The Complete History of Quentin Tarantino Saying "? "

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Busta Carmichael
Busta Carmichael Members, Moderators Posts: 13,161 Regulator
edited December 2015 in For The Grown & Sexy
http://gawker.com/the-complete-history-of-quentin-tarantino-saying-nigge-1748731193
No contemporary white public figure has a more involved relationship to the word “? ” than Quentin Tarantino. He’s used it in screenplays since the beginning of his directing career, he’s been criticized (and defended) by black peers for it, and he’s explained his rationale for it several times in a variety of ways. Americans are obsessed with the word “? ,” a semantic memento of our country’s shameful founding legacy. But few white artists seem to me more obsessed than Tarantino.

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No contemporary white public figure has a more involved relationship to the word “? ” than Quentin Tarantino. He’s used it in screenplays since the beginning of his directing career, he’s been criticized (and defended) by black peers for it, and he’s explained his rationale for it several times in a variety of ways. Americans are obsessed with the word “? ,” a semantic memento of our country’s shameful founding legacy. But few white artists seem to me more obsessed than Tarantino.

The word is said roughly 65 times in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a post-Civil War Western that takes place in Wyoming. Maybe if I liked the movie more, and found it all around less tedious and its characters worth caring about, that would have been less distracting. But it did distract me, and that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue character gets called a “? ” repeatedly and is brutally beaten by the movie’s male characters (chiefly, Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter John Ruth) provides no contrasting comfort. If it is a matter of historical accuracy that Samuel L. Jackson’s character should be referred to as such dozens of times, the presence of modern phrases like “? up,” and “I don’t know about all that” suggests a selectiveness when it comes to keeping the language in step with the time portrayed.

At this point, especially after the relentless use of “? ” in his last movie, 2012’s Django Unchained, I can’t help but wonder if Tarantino is inventing excuses, via his films’ premises, to have his characters use “? ” as many times as possible in a single movie. He knows what he’s doing—his will is as explicit onscreen as the violence and dirtbag characters in his movie. He has acknowledged, specifically, the power of the word “? ,” telling The Australian in a 1998: “When you’re talking about the word ‘? ’, you’re talking about probably the most volatile word there is in the English language. The N-word is a word we can’t even say out loud. It has that much power.”

And yet, Tarantino has said it—through his characters (including the one he played in Pulp Fiction)—repeatedly in public for over 20 years. The Hateful Eight inspired me to look back at Tarantino’s history with the word—his often unsatisfying reasons for using it in his work as much as he does, the controversy it has caused, the feuds it inspired. I’m less interested in shaming Tarantino for his artistic decisions, or his comfort in using a word that makes so many uncomfortable, than I am in exploring and contextualizing, as I find much of his on-record discussion on this matter to be telling in itself.

Before we look at the press, though, here’s a a chronological compilation of the usage of “? ” in the films he wrote to date (except for The Hateful Eight). This includes True Romance, which Tarantino wrote but did not direct, and is for the sake of putting this in cinematic context:
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