Reservoir: a receptacle or part of a machine designed to hold fluid.

Commode: a portable toilet, especially one on a chair-like frame with wheels, as for an invalid.

No one knows where the name came from. Reservoir Dogs. There are a few theories though. One of them being that when Tarantino worked at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, he would refer to Louise Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants as Reservoir Dogs, the French pronunciation being too much to handle. One can relate. That one’s a doozy. Or, there’s the Lawrence Tierney version that the title was a popular expression in America for dogs who liked to hang out near reservoirs. Bit of a stretch. But the one that makes the most sense, but a bit unfounded, is that Reservoir Dogs is a long, slang term for rats. Rats hang out in reservoirs, and the movie hinges on an undercover cop mucking up the works.

But I’m not so sure that applies to all of the characters in the film. Sure, they may be dogs but are they reservoir dogs? Are they all rats? The simple answer is no.

Mr. Blonde (Vic Vega) we know for sure is NOT a rat. He just got out of jail for serving time at the behest of Joe Cabot and his son Nice Guy Eddie. Who in turn have set this job up and almost definitely aren’t the rats. Although, there timelines are a bit iffy, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue die early. So, nix them. Mr. Pink and Mr. White are the characters we spend the most time with. Considering the backstory we get on Mr. White, we can assume he’s never been a rat before in his life. Mr. Pink, that’s an interesting thing to think about, whether he’s been a rat before in his criminal career. Possibly. Can you really trust a guy who doesn’t tip? But that’s another article. Mr. Orange being the undercover cop gets the rat collar.

So, only one of these guys is a Reservoir Dog. A rat, if you go on the terms of believing that’s what a Reservoir Dog is. Now, I know that taking this literally is fucking trivial. They could all still be rats in the general since of rodents running around a dungeon somewhere after stealing bread from the kitchen table. Well, in a sense they are and I’m not trying to argue that. What I am trying to argue is, is that the word Reservoir has more than one meaning in this film.

After that first harrowing scene, that even now seems so nerve-racking and never ending, Mr. White and a gut shot Mr. Orange make it back to a warehouse that’s serving as a hideout/rendezvous after the jewel heist goes bonkers. Mr. Pink shows up right on their heels. While Mr. Orange passes out due to a loss of blood and unbelievable pain, Misters White and Pink go for a confab in another room in the Warehouse. And this is where a certain motif enters the film that I think is significant.

It’s a tracking shot that starts with a medium shot of a toilet top. The top of a toilet and some broken parts of a thrown away commode. Then the camera moves to an open doorway where we can see Mr. White in another room. That’s the first visual reference to a toilet in the film. But let’s backtrack a bit. Just before this scene, Mr. White and Mr. Pink are standing over Mr. Orange. Mr. Pink asking if Orange is dead. No, Mr. White says, just passed out. Mr. Pink breaks the serious moment with a line. “Where’s the commode in this dungeon? I gotta take a squirt.” The first reference to the warehouse being a toilet.

Also, this is the first location of a scene that takes place in a bathroom. A scene that has some expository relevance. Mr. White and Pink go into the figuring out of what happened at the jewelry store. This is the first glimpse we get into the un-filmed jewelry heist. It’s a moment of reflection in a bathroom.

And Tarantino plays the scene out. Water splashed on faces and hair. Combs come out to flatten back that hair, giving it a 50’s greaser vibe. Shared cigarettes and clearer thinking start to prevail. A moment of getting the head clear in a bathroom. Looking at oneself in the mirror. Mr. White does this, looks at himself in the mirror. His wet, haggard face looking back at him wondering where he went wrong in life. We’ve all been there. Looking in the mirror after all those banks/jewelry stores we’ve robbed, thinking, oh yeah, one of these days there’s gonna be an undercover cop in one of these setups, you just wait. Well, here it is, pal.

Now, most of the movie is set in this warehouse, as you know, with brief respites provided by flashbacks. We see Mr. White and Joe at his office, talking shop. We see Mr. Blonde and Nice Guy Eddie horsing around and talking shit. And we’re giving the information that Mr. Orange is indeed the undercover cop. THE Reservoir Dog. In fact, a good many flashbacks have everything to do with Mr. Orange and his handler gearing him up for his hellish undercover work.

One of the things the Detective Hollaway (Mr. Orange’s handler) has his informant do is memorize a story. Part of Orange’s back story is he’s a small time weed dealer. So, Detective Hollaway sells him on becoming an actor. He’s got to play this role, man, and everybody’s got to believe it. Part of the role is memorizing this story Detective Hollaway gives him, and fashioning it as his own. Adding little tidbits of his life to make the story more lived in. The story being something he tells to the Crew-of-Colors to convince them he’s the real thing.

It’s a harmless little pot dealer story, told with unbelievable panache and a maniac’s sense of dramatic portent. He should. He practiced it enough. So, by the time we get to this flashback where Orange tells the story to Mr. White, Pink and Nice Guy Eddie in a strip club, he’s got them all in the palm of his hand. The story centers around a chance encounter in a bathroom with three Sheriff’s deputies and their drug sniffing dog. Mr. Orange carrying a bag full of weed (this is the 90’s, but probably more of a mid 80’s set piece, the Madonna bit clueing it to that era).

The story is told in a flashback. A flashback within a flashback. The flashback to Mr. Orange telling it and a flash to the re-creation of the story. But since it’s not a story that actually happened, maybe it’s flash-fiction. A flash-fiction within a flashback. There we go.

So, in the story, Mr. Orange is in a bathroom taking a leak with his bowling-ball bag of weed. He goes to wash his hands and there’s three cops talking shop by the sinks. The dog starts to bark at Orange and in the flashback, he’s playing it cool. Washes his hands, goes to the hand driver, and being such a cool mother, he leaves the bag of weed on one of the sinks, as if to say to the cops, I got nothing to hide. This is what’s happening in the fan fiction. In the flashback Orange is relating to his new criminal friends how scared he really is of those really lame cops and their frothing at the mouth dog.

The interesting thing here is, the story that Mr. Orange and Hollaway spend so much time on perfecting, takes place in a bathroom. And it’s a pivotal scene. A pivotal telling. Everything for Mr. Orange and this undercover operation hinges on this diamond-jacking crew believing his story. Not just this bathroom story but his whole fucking story in general. But the story, the story is what puts him over the fence, into the backyard of their felonious world. It’s this story they all want to hear.

They make a day out of it, in fact. It’s spread out through the movie. Nice Guy Eddie’s driving, Mr. White in the passenger seat. Mr. Pink and Orange in the back. They tell jokes and goof on each other and TV shows. It’s a ramp up to modern male bonding. But it’s also a try out for Mr. Orange. Nobody’s supposed to know each other on these types of jobs, right, hence the color-coded names. But Mr. White knows Joe and Eddy. Same for Mr. Blonde. Is it stretch to say that Mr. White and Mr. Blonde have run across each other’s paths before? And Mr. Pink is always letting you know that he’s the consummate professional. He even let’s slip, that on a past job that went sour, they thought there was a rat. The only one that’s the unknown is Mr. Orange. Joe confirms it at the end.

So, the trip to strip club is pure pageantry. It’s a chance for both sides to see what Mr. Orange is about. Both sides have agreed to the performance in a way. And Mr. Orange gives a rousing one. It’s convincing. He has the guys in the palm of his hand. All because he rehearsed that story with maniacal relish.

And at the center of this Russian-nesting-doll is a story set in a bathroom.

It harkens back to that shot of the broken commode. Yes, these characters are Reservoir Dogs. And what’s a Reservoir? A collection of water. What’s a commode? A collection of water. They’re all being flushed down the toilet and that warehouse is the bathroom.

You can see it in David Wasco’s set design and Adrzej Sekula use of color. The place looks like a 70’s bathroom. That deep aqua-green color that gives it this underwater feel. These dogs are just turds waiting to be flushed. Commode Dogs.

Ode to the Commode.

In hindsight, gandering back at Tarantino’s oeuvre, we can see a bathroom motif in his films. A lot has been made of his foot fetish, but what about his bathroom fetish? Not even sure if that’s a fetish, but there is a sick and mirthful bathroom humor running through his work. Vince Vega dies on the toilet in Pulp. Max Cherry’s office bathroom looms large in Jackie Brown. Keaton’s ATF agent hides in the bathroom before stepping out and killing Ordell Robbie. There’s a heartbreaking scene in Kill Bill Vol. 2 when the Bride has to go in the bathroom and cry on the floor after meeting her daughter. Which may be a turning point in Tarantino’s career.

Because we’d like to think that the bathroom is a safe place. A safe place to release one’s bowels behind closed doors and get rid of the evidence. A safe place to get naked and wash the sins of the day away. A safe place to go and cry. But for almost four films, Tarantino subverted that into his own little horror trope. Until Kill Bill Vol. 2. He finally provides the bathroom as safe place in his films.

With Reservoir Dogs it’s the beginning of that horror. The whole movie, set in a toilet bowl, rats foaming at the mouth, scraping and crawling to get out.