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Tarantino and
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Kill Bill
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In most instances, larger-than-life movie characters who exist beyond the rules and limitations of normality are loners, outside of society, constantly faced not just with death but with extinction. But Bill and the Bride have a child and through that child – brought up with a comic book wisdom beyond good and evil – Tarantino has the chance of bringing Kill Bill's structure full circle by proposing an alternative to the shattered normality-image of Vernita's home. (The hyper-mundanity of this home was after all, simply a disguised haven for another lethal killer – Buñuel would doubtless have approved!) From the impossible lives of his epic characters he could potentially create a new domestic ideal, as the epic becomes the banal for a child raised with cartoonish battles as background to the everyday gestures that make up her life. This new ideal would not be a perversion or poisoning of normal family life but rather a completely new value structure with the ethos of action cinema at its centre. This is as opposed to the devastating invasion of home life suffered by the little girl the Bride orphans or by the young O-Ren Ishii (as an adult, Lucy Liu), the pathologising intervention of monstrous circumstances that so often define the fate of action movie characters. The Bride's child's comparatively cosy upbringing is pragmatically geared towards making her not necessarily an action movie character, but an inhabitant of the world of pulp cinema nevertheless. She is a child of cinema, and there is something of a film nut's wish-fulfilment fantasy in having parents able to relate to the extremes of violent cinema and, instead of censuring or interdicting them, allowing those extremes not only to coexist with the tenets of a loving household, but to be integral to them. That these parents should also be protagonists of this cinema awards the otherwise imaginary concerns of a film-fevered young mind an adult importance unobtainable in reality.
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Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction
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Before lamenting their abandonment, however, we need to ask: in what way are these pseudo-values positive? They are fundamental to the world Tarantino creates in Kill Bill. This world exists purely in terms of cinema, completely independently of the real world. While this is, of course, the case with countless genre films, most of them propose an alternative universe, the rules of which we are called on to accept as a substitute reality. In Kill Bill, on the other hand, the audience is constantly, winkingly reminded that what it is watching is “only” a movie. This postmodern distance gives rise to if not exactly a critical distance, then a pedagogical one. What Kill Bill offers is a lesson in cinema history that unites several genres in a loving, mannerist monument to the films that made Tarantino's cinephilia as powerful a driving force as it evidently is for him. We are not looking at an alternative reality, but an actual existing reality or, rather, realities – those contained in the history of certain movie genres, each with its own folklore and ethical procedures. In his role of self-appointed historian/ambassador to these domains of fiction, Tarantino is – at least up until the aforementioned back-pedalling during the scene of Bill's comeuppance – uninterested in making their customs morally palatable to us citizens of the non-fictional world. The ways of the chambara or Kung-Fu flick or Spaghetti Western are not our ways and Tarantino's unique, almost unbalanced degree of respect for these traditions is such that he demands the same from us. The deranged intensity that this attitude generates is the source of Kill Bill's charm – its pseudo-values might be false, but the sincerity of Tarantino's faith in their fantastical power effectively dynamises them.
Let's open a long parenthesis and contextualise Kill Bill within Tarantino's oeuvre. Reservoir Dogs (1992) was a good movie, lean and intense, a worthy addition to the grand tradition of low-budget American crime cinema. Its director was imaginative and unique enough to have brought that tradition creditably into the '90s. Not a genius like Abel Ferrara or Takashi Miike, but a potentially exciting filmmaker nevertheless. Then he made Pulp Fiction (1994) and it all seemed to go wrong. He stopped making generic crime cinema and instead devised the “Tarantino film”, an overblown, schizophrenic monster. The good but damagingly overpraised qualities of his debut – a flair for making striking use of known actors both in terms of character and iconic imaging, an interesting grasp of structure, the much celebrated post-modern referentiality of the dialogue that functions to effectively but superficially endow genre characters with a sense of existing in “the real world” – are sufficient to make a genre film interesting but too flimsy for Tarantino to build an entire movie upon, which is what Pulp Fiction attempted. The result is crippled with self-consciousness. Every line of dialogue has to be an event. Every plot twist has to be a surprise, but a surprise so carefully worked out that it becomes predictable. With Pulp Fiction any sense of spontaneity left Tarantino's cinema never to return.
Tarantino might freely use such expressions as “grindhouse” in describing his work, but he does so from within the safety of the mainstream, never exposing himself to the real dangers and messy pleasures of the B-film. His take on genre since Pulp Fiction is more like a theme park ride version of “grindhouse” than the real item, a place where actors can flirt with carefully packaged disreputability and come away looking and feeling hip while actually risking nothing. After all, how can a B-movie shoulder the responsibility of being a major pop-culture event, which is what is demanded of poor Tarantino every time out? Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with creating a hybrid form and, to his credit, Tarantino's films have always remained personal. Yet even with the release of Jackie Brown (1997), on many levels an extremely good film, the nagging fantasies persisted of a poorer but more vital Tarantino making a small, ferocious movie every year (assuming that he couldn't make five ferocious movies every year like Miike!) instead of a bloated self-important “event” every four.
He has stated that his films function as generic crime narratives whose traditional progress is interrupted and derailed by the unexpected intervention of events from “real life”. However “real life” was never Tarantino's forte. His films deal uniquely with the cinema and, more precisely, his relationship with the cinema. “Real life” is largely signified by the discussion of pop culture which appears to be the only alternative to enacting generic cinema rituals – what is not “cinema” is still defined only in terms of cinema (or music or TV or fast food).
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Kill Bill
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What is instead present is Tarantino whose voice comes through in every character, every event. Many directors create unique universes that represent their fantasies or visions of the world, but few, if any, are as neurotically, univocally present as Tarantino. In this respect he is closer to stand up comedian than exponent of crime cinema, enacting all the parts in his sketches with one variously modulated voice. Except that Tarantino enacts the parts through other actors. He is the phantom actor behind the self-consciously performative tics of his otherwise two-dimensional characters. It is not that he wants to be these characters, but he wants to speak them, act them out – in short, to play at movie gangster. Each character and situation is like a custom-made virtual reality game through which Tarantino can insert himself into cinema. In this way every character becomes a wish fulfillment fantasy for one man, an assortment of iconic figurines personalised through the addition of some everyday quirks. His great good fortune is that, in his physical absence, an audience can pick up on this karaoke ontology and play Tarantino's computer game as well. They can slip into the empty space behind the characters and enjoy their posturing with more than the usual vicarious identification because, unlike in an average Hollywood product, the “game” is so personal. The Tarantino formula doesn't get into your head, you get into its head. You leave yourself behind and move through a carefully designed pattern of behavioural set pieces, often apparently outrageous but never actually dangerous thanks to the taut degree of control exercised over them. The downside of this heavy-duty manipulation, unleavened by the attainment of a visionary state (as in the horror film), is a depressing emotional aridity, a claustrophobia arising from the brutal suppression of the viewer's faculty for forming a free relationship with the world on screen and a relentlessly mechanistic reliance on ultimately grating and empty cleverness. His invitation to a viewer is not the usual one – to look at a/the world through the director's eyes – but to fuse with his mental gestures, gestures that ultimately constrain rather than liberate the audience.
These characteristics were latent in Reservoir Dogs but came to dominate in Pulp Fiction. Of course Jackie Brown transcended these paradigms in many ways – it showed Tarantino capable of genuine gentleness, willing to work with characters that existed beyond the gestural moment with pasts, futures and real relationships. However, at the risk of sounding mean-spirited, perhaps this “mature” Tarantino had simply made a more conventional film? With Pulp Fiction, his defining moment as a filmmaker, he had come up with something as unique as it was questionable. With Jackie Brown, rather than develop and move forward in terms of the challenges set down by Pulp Fiction, he successfully deviated into adaptation which, to play devil's advocate, might seem to represent not a step forward so much as a parenthetical aside in the unfolding Tarantino style. But on another level it represented a very crucial point of transformation between Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. It is no longer the “Tarantino monologue” but instead Tarantino engaging with a text, Elmore Leonard's novel. Jackie Brown charts the interaction of Tarantino's sensibility with something outside himself, not “real life” but a book that is in itself a pop-culture object. Even if it's only perceptible in post-Bill retrospect, the real breakthrough in Jackie Brown was the emergence of Tarantino the spectator (or reader) director. It revealed his true talent as a textual filmmaker. He might fail in Pulp Fiction at generating a personalised take on “reality” that goes beyond noisily limp post-human caricature, but when he films as a connoisseur and even curator of pop culture “texts” – whether Leonard's book (by way of his concerns with Blaxploitation cinema) or his own personal digest of film history in Bill – he can be a brilliant and engaging cinematic mind. His undeniable sophistication evidently needs something to engage with outside of itself.
Of course, no two Tarantino films are more different than Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Through his adaptation of the former, he approached a level of verisimilitude that went beyond that of Pulp Fiction. By glammed-up, streamlined Hollywood standards, Jackie Brown presents an image of reality that isn't exceptionally stylised. Bill, on the other hand, returns to the uniquely “Tarantino world” of Pulp Fiction and solves its problems by rejecting any semblance of reality. He has frequently described Kill Bill as the film that characters in his previous movies would go and see – a composite fantasy of the “movie-movie”. The gangsters, especially in the first two films, are linked to the viewer only by their common consumption of pop culture – both products and consumers, they exist halfway between the audience and the realm of cinema (and television) that haunts these pictures almost like a mythological belief system. Kill Bill directly confronts the ontological mystery beyond these characters and explores the mythological underpinnings of their existence. Thus Kill Bill is no longer about Tarantino; it is about what Tarantino loves and what he wants to share with us. The annoying posturing and tiring cleverness of Pulp Fiction have been replaced by a profound and strangely moving generosity.
Compared to the previous movies, dialogue takes a backseat for much of Kill Bill. Its director is now looking rather than talking. Much credit for this development must go to his fetishistic fascination with Uma Thurman. He has, rather touchingly, described the influence of the Sternberg/Dietrich collaboration on his treatment of his star, on the fact that the film is designed entirely to highlight her presence. There has always been an element of playing at filmmaker with Tarantino, as if he were ticking off a list he made when he was about 12 years old of films that he wanted to direct. This time round he is playing at collaborating with “his” actress, at creating an icon. He's found a playmate in his game of cinema, one whose presence has managed to distract him from the sound of his own dialogue. Fortunately, Thurman proves more than worthy of all this attention and embodies the sword-wielding Alice in his Wonderland with exceptional grace and authority. If she is a Jane-of-all-genres, most of the other main characters also function iconically, as the embodiment of a particular genre and the pretext for the Bride's engagement with the tropes and geography of that genre: the chambara (Sonny Chiba), the yakuza movie (Lucy Liu), the Kung Fu film (Gordon Liu), the Western (Michael Madsen), the Blaxploitation picture (Vivica A. Fox). In Bill, or, rather, in David Carradine, star of both The Long Riders (Walter Hill, 1980) and the Kung Fu TV series, the traditions of the Western and Martial Arts cinemas are neatly united. He incarnates the cultural fusion that the whole movie attempts.
The difference between these overtly monumental characters and those in previous Tarantino films becomes most obvious in that unfortunate Bride/Bill confrontation scene which we will return to simply in order to highlight its difference from the rest of the picture – and its incongruous similarity to the previous work. As soon as their daughter is safely asleep, the antagonists start talking. They talk at great length, in so doing basically going over everything that we have been shown over the course of the film, over-emphasising, over-explaining. It is the only occasion when dialogue is not tied to unfolding events, to movement, to action. The Bill-Bride relationship was already admirably summarised in a wonderful scene in church during her wedding rehearsal, just before he shoots her. Not only is the dialogue here redundant on an expositional level but it reveals a serious underestimation of the actors on Tarantino's part. Their expressivity is such that a few looks and gestures would have been more than sufficient to convey everything that needs saying with much greater feeling than all the scene's verbose hot air. Worst of all, their verbal expressions are often woefully inappropriate. It's as if the prospect of finding an adequate conclusion to Kill Bill scared Tarantino to such an extent that his only recourse was to drag every Tarantino party trick out of the closet. Or maybe he believed that the audience would feel cheated if they didn't have enough of the requisite “Tarantino dialogue”. Either way, the result is close to self-parody. Tarantino's voice starts speaking through Bill and the Bride; they talk like characters from Pulp Fiction. But whereas the earlier film was entirely built on Tarantino's univocality, the effect here is that the words overwhelm the characters and their predicament. Even the actors' delivery seems suddenly excessively smug, heavy with the knowledge that every word spoken adds another gem of Tarantino's smartness to the grateful setting of popular culture. The problem is that this manner of speech, as described above, sets the character midway between the audience and the world of “movie-movie”, which Kill Bill emphatically inhabits. It is blindingly obvious that Bill and the Bride were born to be “superheroes”, to be different from ordinary people. There's no need for Bill to verbalise that and certainly not as an embarrassing, pseudo-philosophical dissertation on Superman comics. Such a speech would not be out of place in the mouths of John Travolta or Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, existing as do they between viewer and generic archetype. But hearing it from David Carradine, with all Bill's gravitas, is almost grotesque, as if Superman himself suddenly started imitating Tarantino!
Fortunately, elsewhere in the film the dialogue, while recognisably Tarantino's, remains appropriately the language of “superheroes” and elegantly functional. The conclusion notwithstanding, Kill Bill is the first of his films plotted in such a way that
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Kill Bill
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Death and rebirth are at the heart of Kill Bill's vision of cinema: the vulnerability and resilience of genres that are all essentially dead. They exist either completely in the past or else the era of their history that Kill Bill specifically cites is no more. Cycles of revenge dominate the structure of the film: Bill's shooting of the Bride, Vernita's daughter's possible future revenge against the Bride for her mother's death, the Bride's revenge quest, the massacre of O-Ren Ishii's parents that turned her into a killer. The nature of revenge: one moment of the past played and replayed obsessively to the point of excluding present reality – the absolute domination of a past that not only won't go away but is not allowed to go away. Perhaps Kill Bill is the past of certain cinemas come back to take revenge on the collective mainstream of cinematic memory that has almost forgotten them. Rebirth against all odds is also central to Kill Bill. However much punishment she takes, the Bride keeps coming back – shot in the head, raped, buried alive, drugged, battered several times over, she refuses to let herself die. Her persistence is at once the persistence of basic cinematic narratives that won't go away, like the revenge story, and their destruction: her quest is, after all, to systematically eradicate film genres that are already, in fact, dead and, ultimately, to save her daughter from the clutches of cinema, to return her to a normal reality where the formal relics through which she has fought can find no nourishment. Yet is her murder of a little girl's mother at the film's opening not perhaps a booby trap that could one day result in her own death and the recommencement of the endless cycle of revenge with her now apparently safe daughter? Is the normality of their family life going to be any less of a Buñuelesque sham than Vernita's was? Might not one day a flow of blood again lead to a flow of images, memory images of a cinema past that, vampire-like, is waiting to leap anew into spectral action at the first drop? The image of the violent murder of loved ones, the indelible image of violence that leaves an after-image so potent that it must be pursued forever after, here doubles as the cinematic experience, as the cinephile Tarantino witnessing his own unforgettable images of violence in the cinema and pursuing them until he had replicated them. William Witney, Kinji Fukasaku, Charles Bronson and the other names on the list of the dead in the closing credits might be no more, but the narrative echoes of the films they participated in carry on endlessly, perpetuating themselves in a void that now exists beyond time and which can be accessed only through memory – or the refusal to forget. This is the space that Kill Bill articulates.
The fragility of life, or, rather, of the images which sustain the lives in Kill Bill is constantly highlighted: Vernita's wrecked household, the snow-covered garden appearing behind the Tokyo nightclub, the Bride's new family-to-(never)-be wiped out in the church, the apparently washed up Budd's unexpected ambush, the snake that bites him hidden in the case of money, Bill's assumed superiority in martial arts undermined by the Bride… This fragility does not merely reflect the constant threat of death or the deceptive nature of appearances, but the thinness of those appearances and the emptiness behind them, their lack of roots in reality. Like the characters in Pulp Fiction, those in Kill Bill exist only through their image, but this time around Tarantino acknowledges the fact and its consequences and, crucially, links their faux-existentialist predicament to the memory of cinema past. In the act of acknowledging the disappearance of these cinemas, Tarantino causes them to live again and die again. But this death is never final because even if a character is truly done for, it only takes another killing and the endlessly renewable forces of basic narrative will start the whole pageant again with an equivalent character built of the same image, an image as indestructible as the host-character is disposable… It could be in the studios of Hollywood or Shanghai, on the streets of Tokyo or Hong Kong, in the deserts of Almeria… It could be the '70s, it could be now, the '60s, the future… It could be a memorable film or we might forget it immediately. But at least we can do so in the knowledge that Quentin Tarantino, an interesting filmmaker and a priceless film historian, is probably remembering it for us.
© Maximilian le Cain, June 2004
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