Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
A double session, with papers on Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.
Monika Loewy (Goldsmiths):
'Death Proof: Proof of and Against Breaking Down'
This paper develops psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s essay “Fear of Breakdown” through Quentin Tarantino’s film Death Proof. Winnicott’s essay theorizes that people traumatized when young may be disturbed by psychotic tendencies and a drive to death, which can be worked through in a therapeutic “breakdown.” I argue that protagonist Stuntman Mike represents the agony and fracture that haunts the traumatized subject in Winnicott’s model, and that the girls in the first half of the movie represent the traumatized subject. The car accident in the middle of the film parallels the breakdown that occurs in therapy, while the second half of the movie exemplifies Winnicott’s notion of healthy independence that is sought out through psychoanalysis.
To illustrate, I will discuss why Stuntman Mike symbolizes Winnicott’s notion of an internal void, how this is manifested through the girls’ actions and relationships in the first half of the film, and how their deadly accident reflects Winnicott’s notion of a breakdown. Central is that both the girls and stuntman reflect the psychotic subject, because they protectively cut themselves off from others to pursue and hide from death.
The paper will then show how the second half of the movie, in which the characters survive the crash, presents us with a different fiction to recuperate the loss of the other characters and indicate a movement towards independence. Moreover, through the film’s form (which sets out to revisit a previous genre of film), a space is opened for the audience to reconstruct preconceived notions (of self and other) and feel traces their own related emotions; reflective of both the characters’ and the analyzand’s experience.
Chris Lloyd (Goldsmiths):
'“F*ing Around on Tobacco Road”: Female Revenge,Genre-play, and the Southern Road Movie'
Paired as it is with Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof insists that we see it in terms of couplings and doubles. Tracing these doubles to begin with will enable us to acknowledge the ultimately dual and conflicted nature of Tarantino’s film. I suggest that in the film’s two distinct halves, Death Proof plays not only with cinematic form and audience expectations, but also genre. Death Proof hinges, I suggest, upon the inscription and simultaneous deconstruction of filmic genre: notably the American car-chase movie so popular in the 1970s.
These car-oriented films – replete with chases, fetishized technology, amped-up masculinity – were often, furthermore, set in the American Deep South. These locales served multiple purposes, not least a particular sense of place and small-town (back road) life. Tarantino, setting his film in two Southern locations (note the further double), engages with a very specific American landscape and geography, at the heart of which is a playful but serious consideration of regional signifiers.
Finally, this brings me to recognize the importance of women in Death Proof. With Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, Tarantino has already revealed the complex ways in which women are depicted on screen, and how the male gaze can – and has been – disturbed and challenged. The female doubles in this film charge Death Proof with a revenge narrative that seeks to turn the tables: gender-wise, generically and cinematically. More than a parody, or nostalgia for an old genre then, Death Proof is evidence, if needed, of Tarantino’s forceful and engaged dialogue with the history of film and the places it can yet go.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Jan 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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