experience. As poetically apt as that would have been, it also would’ve been depressing as fuck.)
I’ve seen a good number of films over the past two decades that have impressed me, but I think the last blockbuster that wowed me was Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003. How ironic, then, that that was a story about a way of life, however fictionalized, that was approaching its cessation. Who knew, huh?
(I haven’t yet watched Andrew McCarthy’s documentary Brats, but this Salon article about it seems relevant to our conversation: “By making peace with The Brat Pack, Brats shows Generation X how to let go”)
On the subject of piracy: The Goonies came out when I was nine, and I saw it on VHS when I was ten or eleven, as I recall. I enjoyed it just fine — and I’ve enjoyed it the three or four times I’ve seen it, in full or in part, since — but for whatever reason it’s just never been a movie that resonated with me emotionally. I’ve only ever liked that movie, not loved it. I’m not sure why. On paper, a late-wave Xer like myself should hold The Goonies in the same vaulted esteem as Back to the Future and The Lost Boys and The Karate Kid and E.T., but it’s not a movie that inspired me, or that I ever owned a copy of on home video, or that I ever thought about if it wasn’t playing on the TV before my eyes. For me, The Goonies is filed in that same category of ’80s “classics” as Top Gun: I saw it when it came out; I remember the hype around it; I engaged in two or three schoolyard conversations about it; I didn’t carry it with me into adolescence or adulthood.
I’ll have more to say about this in the next post, but I suspect part of the reason I never meaningfully engaged with The Goonies is because I tended to relate to adolescent adventure stories in which the boys came from broken homes (E.T. and The Karate Kid and The Lost Boys) and/or dysfunctional families (Back to the Future and Stand by Me and, in the instance of Cameron Frye, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Every one of my friends — every one, without exception — hailed from a home blighted by either divorce or alcoholism or depression or infidelity or mental illness or some combination thereof. Everybody was fucked up.
Accordingly, I think I responded unconsciously when I saw familial dysfunction reflected in the movies of the ’80s, even — perhaps especially? — if it was just background detail. Whereas I saw myself and all my friends in Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern from Stand by Me, The Goonies‘ Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, and Data were just reductive archetypes — cartoon characters on a cartoon adventure, with no emotional stakes whatsoever. And there’s nothing wrong with that… but I suspect it’s the reason The Goonies neither spoke to me nor stayed with me like the films we’ll examine in “Under the Influence, Part 2.”
I was too young for Star Wars and Empire, but I absolutely recall seeing Return of the Jedi in theaters… and it took my seven-year-old breath away. I know it became fashionable in the ’90s, thanks to shit like Clerks, to crap on Jedi for its perceived kiddie-pandering, but Lucas never claimed to be making those movies for anyone but 12-year-old boys. It’s easy for geek-culture blogs and podcasts administered by middle-aged fanboys to reappraise this stuff from the perspective of 2024; it’s much harder to step back, thoughtfully and dispassionately, and appreciate those movies in the context of the time they were produced and through the eyes of their intended audience, an argument I made in “Superman IV at 35″ and “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” But, then, fandom bled all the fun — certainly any sense of magic — from pop culture a long time ago…
I… have a few “personal issues” that I could use for stories…
But, honestly, I do have trouble confronting them
And in actuallity, my issues, though painful to me, would most likely be banal to the reader
Well, that goes to the matter of “writing what you know,” something you and I were discussing last month, Dell.
I’ll provide very specific case studies for this in “Under the Influence, Part 2,” but “writing what you know” has, I think, three elemental components: influence, inspiration, and experience.
My influences are personal and varied, in accordance with Geddy Lee’s prescription for artistic originality, but they include the horror/comedies of the ’80s, the buddy comedies of the ’80s, the character melodramas of the ’90s (a subject into which we’ll delve in “Under the Influence, Part 3”), as well as my lifelong passion for environmentalism (first inspired by a fifth-grade class trip aboard the sloop Clearwater and then later quickened by An Inconvenient Truth around the time I turned 30) and social activism. All of those interests — and many more — had long since shaped the way I engage with the world around me.
Then I had a moment of inspiration watching The X-Files, wondering if a cryptid attack in Small Town, USA, would really be investigated by the FBI… or more likely fall under the purview of local Animal Control. An intellectual curiosity suggested a fictional scenario: dogcatcher vs. werewolf.
Then I drew on my own personal experiences to create that storyworld and break the plot: a trip I’d taken to Ithaca, New York (the setting of the story); having lived away in California for many years only to find myself home for good again (Jessie’s backstory); having volunteered for L.A. Animal Services (which informed the procedural protocols of Cornault Animal Control); my progressive politics (reflected in the mayor and Nick’s democratic socialism); the lifelong friendship I’ve maintained with the guy who grew up next door to me (the basis for Frank and Waff’s shared history); having lost a parent as a preteen (to divorce, not death, but still); having been in a healthy romantic relationship since I was very young (Nick and Laura’s marriage); and many, many other things I couldn’t even consciously account for. Every story detail was biographically and/or emotionally relatable to me… even if the story itself was pure fiction.
That’s writing what you know: when you fuse your influences with a spark of inspiration, then develop a premise into a narrative by drawing from personal experience to make the story emotionally honest/resonant. And I’m going to show how that was done in the next post by using several examples of commercial films from the 1980s…
I will add in closing that the trio of Out of the Bottle stories I’m currently writing are all deeply, even painfully, autobiographical… but they’re the best work I’ve ever produced. Ditto my novelization of The Lost Boys of the Bronx (or LB-BX, for short). Believe me when I tell you I’ve had days when I’ve been sorry I ever started down those roads — particularly with respect to LB-BX, which dredged up a lot of repressed pain — but there’s been tremendous catharsis in exchange for having undertaken those creative journeys.
And no, nothing about my own upbringing or personal issues is particularly special or interesting enough to warrant a true autobiography! So, I added a dash of magical realism (in the cases of Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O.) and heavily fictionalized the plots (particularly with regard to LB-BX), because factual truth isn’t the goal of good fiction — emotional truth is. (That and an entertaining yarn, of course. I guess the fourth and final component in the writing-what-you-know equation is imagination.) The best fiction is always emotionally truthful, which is the artful amalgamation of influence, inspiration, experience, and imagination — a.k.a. “writing what you know.”
Thinking about it…
I think one of the biggest influences on me might be Dungeons & Dragons and other table-top roleplaying games
A small group of people, with a variety of skills, working together. Even if there is a leader, no one character is the “main character”. It is an ensemble cast
I would imagine many members of our generation were influenced by D&D — particularly early Xers. It was really revolutionary: a board game with a sprawling mythology, structured as an interactive, open-ended, infinite-possibility narrative, where the objective isn’t to win, merely to keep the game going. It’s influence on videogame designers and postnarrative authors/screenwriters is quantum. When it was first published half a century ago, D&D was the perfect underground vehicle to beta-test “storyless fiction,” because there’s relatively little expense in creating a board game, in contrast with an MMORPG or a serialized television series.
D&D was also confined to a niche audience, which gave folks like Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson a certain degree of freedom to experiment — to fail and refine — and to build a ground-up fan base, much the way comic-book superheroes were niche entertainment before they went mainstream. D&D became the proof-of-concept model that allowed creatives to break away from the linear hero’s journey narrative model — which is ironic, given how heavily D&D drew inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, a textbook hero’s journey — and innovate new modes of storytelling.
Also: I’m no expert on the history of multimedia IPs, but I think it’s fair to say TSR was one of the first entertainment companies to capitalize on that concept, franchising D&D with official monthly magazines (Dragon and Dungeon), gamebooks (Endless Quest), a Saturday-morning cartoon, endless original novels, feature films (though a bit later), to say nothing of establishing a “shared universe” with Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and so on…
If you haven’t already read it, Dell, you might enjoy Gabrielle Zevin‘s 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Set primarily in the ’90s and ’00s, it’s about friendship and creativity and the ways in which videogames represent the challenges and unlimited possibilities of life itself. D&D is cited by the characters as an influence. It is, in every possible way, the anti–Ready Player One.