Before I watched it, I assumed the interviewer in the clip below just asked Quentin Tarantino the wrong question. Instead of “Does movie violence lead to real violence?” he should have asked, “How has movie violence affected you?” I.e., Why do you make these kinds of movies? What is it about spaghetti westerns that appeal and why? I assumed the interviewer was just ham-handed.

Instead, the interviewer, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, is the furthest thing from ham-handed. He does in fact ask the question I thought he should ask, and is polite and articulate in doing so. It's Tarantino who's ham-handed. He comes off as a major asshole here. He comes off as pompous and privileged in promoting “Django Unchained.”

Here it is:

In the beginning he says the pompous:

I'm responsible for people talking about slavery in a way they have not in 30 years. ... There is a dialogue going on about slavery that has not been happening at all. It's a subject people are afraid to talk about. And now because of this movie, people aren't afraid to talk about it.

I'm thinking: What dialogue are people having about slavery? They're having a dialogue about you; and it's the same fucking dialogue. Tarantino wants to be a black man. No, Tarantino hates black men. The N-word: Why say it so often? Why this gratuitous violence against black men? In other words, the criticism leveled at him during “Inglourious Basterds”—that QT turned the victims (Jews) into victimizers, and victimizers (Nazis) into victims, because he never shows the Jews as victims—here becomes its opposite. Keli Goff on HuffPo is the worst in this regard. She also complains about the lack of a strong female character. This after 15 years of Jackie Brown, the Bride, Shoshanna Dreyfus. The only ones who come off worse than QT in discussing his films is everyone else.

Then Guru-Murthy asks Tarantino about the relationship between movie violence and real violence and QT joins the crowd:

I refuse your question. I’m not your slave and you’re not my master. You can’t make me dance to your tune. I’m not a monkey.

No, you're a privileged asshole. Because the next thing you say, rather snidely, is this:

Because I’m here to sell my movie. This is a commercial for the movie—make no mistake.

So the dialogue about slavery the U.S. is having because of you? That was PR? Of course it was.

I could go on. Almost everything people think is wrong about Tarantino's movies (the N-word, racism) isn't. But almost everything people think is right about Tarantino's movies (how cool they are) isn't. In the end, he's not worth this much time. We should stop dancing to his tune.

“This is a commercial for the movie—make no mistake.”

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