Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Bronfen, Broomhilda Unchained: Tarantino’s Wagner

July 2015, Volume 9, Number 2, 55–67.

Fictional quests depend in their cleanness and their linearity on the support of another kind of plot, another kind of character. In order to afford the questing characters their goals, their adversities, their growth, these other characters have to remain static; where the former are always on the move to someplace different, these latter wallow, however mobile they may be, in their own circles. Odysseus has his reasons for blinding Polyphemus, but has anyone ever asked what reasons Polyphemus has for being Polyphemus? Odysseus’s progress on his way to Ithaca is premised on him clawing himself out of the mind-numbing circularity that determines the existence of Polyphemus, of the Sirens, of the Lotus Eaters.

The question is of course who gets to strive and who wallows, and the answer is: usually white men strive, everybody else gets to help, impede or inspire them.