A Fistful of Ethics: Tarantino and Spaghetto Western's alienating moral code (Patreon)

The only thing that can stop a maniacal serial killer with a gun is a quieter killer with a gun.

Quentin Tarantino makes no secret of his debt to Spaghetti Westerns, but the debt is more subtle than he gets credit for. He doesn’t simply copy shots from director-Sergios Leone and Corbucci, though let’s not forget that Reservoir Dogs’ infamous scene where Michael Madsen cuts off a cop’s ear while listening to Sixties one-hit-wonder’s Stealers Wheel’s one hit “Stuck in the Middle With You” comes from an even more gruesome scene in Corbucci’s Django.

But Tarantino’s character-writing is also indebted to Spaghetti Westerns. The ways in which he steals from Leone and Corbucci are ultimately part of his storytelling. Kill Bill’s use of wide shots creates an almost Brechtian sense of alienation, as Kill Bill is far less about emotionally identifiable drama than an almost experimental approach to action filmmaking.

Beatrix Kiddo is a fairly Brechtian protagonist, far removed from any sort of relatable human experience. She’s a superhuman killer who’d be only somewhat out of place as a villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The camera in Kill Bill treats its characters as alien objects in a more alien way Tarantino’s first three would do. It’s not that Tarantino rips off Leone’s visual style: he’s dialoguing with the code of ethics Leone’s characters follow.

Tarantino has pointed out that Spaghetti Western’s protagonists would be villains in different movies, and that their heroism is entirely predicated on the antagonists being even worse. Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name is instinctually homicidal, as he guns down strangers for laughing at him in A Fistful of Dollars. Yet he has flashes of decency. When Eastwood witnesses a Civil War battle in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he almost seems to grieve the carnage: “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly.”

Tarantino’s protagonists operate similarly: they tend to be murderous criminal scumbags. But like Vito Corleone or any good movie mob boss, they usually only kill under severe provocation by even more murderous or criminal scumbags (or if they hit a speed bump and accidentally blow their passenger’s brains all over the backseat of a 1974 Chevrolet Nova).

Tarantino’s protagonists tend to have a strong sense of loyalty and camaraderie. Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction are best friends who murder people together. There’s never a sense they’re going to turn on each other: a job is a job, even if it means blowing each other’s brains out. Jules even has a come to Jesus moment after miraculously surviving gunfire. These characters have ethics: not good ethics, but coherent ones.

The closest Spaghetti Westerns get to a morally grounded hero is Franco Nero’s Django. Django appears to be neither a rapist nor a murderer of annoying civilians. His backstory is blessedly unexplained — he seems to be a Union cavalry veteran fighting Confederates and Klansmen out of a moral duty. Yet there’s a real despair to his heroism that’s absent from Leone. He spends half the movie at the grave of a woman named Mercedes (wisely unidentified by the movie, although Tarantino has a fun theory about her). Corbucci has an obsession with mutilating his Western heroes’ hands, the chief weapon of a gunslinger. It’s an inspiring movie in a bleak way, although not nearly as bleak as Corbucci’s followup The Great Silence, where the mutilation of the hero’s hands ultimately gets him killed.

Django gets to be both alien and morally upright as a protagonist. Tarantino follows suit to an extent in some of his post-Kill Bill movies. Alright, The Hateful Eight is a gleeful mutilation of Western heroism that would make Leone think twice, but Inglourious Basterds has some fairly alienating, unnatural characters with some pretty clear moral ideas about what to do with Nazis (it’s the correct one — shoot and scalp the motherfuckers).

Tarantino, Leone and Corbucci push against the heroism of the classical Western, which is predicated on genocidal bloodshed and afterwards erasing the carnage (look at Shane, with its saccharine view of the Old West). They face the white supremacism of Westerns head on, especially Corbucci. Having emotionally identifiable characters is simply missing the point. The Western hero has exsanguinated himself. All that’s left is to spill other people’s blood. If we’re lucky, that blood will belong to Nazis and Klansmen.