The Nature of Surrealism and “True Reality” in Quentin Tarantino’s Films In one of the most penetrating scenes of Reservoir Dogs (1992), Mr. Blonde, played by Michael Madsen, turns on his favorite radio station and begins dancing around a warehouse room to the song Stuck in the Middle with You. With a clean suit on and a knife in hand, he approaches Marvin, a cop who has been bound and gagged, with a face already bloodied from a previous beating. The camera pans left to an empty doorway, and the sound of rustling can be heard between the song and the sound of Marvin’s muffled screams. Suddenly, Mr. Blonde enters the frame holding a bloody dismembered ear and a bloody knife. He holds the ear up to his mouth and jokingly says something into it. He laughs, and Marvin screams; he dances around, and Marvin writhes in pain. The juxtaposition of Mr. Blonde’s psychopathic cheerfulness and Marvin’s severe agony is a classic example of surrealism, which is a form of artistic expression in which the workings of the subconscious mind are privileged, and the emphasis is on a blending of fantasy and reality. Surrealism juxtaposes images and situations that are somewhere in between a sort of dream-like, subconscious state and reality. Surrealism – especially the kind we see in Quentin Tarantino’s films -- also reflects a postmodernist perspective on reality and the subconscious. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (1994) are perhaps the most revealing films of Tarantino’s filmmaking style and postmodern philosophy. The outlandish and bizarre storylines, the witty dialogue, and the cartoonish aspects of his characters create a surreal effect. The intertwining of a fantasttic and cerebral experience with a hyperbolic visceral experience introduces us to a dreamlike, subconscious realm. A good example of this surrealism is the use of wardrobe homogeneity in both films. In Reservoir Dogs, the heist team members wear matching uniforms (black suits with white buttoned-up shirts and black ties); they are each stripped of their “Christian” names and given color-coded names, and they are forbidden to speak about their personal lives or to associate with one another in any way beyond the heist. In Pulp Fiction, there is a similar use of homogeneity amongst the gangsters, as they also wear matching black suit uniforms. This particular use of uniforms and sameness strips each character of his individuality, and, in effect, they merge together to become a separate entity in itself. There is no longer a sense of “real” people, rather a sense of separate surreal forces. In one scene of Reservoir Dogs, for example, Mr. Pink (played by Steve Buscemi) and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) talk about the robbery that went sour. When Mr. Pink asks Mr. White if he has killed anyone, Mr. White responds, “A few cops,” to which Mr. Pink responds with the question, “No real people?” The dialogue illustrates that not only have the heist members ...

1. The Nature of Surrealism and “True Reality” in
Quentin Tarantino’s Films
In one of the most penetrating scenes of Reservoir Dogs
(1992), Mr. Blonde, played by
Michael Madsen, turns on his favorite radio station and begins
dancing around a warehouse
room to the song Stuck in the Middle with You. With a clean
suit on and a knife in hand, he
approaches Marvin, a cop who has been bound and gagged, with
a face already bloodied
from a previous beating. The camera pans left to an empty
doorway, and the sound of rustling
can be heard between the song and the sound of Marvin’s
muffled screams. Suddenly, Mr.
Blonde enters the frame holding a bloody dismembered ear and
a bloody knife. He holds the
ear up to his mouth and jokingly says something into it. He
laughs, and Marvin screams; he
dances around, and Marvin writhes in pain. The juxtaposition of
Mr. Blonde’s psychopathic
cheerfulness and Marvin’s severe agony is a classic example of
surrealism, which is a form
of artistic expression in which the workings of the subconscious
mind are privileged, and the

2. emphasis is on a blending of fantasy and reality. Surrealism
juxtaposes images and situations
that are somewhere in between a sort of dream-like,
subconscious state and reality. Surrealism
– especially the kind we see in Quentin Tarantino’s films --
also reflects a postmodernist
perspective on reality and the subconscious.
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (1994) are perhaps the most
revealing films of
Tarantino’s filmmaking style and postmodern philosophy. The
outlandish and bizarre
storylines, the witty dialogue, and the cartoonish aspects of his
characters create a surreal
effect. The intertwining of a fantasttic and cerebral experience
with a hyperbolic visceral
experience introduces us to a dreamlike, subconscious realm. A
good example of this
surrealism is the use of wardrobe homogeneity in both films. In
Reservoir Dogs, the heist
team members wear matching uniforms (black suits with white
buttoned-up shirts and black
ties); they are each stripped of their “Christian” names and
given color-coded names, and they
are forbidden to speak about their personal lives or to associate
with one another in any way
beyond the heist.
In Pulp Fiction, there is a similar use of homogeneity

3. amongst the gangsters, as they also
wear matching black suit uniforms. This particular use of
uniforms and sameness strips each
character of his individuality, and, in effect, they merge
together to become a separate entity
in itself. There is no longer a sense of “real” people, rather a
sense of separate surreal forces.
In one scene of Reservoir Dogs, for example, Mr. Pink (played
by Steve Buscemi) and Mr.
White (Harvey Keitel) talk about the robbery that went sour.
When Mr. Pink asks Mr. White if
he has killed anyone, Mr. White responds, “A few cops,” to
which Mr. Pink responds with the
question, “No real people?” The dialogue illustrates that not
only have the heist members
lost a sense of their own selves and identity, but they are also
quickly losing their grasp on
reality with respect to other “real people” in their surreal state
of existence.
The loss of one’s grip on reality illustrates the presence
of a dream-like world, one that
opens the subconscious “eye.” Constant switches from
normality to hyper violence, and the
juxtaposition of pain and pleasure, or crime and humor,
ultimately question the validity of
“reality.” Through the medium of the cinema, Tarantino is able
to create these unnerving and
illogical scenes that illustrate a deeper realm of existence. If we
create our own “reality” with
made-up expectations, definitions, and structures, then there is
hardly any separation between
the waking life, in which we follow the uniform rules of
society, and a fantastical dream world
where we make up our own rules. The only difference between

4. the two experiences must,
therefore, lie in the homogeneity of social rules in the waking
life. Similar to the use of
uniforms amongst the robbers and gangsters in Pulp Fiction and
Reservoir Dogs, we use
definition and language to strip ourselves of individual
experience and become the entity
which we call society. The question is whether we see
ourselves as “real people,” or simply as
a small, irrelevant part of a larger community in our waking
life.
In Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace is immediately resurrected
from the dead with a quick stab
of adrenalin to her heart; in Reservoir Dogs, almost everyone’s
first name is Mister. In a
Quentin Tarantino film, there is not much that makes sense with
respect to “real” world rules.
The surreal visceral experience we can take from his films,
however, begs the question of
what reality “really” is, because, although the films present
surreal and untrue conditions, the
experience of watching the films is undeniably real and true.
We cannot consider ourselves
“real” people when we are simply a small piece of a larger
entity, and we cannot consider our
reality a “true” reality if we never alter our perception, as
perception breeds experience, and
experience defines our existence. The one realm where rules are

5. bent and broken – the realm
of the subconscious – is where our true reality thus lies.
Notes on the Development of Film Noir and Neo-Noir Film and
Some of the Thematic and Stylistic Devices Used in These
Films
Film noir is both a genre and a style of films made first,
between 1941 and 1958 (the classic film noir period), then,
between 1960 and 1980 (the modernist neo-noir period), and
finally, between 1981 and the present (the postmodernist neo-
noir period), and characterized by the use of all or some of the
following thematic devices:
1) an anti-hero protagonist who, although essentially a
good guy, makes questionable moral decisions;
2) a general mood of dislocation and bleakness;
3) the inversion of traditional values and the
corresponding moral ambivalence;
4) the feeling of alienation, paranoia, and cynicism;
5) the presence of crime and violence as social criticism;
6) the disorientation of the viewer, which is in large part
accomplished by the use of the following cinematic techniques
which are the basic stylistic devices of film noir and neo-noir
film:
1) the use of unconventional or nonclassical narrative
patterns which point to the problems of truth and objectivity
and our ability to know and understand reality -- the very basis
of post-Nietzschean, Existentialist, Modernist (and
Postmodernist) thought (see below);
2) the constant opposition of light and shadow;
3) oblique camera angles, and their disruptive
compositional balance of frames and scenes;

6. 4) the way characters are placed in awkward and
unconventional positions within shots;
5) the non-chronological ordering of events, often
achieved through flashbacks;
6) incoherent plot lines;
7) characters whose actions are not motivated or
understandable in any rational way.
The classic film noir period is generally accepted to begin with
director John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), and continue
through the 1940's and '50's with films such as Billy Wilder's
Double Indemnity (1944), Tay Garnett's The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1946), Howard Hawkes' The Big Sleep (1946),
Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), Orson Welles' The
Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (19408), John
Farrow's The Big Clock (1948), Carol Reed's The Third Man
(1949), and Orson Welles' Man in the Shadows (1952), to name
just a few, and end with Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).
The modernist neo-noir period is generally thought to begin
with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), John Boorman's
Point Blank (1967), Rene Clement's Purple Rain (1960), Roman
Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver
(1976) and Raging Bull (1980), and the postmodern neo-noir
period to continue through the 1980's and '90's with films such
as Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), Ridley Scott's Blade
Runner (1982), David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Roger
Donaldson's No Way Out (1987), the Coen Brothers' Fargo
(1996), Quentin Tarrantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp
Fiction (1994), David Fincher's Fight Club (1996), and
Christopher Nolan's The Following (1998), Memento (2002),
and The Dark Knight (2008), and the Coen Brothers' The Man
Who Wasn't There (2001), to name just a few.
Noir is a way of looking at the world, an outlook on life and
human existence, which, according to film scholar and

7. philosopher Mark Conrad, essentially derives from the work of
Frederich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher who
famously said, "God is dead." What Nietzsche meant by his
controversial statement is that empirical science has replaced
metaphysical (religious and philosophical) explanations for the
creation of the universe, and, therefore, the traditional Judeo-
Christian biblical (and other) creation stories are no longer seen
as a viable explanation for the origins, meaning, and purpose of
human life.
For the most part. Nietzsche's philosophy also implied that the
"grand narratives/metanarratives" of Western thought were
equally invalid and made irrelevant as notions of absolute or
universal "Truth," thus rendering human beings without a
reliable and unchanging moral structure and code to live by, a
world view which is clearly seen in the "existential angst"
experienced by the protagonists of writers such as Jean-Paul
Sartre, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett . A predominantly
pessimistic -- and even cynical -- view about the nature and
purpose of human life had earlier emerged in the literature of
the mid- to late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to
Emersonian Transcendentalism, and was the predominant view
of life expressed in the "realist" and "naturalist" literature of
writers such as Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Edgar Allan
Poe ( "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Telltale
Heart,""The Raven"), and later, in what came to be called the
"existentialist" literature of the early to mid-20th century. In
these works, loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, and a
general feeling of anxiety and insecurity are prevalent, and
death and/or destruction are seen as more characteristic of
human existence than any joy or happiness could ever be. In the
play No Exit by the French Existentialist writer Jean-Paul
Sartre, for example, there is no escape from the world of
meaninglessness, purposelessness, sadness, and moral
ambiguity. And in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger and
Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, the anti-hero

8. protagonists live in a disenchanted world, one that is not so
benign, and one that they can neither fully escape nor fully
embrace.
The "black vision" of film noir, then, is one of despair,
loneliness, and dread, which is nothing less than an "existential"
attitude towards life deriving from from Nietzschean
philosophy, the "realist," then "naturalist," traditions expressed
in 19th century American literature in response to Emersonian
Transcendentalism, and later the writers of pulp fiction, the so-
called "hardboiled" school of writers, such as Dashiell
Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, and David Goodis,
all of whom emphasize the seeming indifference -- and even
hostility at times -- of the world of nature to its human
inhabitants.
For further reading on this subject, I recommend the first five
following essays, which can be found in The Philosophy of Film
Noir, edited by Mark T. Conrad, and published by The
University Press of Kentucky in 2006, and the next seven,
which can be found in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir Film, also
edited by Mark T. Conrad and published by The University
Press of Kentucky in 2009: