When I first watched Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in 1992, I was struck by its inventive opening. Tarantino launched a gritty crime thriller not with a gunfight or a heist but with eight mobsters in a diner, finishing breakfast while bickering over Madonna and tipping etiquette.
By depicting hardened criminals as ordinary men carping about daily trivialities, Tarantino dispensed with the genre’s macho clichés, rendering the characters disarmingly authentic. Decades later, the subject of tipping still dominates daily American life.
On my recent visit to the United States, that famous anti-tipping monologue came back to me like recurring deja vu. Whether in conversation with intellectuals, corporate executives or hard-pressed students, the subject inevitably surfaced. Increasingly, I heard Mr Pink’s voice, the mobster who stubbornly refused to tip, echoed by people born long after the film’s release and by those who have never seen it.