The mysterious allure of Major Marquis Warren, Samuel L Jackson’s suave western icon
It should go without saying to any movie fan that the films of Quentin Tarantino are some of the most thunderously chaotic and explosively violent, featuring stylish characters delivering slick monologues before disposing of their adversaries with a swift gunshot, or indeed worse. Such is typified by the symphony of ferocity in the Kill Bill series or the seminal, polished crime flick Pulp Fiction, and explains why 2015’s Hateful Eight was so disliked by Tarantino’s loyal legion of fans, with young teenagers leaving the cinema decrying a lack of volatile action sequences and gutsy energy.
However, as the years pass, Tarantino’s film seems increasingly more mature, a slow, steady and considered murder mystery where the Wild West’s worst criminals gather in a solitary hut surrounded by great American wilderness. Feeling like a film plucked from the origins of Hollywood cinema, Tarantino channelled one of his boyhood heroes, Sergio Leone, even employing his longtime collaborator, the composer Ennio Morricone, to help execute his suave story that dissects deceit, savagery and frontier justice in the years following the Civil War.
Where charming characters had made Tarantino’s filmography pop in the past, in The Hateful Eight, a charming roster was perhaps its most important ingredient, with the director filling the screenplay with a glut of nefarious enigmas. Jennifer Jason Leigh morphs into the irredeemable criminal Daisy Domergue, and Bruce Dern slithers as the guilty former Civil War ex-Confederate officer Sanford Smithers, but it’s Samuel L Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren who commands the story as Tarantino’s focus, the master of ceremonies.
Sitting on a horse saddle atop a pile of frozen dead bodies, as if his victims were merely cargo, Marquis Warren stares dead into the centre of the camera, “Room for one more”, delicately announcing himself as the antihero to the audience, and the person now subliminally in control of the stationary wagon ahead of him. An ex-Civil War Union cavalry major turned bounty hunter, Warren boards the wagon, joining Kurt Russell’s John Ruth, a man of the same profession with a passion for seeing his victims swing from the gallows.
A protagonist with no moral centre, flitting between genre identities of the outlaw and loyal man of justice, Warren’s appearance well reflects this split personality, looking a little like a charismatic circus ringleader mixed with a debonaire cartoon villain. Despite the yellow lapels of his jacket, striking red tie and wide-brim hat that shrouds his face in darkness, it is Warren’s eyes that demand your attention, bolting instantly into your soul as he reads its contents.
Yet, his mischievous words say otherwise, as his dialogue spills from his mouth with a cheeky grin, almost as if he knows what high-stakes gamble he is taking as he steps onto the wagon, yet doesn’t care about the outcome.
By the time Warren arrives at the cabin that plays host to The Hateful Eight, he is ready to take the centre stage of Tarantino’s theatre. Dividing the cabin of criminals as if the hut itself were a microcosm of the American Civil War, Warren stands between the two parties who fling insults and threats at each other in place of bullets and bayonets.
All the while, Warren presents himself like a wise overseer of proceedings, as if he can peer into the souls of each evildoer present and allocate the true essence behind the whites of their eyes. Revelling in his role as the master of ceremonies, Jackson’s character controls the tempo and the tempers of each hot-head in the snow-peaked hut, barking, “Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down,” during one moment when tensions boil over, as if he is Tarantino’s mouthpiece, controlling the story like the writer and editor of the tale.
Much like the iconic Hercule Poirot, inquisitive Sherlock or even the omniscient Inspector of J. B. Priestley’s play, Warren is the man holding the suspects hostage before unravelling his knowledge like a finely-spun tapestry onto his guests, revealing tiny details about their characters that makes him seem less like a mere bounty hunter and more like a fallible spirit of the wild west, determined to bring these lost souls to hell’s damnation.
It may sound absurd, though Tarantino has been known to toy with fantasy, and Warren is such a complex enigma of a character that such an ethereal origin shouldn’t be totally discarded, especially as, after all, The Hateful Eight is a fanciful love letter to the myth of the American West. Consider further that Warren’s backstory sounds like the work of a superhero, escaping a POW camp by burning it to the ground before killing Confederate guards and prisoners to match, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem so crazy to see him as a vengeful soul whose power and violence reflects the mysticism and potency of America’s most iconic genre.
As such, Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren represents one of Tarantino’s most haunting and endearing characters, being the embodiment of the story’s obsession with deceit, death and violence. In a film that begins with a shot of a snow-topped crucifix, Warren is the grim reaper, sent to deliver seven souls to hell before he, too, joins them on their merry way.
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