The fan theory that completely changes ‘Reservoir Dogs’
Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, is famously a heist movie that doesn’t show the heist, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions as to what really went down.
What’s inarguable is that the team of thieves assembled by Joe Cabot to pull off a diamond robbery in broad daylight end up destroying themselves from the inside out after suspicions, paranoia, double-crossed, and treachery begin to sweep through their remaining – and ever-dwindling – number.
A seminal moment for independent cinema, Reservoir Dogs was heavily criticised at the time for its unflinching violence but ended up as a massive influence on the medium. Coupled with Tarantino’s follow-up Pulp Fiction, it felt as though every second feature from a budding filmmaker was a nonlinear crime caper with rat-a-tat dialogue and needle-drops galore, but very few of them came close in terms of quality.
The opening scene set out Tarantino’s stall as a writer, with the characters engaging in loose, naturalistic dialogue peppered with pop culture references as the barbs fly back and forth. It’s key to introducing, establishing, and adding layers to the key characters, but what if it never really happened at all?
Never mind the events of the botched heist, a popular theory circulated online in the years since Reservoir Dogs first landed has suggested that the introductory exchange unfolds in the afterlife, with every single principal player within being dead once events are set in motion on-screen.
It admittedly requires a fairly substantial leap of logic, operating under the assumption that the fractured timeline even extends to the very first scene of the movie unfolding last chronologically, as well as ruining the dreams of anybody who hoped Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink had emerged as the sole survivor.
Essentially, every single colour-coded thief has died in the aftermath of the diamond job, with the diner acting as a purgatory where they all catch up, shoot the shit, and trade stories back and forth. During their first meeting, Joe specifically warned them not to joke around, but here they are, tossing one-liners around with reckless abandon.
Joe says that everybody can go on vacation to Hawaii together after the job is done, where they’ll finally be able to see him cut loose and have a little fun. Switch out Hawaii for the afterlife, and maybe that’s their next destination when they leave the diner, with the iconic stroll down the street to the sounds of ‘Little Green Bag’ unfolding already and resulting in all of their deaths.
It stretches suspension of disbelief to somewhere near breaking point, and it’s certainly flimsy under scrutiny, but rewatching Reservoir Dogs under the assumption that everybody’s dead from the start does, at the very least, offer a brand new interpretation and a way to experience the end result.
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