“Wiggle your big toe.”
This iconic line is repeated seven times by the Bride in Kill Bill: Volume 1. She has just hauled herself into a pickup truck. Her partly paralyzed body is not playing ball. No one is coming to save her. It’s a case of wiggle or die.
As a line, it’s memorable, it’s empowering, and it’s a little bit silly. It also mirrors a situation that women in Quentin Tarantino films find themselves in frequently.
Here, the Bride is literally trapped. First, in her own comatose body. Then, in a hospital room where she’s preyed on by vile men. Even once she has escaped and got back on her feet, she’s trapped in a quest for vengeance. And ultimately, it’s an older man who’s pulling the strings.
Tarantino is a controversial director for many reasons. But there’s something a lot of his critics miss. It’s that for oppressed characters to be empowered, they need something to fight against. Sometimes, their defiance is rewarded. Other times, it’s punished. Along the way, there’s usually room for catharsis.
Once I started to think about female characters being trapped, the pattern became obvious. Stick around, and I’ll prove my point.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Mia Wallace is Tarantino’s first trapped woman, although it’s not obvious at first glance. She’s cool, she’s kooky, and she’s clever. She talks rings around Vincent Vega and dances rings around him too. But she’s also a hostage in her own home.
Her relationship with her husband, Marsellus Wallace, makes her a commodity, and Vega is there to protect her. She may as well be a Ming vase.
Jackie Brown (1998)
Less loved but more mature than the rest of Tarantino’s 1990s output, this is another case of a woman being tangled up in a web spun by men. Jackie Brown is an almost powerless flight attendant-turned money mule, having to deal with a violent gun runner and the long arm of the law simultaneously.
As well as literally ending up behind bars, Jackie Brown is only able to break free of her predicament by playing the same game as powerful men. It’s never her own enterprise, no matter how bold she becomes.
Death Proof (2007)
As an homage to exploitation movies, Death Proof is a claustrophobic affair throughout. First its group of female leads are trapped in a drawn-out barroom chat with the half charming, half grotesque Stuntman Mike. Then, they’re trapped in cars that Mike uses as a murder weapon. It’s a literal death trap.
As the second half of the film gets underway, a new clutch of women enter the fray. One, Lee, is used as a bargaining chip to allow the others to test drive a muscle car, and again, we’re presented with the idea that men see women as objects, not people. This movie might end with a man being beaten to death by three women, but this is a situation that’s forced upon them, not one they set out in pursuit of at the start. This messiness might explain why Tarantino himself sees it as his worst effort.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
In what’s arguably one of the finest opening scenes of all time, Tarantino gives us a literal interpretation of the trapped trope. The Jewish family hiding beneath the floorboards of a French farmhouse are between a rock and a hard place. It doesn’t end well.
Shoshana, the one girl that does escape the Nazi massacre that day, isn’t really free. Instead, she’s more confined than ever, managing a cinema in occupied Paris and forced to play propaganda films for her effective captors. Her only avenue for escape is one that requires the ultimate sacrifice.
Django Unchained (2013)
It’s not groundbreaking to say that a film about slavery involves a female main character who’s thoroughly trapped. What is interesting is that Django’s wife, Broomhilda, is faced with the same obstacles as the ‘free’ women in Tarantino’s other films.
When we first see her, she’s literally trapped like Shoshana, and she’s then used as a commodity in a trade like Lee before being ultimately rescued by her man, as is the case for Jackie Brown. She’s got the least agency of any female character from this particular auteur. It seems unfair and even regressive, but on the other hand, it’s inevitable given the setting and necessary to give the plot its final, satisfying payoff.
The Hateful Eight (2016)
More than 20 years into his career, Tarantino’s appetite for trapping women and creating an ethical kerfuffle was especially intense in The Hateful Eight. The claustrophobia of Death Proof’s bar is back. In place of a slimy stuntman, we get a raging blizzard.
In terms of what the camera shows us, “Crazy” Daisy Domergue is the most put-upon of Tarantino’s anti-heroines. She’s verbally abused, beaten, and eventually hanged. Some felt her treatment wasn’t earned. At least this time the character who’s lurking beneath the floorboards is a man.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
The most recent film in Tarantino’s canon is another unambiguous instance of women being trapped. The female followers of Charles Manson’s cult are free spirits in theory, but in practice, their situation leaves them shackled.
They squat on a remote ranch, using sexual favors to keep the decrepit male owner quiet, and rely on wannabe cowboy Tex to run off Cliff Booth when he gets suspicious about their antics. During the film’s climactic home invasion, the two women who dare to use violence against men are punished viscerally.
Even the character of Sharon Tate feels imprisoned by the film, irrespective of the fact it allows her to escape the fate of her real-life inspiration. She’s stuck in a big house in the Hollywood Hills like a bird in a cage. Everyone’s raving about her more famous husband while she’s still waiting for her career to catch fire.
The hopeful ending invites us to imagine big things for Tate. However, the cynical undertone of every Tarantino joint taints this attempt at positivity. Her doe-eyed presentation is also one of the reasons that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody described the film as ‘obscenely regressive’.
Why This Matters
However you feel about Tarantino’s treatment of the female characters in his films, there are some intriguing aspects to the idea that they’re all trapped in some way. Contrasted with the typical story arc that we’re used to when male characters are the focus, it highlights the added burden society places on women by default.
Consider the hero’s journey as the blueprint against which to compare this. A character takes decisive action to leave their mundane life behind, experience an adventure, overcome challenges in the process, and return to their starting point much changed.
Through Tarantino’s eyes, we see women who start off at a disadvantage, have dilemmas thrust upon them, and potentially manage to make it through to the other side unscathed. Those that do survive rarely get what they want, have not transformed in a positive way, and are still pawns in a game played by men. This is not progressive, but it does reflect how the real world works.
There’s even an odd parallel to the “No hugging, no learning” ethos of Seinfeld. The stories may be intricate and complex, but they don’t have to come to rose-tinted conclusions about the human condition.
The Less Successful Imitators
Tarantino is an immensely influential director, and that’s fitting for someone who’s always been keen to highlight his own influences. The trapped women trope has been adopted by other filmmakers as a result of his prominence. Unfortunately, this doesn’t often work out well.
Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch fits this mold. In it, a young woman is committed to an asylum by her stepfather and threatened with a lobotomy. She descends into an elaborate series of fantasy scenarios to cope with the horrors of the real world, but ultimately can’t escape her fate. There are echoes of Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, but the characters are hollow, and the action is empty of audience involvement. That’s probably why Tarantino himself ranked it among the worst films of 2011.
This trope also crops up courtesy of frequent Tarantino collaborator Eli Roth. In Hostel we see the female characters as bait, used to lure men to be tortured and killed. The sick operation they represent is once again one with men at its head, although that doesn’t stop the women from getting their comeuppance. Tarantino’s role as producer here might imply a degree of endorsement, but the amoral outlook of Hostel makes it difficult to read anything deeper into its bloody plot.
The Bottom Line
It’s fine to feel uneasy about the way Tarantino treats his female characters. They’re trapped, tortured, and put through hell at the hands of men. We don’t have to like it, and in fact, we’re not expected to. He recognizes that for us to care about and connect with characters, we have to understand the struggles they face. We’ll cheer all the louder when they break the cycle if we see the damage that’s been done by it.
This is a case of presenting empowerment through defiance. The women who are caught in circumstances they didn’t kick start may not always be in a stronger position by the time the credits roll. But we’ve been through the wringer with them. And if that’s not a way to kindle empathy and solidarity, I don’t know what is.
