The Heist with No Crime Scene

The Heist with No Crime Scene

It is hard to believe that Reservoir Dogs was a debut feature made with the $50,000 Quentin Tarantino earned by selling a script while working as a clerk at an ordinary video rental store in Los Angeles. From its style and narrative structure to its characters, the film is deeply impressive. It is already full of Tarantino’s personal signature, a signature that would later be fully developed and deepened in his subsequent films, becoming one of the most distinctive currents in Hollywood cinema: clever, fragmented storytelling; bizarre accidents and unexpected turns; bloody violence infused with black humor... All of these elements, blended together in Tarantino’s films, give both the man and his movies a strange and irresistible charm.

Like other quintessential Tarantino films—and that phrase will probably come up more than once below—Reservoir Dogs does not tell a particularly complicated story: a group of robbers who do not know one another carry out a failed heist under the leadership of the boss Joe, and the film follows what happens afterward. To emphasize the fact that these men are already “reservoir dogs,” the movie focuses much more on the second half of the story—after the robbery. More precisely, perhaps because of budget limitations, or perhaps because it was part of the director’s plan from the beginning, Reservoir Dogs, as a heist film, is unique in that it never shows a single shot of the robbery itself. The only two scenes connected to the crime are sketched out through some hurried running and a few rough gunshots: once when Mr. Pink escapes the scene, and once when Mr. White and Mr. Orange flee afterward. As for Mr. Blue and the other one—whose color I have already forgotten—they never appear again after the opening scene.

All of those blanks are filled in through storytelling. Tarantino not only boldly lets his characters narrate large chunks of plot, he also uses a story within the film to show the audience how storytelling works—details matter. Mr. Orange’s story about encountering police officers in a restroom is, to some extent, inserted to demonstrate the principles of telling a convincing story. In this film, the reliance on such stories may partly be due to budget constraints—just a guess—but more importantly, it reflects Tarantino’s command over script, scene, and audience. Through plot design, performances, and the sheer charm of the screenplay, he is able to hold the viewer’s attention through dialogue alone, without needing lavish special effects or action scenes to fill in the gaps. This theatrical kind of appeal would be displayed even more vividly in his next film, Pulp Fiction.

In fact, to a considerable extent, Reservoir Dogs feels more like an experiment leading toward Pulp Fiction, while the latter is a fuller expansion of what the former set out to do. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino as a director is more professionally assured, the script itself is richer and more complete, and the interwoven narrative and dialogue show a more fully realized Tarantino style. Even the scene of someone being shot in the back seat is almost identical in both films—though the timing and manner of the shooting differ slightly, the image of the back seat turned into total chaos is nearly the same. Tarantino seems especially fond of this kind of scene; perhaps before he ever became a director, he had already imagined it over and over while driving down the road himself.

Beyond that, Reservoir Dogs also feels in many ways more like an outline, a sketching-in of ideas, as if it were an attempt and preparation for Tarantino’s later films. Of course, that is not to deny that Reservoir Dogs itself is already worthy of being counted among great films. In terms of characterization, the major figures are all distinctive, yet they remain somewhat thin, more like symbols than fully vivid people. Tarantino’s scenes recounting each character’s background also feel detached from the main thread and somewhat scattered. Although the narrative style already bears the hallmarks of classic Tarantino, the director is clearly not yet fully mature in every respect.

After watching Reservoir Dogs, I cannot help but think of Jin Yong’s The Book and the Sword. It has its flaws, but it remains a classic. More importantly, it marks a milestone in the path by which a great director—or writer—becomes truly great.