How Tarantino CORRUPTS His Audience 

Which of Tarantino's morally corrupt protagonists is your favourite? (That's quite a tough question to answer...)

He never corrupted me with these guys. I knew they were scumbags, but then so was The Dirty Dozen.

You skipped Butch's motivation for throwing the fight, it was how Vincent talked to him at the bar, so Butch keyed his Malibu. Butch was ready to throw the fight until a junkie that worked for Wallace denigrated him.

When its kill or be killed, morality takes a back seat

Hateful 8 is tarantinos love letter to "The Thing"

Theres no reason for violence, til there is.

Tarantino never writes good or bad guys ....he just writes people who find themselves in situations and do what they gotta do

I always believe Butch was going to take the dive but when Vincent said what he said to him at the bar Butch changed his mind

His best character is Hans Landa. I love that guy. The whole movie is in another gear when he is on the screen. And You don't have to pull for him, you just know that he does not need that. With the exception of the last minute of the movie he is always in control and on the winning side. Aldo's action in the last minute is the only thing which make the balance right. He is just like Heath Ledger's Joker. Makes you craving to have him on the screen again. And he is so much above anybody in intellect, charisma, vision, one cannot help but love the guy.

Sam jackson is the only "good" character in pulp fiction. By the end he realized he didnt want to be that anymore.

Butch takes a major risk to rescue Marcellus - compelled by a sense of honor, like Jules. Vincent also has a sense of honor, but is closed to the spiritual encounter that has impacted Jules so much. How'd they end up? I would argue that Tarantino's writing became angry and corrupted after Django.

The thing with his movies, is that it doesn't matter who kills over, because they are all bad so you never feel too bad when it happens. One monster will win, the other will lose, we all lose with them but sometimes we lose less... And we feel good about liking something that's definitely not good.

Butch killing Vince/Marcellus/Zed/Maynard could be considered self defense. He didn't kill the Gimp.

The Basterds are definitely akin to the Glanton Gang. In a group like that the moral code is pitch coloured but even still there are little greys and small honours as the true evil emerges. Even Bathcat had a limit. And as for the gang from Blood Meridian, it’s fascinating that the most evil among them has such an exacting hold on what being good might mean, and how limited it is in the face of evil

What's that line from Rusty Cohle in True Detective Season 1? "The world needs bad men. Keeps the other bad men from the door."

You could've also included "Natural Born Killers" "Four Rooms" and "True Romance" to further your point. Well made sir.

I've seen all the movies you've discussed but I didn't pick up on how once a character is an under dog, the audience will tolerate a great degree of moral ambiguity or them being "bad." I also like how Tarantino humanizes his villains. Great stuff for any writer to know. Thanks for making this video!

I watched Inglorious Bastards with my dad. When the bat scene happened, he said “well that’s excessive.” Then I told him these are Jewish men and he was like “Oh, well that makes sense then.”

I remember in Inglourious Basterds when the Basterd known as the Jew Bear beat that very brave German officer to death and the audience cheered. I was disgusted with the audience. It really bothers me that people find it so easy to dehumanize the enemy. It requires all most no effort to turn people into war criminals and the perpetrators of genocides. I'm guilty too because I like Tarantino's films. The guy is a brilliant writer and director and I own almost all of his films. But sometimes I feel like Tarantino's audiences are like the audiences in 1984. Where the party shows films to its members that show the enemy being slaughtered on screen and everyone is cheering.

Computers are programmed by input. Put in trash, get out trash. I was bothered by rooting for bad guys for years. Godfather, Scarface, pulp fiction, breaking bad, sons of anarchy, Vikings. I refuse to be entertained by such obviously evil characters and plots. Your brain is only composed of what you put in it. You can claim it doesn’t affect you because you think your morality is above it… add salt to a glass of ice tea in very small amounts… it eventually becomes undrinkable no matter how sweet the tea began.

Scorsese does the same in Goodfellas. You get seduced into liking these characters but then you're reminded, in characters like the Pesci character, that these people, these gangsters, are sociopathic.

They're called anti-heroes and they aren't exclusive to Tarantino movies. The reason I root for them is because I can relate more to imperfect characters more than I can morally perfect characters.

Great video and the editing was amazing. Well done and keep them coming 👏🏽🔥

You bring up that snippet from his book where he’s talking about Dirty Harry, (someone recently made a video about that bit of the book) but Tarantino has also specifically talked about the thing you’re talking about here in relation to his own movies too in interviews. He talked about this with Django Unchained, and brought it up in relation to Sergio Corbucci westerners like Django, but more specifically The Great Silence. He talked about how the characters are the kinds of characters that in any other movie would be the villains, but juxtaposed against the villains of the movie they’re the heroes. Like Dr. King Schultz in Django Unchained may seem like a good guy in Django Unchained, but he does kill people for money, and he does have Django kill a guy in front of his own son. He’s talked about this in reaction to Butch as well... maybe in the Pulp Fiction related Charlie Rose interview he did, I don’t quite remember where he talked about it specifically anymore. But it was probably that interview since that interview is on the DVD. The Hateful Eight was all about this. It’s built around a particularly type of episode Western tv of the ‘50s and ‘60s would do from time to time where a bunch of guest stars (these were usually guys you’d see showing up in Spaghetti Western later, or they were Roger Corman’s crew) playing villains would show up and hold some characters up (maybe even the main characters) and the leads of the show would have to take care of them. These episodes in particular are always pretty cool, and almost function a little movies. Sometimes the main characters of the show are barely in these episodes. It’s a style of episode TV (be it actually TV or streaming) doesn’t really do anymore. Hateful Eight is that but without the hero characters. Originally it did have a hero character though, since Tarantino started writing it with the idea of it being a Django paperback.

I don't know. I'd say the protagonists of inglorious bastards are mostly morally gray, not necessarily bad in context of their world. Unless most people would tell you it's it's basically pointless to interpret morals in a vacuum in any meaningful way

This actually happened already at early 70's when The Godafher came to be the big hit. The crime boss Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his son Michael (Al Pacino) who in the end of the movie took his place and became to be the most ruthless and violent don in New York, were both more admired than anything else by the audience. The charismatic actors, clever direction by Francis F. Coppola and beautyful music by Nino Rota made people falling in love with this story over generations.

You mean revenge? Because that’s what the “protagonists” often do in these Tarantino movies. Other than that, Jules knew how improbable his survival was and knew he likely wasn’t going survive another such incident, so he left working for Marcellus. As for going around to save Marcellus, it was a case of even Butch felt like a person getting raped was worse than just killing him. I do agree that the underdog works in getting you to root for a character.

As they say: It takes a thief to catch a thief. That's why Godzzilla vs. Kong works, while Godzilla vs. Laura Ingalls-Wilder wouldn't. In From Dusk til Dawn we see, what happens to those, who don't belong to the "bad mofo club": As the son hesitates just for a second to kill the vampire that once was his father, he's just prey. Also: Tarantino uses stages of bad people. From underdogs, who just toughened up due to bad experiences to outright evil. And Tarantino took a lot of inspiration from italo western movies, which themselves were based on premises, found in italian realism: When life's hard, it's not easy to remain a good person. And then it starts to matter less, what lines you cross, but more, which ones you wouldn't, in order to keep living with yourself and seeing yourself still as some kind of decent person.

One time Tarantino did not get me was Brad Pitt's character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I kept remembering he killed his wife throughout the movie and refused to root for him. Just wanted his character to get killed off LMAO extremely unlikable throughout.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood was one of the times Tarantino's main characters were not "bad"

This also happens to be EXACTLY what the mainstream media does. Manipulate. Using those tactics. Tarantino is a reflection of this kind of manipulation, but on the big screen. It is easier to see it in his films, but few really grasp or wish to admit how MSM has engaged in this for decades.

Don't know if you're an anime fan, but... this video explains the difference between how villains are portrayed in One Piece specifically Kaido vs Doflamingo. Thanks for putting it into words, the idea was burning a whole in my mind.

Worth the wait bro. Such a good watch. Every vid is getting better and better!!!

The simple ingredient for making a morally ambiguous character seem better is to reduce the 'good light' shown in the movie. So, in removing any people that have no connections to 'the drama', it leaves us with only people that have some incentive for the end to come about in a specific way. The 'good people' in these productions are extras, with no names, seen shopping, or playing games with their children, or just depositing their check at the bank. Facts.

Remember in Django Unchained when the "hero" shoots an unarmed woman who posed no physical threat to him, and the audience cheered?

AMAAAAAAZING analysis. This makes so many Tarantino scenes and choices make sense… even as far back as his writing in True Romance. In his universe THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS.

I think his most heroic character that he’s ever written/ good guy might have been Dr. Shultz. A dentist turned Bounty Hunter. I don’t remember the reason of they even said. He did pay for Django, and kill the slavers horse, he still could’ve just used Django for what he used him for then left him to his own devices. Instead he helped him find Broomhilda and hated the person who was Calvin Candy for how he treated everyone on his land

Very good analysis. I'm going to talk about anti-heroes for my analysis. In addition, Tarantino does not include a third character who serves as a moral compass to show that his protagonists are anti-heroes. Whereas this is what we see in Falling Down (with the policeman or his ex-wife), The Godfather (Kay his wife), ... And there is no redemption arc. He is very Scorsesian about it. Tarantino lets us into a world of shades of grey moralities without holding our hands. --- And I specify that I am not a very big fan of Tarantino, he has qualities and he is a real director (an auteur). But for me he is chapter 1 of book 1 of cinephilia.

Tarantino's movies are like a baroque painting by Caravaggio : the idea of the Sacred and the Profane in perfect harmony

Great video. Shame we didn't get a section about the Bride. I've always loved her character. She's not necessarily a good woman, being an assassin and all. We never learn who she kills but we can assume they weren't all bad people. But she gets screwed over by her former team and that's what makes her the protagonist not really the 'hero'. Great writing.

I love this break down of character traits. That being said...has anyone ever told you, YOU sir are the most British looking man I have ever seen. Good on ya!

Yes! Some great questions have been asked. Another sentence for the tube. Another as well. Keep up the awesome! :)

Great video and analysis.

Hugo Stiglits is my favourite morally corrupt character PS im here at 16.1k subscribers this channel is gonna blow up soon your in depth analysis of the books you referenced as well as the modern flawless editing makes you stand out from the rest

Thank you I've never understood why I don't like any of his movies but now I do.

Question. If I am basically not a bad guy but, over the course of time, do a couple of bad things probably due to life circumstances that pop up, does that automatically negate any inate goodness I might possess and make me just a total bad guy through and through?

I have a traumatic childhood. It was very bad. I got free of it at 16 and recovered a bit but decided to join the army at 21. I decided on artillery. Figured I wouldn't be in any real danger and still be combat arms because it sounded cool. Trained for a whole year doing artillery and kicking in doors. My platoon didn't think much of me and never put me in line. Always a gunner in a hummer. I play a lot of video games. It's my main hobby besides hiking and my son's T ball practice and games. They hated me for that. When it came time to deploy and test our reaction time and mental awareness, I exceeded everyone. They gave me an M9 to test with, and I shot expert, mostly one handed in full kit. So, they made me the front man to charge in first. I survived a few missions and explosions that weren't timed correctly. I just brushed all this off. Like it was nothing. Because of my already warped brain, I compartmentalized it all to deal with later. Scared my platoon as they thought I was psychopath in the making. I'm not. I was pushed to my limit and adjusted accordingly on the fly. My brain doesn't work the way a normal person's does because of my traumatic childhood. I think this was Tarantino putting himself in the characters. He even made up a bible quote that had people believing it was actually from the bible. Just some food for thought.

Great video and very accurated analisys. Bravo Luke!

1 person that fits in this category is The Bride from the Kill Bill series. You root for her because she's on a revenge mission to kill those who attempted to kill her. But throughout both films, you can see that there is serious contempt and disgust for all of the former members of the VIPer Squad have towards her. The film never outright says it, but it does heavily hint that by attempting to kill her, it was seen as justifiable by the other members. Plus, her prior profession was being part of an assassination-for-hire outfit. So while they likely killed some loathsome people along the way, they very likely took innocent lives as well. On repeat viewings of both films, The Bride just seems like the least evil in a group of detestable people. Like in the whole series, she is the hero of the film, but by default. The audience roots for her because the film needs somebody to root for and not because she was some innocent civilian caught in a cross fire (also add the pregnancyfactor as well). In actuality, she was probably just as twisted and evil as any of them

I'm not sure how far Bruce Willis's condition has progressed at this point but if it was in any way possible the last Tarantino film I would want to see is Butch's final chapter..... it's left so open ended. I don't really want another kill Bill movie anyway

Those characters have this aura of power, the ability of not giving a damn. I fliped on on my boss once and lost my job. Was hired one month later ny the same company for a higher pay, while my boss got fired. This feeling of telling anybody to go ef themselfes is priceless.

Great channel! Subscribed :) Good luck on your journey!!

Butch is not so much a bad guy as he is a survivor. There is a significant difference. He doesn't really do anything immoral, just violent, but for survival sake. And he does rescue Marcelis. That's a big deal. He pitied his enemy. Very angelic.

Great content and quality production 👍🏻

Inglorious Bastards aka The beginnings of The Mossad

I am very impressed by this video. You are very underrated

This is so weird. I think I'm being recommended your videos because you were in some gym video i watched ages ago. Pretty cool pivot.

This can a form of social proframming, as it teaches that the ends justify the means

In Kill Bill he practically admitted it himself more than once! Even Django does not allow King to save D’Artagnan from being ripped apart. It is not even for the greater good but to save another person!

There’s a lot of things I loved when I was in my late teens early 20s that I don’t care for anymore now in my late 30s… Tarantino movies are NOT one of those things

Any soldier would be considered "bad" in a different situation. But that's ridiculous. You can only judge someone on a certain situation.

I don’t think that morally corrupt characters are more engaging than conventional hero archetypes. It’s more about the fact that telling a good story about a morally pure character is way more difficult. Also we live in a time and age where audiences literally have been pushed towards the morally ambiguous. Cultivating these tendencies is the key. Recognising ourselves in these characters is more straightforward as long as communicating goes. Showing people a “hero”, inspiring them to be better, and making a good story out of it is a real challenge only few can pull off. All this to be said I LOVE Tarantino. He’s a genius and love his films.

Newly subscribed; thank you for this wonderful vid!!

So being from Canada and knowing our contribution to the Geneva Convention Laws, The Bastards, are pretty Vanilla😂

Pretty good analysis! I've been writing a series with these same elements without even noticing!

It’s really not surprising if you think about it, he’s exposing the dark side of humanity by tapping into the most psychotic aspects of certain people. Society cheers war, capital punishment, police brutality, and many other disgusting things. You can really learn a lot about a person based on how they react to the actions of a fictional character.

While not a Tarantino character, I feel Walter White also fits in very well with this idea of corrupting an audience into rooting for a morally bankrupt person. We see him initially as an underdog (he’s a failed chemistry genius, he’s teaching high school and having to work at a car wash to make ends meet, and to top it off, he has cancer) who’s forced into a life he doesn’t want to be in, but as the show goes on, you see his ego come more and more to the surface as he does more and more abhorrent things, yet we still want to see him succeed. Hell, it’s so corrupting that many people saw Skyler as the bad guy in the situation and while yeah, some of her actions are less than noble, especially in IFT, she’s also a wife who has grown more estranged from her husband and even scared of him with his actions and behavior. If Walter and Skyler were your neighbors, you’d probably feel more scared for Skyler than you would feel sympathy for Walt.

Call me Homelander because I was gaslit into being the villain.

Liked and subscribed! Very well done.

I think we like them because they express what we painstakingly struggle to suppress to an almost self harming level every day. Not that we urge to murder people every day but we swallow so much irritation and anger to be socially acceptable while still just being mammals.

You've got it all wrong: the protagonist of Inglourious Basterds is Hans Landa.

I was watching once upon a time in Hollywood and think something similar. How brutally they kill the hippies and just shrug it off

great video essay, instant subscriber

I recommend you to watch Ross MacFarlane video essay on Once upon a time in Hollywood. He suggest that Pitt's caracter is the opposite personification of Harvey Weinstein. The video is called Once upon a time in Hollywood overanalysed

I remember hearing an interview with Tarantino about the Joker movie, and how he thought the movie was just a ripoff of Taxi Driver until the final interview, where he praised the massive subversion the movie puts on the audience, convincing us to cheer for the Joker brutally murdering Murray on live TV even though there's nothing in the story that would make Murray seem like a bad person.

Great vid, dude! I salute thee

Great video 👍 You are onto something. I have always felt Tarantino's bad guy protagonists are very realistic. I feel that could make good food for thought when it comes to discerning satisfying from their ideas of what is morally just... and why. Dusk till dawn is another good example. Most real life "bad" people are rarely 100 bad, if they were they would have zero friends, no one would trust them let alone desire to assist or protect them. Sticking out too much, like a mustache twirling cartoon character. Real life "bad people" often have lines they will not cross for understandable reasons. Even if the rest of their actions make no sense in context. It is easy to hate someone if you only see bad in them. The obverse is seen in "inglorious bastards" where they humanize a few of the Nazis they killed. Revenge movies like inglorious bastards, revenge of the nerds and I spit on your grave; show people doing horrific, unacceptable things to horrible people. Quality and options aside, that genre is made to be satisfying on screen, and remain there in the film. Where no one really gets hurt and there are no laws broken. Not used as blueprint for anything other than how to make a revenge film.

I think that part of creating a pretty effective lovable or likable bad guy or antihero is creating a character who can kind of manipulate or gaslight the audience to some extent.I would say that with a movie such as the Joker the scene before killing Murray is basically the antihero gas lighting and manipulating the audience and watchers to some extent despite the fact that most people watching a movie like The Joker still at least in some way deep down inside know full well that the main character is a scumbag and is definitely not a good person.

My favorite example of this kind of character is Kurosawa's "man with no name". He never gives his true name, never lets anyone get emotionally close, seems to help out of a sense of guilt for what he was in the past and then immediately leaves, and has no master, yet possesses the skill of a lord's vassal. Do I even want to know who this butcher of humans once was? Yet it still gives me great satisfaction watching him trick and destroy the wicked and corrupt.

Scorsese did the same thing but with a different technique. In Goodfellas he'll depict the 'heroes' killing someone or doing something terrible but it's always followed up by a comical situation that changes the entire mood of the scene. Joe Pesci's character murders someone in colf blood in a car, but the next moment he's arguing with the driver because he's clumsy and it's hilarious. It's like the Three Stooges if the Stooges were killers.

One interesting scene I like to analyze is the Vet scene from Inglorious Bastards. Remember, when Aldo said Nazi need to be killed because they got no humanity, then I wonder how they personally feel about having to put the vet, who’s obviously just an innocent bystander, in the middle of all that drama and insanity? But you can clearly see a difference between Aldo and his men with Hans and his men if you compare this scene with the 20 minute opening scene. But one thing that I’m curious about is what they did about the vet? The movie didn’t address that.

Haven’t seen once upon a time in Hollywood; but I’d argue that the Bastards seemed like they were doing what they saw as necessary to win a war against a bunch of genocidal psychopaths. Butch’s girlfriend/wife/whatever was used to soften his character in the eyes of the viewers. Re Hateful 8: Hard to feel bad for someone who fought to keep the institution of slavery (with all of its atrocities) alive. Either way, great stuff. Newly subscribed

I’m not trying to undermine the premise of the video or anything but I feel like this a thing all film makers do all the time. Every single story of every show or movie is a carefully curated selection of scenes put together to tell a story and so in a way they are all “manipulating” the audience. In the end though it’s ultimately up to the audience to feel how they want to feel about the story given.

I remember him talking about this with the Joker movie but lets be honest, todays audience is already corrupt.

I’ve never found Tarantino movies to be that good and I can never explain why. I wonder if it’s because since everyone sucks I have no investment in the character’s stories and survival

Why are morally corrupt characters so appealing. Cuz they're amusing. Heroes aren't amusing.

This is where the similarity and also the difference, between Lynch and Tarantino, as some perspicuous authors have noted, becomes interesting. Both directors cast deeply unsympathetic and bad men, like in wild at heart, where Nicholas' Cage beat a man to death. The thing missing though in Tarantino's ouvre is the other pole aspect of the dualism between the evil and the beatific. That's because Lynch is artistically displaying violence and its consequences, how they are intertwined and have an effect on the spirit of love of the one affected by it. We see a trauma to violence. Tarantino's characters are above reacting to their violent scenes though; they chatter and splatter. At moments in Tarantino films is gets closer to not being like this - in Inglorious Basterds, for instance, there are scenes of the Shosanna Dreyfus proprietor of the Le Gamaar Cinema that almost come to moments of this vision of true moral complexity of good and light and darkness like in Lynch, as though a more serious, interesting and taut drama film could be made by taking certain scenes out of Inglorious Basterds and leaving behind the chatter and splatter to find a, earnest - not-comic-bookish - artistic film about the human interest of beauty and the fragility of that tenderness of compassion to this omniscient darkness and destructiveness omnipresent even in the blades of grass of Lynch's Blue Velvet - but the hilarious comic book scenes immediate after return us back again into the seat of a pulp story not meant to be taken to heart. I am interested, in what Tarantino could do, if he tried an entirely serious drama story for a change, and approached and attempted beauty and artistic endeavour entirely with no grindhouse or genre or pulp formula to make the characters into a Carnivále of B-cinema roles who we precariously enjoy having the power fantasies of. Underneath the comic book enjoyment of sharing the power fantasy of bad guys, Tarantino displays a deeply literary love of dialogue that I think is missing in more serious drama films, and that there are flashes in between the cheesiness of Tarantino's films to show aspects of a deeply artistic man who would have it in him to write an entirely serious film to take to heart without the ironic detachment we usually get.

I thought about this after watching the movie A Good Time by Robert Pattinson. I thoroughly disliked the movie but it did make me think, these characters are scumbags and they’re trying to make me think they’re cool. It’s easier for Tarantino because he’s a skilled director, but he’s still guilty of it

We ourselves are flawed and self serving. We find comfort in the idea that they are worse than us. Like us? They have their righteous moments. We all try to forget our horrible base nature, and focus on those righteous moments. These stories make that easy for us.

You forgot to add two films he wrote and yet did not direct, "Natural Born Killers" and "True Romance" where the protagonist where still evil and we still had to route for them. Just throwing that out there.

The idea that violence is inherently justified if someone belongs to a specified group that is designated as morally wrong or reprehensible is about as slippery as a slope can be. The problem is that morality is not a set condition. It evolves and can change.

I feel like you’re looking at things in a very British context as an American we don’t separate actions from the context of our situations we feel like when someone is doing that it’s a way for them to look down on you without ever having to have lived through what you’ve been through

I never really had a favorite in, Pulp Fiction, aside from Fabienne. Fabienne- "Where did you get the motorcycle?" Butch- "It's not a motorcycle, Baby, it's a chopper." F- "Where did you get the chopper?" B- "Zed...and Zed's dead." She was so cute and innocent.

The Lesser Evil is a good choice of name. I always saw the Basterds as Nominal Heroes, a type of anti-hero that is anything but good, a “hero” in name alone. Unlike the Unscrupulous Hero (or any other anti-hero), the Nominal Hero does not redeem oneself. As a Non-Escapist, the Nominal Heroes have been my favorite type of anti-hero.

Since, you referred to Better Call Saul in the video, remember Nacho's dad called out Mike on his facade.

Guy Ritchie can do this as well in films like Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and RocknRolla. However, RocknRolla was best in rivaling Tarantino's talent for this

This made me think about rob zombie and his films he takes this to a hole nother level

I thought Inglorious bastards where a bunch of horrible war criminals and I never routed for them through the film, but I studied history...there are no good guys in humanity

One of the tiny details people might miss is that the soldier dying bravely in the bat scene is not wearing an SS uniform but the regular german army uniform , i think this was done intentionally to show the bastards didnt care if you were SS or not

Great video and insight