i finally understand tarantino's edgelord problem

Plus an update on the newsletter.

Hi my lovely readers,

You may have noticed I’ve quietly posted a couple of things recently without making this whole “I’M BACK” announcement because I wasn’t sure how to do that without it feeling weird.

But I want to say I am back. And I’ve been thinking a lot during the break about what I want this newsletter to be. What works, what doesn’t, what I can sustain without burning out and disappearing on you again.

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What happens now:

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But if you want to stick around, I’m offering 50% off for the rest of the year as a thank you for being patient while I sorted this out.

Now let’s dive right in 🫶🏻

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Goddammit okay, time to write about this guy. I was supposed to be writing a piece on Pluribus but here we are. Sunday afternoon, lying around in my pyjamas, laptop balanced on my chest, cursor blinking at an open Substack draft that contained exactly eleven words. Reddit was calling to me, that familiar black hole of procrastination camouflaged as research, and I was deep in someone’s biohacker routine when I saw it. Quentin Tarantino trending. Which already felt ominous because when has a 62-year-old white man trending ever been good news? I clicked.

Quentin Tarantino had called Paul Dano “the limpest dick in the world” on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. Listen. I do enjoy some Tarantino films. Django’s soundtrack is on my weekly rotation, Pulp Fiction is superb, the Kill Bill films are good fun, sure—but the man himself has always made me want to mute my TV whenever he appears on screen. The manic energy, the constant interrupting, the way he explains film history to journalists like they’re particularly slow children.

I know this isn’t S-tier cultural criticism but when I heard what he said, my first thought was: He’s such a whiny baby.

The full quote was worse—”weakest fucking actor in SAG,” “weak sauce,” apparently watching Paul Dano act makes Tarantino want to “take a fucking nap.” Which is rich because Paul Dano made drinking milkshakes in There Will Be Blood feel like watching someone commit murder with dairy products. Sweet, anxious Paul Dano who looks like he sends thank-you cards to his grocery store cashier.

This attack on Dano didn’t land well with audiences nor the industry. The comments sections were brutal—fans defending Dano with a golden-retriever level of protective energy. Within hours, Daniel Day-Lewis had come out of semi-retirement to defend his There Will Be Blood co-star. Matt Reeves posted Instagram stories calling Dano “incredible.” Ben Stiller, Reese Witherspoon, half of Hollywood suddenly became Paul Dano’s personal protection squad. I hadn’t seen anything like it since Jeremy Strong and the infamous The New Yorker hit piece. Then Colleen Foy, who apparently was at the There Will Be Blood screening Tarantino attended, posted that he “vibed” with Dano’s performance at the time.

So either he was lying then or he’s lying now. Both options make him look pathetic. Tarantino has finally picked on someone so universally beloved, so genuinely talented, that people are snapping out of whatever spell his hot takes usually cast. Plus, the whole thing felt less like fair criticism and more like watching someone have a very public breakdown.

All of which raise some obvious questions: what compulsion drives someone to announce their hatred of Paul Dano like it’s breaking news? Why did this need to be public at all? And more importantly, why does Tarantino always need an audience for his contrarian takes? Is there something genuinely tragic about being a 62-year-old edgelord?

attempting to define edgelordism

Before we get into the why, it’s worth defining the inner workings of an edgelord.

The genealogy of the term emerges from the most terminally online spaces. It’s January 2013, and massively multiplayer online games are hitting their stride. Guild Wars 2 has been out for a few months, and players are deep into the endgame grind, showing off their badass weapons and rare armor sets. Certain players have developed an extremely predictable aesthetic. Think black and red color schemes, the darkest possible armor, tragic backstories, and usernames that sound like they were generated by a 14-year-old’s idea of what “intimidating” looks like. These players enacted what we might call ‘aesthetic recuperation’, wearing it like a costume to signal how mysterious and dangerous they supposedly are.

On January 28, 2013, a Guild Wars 2 player spots one of them and posts about it on the r/Guildwars2 subreddit: “some kind of edgelord with twilight [a legendary sword] and full of [Citadel of Flame armor] and black and red, which is good for a laugh.” The emphasis is on the aesthetic rather than the character archetype we would now call an “edgelord” but regardless, it stuck. On February 19th, 2015, Urban Dictionary user Petrus4 submitted an entry for “edgelord.”

The term would eventually escape gaming forums altogether.

By 2015, Sarah Nyberg wrote the popular essay “I’m Sarah Nyberg, and I Was A Teenage Edgelord” during peak #Gamergate, launching the term beyond gaming into general internet vernacular. People finally had a word for cubicle fascists mainstreaming chan-board Nazi jokes and mid-tier podcasters mistaking R-word deployment for epistemological courage. Progress.

“Edgelord” smashes together “edge” and “lord”—edge meaning you’re pushing boundaries, lord being this sarcastic honorific borrowed from internet gems like “shitlord” and “douchelord” and “jukelord”. Oxford added it in its vocabulary just last year, making it among the freshest entries in formal English.

Edgelords may have elevated contrarianism as libidinal economy in recent years, but psychologists have been studying them under various names for a long time. Their public provocative behavior strongly correlates with what you would know as the “Dark Tetrad”—a delightful combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Sounds like a psychiatric diagnosis designed by someone with a very twisted sense of humor!

So what are the key characteristics of a fully-formed edgelord? Consider this your field guide to spotting them in the wild:

• They depend on audiences: Private opinions are for peasants. Edgelords need an audience for their intellectual superiority, preferably one that will react with shock and awe.

• They escalate when previous controversies start getting reactions: What starts as mild contrarianism (”I don’t like Marvel movies”) eventually becomes nuclear takes (”Paul Dano has the limpest dick in the world”) as they require bigger shocks to maintain their transgressive currency.

• They like to perform rationality: Edgelords are not truth seekers. They are performing the appearance of being logical while actually just showing off their supposed superior taste.

• They frame cruelty as intellectual honesty: They enjoy being horrible to specific individuals but if you challenge them they’ll say it’s fearless cultural criticism or artistic integrity.

• They have a need for uniqueness: Aka a compulsive drive to resist majority opinion, even when the majority is objectively correct, just to maintain their sense of being special.

Things get juicy in a 2014 study titled “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun”, in which researchers found that internet trolls—our modern edgelords—derive genuine pleasure from causing distress to others, rating images of human suffering as “relatively pleasing” compared to normal people who, you know, have functioning empathy. Unlike what one would assume, they have high self-esteem combined with sadistic tendencies, meaning they’re not broken losers seeking validation, they’re functional sociopaths who get off on causing psychic damage. In other words, they think they have a superpower, except the power is being an asshole and believing they’re saving civilization.

Edgelord behavior typically peaks in adolescence and fades once people discover that cruelty doesn’t seriously make you interesting. But Tarantino represents a different species. This is someone whose edgelord tendencies have progressively escalated. You could argue there are different reasons for this:

1) Early in his career, he could get away with shock-value provocations because transgression itself felt revolutionary in the ‘90s.

2) Industry power has insulated Tarantino from consequences in ways that would be impossible for other filmmakers. A white male director without two Oscars and a Palme d’Or couldn’t casually destroy actors’ reputations without career repercussions.

3) Cultural amnesia protects Tarantino from pattern recognition. His unopposed provocation teaches him that cruelty carries no professional costs, only social rewards.

So if you think this dynamic developed overnight, please allow me to enter the thirty-year old exhibits that help shade light to the case.

tarantino’s (non-exhaustive) edgelord timeline

1992

Target: David Lynch
Quote: “After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at Cannes, David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. And you know, I loved him. I loved him.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

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1997

Target: Spike Lee
Lee’s Quote: “Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made—an honorary black man?” (referring to 38 uses of N-word in Jackie Brown)
Tarantino’s Response: “As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. And to say that I can’t do that because I’m white... that is racist.”
Later Tarantino Quote: “He attacked me to keep his ‘Jesse Jackson of cinema’ status... I wasn’t looking for his approval, and so he was taking me on to keep his status.”
Edgelord Rating: 10/10

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2000s

Target: David Fincher
Quote: “David Fincher is not in the same category as me because I’m a writer-director.”
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

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2003

Target: Stanley Kubrick
Quote: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite. Because his party line was, ‘I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence.’ And it’s just, like, ‘Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes.’“
Edgelord Rating: 7/10

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2003

Target: 13-year-old rape victim Samantha Geimer
Quote: Called Geimer a “party girl” and dismissed rape accusations against Roman Polanski
Edgelord Rating: 10/10

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2012

Target: Alfred Hitchcock
Quote: “People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think it’s wonderful when actually it’s a very mediocre movie... [Hitchcock films] have the stink of the 50s which is similar to the stink of the 80s.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

---

2015

Target: Ava DuVernay
Quote: “She did a really good job on Selma but Selma deserved an Emmy.” (He then followed up to say he actually never saw Selma but c’est la vie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

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2015

Target: Wes Craven
Quote: “I actually didn’t care for Wes Craven’s direction of [Scream]. I thought he was the iron chain attached to its ankle that kept it earthbound and stopped it from going to the moon.”
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

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2015

Target: Blake Lively and The Town casting
Quote: “When you see David O. Russell cast those sisters [in The Fighter], and you see Ben Affleck cast Blake Lively, you can’t compare the two movies. One just shows how phony the other is.”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

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2021

Target: His own mother (Connie Zastoupil)
Quote: “OK, lady, when I become a successful writer, you will never see penny one from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing. Because you said that.” (This was revealed on “The Moment” podcast that he’s kept a childhood vow when he was ~13 to never give his mother money after she dismissed his “little writing career”.)
Edgelord Rating: 8/10

---

2022

Target: Robert Altman
Quote: “Brewster McCloud is the cinematic equivalent of “a bird shitting on your head”.
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

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2023

Target: George Clooney
Quote: “When was the last time that he had a hit in this millennium?”
Clooney’s response: “Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career. So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off.”
Edgelord Rating: 5/10

---

2023

Target: Martin Scorsese
Quote: “While Spielberg “still has it” with West Side Story, “I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting” this century.”
Edgelord Rating: 4/10

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2025

Target: Paul Dano
Quotes:

• “He is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister.”

• “The weakest fucking actor in SAG”

• “The limpest dick in the world”

• “He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy”

Edgelord Rating: 10/10

---

2025

Target: Owen Wilson
Quote: “Oddly enough, I really can’t stand Owen Wilson. I mean, I can’t stand him.”
Edgelord Rating: 7/10

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2025

Target: Matthew Lillard
Quote: “I don’t care for Matthew Lillard”
Edgelord Rating: 6/10

Now here’s where you may be reading these takes and thinking “lol I also think Matthew Lillard is mid” and for the record, you have every right to that opinion. We have a democracy after all, and you can hold that opinion, no matter how incorrect it may be. Freedom of speech and all that jazz! But let me give you some reasons you might want to keep that shit to yourself.

This sounds obvious but apparently it needs saying: Your personal attacks get to people. “It hurts your feelings. It fucking sucks.”, Lillard said in response to Tarantino’s remarks. “And you wouldn’t say that to Tom Cruise. You wouldn’t say that to somebody who’s a top-line actor in Hollywood.”

Lillard isn’t wrong—modern edgelords love to roleplay as practitioners of what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia, fearless speech. They frame themselves as courageous truthtellers who are willing to speak the “dangerous” truths that polite society is too scared to utter. But true parrhesia requires speaking truth to power, usually at great personal risk. Tarantino is doing the exact opposite.

Second, in literally any other professional context, this behavior would get you called into a meeting with your boss the next morning. Imagine if you worked at McKinsey and decided to announce at the company retreat that Jennifer from accounting was “the weakest fucking consultant in the firm” because you didn’t like her presentation style. You’d be updating your LinkedIn by lunch. But edgelords like Tarantino operate in a biosphere of unchecked privilege where consequences are for poor people. You, my darling, do not.

Third—and this is the part that may worry aspiring edgelords—people don’t want to hang out with you. Mean-spirited contrarians are exhausting company because everyone knows you’re workshopping your next takedown. If you’re the person at the dinner party explaining why actuallyyyyyyy everyone’s favorite movie is overrated whilst claiming you’re “just being real”, you stop getting invited to dinner parties. (Also, you’re probably wrong about the movie but I digress.)

Finally, edgelords never operate in good faith. Even if we accept the premise that Tarantino just wants to help actors and directors to “get better” through public demolition (again: see edgelord definition), why doesn’t he take that private? Why not call Paul Dano directly and offer some constructive feedback? What does airing his negative thoughts in public actually accomplish beyond feeding his own ego? The answer is simple.

Genuine artistic criticism doesn’t require witnesses—it requires conversation, nuance, and the possibility of being wrong. Spectacularized destruction serves purely as narcissistic supply to the destroyer, suturing whatever primal wound necessitates this compulsive cycle of witnessed cruelty.

what a tragedy!

So I started wondering: if Tarantino understands rejection this intimately, where did that education come from? My theory is that edgelords usually target the exact space where they experienced their own deepest humiliation. Tarantino’s industry-wide bitterness—his compulsion to systematically diminish everyone from actors to legendary directors—starts to make a lot more sense when you consider that Hollywood rejected him long before it embraced him. Quentin Tarantino desperately wanted to be an actor, failed spectacularly at it, and I suspect he’s been making the entire film industry pay for that rejection ever since.

A good tweet.

It’s time to back up for some context here, because understanding Tarantino’s behavior requires knowing what he originally wanted to be. His first, and perhaps truest, love was the spotlight. As a teenager, he performed with the Torrance Community Theater. Around 1981, he studied acting seriously with James Best at the James Best Theatre Company (yes, that James Best from The Dukes of Hazzard, which somehow makes this whole story even more tragic). His first professional TV appearance was playing an Elvis impersonator in The Golden Girls—he used those residuals ($3,000 eventually) to fund Reservoir Dogs preproduction, which feels like the universe’s way of saying “maybe try something else, buddy.”

The pivotal shift came accidentally during acting class when he memorized movie scenes, wrote them from memory, and filled gaps with original material. His instructor noticed: “Quentin, you rewrote Paddy Chayefsky.” More significantly, Tarantino realized: “I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema, and they cared about themselves.”

But even with this obvious talent for writing and directing, he admits: “My parents said, ‘Oh, he’s going to be a director someday.’ I wanted to be an actor.”

Uma Thurman also noted this in a 2003 Vanity Fair profile:

“You must never forget with Quentin that he wanted to be an actor. If somebody asked him to act in something while he was prepping Kill Bill, he would’ve dropped everything to go and act.”

But then came 1998 and his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark opposite Marisa Tomei, which turned into the sort of professional humiliation that scars someone for life. The New York Times eviscerated him:

“Mr. Tarantino seems menacing to nothing except possibly the script... he registers at best as merely petulant, like a suburban teenager who has been denied the use of his father’s Lexus for the night.”

The Daily News went for the jugular:

“As a movie director Tarantino may be the new Alfred Hitchcock, but as a stage actor he is the new Ed Wood. He has the vocal modulation of a railway station announcer, the expressive power of a fence post and the charisma of a week-old head of lettuce.” (Week-old lettuce! Limpest dick energy!).

Tarantino was completely shattered by the response:

“I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal. It was not about the play—it was about me...It started getting to me. It’s fucked up when people make fun of you.”

The irony here (🤡) is so thick you could cut it with a knife. He’s been giving us a flawless blueprint for edgelord behavior while simultaneously crying about how much it hurts when people do exactly that to you.

A Vanity Fair source reported that Tarantino was “traumatised by that resounding slam... He went into a tailspin. It scared him. He’s a very wounded guy in that way.” The show closed after 97 performances, and here, my friends, we witness a quintessential Greek tragedy unfold in real time.

Like Oedipus fleeing his fate only to run straight into it, Tarantino became the exact thing that destroyed his dreams—the cruel critic who makes it personal, who targets the individual instead of the work. Tarantino’s hubris is the most pathetic form of self-preservation. He avoids ever feeling vulnerable again by making sure everyone around him feels exactly that vulnerable all the time. But edgelords are doomed to repeat their trauma forever, trapped in their own hamartia: the inability to heal from the original wound means they’re condemned to keep reopening it in others, never realizing that their “victory” is actually their eternal punishment.

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