Flak Magazine: Review of Kill Bill Vol. 1, 10-23-03

It's hard to tell if the ejaculations of blood on Uma Thurman's face are meant as homicidal cum shots, or if writer/director Quentin Tarantino is penetrating the nature of our desire to observe violence on film. The answer may lie in how much trust one places in Tarantino as an artist: On the one hand, he could be a visionary who has parlayed his cult of personality into a daring work that no other filmmaker could attempt, or he could be an autuer with serial-killer tendencies who has become incrementally bolder in playing out his perverse fantasies. An exhibit for the defense might be Tarantino's catalogue of allusions, but that in itself does not necessarily elevate Kill Bill Vol. 1 to the level of art any more than a karaoke singer who sings opera, soul, country and rock in the same set is necessarily a good singer. Yet if these wildly disparate references do cohere into something profound, then the pretension crosses over into brilliance. In short, Kill Bill is either Quentin Tarantino's pornography of killing or samurai cinema's "Ulysses."

In style and ambition, Kill Bill somewhat resembles James Joyce's book, the most famously "profane" book of the 20th century. When The Little Review attempted to serialize it in America in the early '20s, it had already gained considerable literary reputation in Europe. But its graphic and frank depictions of bodily functions (Virginia Woolf referred to Joyce's "cloacal obsession") led a court to declare the text profane and "unintelligible" (a judgment described as "an absurd act of puritanic spleen" by one critic). A decade later, Random House argued before a United States District Court that Ulysses did have artistic merit, and for that reason, it should not be considered obscene and subject to confiscation. Judge John M. Woolsey's opinion in the Ulysses obscenity trial points us to the heart of the matter:

… In any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic — that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.

If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.

But in "Ulysses," in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.

Is Tarantino "exploiting obscenity?" Does he have the "leer of a sensualist?" Well, his camera does linger on a decapitated body while a fountain of blood spurts from the neck, careful to catch the arch of the blood and how the streams break into a gentle mist during its fall. A room full of delimbed samurai warriors moan as if spent from a particularly demanding orgy. His main character is referred to as a "blood-splattered angel." Judge Woolsey provides more guidance in the final paragraph of his opinion:

As I have stated, "Ulysses" is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains … many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt's sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers.

Not only is Kill Bill Vol. 1 both brilliant and dull, and intelligible and obscure, but it raises the question: Are Kill Bill's bloody frames contributing, like a bit of mosaic, to a detailed picture which Tarantino is seeking to construct for his viewers? Or is this cinematic masturbation, the little drops of blood lightly splattered on Lucy Liu's face just a perverse wet dream? This depends on how you assess the depth of Kill Bill's main character, the Bride. Despite Tarantino's deep historical allusions to Japanese film (Akira Kurosawa and Bruce Lee, most recognizably), on its surface it seems more of an extension of the post-feminist pop culture of Charlie's Angels. The movie centers on the unnamed Bride (Uma Thurman), who is brutally attacked and left for dead by some gang known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, led by Bill, whose motives for making an abattoir of The Bride's wedding are yet unclear.

The plot is a gynomaniacal revenge fantasy, positing that the Bombeck housewife has been unshackled and given way to the superhero image of womaen winning their way into the masculine world — even the ultra-violent samurai arena. The Bride doesn't shed her feminine impulse for the sake of her masculine drive; she is most upset that the DVAS killed her yet-unborn daughter, so the first fight scene is a revenge on the quiet life of the comfort class. It's a literal destruction of domesticity, with the Bride and Vernita Green (Code Name: Copperhead, played by Vivica A. Fox) kung fu fighting through a previously tidy Pasedena living room. Tarantino really enjoys the image of falling glass shelves, with the inconsequential bric-a-brac of suburban life just clutter in this larger, more primal struggle. Yet the scene suggests a traditional womanly contract: When Green's daughter gets off the school bus, a knowing glance interrupts the fight; the daughter is ushered upstairs, the mothers' knives hidden behind their backs. The sequence ends with Green firing a gun through a box of Kaboom! (a circus-themed, multi-colored kids cereal) at the Bride, missing (like the "fucking miracle" in Pulp Fiction) and then taking a knife in the chest. The daughter witnesses the death, the scene ending with a corpse lying amongst the carnival cereal.

Is this just nonsensical shock, or is there some post-feminist statement here about the conflict between desire and duty in the have-it-all millennial woman? Tarantino might be suggesting a universal predatory compulsion of women: What wakes the Bride from her coma is a mosquito, which Tarantino shows us in a super-zoom, catching the insect's elongated mouth penetrating and sucking the blood from her. (Remember, it's only the female mosquito that harvests blood.) The image resembles the adrenaline shot from Pulp Fiction — but is revenge really just a drug-like compulsion seated deep within the female psyche? Surely Tarantino's thoughts run deeper than that, but in this incomplete form — Vol. 2 comes out in 2004 — it's hard to tell. Instead, we're treated to phallically oriented scenes of Bill fingering his sword as he sweet-talks Elle Driver (Codename: California Mountain Snake, played by Daryl Hannah) into mercy, and the Bride's soft, candle-lit ceremony in which she receives a special sword, and the quivering swords when the Bride slices and dices through an army of kung fun clones during what is probably the bloodiest orgy of violence ever filmed. The scene is a thwarted gangfuck, filmed in black and white with gory details down to the spit-sounds of spurting blood. These details are probably meant to bind the aggressions of violence and sex, but this should not be news to the average moviegoer. So is that all there is to Tarantino's vision?

In this incomplete state, it's impossible to tell whether all of this adds up to anything. The piles and piles of allusions, ranging from Busby Berkley to Brian De Palma to Sergio Leone to Akira Kurosawa to a 20-minute anime interlude, certainly enrichens the texture of the film, and to his credit, Tarantino manages to agglomerate these styles into a unique cinematic voice. For the unskilled director, this type of meta-homage becomes disaster, but when a virtuoso like Tarantino is involved, the effect transcends the traditional tonal limitations of cinema. This happens to be precisely what exalts a wordsmith like James Joyce. Unfairly labeled as indecipherable by some critics for his excessive wordplay or pretentious for his volumes of mythological and literary references, a master like Joyce can create a phrase like "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" and couch a stream-of-conscious day-in-the-life narrative as an immortal mythological journey. The ambition of great artists is to create works that encompass everything — like the Sisyphean quest of quantam physicists to find that unified theory of the entire universe. Joyce pulled the trick and created what is considered the best English-language novel of the 20th century.

Tarantino shows the same kind of talent not just for finding relevant tangents in seemingly random associations, and also for puns and invented language — virtuosic compared to any other Gen X director. Who else could transition his main character from a Leone-style Woman With No Name to Foxy Brown kung fu artist to Kurosawa-style samurai warrior to Bruce Lee and make it work? Joyce once remarked that "Ulysses" would "keep the critics busy for 300 years," and the same could be said for Tarantino.

But all of that is style, and a great artist must also have substance. "Ulysses" purports the futility of modern man by paralleling the unheroic wanderings of an advertising man with the greatest adventure story ever told. What does Kill Bill have to say? If Kill Bill, Vol. 2 reveals some sort of definitive post-feminist psychostudy couched in a meditation on the voyeurism of filmed killing, it could become one of the best films of its time. If not, it's just a movie with a delimbed kung fu Agent Smith falling into a bloody swimming pool, POV from Uma Thurman's crotch.

Some have said that the style itself is the message, but if so, then Kill Bill is fanboy showcase and little more — though that doesn't render the film entirely useless. In his opinion in the "Ulysses" case in the Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Austus Hand ruled that "art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique." This is especially true for the current cinema, and we should be thankful that Tarantino exists in a landscape dominated by genre films. But if Tarantino molds Kill Bill's allusions into a cohesive meta-study of violence in cinema (much as Ulysses is said to be about "everything," with ancient myth as a psychological foundation), then Kill Bill might just be one of the most important works of this generation of filmmakers. Without Vol. 2, however, perhaps the only definite statement about Kill Bill is echoed in Judge Woolsey's assessment that "Ulysses" is "somewhat emetic, (but) nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac." Except, perhaps, for Quentin Tarantino himself.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)