Reservoir Dogs and Decentralizing the Nature of Reality

by Christopher Barr

“Structuralism is the belief that the phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations.  These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture.” – Philosopher Simon Blackburn

“Are you going to bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite?”

Reservoir Dogs was a brilliant film by first time writer/director Quentin Tarantino, which was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.  It was a movie that helped launch the Independent Film craze of the early 90’s, along with the likes of Slacker and Clerks.  The film on the surface seems somewhat simple but upon a closer look we can see that it is filled with structuralism and psychoanalysis.

The story is about a group of thieves and the events of the aftermath of a botched bank heist.  The goal was to steal a boat load of diamonds and live happily ever after.  The problem is ego got involved on a seemingly flawless gig, resulting in everyone getting killed in the end.

A mob boss Joe Cabot and his son “Nice Guy” Eddie, the organizers of the heist, sit around a table with six men who are unknown to each other.  They are having breakfast before their planned diamond heist, chatting about arbitrary things like; what’s the actual meaning of the Madonna song Like a Virgin or whether to leave a tip for the waitress or not.  The six men that are unknown to each other go by aliases given to them by Joe; Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown and Mr. Blonde.

The Semiology of the film can first be found in the arbitrary names of the characters in relation to who they are as men.  Mr. White is Mr. White only because he is not Mr. Pink and so on.  The use of colors to label these men is no different than naming them Larry or Bob but it does allow the meaninglessness of the names to standout more prevalently.

For me the film is an interesting lesson in the nature of reality and the arbitrariness of language.  Structuralism in part, derives from the student notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure and published as Course in General Linguistics, for Saussure, The Sign is a combination of the Signifier; the sound patterns of words, the names we apply to things in the world, the phonic components and the Signified; the ideational components, the abstract concepts or objects that appear in the mind that together, help form an understanding of the world outside of the mind and our ability to relate to it.

Reservoir Dogs is quite unique with what we don’t see in the film.  We see before and after of the slicing of the cop’s ear by the nihilist Mr. Blonde, but not the actual slicing of it.  We see before the heist at the breakfast diner and after the heist at the warehouse but never the actual heist.  The bullets at the end of the film are not seen but only heard, we as an audience member assume that the remaining men are shot and killed by police.  After the Mexican stand-off, resulting in Joe and Eddie being killed instantly and Mr. White taken a bullet, lets us know that these men were shot and killed by bullets but when Mr. Pink fled we merely hear his botched escape and we fill in the blanks appropriating the Imaginary Order, mediated through the always present Symbolic Order.  Personifying the Symbolic by way of the Imaginary, one is able to alter reality and make it about them, making reality a perceived event from their own point of understanding and not an actual one.   

The end of the film resulted in a victory of the Super-Ego, the police, defeating the Ego, Mr. White and Mr. Pink and the Id, Mr. Blonde.  Mr. Orange was the Super-Ego in disguise and was thus defeated by the Ego, Mr. White after it was revealed of his deception, for Mr. White’s encounter with the Real was too overwhelming for him to handle.  It also should be noted on a psychoanalytical level, that the writer and director of the film Quentin Tarantino, when he was a child his father left he and his mother.  There were levels of guilt on his part for this, so in that regard, Mr. White could be seen as Quentin’s real father Tony and Mr. Orange could be seen as Quentin.  His unconscious guilt of his father leaving him as a child could have led to Quentin thinking that he must be punished in some way for forcing him to leave them.  In reality Quentin’s father was a piece of shit and he and his mother Connie were better off without him.  Regardless, guilt stays with us, even if we are rationally not guilty, this film is about punishing the guilt within us all, a sort of all-out-cleansing and thus is a fantasy.

Therein lies the issue, this movie rarely-to-never shows reality within the context of the film.  Reservoir Dogs is about the underlying system of language and is thus trapped in the arbitrary nature of the structure.  The film is unable to escape the Symbolic Order of its own subjective reality to actually “witness” the events as they would have taken place in the Order of the Real.  The Symbolic convinces the Imaginary that it is in the Real but it actually isn’t.  The film is not intentional on this point; the film had a small budget and couldn’t afford to include the heist scenes.  Regardless, as the film exists in the form as it does today, we are able to see it as metaphor for our prison of existence.  The warehouse is the Symbolic Order, as the men argue and fight, they point outwardly often, referencing outside in the world were the heist took place, but like in a novel, the Imaginary Order is activated for us to fantasize about what happened.  This initiates our belief system about what we understand about heists and how they may or may not go wrong.  This may well be the true brilliance of the film; it never tries to convince us that it’s real.