Virtual Fools

Let it be known first that I, hopeless film snob and critic of contemporary things on all fronts, was entirely not looking forward to seeing this film. Far too often in the past have I seen the newest work of a “great” director and lost nearly all of my respect for them (ahem, Artificial Intelligence comes to mind.) The thoughts that flooded my head after I left the theater and entered the bathroom, however, confirmed the fact that I had just witnessed the unique brand of genre-charged authorship that only the unapproachable Quentin Tarantino could provide. At this point, after a scant one viewing, I’d be willing to argue a world of things about this film: that it does more with genre then any film in the last 25 years, that it is so expertly constructed as to quickly instruct the view to its language (it literally desensitizes you to its excesses as you watch,) and that it reeks of authenticity, if only in what initially appears to be a fan-boy sort of way. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the stylistic and thematic summation of Tarantino’s work to this point, a work that illustrates the fact that a director may have some creative clout in Hollywood after all.

A brief plot synopsis is in order, and is integral to understanding why this film is something to be marveled at. “The Bride”/Black Mamba, played by Uma Thurman (in this case, it may be more appropriate to say “anti-played,”) is murdered on her wedding day by the leader of the elite assassination squad of which is she is a part. Left for dead, she wakes up in a hospital five years later. Her life now entirely devoted to revenge, she seeks the systematic destruction malefactors. Short plot, isn’t it? What is significant is how little there is to it: the plot is, more or less, a loose framework that allows Tarantino to explore and exploit genre clichés. The degree to which humanist interactions have been blotted out of the picture borders on absurd, but it is not without purpose. Look, for example at the battle between The Bride and Vernita Green (Copperhead): right in the middle of a fervent battle, Green’s daughter steps off the bus and approaches the house. The daughter is perhaps the only human character grounded in any sort of reality to have lines in the film, but her sense of the world is altered by what goes on. She witnesses her mother’s attempt at killing The Bride, but instead dies for trying. The Bride then gives a sort of disembodied speech that all but consigns this little girl to follow a path similar to her own, or perhaps even comparable to that explored by O-Ren Ishii. So, before The Bride’s quest has even hardly begun, she has already established another generation of killers who seek satisfaction and recompense through blood. In other words, another one bites the dust.

Next, the “problem” of narrative structure must be addressed. While not wrong or misused, the narrative is very much in the spirit of Tarantino’s other three directorial efforts. Kill Bill plays around with temporal linkages, usually choosing to subvert linear storytelling and instead focus on themes. The film is chopped into chapters, which gives some sort of a jumping off point. Given the nature of the film, which can, perhaps unjustly, be simplified as “Kung Fu Action,” one has to ask, “Is the structure really necessary?” I cannot even begin to give a straight Yes or No, but I do know one thing: it would be a very different film were it narrated in another manner. The choreographed fights and the full-blown violence aren’t the only things that make this film beautiful. The story is told as effortlessly as The Bride’s defeat of the Crazy 88 Army – there is to be found a sense of finesse that no doubt springs from Tarantino’s having watched hundreds of films and absorbed something from each one. Owing equally to Rashomon and Enter the Dragon, Tarantino nicely sums up what West seems to have garnered from Asian film and Asian filmmakers over the last 50 years. For better or worse, he uses their filmic language and applies it to most of the aspects of the “exploitation” genres. Whether one likes or dislikes the film and its content is almost rendered irrelevant. There are so many visual quotations, homages, allusions and nods that Kill Bill at times reads like the bibliography of a book by Quentin Tarantino on filmmaking, if there were such a thing.

What about the matter of violence? The blood and gore was probably what gave this film more buzz then anything except the fact that Tarantino’s name was attached to it. From my critical perspective, the violence is entirely justified as it literally becomes an element of the film’s own visual language. Certain scenes of brutality, including the opening shot of The Bride’s mangled face and the graphic rape of The Bride as she is unconscious, could be done away with in my approximation. Tarantino has a fixation with this sort of suffering though, as perhaps the most memorable scenes from both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction contain these elements. Since the scenes containing the most blood are at the beginning, middle and end of this portion of the film at large, it can be said that the first two scenes of extreme (with the brief interludes in between,) prepare the viewer for the climax(es). There are two particularly significant scenes of bloodshed, where all else takes a back seat to shock: the anime sequence and the now famous self-censoring black & white battle. When O-Ren Ishii’s tale is recounted, the original world of humans is left behind in favor of a highly stylized vision of how she became such a deadly killer. If the majority of the film is shot in praise of the Hong Kong kung-fu films of the past, then this portion is a nod to the violent manga of the present. Whether or not it works is almost beyond the point, since it isn’t important for what it contains, but rather, how it’s done. Thus, you can think of Kill Bill, in general, as a film with so many excesses that the excesses themselves are not important, rather the style in which they are conveyed. The battle between O-Ren’s Crazy 88’s and The Bride is the decorative centerpiece of the film’s proverbial table of style. In the middle of one of the largest, most lopsided rumbles ever captured on celluloid, the ballet of fighting changes from full color to black & white. Most claim (and I am inclined to believe them) that it was done at that particular moment to prevent the censors from chopping up the film. Blood literally fills the screen, in an almost comic way, as The Bride brandishes her sword in every imaginable direction. I think that this is a valid reason to shift color pallets, but also feel that there is something of an artistic agenda at this point. As I have suggested, this portion of the battle almost feels like a ballet, one that revels in being choreographed. Aside from lending the sequence a nostalgic feel, the two in conjunction (graceful dance and inspired classicism) breed to create the unmistakable musk of High Art. Does Tarantino think that this violence is High Art (capitalized for Platonic purposes)? Probably not. But I do believe that he feels it to be the “meat and potatoes” of the movie, so much show that it has to be highlighted by being displayed in a different manner. To conclude what is increasingly becoming a divergent argument, the plot takes backseat to the general style of the film, itself a container for a sort of glorified violence that would make Peckinpah, Leone or even Pasolini blush.

Few directors in the Hollywood system are able to constantly produce films that bear the unmistakable marks of their principle creators. Tarantino’s films are a certain exception, proving that a director can forge a very distinctive identity, despite the pressures of the capitalist, commodity-based system that rules them. I was in awe over the way that Kill Bill begins. After a “Shaw Brothers” logo (my favorite idiosyncratic detail: the Shaw brothers pretty much saved the Hong Kong film industry by producing, en masse, kung-fu films that were popular at home and abroad,) a title card soon follows, introducing it as “The 4th film by Quentin Tarantino.” Wow! True auteur status after 3 films, or 3 ½ if you want to count his segment for The Four Rooms. It took Fellini something like 8 ½ to get there (don’t credit me with the comparison, it was made by most critics the day of the film’s premiere.) Looking at the rest of Tarantino’s oeuvre, Kill Bill seems like nothing short of the summation of a logical thematic progression. Reservoir Dogs was all about ensemble crime, disjointed narrative and kitschy dialogue. Pulp Fiction upped the ante on nearly all fronts, and hinted at the sort of single character-drive film that would emerge in his third feature. A little less lauded and slightly different from his previous efforts, Jackie Brown is no less important. Here, for the first time, Tarantino tackles “exploitation” filmmaking in one of the strongest sense, lauding crime, non-linear progression and blaxploitation all in the same film. These three films are also significant in that they resurrect genres, especially film noir/crime and blaxploitation, and offer up Tarantino’s reinterpretation, from his perspective as an encyclopedic synthesizer. Kill Bill, then, is all of these previous things and more. This time resurrecting the kung-fu films of the 1970s, and adding to the mix a large helping of crime and exploitation, the picture relishes in the now familiar non-chronological narrative structure and focuses predominately on a single female heroine. Now however, the eye of the camera is almost equally as important as The Bride. In-jokes, cameos and allusion seem to either more pronounced, less obscure, more common, or all of the above. If Tarantino’s directorial career were an addition equation, Kill Bill would be the only logical answer.