IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE that in the five films which he has directed, Quentin Tarantino has shot not a single love scene. It’s not that he has an aversion to sex, per se. There’s the sodomy forced on a bound and gagged Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction; there’s the momentary Clinton-style copulation Bruce Willis performs in the same movie; there’s the stoned, bored, three-minute quickie Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda share off-camera in Jackie Brown; and there’s the brutal, mostly off-camera rape of a comatose Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Nowhere in his corpus, however, does Tarantino show any true sexual intimacy. In this way–a small way, to be sure–none of Tarantino’s characters are real human beings and their actions create no dramatic resonance with an audience. Tarantino, in short, is not a student of the human condition. He is a student of cool. But then, you already knew that.