My Favorite Scene: the Silence of Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino’s films are known for many things: rapid-fire dialogue exchanges, operatic profanity, sneakily long takes, ceaseless pop culture references, and so on. All of these techniques have been discussed and dissected and scrutinized endlessly, but what rarely gets mentioned is Tarantino’s precise and beautifully timed bouts of silence.

Now, I don’t mean that every audio track on the soundtrack goes mute, but rather the character on screen falls silent. Below are three examples (and, subsequently, my favorite moment from each film) in which a character in a Tarantino film perfectly flexed the art of thinking. They say nothing, but they’re saying everything.

Pulp Fiction (1994) – “You lost your L.A. privileges.”

Midway through Pulp Fiction, nearly an hour and a half after we've watched crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) pay boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) to take a dive in an upcoming fight, Marsellus and Butch run into each other in that uniquely Tarantino way.

Butch didn’t lose the fight like he was paid to, choosing to bet on himself and collect the winnings while on the run from a very pissed Marsellus. Push comes to shove, a gold watch (excuse me, the gold watch) comes up missing, and before we know it, Marsellus and Butch are beating the living shit out of each other on the floor of Maynard’s Pawn Shop. Maynard, a ponytail-sporting hick armed with a very big shotgun, breaks up the fight and soon has both Marsellus and Butch tied down and gagged up in his shitty basement.

Enter Zed, a scrawny redneck wearing a very unconvincing police uniform costume. Zed and Maynard discuss which one of the men they “wanna do first,” The Gimp is brought out from his locked cage to implement pathetic security and, after a quick but menacing game of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo, Marsellus is first up for a bit of torture.

Maynard and Zed drag Marsellus to a back room, the door closes, and horror takes hold. Horror that we hear, but do not see. Butch breaks out of his restraints, knocks The Gimp out, and quickly begins to exit the shop. He grabs the keys to Zed’s chopper and opens the door to leave.

He’s free.  Until he hears it.

The mixed sounds of Maynard and Zed’s ecstatic exclamations of satanic joy, garbled with Marsellus’ muffled screams and the blaring saxophone of The Revels’ “Comanche,” is enough to make Butch stop in his tracks. He opens the door to the shop, but can’t bring himself to leave. His sworn enemy, the man who wanted to kill him mere minutes earlier, will soon meet his demise, and Butch will be home free. But watch Willis’ face here. I mean, really fucking watch it. Bruised and bloodied to hell, Willis’ battered face says what, in hindsight, damn near anyone knows to be true: you can’t leave. You have to go back. You have to go back.

Jackie Brown (1997) – “It’s Jackie Brown.”

This moment of silence comes late in the game, long after the scene has been set and the plan executed.

Pam Grier’s titular badass has successfully managed to steal money from Samuel L. Jackson’s Ordell Robbie (that’s, O-R-D-E-L-L R-O-B-B-I-E). She has (supposedly) passed off more than half a million to Ordell’s bimbo lackey, Melanie (Bridget Fonda), who has hesitantly given it over to Ordell’s crime partner, Louis (Robert De Niro).

Louis is stressed out. Fresh out of prison, he’s feeling the heat of this job. So when he can’t remember where he parked the car in the giant lot of a shopping mall, Melanie sees it as a golden opportunity to fuck with him. She teases, he warns, she apologizes, he shoots.

Now, the moment comes when Louis picks up Ordell and Ordell realizes that the bag containing his $550,000 is actually full of beach towels and romance novels. Louis proclaims repeatedly that he has no idea where the money has gone (which he doesn’t), and also tries to convince Ordell that shooting Melanie was his only option (which it wasn’t).

Ordell tells Louis to pull the car over. And then Ordell thinks.

He sits in the passenger seat, facing Louis, with his head looking down at the floorboard of the shitty automobile. He thinks. The camera slowly pushes in, and after several brilliant seconds of controlled acting, he looks up and slowly let’s out, “It’s Jackie Brown.”

His ass may be dumb, but he ain’t no dumb ass.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) – “Ah ah ah, wait from the cream.”

By the conclusion of the epic, miraculous, revelatory opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, SS Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) has ordered the killing of the entire Dreyfus family. Young Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) escapes, but mostly because Landa let’s her.

Three years later, Shosanna is a low-key cinema owner in Paris, living under the name Emmanuelle Mimieux. Upon meeting famous German sniper Fredrick Zoller, it is soon proposed that the premiere for Nation’s Pride, a Nazi propaganda film about Zoller, be held at Shosanna’s theater. However, the brass must approve of the venue, so an informal lunch is held so that Zoller’s superiors can question Shosanna.

And then in he walks.

Col. Landa, The Jew Hunter, walks up and stands ominously behind Shosanna, who conceals her assumed sudden, horrific panic. Landa slowly sits down before gently asking Shosanna about her cinema.

Take a look at what is going on here. She knows who he is, but does he know who she is? To add to the complexity, does she know that HE knows who she is, and visa versa? Basically, it all comes down to if he knows who Shosanna is, then why isn’t he doing anything about it? And if he doesn’t know who she is, when will he figure it out?

Now, this is a bit of an admitted cheat, as Shosanna does indeed engage Landa in (minimal) conversation. Although Shosanna isn’t literally silent, the sentiment remains the same: Laurent’s face is doing so much work, while her voice says very little. When you take in the full scope of the situation, it makes it very hard to believe that Laurent received not a shred of major awards attention for her work here. It’s as fine a moment of emotional expression that Tarantino has ever captured. 

Previous installments of My Favorite Scene include:

8 Mile
Babel
Brokeback Mountain
Crash
Fargo
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
GoodFellas
He Got Game
House of Games
Hustle & Flow
Inception
Insomnia
Leaving Las Vegas
Philadelphia
Platoon
Raging Bull
Redbelt
The Rules of Attraction
Se7en
Sleepers
The Films of Tony Scott

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