Having revisited Tarantino's love of little piggies and Jackie Brown's Best Shots we end the Tarantino 50th Birthday festivities at the appropriate place given the director's love of circular plotting: The Very Beginning. When Quentin Tarantino was, essentially, a nobody, he was still Quentin Tarantino. Long before he was training his camera on knives and hands threatening Jamie Foxx's upside down junk in Django Unchained, he had the balls to open his debut feature with a monologue about big dicks... or Madonna's suggested love for them in her then 8 years old hit single "Like a Virgin".
This is the very first shot of Reservoir Dogs (1992).
Over the black of the credits Mr Brown (Quentin Tarantino) has introduced his thesis "The entire song is a metaphor for big dicks." more...
The first gangster we see is Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) who disagrees. He thinks it's about a vulnerable girl who meets a sensitive guy who makes her feel new again. The conversation splinters as the camera weaves around the crooks in a cafe. Mr. Brown loses his train of thought but starts again until his (literal) partners-in-crime listen.
Let me tell you what "Like A Virgin" is about. It's all about this cooze who's a regular fuck machine. I'm talkin' morning, day, night, afternoon... dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick!
How many dicks is that? "A lot," Mr White (Harvey Keitel) interjects, annoyed. But Tarantino can't help himself.
Then one day, she meets this John Holmes motherfucker. It's like, "Whoa, baby." He's like Charles Bronson in "The Great Escape." He's diggin' tunnels. Now she's gettin' serious dick action. She's feelin' somethin' she ain't felt since forever: pain, pain.
It hurts. It hurts her. It shouldn't hurt her. Her pussy should be Bubble-Yum by now. But when this cat fucks her, it hurts. It hurts just like it did the first time. You see, the pain is reminding a fuck machine...,what it was once like to be a virgin.
Hence, "Like A Virgin."
For as funny as the opening monologue is -- and I have to think Madonna laughed heartily about it at the time since she once has a great sense of humor about herself -- my favorite beat in the scene is the visual punchline of Mr. Orange's reaction shot; Tim Roth's dumbfounded face sways from side to side, lip curled, brows raised.
I wish this were a gif. It is TOO hilarious.
Is he...
- Trying to remember the lyrics?
- Ready to shoot Mr. Brown in the face to shut him up?
- Reeling from misunderstanding the song?
However you interpret it, it's damn funny.
If Reservoir Dogs were released today, Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel would be winning Oscar traction. They're teary bloody confused chemistry as false/genuine friends in the middle of the ear-slicing / stomach-shooting chaos is the film's weirdly tender soul. Hell, if you released it today Tarantino would surely be applauded for getting back to basics and delivering a much tighter film (99 crackling minutes) than he has seemed capable of ever since.
But back to the basics is an odd thing to say about a debut. What's most remarkable about Reservoir Dogs from our vantage point now, with more years of Tarantino having come and stayed in the interim, is how fully formed the auteur already was. "Let me tell you what 'Like a Virgin' is about," is the first sentence ever uttered in Quentin Tarantino's exhaustively vocal feature filmography. That pop culture pitch to moviegoers is even sharper and more oddly astute in retrospect. He, like Madonna, was never like a virgin at all.
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