Both volumes 1 & 2 of Quentin Tarantino’s great “Kill Bill” begin with the blood-spattered bride uttering the phrase, “Bill, it’s your baby” just as Bill unflinchingly shoots her in the head. In that cold hearted moment, you learn virtually everything you ever need to know about Bill in terms of his ruthlessness and his capacity for cruelty. Nothing else needs to be said, and with Bill’s brief act, the bride is given enough cause to go on a “roaring rampage of revenge” the likes of which has never been seen before.
Watching the first film, I felt the bride was justified in killing whoever she wanted to. She was a mother who had lost her child, and that is the most fearsome creature in all of civilization or nature. The movie quickly establishes a warrior code that makes it clear that the bride will not, under any circumstance that might have developed in the years she was in a coma, allow any of her tormenters to live. Her revenge is paramount and absolute.
Despite the Bride’s complete lack of mercy, it is easy to cheer for her for several reasons: first, she is clearly the wronged party, second, the characters she is hunting down are not really people so much as cartoon representations. We know nothing of Bill’s (or the other killers’) motivation, all we know is that he shot the helpless bride in the head. Based on that information alone, we are content to assume he is evil and we can sit back and watch with satisfaction as the bride hunts him down.
End film one, begin part two, and everything changes. All of a sudden the other characters start to get fleshed out; things start to appear a bit more complicated; and Bill, in a movie stealing performance by David Carradine, quickly becomes a lot more interesting.
True to Tarantino form, the chronological beginning of the “Kill Bill” saga isn’t shown until almost the very end of the second film. It is almost as if the impetuous for this vengeance saga is what the director believes is the most exciting and most important component of the film: Black Mamba realizes she is pregnant, and in an instant, her life changes.
While the scene where Black Mamba huddles behind the bed while the assassin sent to kill her fumbles with the directions as to how to read the home pregnancy strip is funny, this is simply not the best visual or dramatic moment in the film However, the power of this moment is inherent in the enormity of its eventual significance, and not what can be shown in the few seconds it takes to occur. The test eventually becomes not so much the proof of whether there is a baby, but of the strength of emotion that exists between Bill and Beatrix Kiddo.
If indifference is the true opposite of love and hatred more aptly described as a manifestation of it (love), then there probably has never been a more intense love ever filmed than that which existed between the Bride and Bill. Indifference is the last emotion that exists between these two.
As it turns out, it is not Bill that makes the first cold hearted move in the relationship, but Black Mamba herself when she disappears without a trace. As Bill states in their dramatic final confrontation, “it is cruel to let somebody who loves you believe you are dead when you really are not.” Certainly the Bride had reason to try to escape Bill, he was a cold hearted killer and she wanted to spare her child any exposure to his world. However, if the manifestation of her baby could so completely change Black Mamba, is it not possible that it could have also been a source of possible redemption for Bill? Remember, Black Mamba was a cold hearted killer before the baby ever came into the scene, and she was with Bill by her choice. She was also under no illusions as to his character, stating in regards to his shooting of her, “I knew you were capable of doing such a thing, I just didn’t think you were capable of doing it to me.”
So that makes it OK behavior for your life-partner to exhibit? You are confident that though he shoots others in the head he won’t shoot you?
The interesting thing about all of these questions is that I believe Tarantino wants us to ask them. These are not flaws, but extremely detailed reflections into each of these characters.
What would have happened if the Bride had told Bill about the baby? Do we have evidence to believe that he would have done something horrible? This is where it gets really interesting because we have a chance to interpret Bill’s behavior. Now, I’m not saying that Bill isn’t a psycho, he definitely is, but let’s not forget, so is the bride. After all, she is the one who kills Copperhead right in front of her young daughter despite the fact that it was obvious Copperhead had changed and wasn’t any kind of future threat. The Bride is as merciless when betrayed as Bill showed himself to be. The two of them are like two angry lions, very dangerous, but approachable if you follow their code (two lions can live together after all).
Bill leads the horrific massacre against the bride at her wedding rehearsal. It is a completely psychotic act, one of cold hearted cruelty for which there is no justification. However, the act can be understood when you put it in context. Consider Bill’s position for the previous three months: distraught, sad, certain that his one true love was dead he had dedicated himself to finding her killer. All of a sudden, he finds her in the desert, alive, pregnant and about to be married. Now, this is a situation that might turn into a crime of passion even if the betrayed party wasn’t a professional killer. The fact that he was a professional killer made the massacre a certainty. The bride knew what kind of guy Bill was, and when he met her outside the chapel she still didn’t come completely clean and reveal the father of the baby. What did Bill do? He “overreacted.” He even sadly admits it later, aware that it isn’t going to resolve anything or be understood. By the end of the movie he seems content to take the last few steps his code of conduct had brought him to, he doesn’t whine or try to get out of what is coming to him. He fights it, but always in accordance with his code.
Consider several things: Bill could have had the Bride killed at any time she was in a coma, why didn’t he? Why spare her? Tactically it wasn’t a good move and it didn’t make any sense to me when I watched it in the first movie. It seemed inconsistent with Bill’s character. He calls Elle off and says that killing the Bride in such a fashion would “lower [them].” Is this what he really thinks, or is it that now that he’s had the time to cool down from the betrayal at the church he feels guilty?
Then there is the fact that Bill apparently raised little B.B. with care and affection. The scenes of his involvement with his daughter are breathtaking (playing guns, the fish dialogue), and Bill cuts a impressive character. He seems accepting of his fate, even reasonable and seems to be motivated more with trying to understand the Bride than escape his own death. Later, he again has the Bride at his mercy, but rather than simply shoot her, he hits her with a truth serum. In these, the last moments of either his or her life, he is more interested in finally finding out several details surrounding what she was thinking during her botched wedding episode. “Did you think that marriage would ever really work out?” he asks, and you get the impression that he really wants to know if she ever truly loved him. He would never ask that directly, but he needs to know at the heart of his character.
Bill is truly a tragically flawed character and by the end of the film he knows it. What had been supreme confidence regarding his cold, ruthless nature, has been turned to regret and sadness at the conclusion. “I knew what shooting her would do to her, what I didn’t know was what it would do to me,” he explains to his daughter, and indirectly to the Bride. The family spends one uneasy night together after the Bride burst into the room with her sword on her back and her gun in her hand, by the time she left, she would have killed Bill by, not simply breaking his heart, but causing it to blow up. It’s appropriate and horrible at the same time, and you are left with the utter knowledge that this was indeed the right woman for Bill--his one true love, or at least the closest thing his nature would allow.
I would have liked to see the Bride’s child’s reaction to the fact that her father was dead. Will she miss him, will the Bride? The movie ends with the words, “the lioness has been reunited with her cub, all is right in the jungle.” True, but what about the lion? He never even had a chance at redemption, not even from the one woman who might have understood him.
What are we supposed to make of that?
The movie begins with Bill telling the Bride that she is seeing him at his most masochistic. It made me chuckle the first time I heard him say it, now I think my reaction will be different. The fact is, when Bill pulls the trigger, he kills himself, and by the time the movie is over we know more about him than we do any other character.
The End