The Washington Post - 26.08.2019

MONDAY, AUGUST 26 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3

trauma experienced 15 years ago

by Uma Thurman — a trauma for

which Tarantino last year public-

ly acknowledged responsibility.

In the final stages of shooting

“Kill Bill: Volume 2,” Tarantino

had asked Thurman, the film’s

lead, to drive a blue Karmann

Ghia down a sandy road at a

speed with which she was un-

comfortable. She had been told

the car was not operating correct-

ly after its manual transmission

was changed to automatic. She

asked Tarantino to get a stunt

double to do it instead.

Tarantino insisted she drive,

and the upshot was awful. The

Karmann Ghia, with Thurman at

the wheel, plowed into a tree.

Thurman, who is convinced she

could have been killed, has since

described the incident as “negli-

gent to the point of criminality.”

She forgave Tarantino (he de-

scribes the incident as the biggest

regret of his life). But Thurman

maintained that the alleged at-

tempt by Harvey Weinstein, Law-

rence Bender and E. Bennett

Walsh to cover it up was “unfor-

givable.”

I love Tarantino’s take on the

movies. I love the energy behind

his enthusiasms. And I share his

crush on the Karmann Ghia. But

his sensibility — which has been

massively influential not just on

the movies but on television and

on the culture at large — also

makes me queasy. I can’t say

why, exactly. But it has to do with

the way his films seem to wallow

in the very confusions they cre-

ate.

Tarantino gets away with his

brand of boyish fandom both

because it speaks to the childish

fantasist in each of us and be-

cause we are, at the same time,

adults. That is to say, we all have a

healthy sense of irony.

We know it’s just the movies.

We know the difference between

a family and a cult. We know how

to distinguish a con man from a

candidate, an active shooter drill

from the real thing, real news

from fake news, real people from

actors and actors from stunt dou-

bles.

Because we do, right? We’re all

clear on that.

I mean, surely we’re all clear on

that?

[email protected]

Tarantino’s fandom is so unin-

hibited, it’s infectious. Spotting

the references to his various ob-

sessions is part of what makes his

films so fun. But he is generous

on this score: If you get his

allusions, great. If you don’t, he’ll

make sure you have a good time

anyway.

His enthusiasm overwhelms

objections and scruples. (Who

else could get away with treating

a subject as distressing as the

murder of a pregnant Sharon

Tate with the moral sensitivity of

a teenage YouTube celebrity?)

And it overwhelms reality.

But that can come at a cost.

Tarantino is happy for you to

know that his father owned a

blue Karmann Ghia. But the men-

tal connection he would probably

prefer you didn’t make when you

see “Once Upon a Time” is be-

tween the Karmann Ghia and a

energies go. His real talent is to

bring the irrational wildness of

fandom to stories and subjects

that in other hands feel exhaust-

ed, cliched or just dated.

al pop obsessions. He’s just like

you and me in this sense, only

more so.

He tells stories, yes. But origi-

nal plotting is not where his

a stunt double: He appears to

become a reckless lunatic, but he

is actually very much in control.

Both sides of his character get to

shine in the film’s denouement.

But honestly, who cares about

that? The real reason — the deep-

er reason — for the extended

Karmann Ghia scene is the same

as the reason Tarantino made

homages to hard-boiled crime

novels (“Pulp Fiction”) and to

blaxploitation films (“Jackie

Brown”); a revenge fantasy about

Nazis (“Inglourious Basterds”);

and a vampire Western (“From

Dusk Till Dawn”). It’s the same as

the reason he chose to cast the

likes of John Travolta, Pam Grier

and Christopher Walken in lead-

ing roles. It’s because he is a fan.

Tarantino’s main talent is and

always has been the exuberant

expression of fandom. He is a sort

of hyperactive curator of person-

own a Honda CRV, and I can
never remember where they’ve
hidden the lever that opens the
hood. But I do love beautiful cars,
and whenever I see a Karmann
Ghia, whether in a film or in real
life, my heart breaks into a canter.
Yes, Porsches are gorgeous. Cit-
roens are cool. And the great
Italian sports cars are obviously
unsurpassable. But Karmann
Ghias — an unlikely combination
of German (Volkswagen) me-
chanicals and Italian design —
are simply the most beautiful
cars ever built.
I know, I know, beauty is sub-
jective. (Although it’s not so hard
to find agreement on the proposi-
tion that Brad Pitt and Margot
Robbie are good-looking.) But
that’s precisely the point: A Kar-
mann Ghia’s attractiveness is not
absolute in any Platonic, arche-
typal way, like a Porsche or a
Ferrari. Karmann Ghias are real.
They’re invitations to fandom.
They’re approachable. They’re af-
fordable. And their shape is — to
a degree that’s almost sublime —
just right.
So yes, if I were Quentin Taran-
tino, setting my film in 1969, with
his moviemaking budget, I, too,
would be looking for just about
any excuse to film a scene with a
Karmann Ghia. I might even
build my whole movie around it.
There was a moment when I
thought that’s exactly what he
had done. In one of the film’s
indelible sequences, Pitt bids
farewell to DiCaprio, hops into
his Karmann Ghia, and drives
home. Suddenly, it’s as if he were
in a different movie, playing a
bank robber with the cops in hot
pursuit.
He’s not. They’re not. The
whole sequence feels gloriously
pointless, and — in classic Taran-
tino style — quite a few seconds
longer than it needs to be. But the
pointlessness is exactly what
makes it so wonderful.
You could argue that the scene
helps “develop” Booth’s charac-
ter. You would dutifully point out
that when acting as Dalton’s
chauffeur, buddy and life coach,
Booth drives his Coupe de Ville
sedately, whereas when he is in
his own car — the Karmann Ghia
— he expresses his true calling as

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK FROM C1

Ugly underside of Brad Pitt’s cool car in ‘Once Upon a Time’

ANDREW COOPER/SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT/COLUMBIA PICTURES

Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” The film features several cult cars, including an extended scene with a

Karmann Ghia like the one seen below.

MANFRED SEGERER/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

Carolyn Hax is

away. The follow-

ing first appeared

April 13, 2005.

Dear Carolyn:
Before my
husband and I
married, we
discussed kids,
and although he admitted he’d
never had an overwhelming
desire to have any, he knew how
much it meant to me and agreed
that one would be okay. Fine.
Except that every time it comes
up, he gets panicky and finds
another reason to put it off. I’m
34, he’s 40, so it’s a somewhat
limited window. He’s utterly
convinced that once we have a
baby, our lives will end. We will
be impoverished, never travel
again, etc. Which is ridiculous —
we are okay financially and have
lots of family nearby to help out.
Unfortunately, our friends with
kids don’t help. They love to
complain that they never have
sex anymore, they are always
broke, they never get any sleep.
Why don’t people ever talk about
the wonderful stuff? If it’s so
awful, why do most of them have
more than one kid? And what
can I do to reassure my poor
husband it will all be okay?
— J.

J. : They have more than one kid

because they were too tired,

broke and frustrated to feel like

playing with the first kid.

Or, they had wonderful

reasons you haven’t really heard

because you’re caught up in the

negative things. Drawing them

out is the perfect antidote to

hearing too many scary stories

about having a child.

It doesn’t help, though, when

your problem is that you

married one. Your husband

either doesn’t know who he is

and what he wants, or worse,

knows but doesn’t have the guts

to act on it. Neither looks

flattering on a 40-year-old.

Anyone with a spouse, friends

and four decades on Earth

knows what it means to have

kids. Debating it now is just

stalling, and stalling breaks his

other promise to you, the tacit

one, the one he made when you

wed: to treat your happiness as

the equal to his own.

Let him stall without clear

protest and you break this same

promise to him, since no doubt

you will grow to resent him.

So: Kindly, lovingly, firmly,

demand that he honor this tacit

promise by being honest with

you. If he doesn’t want any kids

— if he just lied to keep you, or

meant it but since changed his

mind — he needs to admit that,

now. The longer he hides, the

narrower your options. No fair.

And if he really does want a

child, then he needs to realize

the stars won’t align and you

won’t remain 34. The window

isn’t “somewhat limited”; it

shuts, maybe not tomorrow, but

whenever it wants to, not when

you say it does. Plan, budget,

plunge.

Dear Carolyn: So do you think

deadlines for marriage issues

are ever appropriate? Basically,

my GF can’t decide if my not

believing in her god is a deal-

breaker. But this has been going

on for three years. It seems like

at some point “failure to reach a

conclusion” is a conclusion.

— Anonymous

Anonymous: Well said. But

before you go, there’s no harm

in asking one more time

whether she has made up her

mind.

That is, unless the conclusion

you reach by her failure to reach

a conclusion is that you don’t

want to marry someone who’s

unable to reach big conclusions.

Then, I guess, you just go.

Write to Carolyn Hax at

[email protected]. Get her

column delivered to your inbox each

morning at wapo.st/haxpost.

Husband’s stalling is no bundle of joy

Carolyn
Hax

NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

BY RICHARD LIPEZ

Somebody very droll got into

Stieg Larsson’s Wikipedia page.

Recently, an entry on his Millen-

nium crime series described Lis-

beth Salander, the series’s popu-

lar continuing character, simply

as “a woman in her twenties

with a photographic memory

and poor social skills.” That’s

putting it

mildly. Saland-

er’s antisocial

behaviors in-

clude tossing a

molotov cock-

tail at her mur-

derous Rus-

sian spy father

and watching

him burn in

the front seat

of his Mer-

cedes. In the

latest novel,

“The Girl Who

Lived Twice,”

written by Da-

vid Lager-

crantz (Lars-

son died in

2004), Saland-

er irons an abusive husband’s

dress shirt with him in it. She is

as ticked off as ever, and with

troll factories, crooked Swedish

pols and Russian mafiosos on

the loose, she has plenty to set

her off.

Salander is less physically pre-

sent this time — and that’s too

bad, because she’s fascinating. A

superhacker, Salander learns on-

line that her family is genetically

predisposed to both high intelli-

gence and psychopathy. Abused

by both her father and later by a

sadistic child psychiatrist, Sa-

lander devotes her life to revenge

against powerful cruel people,

most of them men. A Stockholm

police inspector describes her as

“a bit like the fallen angel in

paradise” who “serves nobody,

belongs to nobody” but who

can’t stand injustice and is driv-

en to do just about anything to

fix it.

Most of the new novel’s narra-

tive follows Mikael Blomkvist,

the investigative reporter at Mil-

lennium magazine who is Sa-

lander’s good pal and sometime

fellow crime fighter. This time

he’s unusually tired and fed up

while trying to finish an article

about a Russian disinformation

campaign and possible links be-

tween a Swedish cabinet offi-

cial’s financial funny business

and a stock market crash. Blom-

kvist is suffering from news

fatigue because of depressing

developments around the world

(the United States is not men-

tioned by name), so he is almost

relieved when he learns his

phone number has turned up in

the pocket of a strange dwarfish

beggar found dead in a Stock-

holm wooded area.

The corpse, with its disfigured

face and several missing fingers

and toes, is soon identified as a

Nepalese sherpa. Evidence de-

velops revealing that the man

may have been poisoned with a

particular exotic brew. The min-

ister of defense whom Blomkvist

is investigating once survived a

notorious Mount Everest climb-

ing expedition in which others

died. Could there be a connec-

tion between the dead mountain

guide and the official? Blomkvist

perks up.

I wish I could report that I was

gripped by all this, but not really.

The novel meanders annoyingly,

with Salander appearing only

intermittently to lend Blomkvist

mainly technical support as he

interviews cops, diplomats, a

forensic pathologist, the head of

a psychiatric institution. There’s

a secondary plot involving Sa-

lander’s evil (literally) twin sis-

ter, Camilla, a tool of Russian

intelligence who harbors her

own revenge fantasies. Enraged

because Lisbeth murdered the

father Camilla adored — and was

probably being sexually abused

by — she uses her GRU and

Russian gangster cohorts to

track down Lisbeth and exact

revenge.

All of this unfolds with prose

that is borderline stilted and

with major and minor plot turns

that make little sense. Lager-

crantz is a kind of un-Elmore

Leonard. Blomkvist has testy

exchanges with a right-wing col-

umnist named Catrin Lindas, a

journalistic competitor, and out

of nowhere, the pair are entan-

gled: “Then she put a hand

around his neck and pulled him

to her, and within moments it

got completely out of hand...

and in the middle of all this

madness Blomkvist realized that

he had wanted her ever since he

first saw her picture online.” Like

so much here, it’s just mighty

peculiar.

Readers who are ambivalent

about the violence and gore that

are part and parcel of so many

Scandinavian mysteries these

days needn’t worry too much

about “The Girl Who Lived

Twice.” Except for the shirt-iron-

ing sequence and some brief

references to a GRU agent who

liked to roll political opponents

into a cremation oven alive,

there’s not much howling in

excruciating pain until the final

confrontation between Lisbeth

and Camilla, with little serious

harm to our main heroine. If

there’s a seventh Millennium

novel, Blomkvist will probably

be seen hobbling or even in a

wheelchair. Lisbeth will show up

with just a few scratches, howev-

er — her photographic memory

intact and her short fuse ready to

blow.

[email protected]

Richard Lipez writes the Don

Strachey PI novels under the name

Richard Stevenson. “Killer Reunion”

is the latest.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, David

Lagercrantz will be at Politics and

Prose at the Wharf, 70 District Sq.

SW, Washington.

BOOK WORLD

In the bleak ‘Girl Who Lived Twice,’

Lisbeth Salander is angrier than ever

THE GIRL WHO

LIVED TWICE

By David

Lagercrantz

Translated from

the Swedish by

George Goulding

Knopf. 347 pp.

$27.95

ANNA-LENA AHLSTROEM

The author David Lagercrantz,

who has continued Stieg

Larsson’s Millennium series.