What’s left to say about Reservoir Dogs, a movie that’s all talk?
A young Quentin Tarantino’s greatest trick was to turn his audience into the same sort of discussion group that picked over the finer points of Madonna over coffee at LA diner Pat and Lorraine’s, scouring pop culture for hidden profundities. A shark in the fishpond of the fledgling American indie circuit, his auspicious feature debut piqued the interest of innumerable junior cinephiles and David Foster Wallace alike. The image of dorm room walls plastered with his posters has become a cliche, backed up by the maybe-apocryphal claims that film school professors had to ban essays on the auteur’s work just to get dazzled kids to write about anyone else. Every aspect of the film has been subjected to fine-toothed analysis: the notion of costuming as symbolic armor, the soundtrack offering redemptive cachet to one-hit wonders deprived of cool cred, the Shakespearean air to the corpse-strewn climax, the hip irony of Michael Madsen’s ear-slicing soft-shoe routine, the hidden foreshadowing of betrayal in the placement of soap bottles.
