(Left to right) Wayland Flowers, Madame, Quentin Tarantino
Don't know if this means anything, and there probably aren't many people who could appreciate it (well, okay, possibly Tom Servo or Crow T. Robot, but they're fictional and not even on television anymore).
Quentin Tarantino was inescapable recently, turning up all over everywhere in a promotional frenzy trying to push Faster, Urma Thermal, Kill Bill Volume II. Each time I saw him, I kept thinking he looked like somebody else, although I couldn't say who, exactly. At least not at first. But then it came to me.
Quentin Tarantino is midway through turning into "Madame," the papier-mache Tallulah-Bankhead-based ventriloquist's dummy operated by the late Wayland Flowers.
This goes beyond spooky. Who'd have guessed that Tarantino's smirky po-mo/irony-impaired mania for 1970s pop-culture detritus would turn him into an example of same?
I'd say it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone, but when I write that, I can hear Quentin Tarantino saying it, and that makes me shudder.
A couple of days after I wrote this, I was sorting through a pile of old SPY magazines, and there, in a late one (mid 1990s, post-Carter, post-Andersen, and probably post-Hendra) was the "Separated At Birth" feature, in which Mr. Tarantino's similarity to Madame was highlighted.
So I guess, like George Harrison with "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine," I must have had that similarity stored somewhere in my head and had it reassert itself during the Kill Bill PR saturation bombing campaign.
We were never told Madame's surname. I always assumed it was Flowers, after her operator. But it's possible she was Madame Tarantino.
