2. The Ending Is Amoral And Confirms The Film's Misogyny
The most disheartening thing about The Hateful Eight is that it shows QT turning his back on his status as a kind of de facto feminist film-maker. If that seems a stretch, think about it: Mia in Pulp Fiction; The Bride; casting a 40+ year-old Pam Grier - an African American, no less an actress only otherwise known for her cult, B-movie exploitation fare for the lead role in Jackie Brown; Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds; most of Death Proof. No matter what you make of Tarantinos art, its impossible to deny that hes always written great parts for women. Yet here he turns his only female character into a walking heavy-bag, battered at every opportunity and seemingly done so for laughs. She opens the film with a deep circle of black beneath her eye and continues to lose teeth and blood at regular intervals (and her compassion, too, in the aforementioned guitar smashing scene). This might all be fine if Daisy got her revenge in the manner of a Django or a Shoshanna. But no, she gets none, and she suffers the terrible indignity of having her brothers (Channing Tatums Jody) head blown to bits all over her face before finally being hanged by Sam Jacksons Major Marquis Warren and Sherriff Chris Mannix, Walton Goggins character. The death, fetishised unlike anything else in Tarantino except for maybe feet, is the dénouement of Tarantinos presentation of Daisy as female collateral, as a woman abused and beaten for no reason other than the one Tarantino seems to lasso over the whole film in terms of artistic reasoning: because he can. Of course, Daisy is no saint; she's wanted for a reason, and it probably ain't pretty. But it remains that as the only female of the Eight, she becomes an instant, easy target for violence. If QT's reasoning is that it's okay for her to be treated like a man because she's just as bad as they are, then this movie's moral compass is off the f*cking charts.