There will be
large spoilers in this review of
The Hateful Eight because, though it’s easy to evade spoilers when discussing its technical aspects (all first rate) and overall air of menace, it’s impossible to evade them (at least I find it so) when trying to discuss what, besides box office and ultraviolent jollies, the thing is trying to accomplish.
Marquis Warren, a recently demobbed Union Major and bounty hunter on the road to Red Rock, catches a ride on a stage with another bounty hunter, John Ruth, and his current, living prize, Daisy Domergue, worth $10,000 upon delivery. They are joined by another stray, former Confederate raider Chris Mannix, claiming to be Red Rock’s new sheriff. Later they’ll get snowed in with four other characters of at-first-uncertain provenance, and we’ll have ourselves that Eight.
Things are tense from the start. Domergue is extremely troublesome — she’s a spitter, for one thing — but Ruth is committed to taking her, as he does all his charges, to the law alive, despite the lack of a financial percentage in this (though he thinks nothing of breaking Domergue’s nose and, later, knocking out her teeth). He says it’s because he doesn’t want to cheat the hangman of his wage, but it’s easier to believe he does it in accordance with a crude moral code. He trusts no man but has a feeling for justice; when Mannix announces himself to be the new sheriff of Red Rock, Ruth is far more outraged than Warren that a Reb would get the job, or lie about getting it. Warren, for his part, would prefer a simple excuse to kill Mannix, as he is accustomed and in fact pleased to kill white men, especially but not exclusively those whose cause had been his death or enslavement.
The relationship between Warren and Ruth is important. We find out quickly that the two men know each other, but when we learn that Ruth respects Warren’s war record, it’s puzzling, and when Marquis reveals Ruth saved his life, it’s a surprise — because obviously neither trusts the other, or only trusts him insofar as he has to. Theirs is what you might call an unsentimental relationship.
But each has something that motivates him beyond his survival instinct. Ruth, it turns out, not only respects justice, but also has a soft spot for a “Lincoln letter” Warren holds, addressed personally to Warren by the Emancipator himself. Ruth remembers the letter fondly and is visibly moved when he gets a chance to read it again. The letter is mostly anodyne, complimenting Warren’s service, but it vaguely alludes to a post-racist future when they can “work together.” Can there be any other reason why Ruth nearly weeps to read it but that he would like to think so, too? (So long, of course, as he needn’t risk anything to achieve it.)
Later, Ruth is also visibly affected when Warren reveals [look, I told you, spoilers] that the letter’s a fake. He’s more emotional than one might expect; he’s partly angry, but also deeply hurt — feels betrayed, even. And Warren is surprisingly cold and contemptuous as he explains to Ruth that, as a black man in a white world, he is sometimes obliged to “charm” the caucasians to survive, and the fake letter is one such charm.
This is the point where everything starts to break apart, and when the more mechanically plot-driven part of the story kicks in. It takes that long to happen, I think, because Tarantino wanted to first show that the two major characters who seem most evenly matched and who have the best grounds for friendship can’t be anything of the sort because of the huge fact of endemic racism — a bloody chasm too large to be crossed by simple fellow-feeling.
But race isn’t everything, and there are other grounds for unity. At the end, after much Tarantino-style bloodletting, [massive spoiler, here], a new interracial team — Warren and Mannix, both bleeding to death — unite to bring Domergue to a perverted version of the justice to which Ruth was attempting to deliver her. Why this is preferable to just shooting her is not made explicit; Warren cites Ruth’s code, but from what we’ve seen, why would Warren, even in delirium, adopt it? Tarantino drops some hints earlier in the film: a character claiming to be a hangman says that “justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of
not being justice.” When Warren and Mannix clumsily put Domergue to the rope, it’s certainly not justice. (When Mannix reads aloud the Lincoln letter in, as it were, the shade of Domergue’s hanged corpse, the irony is too clear to miss.) It is instead a simple shift in the grounds of hatred. Though the word “nigger” is heard frequently in the film — a Tarantino hallmark — the word “bitch” runs a close second. Some critics have commented on the disturbing abuse Domergue withstands in the course of the film and
wonder if it’s misogynistic. I think misogyny is too limiting an explanation. The violence against Domergue
is disturbing; worse than anyone else's. I can’t imagine any good reason why this character had to be female at all except this: so that the story’s menfolk, or what’s left of them, could be shown to take a special pleasure and comfort in using a moral code, even a second-hand one in which they don’t really believe, to elevate their violence against her into something more satisfying as they face the end of their days. Think of the Eight as a little divided society -- as one of the characters explicitly describes it -- that's too poisoned by greed and fear to survive, and whose members while away its decline indulging every opportunity to settle scores, and you begin to see the point. I wouldn't go so far as to call it feminist, but I will say that it isn't women Tarantino has it in for.
