Characters in Quentin Tarantino movies tend not to have the greatest life expectancies. Before those end credits roll, his people are likely to be shot, stabbed, dismembered, and even Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Techniqued to death. A character might enter a Tarantino movie with a lot of misplaced confidence, sharply dressed and quick with the witty repartee, but exit it as a bloody mess, sprawled all over the floor and wondering where it all went wrong. That’s the kind of thing that happens over and over in “First And Last Appearance Of Quentin Tarantino Films,” a new supercut from Spanish filmmaker Albert Gómez. He’s juxtaposed the first and final views that audiences get of particular characters, be it Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White from Reservoir Dogs or Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candle from Django Unchained. The video is organized chronologically: film by film, character by character.
First and last Appearance of Quentin Tarantino films. from Room 237 on Vimeo.
This supercut offers viewers the opportunity to reflect on how Tarantino treats his characters and uses violence in his films. Even when surrounded by blood-soaked fare, Death Proof seems particularly brutal in this context, surely living up to the “death” part of its title. One curveball here is that Tarantino is famous for telling his stories out of order, relying heavily on flashbacks and flash-forwards. The last time the audience sees a character on screen might not be the end of that character’s story. He or she might have been killed off already in another part of the movie. It’s that particular gimmick that allows John Travolta’s Pulp Fiction character, hitman and hophead Vincent Vega, to enter and exit this supercut in one piece.