Why Quentin Tarantino is complicit in toxic culture

“Time’s up”, or so we are told, but it seems that memories are short and that a clock which stops is sure to start again. When the world sat up and took note of the weight of the accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein almost two years ago, big names in the industry lined up to promise that this would be a watershed moment in how the entire system operated. Women would be treated equally and fairly behind and in front of the camera. The toxic culture of intimidation would end. There would be no more cover-ups, no more hush-ups, no more quashing of women’s careers who dared speak out.

And yet it seems the scope of this effort, and the capacity of audiences and critics to actually care about it, remains distinctly narrow. Early last year, actor Uma Thurman, who worked with Tarantino and Weinstein on Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill (2003) and Kill Bill II (2004), revealed in The New York Times the cause of her “fateful fight” with the director, which wasn’t to be resolved until 15 years later.

Having told Tarantino she was sexually assaulted by Weinstein following Pulp Fiction, Thurman “reminded” him of this when he asked her to work with him again for Kill Bill. Thurman recalled that while he had “probably dismissed it” at the time, it was Tarantino who then convinced Weinstein to apologise to her, allowing the film to go ahead.

Tarantino, whose own former girlfriend was assaulted by Weinstein, has confirmed that he “knew enough to do more than I did”. He explained: “I knew he did a couple of these things. I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard.”

However, it wasn’t this which directly led to his parting of ways with Thurman. That was the literal car crash and cover-up which came after Tarantino insisted that she, as opposed to a stunt double, drive a car in a Kill Bill scene which she believed to be unsafe. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time,” she said, and she was finally persuaded to do it. Thurman said the resulting crash caused her permanent damage to her knees and neck, but she was denied access to footage of the incident at the time which could have enabled her to sue.

It is clear Thurman believes that the way in which the producers, including Weinstein, “destroyed evidence and continue to lie” about the incident was connected to her allegations of sexual assault – a sort of extended punishment for making trouble. Years later – after the widespread claims against Weinstein went public – she spoke to the police and doubled down on her efforts to get the video. It was then that Tarantino handed the footage over. “Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” Thurman said.

Thurman has since said she forgives Tarantino and would work with him again.

Should it, though, be quite that easy for the rest of us to forgive the fact that it took until after Weinstein was publicly shamed on the global stage for Tarantino to either acknowledge the sexual misconduct, or to end his own part in an agreed cover-up of evidence which could have financially harmed Weinstein?

Standing up for what’s right comes pretty cheap when the tide of public opinion is in your favour, and alienating friends and colleagues is far less daunting when the world has already chosen to alienate them.

It would, though, be a mistake to minimise Tarantino’s role in all of this to that of a bystander. The incident with the car, after all, was the product of Tarantino’s own directorial decision, and the culmination of an approach which Thurman described as being “like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother”.

Tarantino has admitted that he performed several of the more violent actions in Kill Bill himself, such as choking Thurman and spitting in her face.

As a respected director and “creative genius”, Tarantino is far from alone in enjoying a widespread dismissal of problematic, intimidating behaviour as the necessary means to an artistic end, or at least as something worth tolerating for the greater good. If you are “brilliant” enough, it seems that all bets are off – that is, if you are a brilliant man.

It is difficult to think of women who are afforded this same protected status, but then the field in which Tarantino operates is almost entirely dominated by men. Between 2007 – 2018, only 4% of the 1200 top-grossing films were directed by women, only five women have ever been nominated in the best director category at the Oscars, and only one has ever won it.

The list of women in the creative industries who have been accused of bad behaviour and roundly derided as “divas” is far longer – but if the past two years have taught us anything, it is that an alarming number of such women, whose career prospects vanished overnight, were in fact victims of harassment or assault who dared to make a fuss.

To view all of these facts as unrelated would be to fail to understand that men have, throughout the history of the entertainment industry, been able to assert their own dominance and to foster such an explicitly misogynistic culture as to make it near-impossible for women to gain an equal footing with their male counterparts. To see Tarantino’s own behaviour or his willingness to turn a blind eye to other men’s abuses for decades as somehow separate from the toxic system in which Weinstein thrived would be to miss the forest for the trees.

Instances of sexual assault or harassment don’t take place in a vacuum and they can’t be neatly set aside from the wider structural inequalities and hostile environments in which people are expected to work. This is true of any industry and Hollywood is by no means a unique example, but it is perhaps an intensified microcosm which demonstrates the impacts which unchecked power imbalances can have.

Tarantino has directly benefited from and reinforced those power imbalances in his own working practices. The world in which Tarantino found his success – a world whose distorted ideals of aggressive men and beautiful, silent women drips from the pores of his films –is exactly the world which he is now asked and permitted to distance himself from.

In fact, Tarantino’s new film has been repeatedly commended by critics for its self-awareness; for its recognition that his place in a fast-changing industry with new gender dynamics is now as precarious as that of his lead character, fading Western star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). Dalton and his seemingly invincible stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who allegedly “killed his wife and got away with it”, are contrasted with the young Hollywood stars of 1969, like real-life victim of the Manson murders Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).

But when Tate’s role is almost entirely aesthetic, and the Old Hollywood men emerge as the heroes of the day by bringing the Mansons to the violent, bloody end which their real victims never could, you will have to forgive me if I don’t see the film’s message as being so optimistically feminist as some might suggest.

Coming from a man who has been firmly embedded in a system which silences, objectifies and victimises women, and who has overlooked and even defended the actions of predatory men (see Tarantino’s 2003 comments on Roman Polanski), I can’t see a film which celebrates and exalts the virtues of that very system as being all that ironic – at least not in a good way.

As Uma Thurman pointed out: “Quentin used Harvey [Weinstein] as the executive producer of Kill Bill, a movie that symbolises female empowerment.” Maybe that, too, was intended as an act of artistic irony. The question is: who’s laughing?