Beyond Crime and Space. How Quentin Tarantino conveys temporality and spatiality in relation to the characters in Reservoir Dogs

Abstract

In my thesis I examine how the screenplay author and director Quentin Tarantino uses the literary format of the screenplay to convey the spatiality and temporality of the characters in the narrative. I also investigate how the reader’s perception of these factors is crystallized, by contrasting the screenplay with its film. I apply theories from screenplay and adaptation studies, and by combining, opposing or altering them I demonstrate how the screenplay can achieve unique effects that are lost when the text is turned into a movie. I show, among other things, that in the screenplay, the reader can be endowed spatial properties. Furthermore, not all spatial properties of the characters have to be specified in the screenplay. The spatiality of the people in the movie depends on whether they are recognized by the spectator or not, as this alters the spectator’s perception of the actors’ extension in space. I also analyze how the distance between reader and narrative is diminished in the screenplay as she partly participates in the creation of it. On the other hand, there seems to be an indelible temporal discrepancy between the music and the events described in the screenplay. Moreover, in a screenplay, silence and inaction can be endowed with temporal extension in a way that movies cannot. I also examine how the screenplay author, thanks to the screenplay’s unique feature of scene headings, can create a temporal rupture that lacks equivalence in the finished film.