Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (2007): Subverting Gender through Genre or Vice Versa?
Résumé
The article examines how Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007) subverts both gender and genre by mixing several genres (the slasher, the car movie, the buddy movie) generally considered to be male, either at the diegetic level (e.g. the main characters) or at the level of reception (i.e. the target audience). The film's play on gender and genre, which is clearly based on the idea that film genres are gendered, is, then, enabled by the very discursivity of these norms. The article also shows how Tarantino took into account feminist film theory, namely Carol Clover and Laura Mulvey, when making Death Proof, suggesting that film genre, for Tarantino, is not so much a matter of corpus as of discourses, including both texts and context, production and reception; the film's visual effects underline, for instance, what Rick Altman calls the “pragmatic” dimension of film genre. The author comes to the conclusion that Death Proof could be considered a hybrid, a horror-car-buddy movie “for girls” insomuch as it highlights the maleness of its generic terms at various levels, e.g. the choice of shots which mirrors the male audience's presumed position as object of the gaze, in other words, because the film has already integrated feminist discourse into its aesthetics and politics.
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