Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema of Vibes

If you’ve ever listened to Quentin Tarantino talk—while on a late-night couch, say, or when he’s visiting a podcast—you will recognize the tone and cadence of the writing in Cinema Speculation. The book feels less typed out than dictated, as if he finally has the captive audience he’s always yearned for and he’s got a lot of things to get off his chest.

I mean this in the best way possible, as Quentin Tarantino is one of the most interesting filmmakers on the planet. He’s an inveterate raconteur, less conversationalist than lecturer, one whose head is overflowing with trivia about which Los Angeles dives were playing which cut-rate exploitation pictures at what point in his childhood. And much of the book’s early going is concerned with those dives and those exploitation flicks, as well as the cineaste’s own earned bravado.

“Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates,” he says after recounting being taken to the theater by his folks (and, later, his mom and her suitors) to see films like M*A*S*H and The French Connection as a tween. “And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was.”

Again, if you’re familiar with the man’s voice, you can practically hear him saying those lines, perhaps emphasizing “because” in each sentence, eyebrows arching and voice inflecting a notch higher on the “they were right.” It’s almost eerie. I loved every page of it.

Cinema Speculation is part memoir, part critical essay, part lament for a past that has departed. Early on he discusses his mother’s theory of violence onscreen—that the act itself is less important than the context in which it occurs—and notes that “this would be a conversation I would have for the rest of my life,” this push and pull between decency and outrage, between scolds who think you shouldn’t blow a guy’s head off in the back of a car and cineastes who appreciate the dark humor in it.

This book is for the appreciators; the scolds can go stew somewhere else.

There are two keys to understanding Tarantino’s body of work in this book, two passages that turn the tumblers and help you make sense of his artistic project. Passage the first:

Bullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, [director Peter] Yates’ great

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