The Hateful Eight Review
*Previously written and reposted here.
Watching the The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, I found myself arrested by the force with which the story was told. Hateful Eight centers on the relationships between eight people, known for and connected by their prior reputations more than anything else. On its surface, the film is about bounty hunter John Ruth’s mission to complete another successful hunt, but the actual meaning of the film is more complex.
The specter of race looms large in it, and Tarantino addresses the issue by setting the film only a few years after the events of the American Civil War. The ghost of that war hovers over and haunts the characters in the film, and apparently still haunt us today—a recent mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina testifies to the fact. Making a movie set in the late 1800’s both timely and appropriate. Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a decorated army veteran who is now himself a renowned bounty hunter. He is black, and the other characters are indignant over having to deal with his presence. To my mind, Warren represents the coming of a new negro, a phrase later taken up during the Harlem Renaissance which symbolized the kind of black person who outspoken in their refusal to accept the indignities of American society.
The encounter that plays out frightful and electrifying, but first there is a series of half-hearted attempts from the other characters to restrain their hostility towards Warren, mostly owed to his reputation as a man highly capable of killing. Tarantino writes Warren as a character whose intellectual prowess matches is subtly displayed, skillfully employed, and certainly surpasses his physical skills. This quality is established early on and reinforced throughout the film, not by making Warren appear superhuman, but by highlighting the other character’s failure to recognize him as human at all.
As could be expected from this director given his past proclivity, The Hateful Eight is littered with the N-word. Though it used often, the word feels less out of place in this film than it does in other films like Django Unchained or Pulp Fiction. The historical setting makes the harsh dialogue plausible, and the acting performances mostly make the use of the word believable. Not excusable, then or now, but believable that the N-word would be used by white men as a sort of power grab, to put Major Warren back in his place, and reassure themselves of their own. In similar fashion, the B-word is frequently directed at Daisy, the only prominent female character in the film, which seemed too illicit less powerful reactions from the audience. Why is this so? Why do we cringe at the on-screen use of the N-word but not the B-word, similarly used to dismiss and dehumanize?
Who exactly is Daisy and what does she mean to this film? Of the prominent characters, her story is the most underdeveloped. She is branded as a ruthless criminal, but we do not know to what extent this is true, and in a film where the relativity of truth is an important theme, this lack of explanation cannot be overlooked. Daisy seems to serve as a vessel for the other characters to act out their own pent-up anger towards women. Some of the characters consider her a devil, while others think her life is worth saving, and each character's belief about her fate doubles as a window into their definition of justice. Is it cold and dispassionate, or is it emotionally tinged?
These ideas about justice are also seen through the ways the characters interact with each other. John Ruth is the easy choice for an example of dispassionate justice, but even he falls short of this ideal. They all do, which may be the point—these American made figures cannot possibly live up to their own moral codes, and when it is a choice between them and the other, such codes are easily abandoned.
Beyond race and gender, The Hateful Eight is commentary more on the overall idea of identity. Flashbacks, and well-crafted dialogues highlight the fluidity of identity, and how quickly it can shift. The characters' behaviors, and perceptions of each other, as well as the viewer’s perception of them, changes at a dizzying pace. This pace does not set a new standard for Tarantino films, but in the past, the frenetic pace left some viewers confused, and others dissatisfied, and it is better executed in The Hateful Eight. By confining most of the film to a single room, Tarantino creates a world that is less open and sprawling, while maintaining his style as a filmmaker. The result is a film that operates well on multiple levels, at once being easy enough to follow, and at the same time complex and layered.
Will the audience understand the message? Will they understand that Tarantino is critiquing race relations in America on multiple levels? I fear that the humorous moments laced throughout the film will provide people with enough justification to gloss over the more serious aspects of the work. Especially people who still today harbor the same hateful attitudes as the film’s titular characters. More than anything, with The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino deftly shrinks down a significant piece of the American experiment and places it into one room, serving as a metaphorical melting pot. He captures all the madness that is produced as result of this experiment called America, and the taste of redemption we get when this experiment functions as intended, however short and fleeting those moments may be.