THE GEOMETRY OF VIOLENCE
A Conversation on Tarantino & Fincher

VOICES:
HOST A — measured, structuralist, loves pattern and form
HOST B — visceral, instinctive, defends the gut over the diagram

A: I want to start with a heresy. Tarantino and Fincher are the same filmmaker.
B: Absolutely not.
A: Hear me out. Both of them treat the camera as a scalpel. Both of them are obsessed with process, with the meticulous unfolding of a thing. The difference is just temperature. Fincher is forty-two degrees and Tarantino is a hundred and four. But the operation underneath? Identical.
B: No, no, no. The temperature IS the thing. You don't get to wave that away. Fincher is a man who shoots ninety takes because he wants to drain the performance of any human accident. Tarantino wants the accident. Tarantino wants you to feel that Samuel L. Jackson just thought of something. They're not the same filmmaker. They're not even in the same religion.
A: But they're praying to the same god.
B: Which is?
A: Control. Total, absolute, frame-by-frame control of the audience's nervous system. Fincher does it with darkness and stillness. Tarantino does it with words and rupture. But the goal is the same. They want you in a vise.
B: Okay. I'll give you that. They're both control freaks. But the direction of the control is opposite. Fincher wants to make you small. He wants you to feel that the universe is indifferent and possibly malevolent and you, sitting in your seat, are a tiny meat thing that will eventually be put in a box. Tarantino wants to make you large. He wants you to feel that being alive is the most exciting thing that has ever happened. Watch the diner scene in Pulp Fiction back to back with the opening of Se7en. One is a celebration. One is a verdict.
A: That's good. That's very good. But I'd push back on the verdict part. Fincher isn't nihilist. Fincher is moral. Se7en is a film about a man who believes the world is sick and decides to perform surgery on it. The film does not endorse him. It is horrified by him. Fight Club is a film about a man who builds a movement and discovers he has built a cult. The film does not endorse him. Zodiac is a film about obsession destroying three lives in pursuit of nothing. Fincher is the most ethically anxious filmmaker working in American cinema.
B: And Tarantino?
A: Tarantino is a filmmaker who has never made a film about consequences.
B: Now you're picking a fight.
A: I'm describing what's on the screen. Tarantino films exist in a moral universe where violence has style, weight, and craft, but it does not have aftermath. People die and the camera moves on. The Bride kills eighty-eight people and we cheer. Hans Landa is shot in the forehead and we cheer. Hitler is machine-gunned in a movie theater and we cheer. Tarantino has built a cinema of righteous catharsis. Fincher has built a cinema of the bill coming due.
B: But that's exactly why they belong in conversation. They are the two halves of how American cinema processes violence after Vietnam, after Reagan, after the nineties. Tarantino says: violence is fun, violence is style, violence is justice when the right person pulls the trigger. Fincher says: violence is rot, violence is what's underneath, violence is the thing you cannot scrub off the bathroom floor no matter how long you try. They are the thesis and the antithesis.
A: And what's the synthesis?
B: I don't know that there is one. I think they're the two engines and American cinema runs on both.
A: Let me try one. The synthesis is that both of them understand cinema is fundamentally a machine for the manipulation of time. Tarantino chops time up. Pulp Fiction is famous for it but Reservoir Dogs did it first and Jackie Brown did it best. He fragments chronology because he wants you to experience consequence before cause. You meet the dead man before you meet the living one. Fincher does the opposite. Fincher slows time down until you can hear it tick. The Zodiac killer drives a woman and her baby down a country road for what feels like nine minutes. The Social Network unspools a deposition over two hours and the deposition is the present and the past is the flashback. Both of them are saying: you do not own time, the filmmaker owns time, sit down.
B: Okay that's the best thing you've said.
A: Thank you.
B: But I want to add something to it. The thing they share that nobody talks about is that they're both filmmakers of the second viewing. Tarantino films reward you for noticing that the same briefcase shows up in three movies. Fincher films reward you for noticing that the killer is in the frame in act one. Both of them are making films for an audience that owns the film. That is a post-VHS, post-DVD, post-streaming sensibility. Their entire aesthetic assumes you will watch this thing more than once. Spielberg doesn't assume that. Scorsese doesn't really assume that. Tarantino and Fincher are the first major American directors who built their style around rewatchability.
A: That's a generational point. They came up in video stores. Tarantino literally worked in one. Fincher came up cutting music videos which is the most rewatched art form of the eighties. They are children of the loop.
B: Right. And that changes everything about what a movie is for. A Spielberg film is a ride. You get on, you scream, you get off. A Tarantino film or a Fincher film is a puzzle box. You take it home. You open it again. You find new compartments.
A: So if they're both puzzle box filmmakers, what's the difference between the boxes?
B: Tarantino's box is full of references. You open it and there's a Sonny Chiba poster, a Brian De Palma split diopter, a piece of dialogue lifted from a 1973 grindhouse film nobody saw. Fincher's box is full of evidence. You open it and there's a fingerprint, a phone record, a frame where someone's eye twitched in a way you didn't catch the first time. Tarantino is curating a record collection. Fincher is building a case file.
A: And what does that tell us about them as artists?
B: It tells us Tarantino loves cinema and Fincher does not trust it.
A: Say more.
B: Tarantino believes movies are the highest form of human expression and his job is to add to the canon. Every film he makes is an act of love directed at the films that made him. Fincher believes movies are a kind of trick, a manipulation, and his job is to perform the trick so flawlessly that you can feel the wires even as you fail to see them. That is why his films feel cold. He is showing you the apparatus while it works on you. It is a fundamentally suspicious art form in his hands. Tarantino has never made a suspicious frame in his life. Tarantino believes.
A: So one is a believer and one is a skeptic.
B: One is a believer and one is a forensic scientist.
A: Last question. If you could put one of them in a room with the other and ask one question, what would it be?
B: I'd ask Fincher to watch the farmhouse scene in Inglourious Basterds and tell me, honestly, whether he thinks Tarantino is doing something he himself cannot do. Because that scene is twenty minutes of two men talking and the tension is unbearable and there is no editing trick, there is no Fincher-style coverage, there is just language and faces. And I think Fincher, who is the most technically formidable director of his generation, would have to admit that there is a thing Tarantino can do with a page of dialogue that no amount of takes can manufacture.
A: And what would you ask Tarantino?
B: I'd ask him to watch the basement scene in Zodiac. The one where Graysmith goes to the house and the man says "I do the posters" and the floor creaks upstairs. And I'd ask him whether he, who is the most verbally gifted director alive, has ever achieved that kind of dread without a single line of dialogue carrying the weight. Because Fincher in that scene is doing something Tarantino has never tried to do. He is making fear out of architecture.
A: So they each have something the other doesn't.
B: They each have the thing the other gave up to get good.
A: That's a hell of a place to end.
B: Then let's end there.