(no subject)
The case of Mr. Blonde:
So I recently got a Reservoir Dogs DVD, and while perusing the special features, I found a little section that profiles Mr. Brown, Mr White, Mr. Pink, and Mr. Blonde. They're decent enough, very typical of what a criminal profiler might come up white, but they're also somewhat hit and miss and should very much enforce the lesson of:
Not everything is as simple as it seems.
Yes these men are criminals, but trust me, you can't reduce them to two or three pages of written text like a cookbook's ingredients. Also, ignorance or ignoring a certain part of a person's life can dramatically skew a profile.
For example, let's look at Mr. Blonde. Mr. Blonde has been pegged as a sheer psychopath by the profiler, as well as a sadist and a sociopath, given his a.) gleeful torture of the cop, b.) his flat affect and c.) his anger at having said cop call Eddie his boss.
Now all of this, examined as separate elemnts, could very well indicate a born psychopath as has been indicated. However, when a single piece of the equation is expanded, the entire thing doen't work anymore.
This piece is Joe Cabot.
As can be witnessed, Joe Cabot is an old motherfucker. He's easily twenty years older than White, who looks to be in his mid forties to early fifties. Simply, Joe did not get to be as old as he was, in as high of a position as he has in the film by being either a.) unobservant or b.) stupid.
Simply, Toothpick Vic couldn't slide by under the radar and be thought of as reliable for as long as he has, and still be as royally fucked up as he was in the film.
Ergo, this is a fairly recent development. Furthermore, Eddie's disbelief at White's claims of Blonde's behavior indicate that Eddie understands a different Victor Vega- he knows his methods, of course, because it's been established that Blonde has had a very healthy working relationship with the Cabots for years. If Blonde had any of the risky behavior associated with him in the film before Joe and Eddie brought him on for the heist, they would have let him rot in jail. So torturing is a new phenomenon- or at least, torturing for the sake of torturing, and as brutal as exacted, is unusual.
Don't get me wrong- Vega is probably used to doing such things as breaking limbs and killing people because he is in the mob, after all. But these are all means to an end- torturing the cop in the film was just for recreational purposes.
Another thing that the profiler failed to mention was Vega's jail time. The unfortunate thing about jail is that it is full of very bad people, who all have to prove to each other that they are not men to be fucked with. Vega had to prove that he was king of the shit pile, and most likely did so by becoming a complete psychopath, something that didn't quite wear off in the 12 or so hours from release to his jubilant return to Cabot's office.
Why Vega chose to torture the cop, as well as his protest of Eddie being called his boss, cannot be simply pinned down to "he doesn't like people". Jail is a brutal hierarchy, with the cops on the top, and if you challenge them, you get fucked over. It is a well known fact that almost every single person who works in American corrections is a complete and total fuckbag, so Vega is not endeared to cops in any way by being near the loveliest species of them while in jail.
Similarly, Eddie most certainly is not Vega's boss, though Joe is. Given the tomfoolery they engaged in during Mr. Blonde's flashback sequence, we can surmise that they're more like brothers than workmates. More like colleagues than anything. Also, Vega, after having spent four years in a place where his every wish was subjugated, Vega does not want anything to do with any kind of authority.
Conclusion? Victor Vega isn't a nice person, and by the time of the film is a monster, but his behavior in the film was learned and adapted from his time spent in jail, not from a wellspring of shitfuckery.
So I recently got a Reservoir Dogs DVD, and while perusing the special features, I found a little section that profiles Mr. Brown, Mr White, Mr. Pink, and Mr. Blonde. They're decent enough, very typical of what a criminal profiler might come up white, but they're also somewhat hit and miss and should very much enforce the lesson of:
Not everything is as simple as it seems.
Yes these men are criminals, but trust me, you can't reduce them to two or three pages of written text like a cookbook's ingredients. Also, ignorance or ignoring a certain part of a person's life can dramatically skew a profile.
For example, let's look at Mr. Blonde. Mr. Blonde has been pegged as a sheer psychopath by the profiler, as well as a sadist and a sociopath, given his a.) gleeful torture of the cop, b.) his flat affect and c.) his anger at having said cop call Eddie his boss.
Now all of this, examined as separate elemnts, could very well indicate a born psychopath as has been indicated. However, when a single piece of the equation is expanded, the entire thing doen't work anymore.
This piece is Joe Cabot.
As can be witnessed, Joe Cabot is an old motherfucker. He's easily twenty years older than White, who looks to be in his mid forties to early fifties. Simply, Joe did not get to be as old as he was, in as high of a position as he has in the film by being either a.) unobservant or b.) stupid.
Simply, Toothpick Vic couldn't slide by under the radar and be thought of as reliable for as long as he has, and still be as royally fucked up as he was in the film.
Ergo, this is a fairly recent development. Furthermore, Eddie's disbelief at White's claims of Blonde's behavior indicate that Eddie understands a different Victor Vega- he knows his methods, of course, because it's been established that Blonde has had a very healthy working relationship with the Cabots for years. If Blonde had any of the risky behavior associated with him in the film before Joe and Eddie brought him on for the heist, they would have let him rot in jail. So torturing is a new phenomenon- or at least, torturing for the sake of torturing, and as brutal as exacted, is unusual.
Don't get me wrong- Vega is probably used to doing such things as breaking limbs and killing people because he is in the mob, after all. But these are all means to an end- torturing the cop in the film was just for recreational purposes.
Another thing that the profiler failed to mention was Vega's jail time. The unfortunate thing about jail is that it is full of very bad people, who all have to prove to each other that they are not men to be fucked with. Vega had to prove that he was king of the shit pile, and most likely did so by becoming a complete psychopath, something that didn't quite wear off in the 12 or so hours from release to his jubilant return to Cabot's office.
Why Vega chose to torture the cop, as well as his protest of Eddie being called his boss, cannot be simply pinned down to "he doesn't like people". Jail is a brutal hierarchy, with the cops on the top, and if you challenge them, you get fucked over. It is a well known fact that almost every single person who works in American corrections is a complete and total fuckbag, so Vega is not endeared to cops in any way by being near the loveliest species of them while in jail.
Similarly, Eddie most certainly is not Vega's boss, though Joe is. Given the tomfoolery they engaged in during Mr. Blonde's flashback sequence, we can surmise that they're more like brothers than workmates. More like colleagues than anything. Also, Vega, after having spent four years in a place where his every wish was subjugated, Vega does not want anything to do with any kind of authority.
Conclusion? Victor Vega isn't a nice person, and by the time of the film is a monster, but his behavior in the film was learned and adapted from his time spent in jail, not from a wellspring of shitfuckery.