There is a lot of violence in movies. For some directors, violence does not always serve a despicable purpose. Quentin Tarantino explores this language very well, using a brilliant, explosive, hyper-theatrical violence, almost in opposition to reality. For some characters it is cathartic; for others, it is natural and cold.
Being passionate about the films of this brilliant director, I decided to do a DataViz project exploring his non-linear scripts and interconnected characters.
I started watching all the movies and counting the number of deaths(who,how and when they happened), exploring the characters’ connections and realising a meticulous search in its scripts for swearing and verbal aggression.
“There are actually two separate universes. There is the "realer" than the real universe, alright, and all the characters inhabit that one. But then there’s this movie universe. So From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill, they all take place in this special movie universe. So when all the characters of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, go to the movies, Kill Bill is what they go to see.”
Searching all over, I found a lot of references that corroborate this multi-universe that Tarantino describes. I started wondering - how can we visualize these special connections and explore the director's mind?
After a lot of exploration, I created this graph that compares two movies. Once one selects two movies, one can compare the connections between them. I also felt a compulsion to see how the director distributed the violence in his movies, so I used my notes concerning every death(hours,minutes and seconds) and put in the same graph. Those circles aim to represent the level of physical violence that occurs considering the movie as a timeline.
Examples of those connections are everywhere in his movies, such as when viewers realize that Vic Veg(Mr.Blonde in Reservoir Dogs) and Vincent Vega(fromPulp Fiction) are brothers. Viewers hear a commercial for a restaurant called Jack Rabbit when Mr. Orange shoots Mr. Blonde. Jack Rabbit is the restaurant where Travolta dances with Uma Thurman and this dance looks a lot like a dance scene in Felinni's 8½.
"I steal from every single movie ever made. If my work has anything, it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together.
Although violence is frequent, he deals with it differently in each movie. One cannot compare the violence in Pulp Fiction with the historical revenge of Inglorious Basterds. Ignoring the context of violent actions against others in his movies, I counted each act of violence(gunshot,knife, car accident, fight, drug-related and rape) and created a graph to see which movies are the most violent.
Beyond physical violence, language is also used as a weapon. Some actors feel uncomfortable with the constant use of n****. I wanted to see how this happens in his movies, so I found all the original movie scripts online and analysed them with a word frequency counter. This is not an exact transcription of the movie but is the most accurate that I could manage.
In these explorations with graphics, data, and information, I wanted to visualize things and, more than that, I've tried to visualize the mind of this brilliant director.
The project was created to be on a website where I explain all those theories and give more details about the collected data.
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