Flak Magazine: Review of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, 04.29.04

When we last considered Kill Bill, the question was whether it would, with its second volume, result in samurai cinema's "Ulysses" — that is, would Quentin Tarantino's manic artistry yield something profound? The root of the comparison is that both works are enormous montages, each defined by its catalogue of allusions (and alleged pornography). According to their worshipful fans, to really "get" these artists, you have to be initiated into the worlds mapped out by their works. The difference is that Joyce's disciples tend to be literary critics or the very well-read; Tarantino's devotees are of a generation raised by mostly bad movies. To the cult of Tarantino, he's a genius and his films are the apotheosis of all cinema — sort of a trash-culture counterpart to "Ulysses," which scored enough avid proponents to be voted the greatest book of the 20th century. Although there's a vocal minority, many critics have also drunk the Kool-Aid and all but anointed Tarantino as the filmmaker of his generation, with Pulp Fiction landing in most critics' top 10 of the '90s. But the essential question remains: Sure, Tarantino's work may be cool, but what's it all add up to? Is it really genius?

The truth is that we live in a time when "genius" is tossed about too carelessly. The difference between true genius (Joyce) and the masquerade of genius (Tarantino) is this: Joyce binds his allusions together so that when the reader looks back at what seems like the randomness of stream-of-consciousness, we see how the character's intricate thought processes develop his worldview — the arrangement of allusions replicates how the mind processes information and formulates ideas. In "Ulysses'" first chapter, the protagonist encounters an aging milkwoman whom he envisions as a comical character from a folk song, a witch on a toadstool, one of the Wyrd sisters from Beowulf, Ireland itself and, finally, his dead mother. This progression of internalized thought, constructed from seemingly random references ranging from cultural trivia to classical literature to personal experience, becomes a mini-essay on the theme of deteriorating mother figures. This scene takes on greater significance as the protagonist's melancholy is explored — he discusses Hamlet and his mother appears to him as a ghost. The tangents are skillfully bent into deep, complex and coherent thematic explorations.

Tarantino, on the other hand, has created an enormous collage that's simply a show-and-tell of all the movies he likes. Kill Bill's premise, as indicated by its bookend scenes, is worthy: Man's domestication of woman has repressed her natural savagery, and the maternal instinct is essentially that of a "natural born killer." Presumably, because Tarantino has collected the history of exploitation cinema into an approaching-five-hour film, he's arguing that film's "revenge fantasy" genre is a dramatization of this conflict — perhaps even the summation of humankind's basest desires. This is a lofty goal, one of those "theories of everything" that ambitious artists strive for, and one worthy of someone vying to be a generation's most dynamic and original filmmaker. And he hits some of the right notes: Vol. 2 — in which we explore how the Bride's savagery is the result of Bill's masochism, who "put a bullet in her head" while she was pregnant with his child — expands on Vol. 1's opening fight scene between the Bride and Vernita Green, in which they tear through a perfect suburban home, pausing only to tend to a child, then fighting until the mother falls dead from a gunshot through a box of children's cereal.

But what do all these allusions to samurai, Busby Berkeley, Sonny Chiba, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, anime and all the rest do to develop his theme? Rather than developing a complex but coherent mythology that expounds upon specific ideas, Tarantino has simply created a collage of exploitation cinema. Because he has proved himself a master of styles with a catalogic mind cinephiles yearn for, too much has been made of his "genius." A typical example from Vol. 2 is an extended sequence in which the Bride trains with "master" Pai Mei (played by martial arts actor Gordon Liu), which is filmed like the old, overwrought late-night kung fu shows. The Bride, never breaking her single-minded seriousness, is insulted and cajoled by Pai Mei, in a completely over-the-top parody performance by Liu, wearing Gandalf-white hair and a beard which he strokes ominously and tosses over his shoulder. Tarantino nails the parody right down to the camera swooping in for an overwrought close-up, which got a huge laugh from the audience. Pai Mei teaches the Bride to punch through a board, which seems like a worthless trick, until we cut back to real time and the Bride has to punch through a coffin. It's a funny sequence, but what the heck does Pai Mei have to do gynomaniacal revenge? Likewise, what does Vol. 1's intense focus on O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) — the 20-minute anime sequence on her origins, the corporate board meeting in which she decapitates a colleague, and the Bride's endless battle with O-Ren's posse, the Crazy 88s — really tell us about the Bride and her quest? OK, the fight with the Crazy 88s was a balletic orgy of violence that suggested a sort of thwarted gang-fuck, which might fit Tarantino's themes, but it never cohered into anything significant to the Bride's story. But this is only goes to demonstrate Tarantino's greatest failing here: Kill Bill's mythology is not about the Bride; it's about him.

Compounding the frustration with Tarantino's extravagance is that Kill Bill has snippets of compelling ideas running throughout his film. Vol. 2 opens with a flashback to the Bride's wedding in El Paso, where Bill has tracked her down. When Tarantino films the Bride's approach to the door like the last scene of The Searchers (one of Tarantino's most fully realized thematic connections), his big idea becomes apparent: Tarantino envisions the tensions of marriage like the mortal struggle in a Western. Bill pretends to be the Bride's father in this flashback, which tells us that his paternal feelings apparently turned sexual, leading to her exploition, which she has every right to avenge with death — even destroying her rivals for his attention and then him who violated her. This is a workable, believe-the-hype idea.

But Tarantino won't stay on task. After this terrific opening, the movie shoots off into tangents that completely distract us from this dramatic scenario. Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen) has retired to a trailer in the middle of nowhere, and gets to deliver some existential cowboy speeches about everyone deserving to die, but there's a 15-minute sequence in which he's humiliated by his boss at the strip club where he's a bouncer. Later, the last of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad shows up to collect the Bride's Hattori Hanzo sword, and she and the Bride destroy the trailer in a dramatic fight scene. Is this because the Bride grew up in a trailer, and so the fight is destroying her memories of childhood, or is this Tarantino working out some sort of repressed memory of his childhood in Tennessee? If his characters were less broad, we might have some idea what he means. Sure, Elle Driver's (Daryl Hannah) "Smokey and the Bandit" Trans Am is pretty kick-ass, and it's fun to listen to her read black mamba trivia written neatly on several pages of a mini-note pad, but what does it have to do with Tarantino's relationship Western?

In the end, Kill Bill's feminism is much like that found in Patty Jenkins' Monster, both of which advocate killing as perfectly natural and logical response to rape. Does Tarantino really believe this, or does he believe it because the movies told him to? He's said that Uma Thurman is his "muse," but Tarantino's movie obsession may have thrown him so far from actual human relationships he's not even sure what that means. Tarantino seems to have a sadistic bent in this film, insisting on putting the Bride through all this torture, just to have her destroy Bill in the end — Bill, who when he was five sucked his thumb "to an obscene amount" during Lana Turner movies. Tarantino's paranoia about relationships begins with a great idea (love as a Western), but ends with a ridiculous exploding heart. The Bride and Bill's child runs around the house with plastic guns, sharing a tender moment with mommy while watching "Shogun Assassin." Tarantino tries to be earnest and cartoony at the same time, like a kid trying to kill with a toy gun.

It's important to distinguish between actual genius and pop-status genius. Kill Bill's whole overlength leads up to one dramatic speech by Bill, the culmination of the "Tarantino dialogue" that's made his reputation. The speech is about how Superman is the only comic book character who was born a superhero and whose costume is that of the average guy — Clark Kent is Superman's comment on the human condition. A neat idea, but Tarantino tries to puff this up into something profound, forcing David Carradine to drag it on until collapse. Tarantino probably directed Carradine to sound like a cowboy, but in Bill's strikingly upscale home, he just sounds slow and wooden, like Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. Compare that to Joyce's discussions of Nietzsche's Superman and how, since science has disproved the existence of God, the Catholic Church creates its own morality to continue to exploit Dublin's poor. Kill Bill is an entertaining enough exercise in pop culture pastiche, but let's not pretend it's something it's not simply because we like a lot of the same movies Tarantino does. There's little harm in fanboys creating myths around their heroes, but when the artist buys into this myth, the work suffers for it. Tarantino is no Superman.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)