As Quentin Tarantino turns 60, a Gen-Z look at his journey from 'cool' to 'uncool'

Feet lover. Visionary director. Music curator. A white man who gives himself the “N-word” pass. Quentin Tarantino, who turns 60 today, is many things at once. 

And with Instagram cinema pages, movie podcasts, and many YouTube video essays owing their existence to Tarantino along with “Marvel-hater” Martin Scorsese and “practical effects CEO” Christopher Nolan, the two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter and director continues to be controversially relevant. 

The ones who are reading this can Google their heart out to explore Tarantino’s socio-political hot takes from liberally uttering “the N-word” in Pulp Fiction to his polarising depiction of slavery-era violence in Django Unchained. While his filmography is definitely relevant to the modern history of Hollywood, Tarantino has intentionally or unintentionally managed to stand out for his hot takes and career controversies. 

The Bad Boy of Hollywood

When fans and relatives of martial artist Bruce Lee expressed their displeasure over a comic scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino was quick to reply with a fiery “Go suck a d**k”. During the shooting of Kill Bill: Volume 2, leading star Uma Thurman accused him of “dehumanising” her and putting her life in jeopardy when he forced her to drive a stunt car herself (as the stunt woman wasn’t on set that day). After a prolonged silence, Thurman and Tarantino are finally on good terms now but such anecdotes can remind cinephiles of someone like Stanley Kubrick (a great director, a not so great man). 

Even though more than half of Tarantino’s movies were produced by convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein’s now-defunct properties Miramax and The Weinstein Company, Tarantino has clearly stated that even though the film fraternity were aware of Weinstein’s concerning behaviour, he was unaware of any sexual assault cases.

And while the director who now sees Weinstein as “a f***ed up father figure” might indeed be speaking the truth, the Internet continues to speculate that the director might have known more than what we think and he might have intentionally kept mum. 

Is Tarantino a sigma male?

The Weinstein theory seems plausible to think as Tarantino and his characters have a lot of potential to cater to a meninist and incel-driven group of dudebros (even though Tarantino himself never propagates these ideals). In the post-pandemic era, a few morally grey characters from 90s-era Hollywood like the anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt in Fight Club) and the woman-killing Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale in American Psycho) have unironically become “sigma males” and role models for such dudebros. What’s ironic however is that Fight Club is based on a novel written by a gay man and American Psycho is directed by a woman! 

What started out as sarcastic meme templates are now being used for more offensive humour targeting women (or fake feminists as the Reddit and Instagram dudebro factions would refer to them). Just take an example from the 2022 Delhi Comic Con. I was myself dressed up as Breaking Bad’s Walter White (a prime character in the pantheon of sigma males) and chanced across a man cosplaying as Patrick Bateman, complete with the ax and blood on his face. 

Now, while I appreciated the Bateman cosplayer’s efforts, what concerned me was how he seemed to emulate the hypermasculinity of the character in quite a realistic fashion. When a bunch of anime cosplayers flocked in a corner, this desi Bateman shouted at them, “Get out, you pu****s”. It might all be an act for him to get into character but just the fact that there might be actual boys who would try to be like Bateman is concerning. 

Getting back to Tarantino, most of his iconic characters are actually quite diverse and don’t stick to the sigma male formula. While his landmark debut Reservoir Dogs might be overanalysed as showing a collective of straight, white men shooting at each other, Tarantino has also written out characters that would suit the “hyper woke” Gen-Z too like the badass Bride (Uma Thurman in Kill Bill) who dons Bruce Lee’s yellow-and-black tracksuit or the free slave Django (Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained) who can turn into a one-man army to save his beloved. One of his most underrated movies. Jackie Brown, resurrected the career of 1970s action legend Pam Grier. 

Jackie Brown was one of the few action blockbusters of the 1990s to have a black woman as the lead. And while Tarantino is no white saviour for making films like Jackie Brown or Django Unchained (and I sincerely hope he never acts like one), he still comes off as a director that somehow ages better than, let’s say a Kubrick and obviously a Woody Allen. And yet, it’s Tarantino’s bad boy image and no-f**ks-given attitude that makes him more appealable to the dudebro demographic (even more so than the characters from his films). 

If we sit down to break down the problems of men writing/directing women or celebrating hyper masculinity in their characters, obviously even veterans like Martin Scorsese would be held guilty. Leave alone Scorsese’s masochistic (but undeniably well-made) gangster classics or the cocaine-fueled cocktail of nudity and profanity that was The Wolf of Wall Street, even a Scorsese magnum opus like Raging Bull can be difficult to watch from my Gen-Z perspectives. I understand that the real-life version of Up’s Mr Fredericksen is trying to deconstruct a flawed hero’s issues with masculinity, boxing, and wife-beating but the scenes of domestic abuse can be a bit distasteful at times (call me a “snowflake” or whatever). 

While Scorsese blew up from the 70s and Tarantino is of the 90s batch of directors, even modern male auteurs like Christopher Nolan have their fair share of flaws in their cinematic masterpieces. For instance, it’s a running joke among cinephiles that Nolan loves killing off his female characters and the point of his heroines is to just die. 

ALSO READ: How to make a Christopher Nolan movie: A recipe

When did Tarantino start becoming "basic"?

I don’t need to pinpoint the eyebrow-raising content in Tarantino’s filmography, but it’s interesting to see how the self-proclaimed cinephiles (many of whom are actually bothered about their Letterboxd reviews) seem to have changed their behaviour towards Tarantino and his films. During my teenage in the mid-2010s, watching a Tarantino film became a symbol of artistic intellectualism. 

And even though my first Tarantino films were heavily-censored versions of Kill Bill: Volume 1 on HBO and Django Unchained on Sony Pix, I was already fascinated with him. Through enough illegal torrenting sites, I managed to binge through his blood-stained, foul-mouthed filmography and I absolutely felt like I have reached the pinnacle of watching “cool adult movies”. The same feeling might have been shared by my peers and many teens in the 1990s and every decade after that. 

However, in an age when A24-distributed "indie" films also dominate Hollywood, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe is crumbling down, and when even non-Hollywood features like Parasite and RRR are gaining global recognition, Tarantino’s brand has somewhat dwindled among the youngsters.

I am in my 20s right now and while I still manage to rewatch Pulp Fiction or Django Unchained every now and then (while obviously recognising the parts that come off as offensive), I am ready to listen to people who refer to Tarantino with words like “pretentious”, “overrated”, or “basic”. 

And this criticism doesn’t even stem from any complaints or problematic content. Tarantino, much like any other influential figure, will incite different reactions in different eras. Back in his heyday, his films might have won over audiences as truly original (even though Tarantino never shies away from directly borrowing inspirations or reinterpreting tropes from international and classic cinema). 

Now, in the current era of streaming and multi-genre Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All At Once, a Pulp Fiction or an Inglorious Basterds might not seem as original as they did at the time of their release. It’s just a general norm of pop culture. Films like Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction and Tarantino’s own image got so ingrained in Western-influenced pop culture that now, maybe audiences have had too much and need some new content. 

So, in the end, many mainstream “best directors” (the dominant chunk of them being straight white men of course) might have battled this journey from becoming “cool” to “uncool”, from becoming “visionary” to “basic”. But with Tarantino’s unabashed attitude, this journey becomes all the more evident. 

ALSO READ: Ram Gopal Varma and his foot fetish

Turning 60 today, he is working on his tenth and final film aptly titled A Movie Critic (probably a sarcastic jab at critics for all we know). And even though Tarantino walks into slightly “Kanye West territory” at times, he has still managed to stay “un-cancelled” despite all his controversies. With his legendary status still intact but his “coolness factor” falling, Tarantino remains an amusing enigma of Hollywood indeed.