Tarantino's Round Flat Characters: A (Mainly) Verbal Study of Reservoir Dogs (1992).

International audienceThis article revisits E.M. Forster's distinction between round and flat characters in order to study the balancing between genre characters and realistic characters Tarantino's first film effects. It starts by examining the relationship between the fictional director of the heist (Joe Cabot), the other characters and the real director in a scene where Tarantino's cameo as a minor character endows the fictional director with authority and consequently emphasizes the shared dimension of filmmaking. The author then argues that the characters' capacity to identify and articulate flatness and rotundity in themselves and each other makes them appear round as it implies that, like Forster's reader, they are endowed with an "emotional eye." Tarantino's characters would appear, then, as realistic characters playing the parts of genre characters, or as round characters trying to act flat. Taking up D.W. Winnicott's distinction between the "true self" and the "false self," the author argues that the characters appear "truest" when they articulate the gap between the "true self" and the "false self," the realistic character and the genre type. The article concludes with a study of the Commode story sequence which suggests that good acting implies embodying the character as narrator of his own character, and thus constructing what Paul Ricœur calls a "narrative identity.