I was down in the commercial center of Lima, Peru, waiting in line to watch “Kill Bill” for the second time, when two irritating American tourists showed up and started pissing me off. There are all kinds of tourists that float around in the local waters, some are worse than others, but these two were of the most hated, head in a cloud, rich bitch variety.
They were the type that thought of all of Lima as their personal Disneyland, complete with starving children in the street that they could toss some of their rich American coins to and feel all warm and fuzzy and good about themselves. They spoke loudly in English, oblivious to the fact that this singled them out as a potential victim to any of the more unsavory element who might be lurking near. But after having lived here for two years, I find that Americans are always stomping around as if they own the place. American tourists are like lion cubs stumbling around in the savannah, getting into trouble that they should know enough to avoid, but getting away with it because mamma lion is sitting there with a threatening eye telling all the other inhabitants of the plain that her babies can do whatever they want and if anybody interferes there will be lethal, bloody, consequences.
The woman was leading the man around by the pubic hairs. The man spoke only in an effeminate voice that truly pissed me off. I don’t know if he was trying to sound all educated and refined or whatever, but it sounded to me like he’d had his balls cut off. Be a man for Christ’s sake!
The woman spoke in this shrill whine, absolute in her confidence that everybody in the whole place wanted to hear her trite, bullshit observation.
“’Kill Bill’ is really bad, we’re not going to go to that!”
I almost walked over to her and slapped her. I almost walked over to her and said, “you should keep your voice down, there might be weak-willed people within hearing distance that could actually think you know what you’re talking about.”
But sorely won experience won over and I merely retreated steaming with rage. You can’t talk to a person like her. The smell of the American ideology is was so thick on her that there was no way to penetrate it. Just to go up and ask her for a more intelligent opinion, or evidence, or anything, would immediately be ciphered into the ideological catch-all that the only reason I could even conceive of challenging her on any point would be because I am a sexist, oppressive man who deserves to have his balls cut off.
God, I’m so fucking sick of having to put up with that crap.
The truth is that I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in English Literature, I’ve written several books, and I’ve been involved with a score of print and online publications; I know a few things about narrative. When somebody asks me an opinion on a movie or a book, I give them something well considered, respectful, and usually more detailed than they want or can handle. I cannot stand it when somebody makes some forceful, negative comment and then refuses to put any evidence on the table when they are pushed. You have to be careful with words. They are powerful instruments. And it isn’t good to tell lies.
And, to say that “Kill Bill” is “bad” is a lie, it is simply untrue and unfair.
You can say you, personally, didn’t enjoy it. You can say you thought it was overly violent. You can say that you thought it was too loud. You can say any idiotic thing that proves your stupidity that you want to, as long as you preface it with the clarification that you are only speaking your opinion and you are not connected with the underlying absolute reality of good versus bad.
But even worse than just good versus bad is the denouncement without evidence. I hate it when I can’t squeeze any more information out of a person than an indignantly burped, “I thought it was bad.” These people recoil in indignation when you press them further as if your quest to discover what their true, worthwhile impression was is an affront to their adulthood.
Screw those idiots!
Because the fact is that “Kill Bill” is amazing. It is such an ambitious, reckless, powerful, and effortless movie that it is truly hard to do it justice with just words. It is so refreshing to go and see a film and not have the same old blunt-edged weaponry of American propaganda smacking again and again into your poor, soft head.
Even the critics gave “Bill” glowing reviews, a fact that also has pissed me off because, by all rights, being the type of movie “Bill” is, the critics should have hated it. There have been many movies in the last ten years that worked on the same brilliant level as “Bill,” “Fight Club” comes to mind, which the critics lambasted because there weren’t any big names attached to them. But Tarantino is bigger than the critics these days, the public knows that everything he does is going to be good, and so the critics are forced to write a good review for fear of losing credibility.
Funny how that works isn’t it?
It’s good to see an arrogant, fat bastard like Roger Ebert eat crow (he gave Reservoir Dogs 2.5 stars and said that Tarantino needed to work on his writing? What?). He understands better than anybody that he is the bitch of some directors and the lord of others. He gleefully changes his tune to scrounge for credibility on well-established directors whose debut he destroyed. He wrote a four star review of “Kill Bill” but he didn’t understand the movie. No critic whose review I have yet read has demonstrated that they understand the movie. They’re all a bunch of hacks.
Superficially, “Kill Bill” is quite simple. A woman who has lost everything is out for revenge. But as desperately simple as the structure is, it opens up the film to acquire a whole host of metaphorical meanings. “Kill Bill” exists somewhere between fantasy and reality. Many of the scenes are signifiers that the audience is not to take the film completely literally. These signifiers can be something as simple as the excessively shooting blood, or the--what I found to be hilarious--way Uma Thurman is allowed to bring her Samurai sword onto commercial jets (I’m actually rather surprised that those guys who are still beating the dead Sept. 11th horse aren’t lining up in protest of this--what they would call--”extremely disrespectful” scene).
Uma Thurman takes an excessive amount of beatings, flies through the air destroying countless attackers, gets shot in the head, wills her limbs out of entropy, and any other number of impossible tasks. Why does the audience suspend disbelief and go along with this charade?
Because at the heart of the movie is this fact: Her character has lost her baby, and the world has a vengeful mother to deal with.
A couple of months ago I was sitting in a restaurant with my girlfriend when this woman started calling out a name in the lobby. She wasn’t screaming, but there was something in her voice that made everybody stop and listen. The restaurant went quiet except for her strangled yelling which grew louder and louder and more hysterical. As we listened, it became clear that the woman was searching for her child, and that if her child wasn’t found quickly, the whole place was going to get torn apart.
We all watched, mesmerized, as she ran from here to there screaming and yelling with a hoarse, tearing sound that froze your blood. I thought, briefly, about getting up and assisting the search, but I was afraid that others would follow my lead and that the resulting chaos of movement would make it worse rather than better. She continued to go from here to there, and we watched with growing concern.
Now, I’m about average height and weight for a man, something like 6 ft 190 lbs. I’m not a giant, but I’m big enough to handle most women. This particular woman was rather small, but sitting there, watching her grow more and more frantic, working herself up into a more highly pitched frenzy, it was easy to see that she was tapping into some primitive, primordial strength that was beyond anything I had a match for. It makes sense that there would be this instinct in human beings, the baby must survive, it is critical for the survival of the species, and if the baby didn’t survive, the culprit must be castigated, a poor second, but still the best you could do. It was sort of like the worm that uses poisonous blood as it’s defense against being eaten. The birds learn not to eat them, but some of the worms have to be sacrificed so that the rest of the birds know to keep away.
The woman eventually found her baby. It was playing quietly in a corner on the second floor. She took it by the hand and lead it out of there, tears streaming down her face but strength in her steps. As soon as she was gone we all sighed, it was as if a bomb had been diffused.
That bomb goes off in “Kill Bill.” The threat to a mother’s child removes all female compassion, mercy, and forgiveness and leaves only a lean, angry, hysterically crazy human form willing to sacrifice everything to wreak vengeance.
There is no doubt that Tarantino made this film primarily as an exercise in bloody, rapid action. Choosing “the blood spattered bride” as his protagonist was a choice made more because it was a cool image rather than the things it implied. But incidental or no, these choices work so amazingly well even when Tarantino’s other objectives lead him to places away from the heart of his material. There is a fair amount of serendipity involved in “Kill Bill” which would perhaps be better referred to as “subconscious direction,” the movie has a wealth of brilliant scenes, a few that aren’t so good, and a few that seem unnecessary. But serendipitous movies are the ones I like best, because the thing that makes them brilliant is a truth that the director reveals without meaning to and which he probably would have kept to himself had he been given the clearly stated choice.
Since the advent of feminism there have been many films that depict what is called “a strong woman.” These movies tend to be ridiculous action flicks where women are shown physically tossing men around and then stopping afterwards to file their nails. They are absurd in that they show women basically as men, and they make no apologies for failing to explore any of the inherent differences between the two sexes. Worst of all, these films are applauded by an adoring public that doesn’t seem to know what it really wants, or what the term “strong woman” signifies.
But “the blood spattered bride” is a strong woman, and she is strong in a truly human, and more importantly, female way. She’s crazy and she’s hysterical. It is not a particularly flattering portrait, but it is true to life and you get the sense that in her current state, there is no power in the universe that could stop her.
Then you get the movie’s final line, and everything changes.
Yes “Kill Bill” is superficially simple, but there is a power beneath the imagery that will sweep you away if you only have the wits to follow it. And you might disagree with me, but if that is the case, you better come swinging with something a bit more developed than “it was bad.” If you say only that I might have to remove your swollen head from your overburdened shoulders with a custom crafted Samurai weapon from a retired swordsmith in Okinawa. And if, in doing so, I only deprived the world of trite commentary such as the previously stated, who could really find fault with me?
The End