Tarantino and the politics of film cruelty after 9/11
by Todd Swift
[ opinion | filmreviews ]
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 in particular, and Volumes 1 & 2 taken as a whole, are one of the most significant American films made since Orson Welles died. Indeed, there are only four supremely violent movies made in America which seem equally significant in terms of art and skill: Touch of Evil; Psycho; Bonnie & Clyde and Blue Velvet. In each case, despite other themes and plot devices, the main tension is between what could be called the quotidian, "square" or basically, liberal-capitalist middle-class world of "small-town" American values (what we often think of as Eisenhower-era mores); and an ethical abyss which leads potentially to perversion, violence and the breaching of every taboo, particularly rape, mutilation, murder and so on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each cornerstone cited above is a sort of film noir manqué; to the extent they are all downbeat explorations of mystery, crime and psycho-sexuality.
What makes each of these fore-runners equally connected to Quentin Tarantino's movie in a resonant way, a way which forms something of a tradition of cinematic-excess-for-cinema's sake, if you will, is two-fold: 1) each was also very much a movie about film, celebrity or voyeurism; or at least, film-making style; and 2) each speaks to the outer political world of its time, if only obliquely; even when most appearing hermetically apolitical, even claustrophobic (one thinks especially of Lynch). In the case of Bonnie & Clyde, of course, the splatter on the screen created by the "police" (or G-men) waiting for the gun-crazy lovers, echoed the run-away police action in Viet Nam outside the cinema house.
This should not be read as unbridled praise for Tarantino; as we know, from de Sade, and lesser lights, cruelty and a sort of artistic genius are not inseparable. For certainly, Kill Bill transgresses; it is post-Christian, and even post-human, in some ways. This cannot take away from its status as a great work. It seems to derive its main force from what Roland Barthes has called the "third meaning" - the signifying level, which is "obtuse" - whose signs moves beyond culture and thought to some place ineffable, ludic, and pleasurable; of this excess he says "it simply designates what is to be loved". Tarantino's new film(s) is, famously, most a designation of what is to be loved, indeed, a collection, a collage, of "moments" from other films and auteurs; it is an act of homage and love, close to a fanzine in anorak-studiousness and force of dedication.
Only one example need be given here, to suggest the probably Joycean levels of complexity at work in the reference-play Tarantino unleashes in this film. The eponymous Bill is played by David Carradine, the actor whose father, John Carradine, was an infamous B-movie character actor. He often acted in horror films, one of which is Buried Alive. There is of course a scene in Kill Bill where Bill's brother (another familial connection) buries the Uma Thurman character Beatrix Kiddo alive. What brings her out of the grave is her dedication to a kung fu master(y); just as Carradine's own "kid" raised the family lineage through stardom in his role in Kung Fu, the 70s TV series. Now Tarantino raises both Bill and Beatrix to new career heights. This is a supreme metafiction at work.
I find it curious, a true case of blindness and insight at work, that in the rush to celebrate this major post-modern work, critics have failed to admit to its shocking cruelty. Cinema is, famously, a case of bringing the viewer into collusion with the eye or eyes of the director's oedipal lens: we must see everything, even the most terrible. This leads to problematic and fascinating suture, when we allow our dreams to go hand in hand with the stranger who leads us into the darkness, to play with our minds, and take away our innocence. Every film is a piece of lost childhood, a re-enactment of waking from Eden, or sleeping with the snake. In Volume 1, the first thing we see is a woman's terrified, blood-coated face, in extreme close-up, just as a gun is put to her temple, and her brains are (imperfectly) blown out. We hear Bill's voice, explaining that he does not mean to be cruel, etc. This seems to be the voice of the director, as well. It is a mumbled, off-screen and disingenuous apologia for sadism as display.
Tarantino is the author of Natural Born Killers, and indeed, in the end of this film, Bill defends the idea that Beatrix is a "natural born killer". Under the sway of truth serum, she is compelled to confess that her murdered fiancé would not have provided a satisfactory life for her, nor indeed would she have been happy to give up the life of an international contract killer; she admits enjoying killing and hurting all the people on the list that brought her back to her daughter and prime lover, Bill. A conservative Eros of Thanatos is established here: for Bill, humans are animals that kill, and like killing, a lot. And once killed, people are simply like dead fish: we flap, and then we stop flapping; hardly as eloquent as Hobbes or Swift, but no less misanthropic, even nihilistic an artistic vision; and of course, American film noir is the 20th century answer to Dostoyevsky's Russian novels of total nihilism.
The devil's apologia is in the sub-text: that Beatrix Kiddo "quit" her killing job as soon as she discovered she was pregnant - literally this saves her life (it is a brilliant revelation scene, balancing knowledge, terror, humour and violence in an inversion of the usual Hitchcock formula where such seeing leads to a dead woman, not a reborn one). I am not yet sure how this empowers feminism, though some claim it does. At any rate, by embracing her biological destiny as a "breeder", and adopting a heterosexual and family-value-oriented (fictional) identity, Kiddo is able to leave a global killing career behind, until it catches up with her at the very place she least expected it, a church in Texas country. In other words, Beatrix Kiddo is America post-9/11 - Ashcroft's America. Under the guise of adopting Christian, Southern fundamentalist "good girl" pro-life attitudes, she underwrites or excuses a subterranean character - at once illicit and more narcotic - which enjoys and endorses the abuse of power, violence, the taking of life, and general international mayhem, for the sake of pure profit.
The aporia is opened when Kiddo "confesses" to Bill about her "mask" (this a very Japanese conceit, as well as Yeatsian; see Mishima) - and then, having killed him with a supremely deft fatal coup-de-grace, setting in motion a satisfying film death for her lover-in-crime - goes back to her daughter, and seeks to "forget" her violent nature, in order to recreate some semblance of "civilization" (see post-war Iraq for this as a failed strategy). Of course, Ulysses himself seeks such a fate after the intense violence of his journey (Kiddo is, at one level, Ulysess); Heaney has called it the "redress of poetry". It is an essential human need, to burn Troy then build Chartres. What is interesting for Kiddo is that in her post-Bill world (Clinton, naturally) she cuddles up in bed with her daughter, and basks in the glow of the new American hearth, the TV screen. What is on? Both troublingly, and harmlessly, a vintage cartoon. In Tarantino's nostalgia for past pop culture is his alibi. The cartoon becomes increasingly violent, as mother and daughter look on, happy to be united in watching it. Such is the world, such has it always been: a series of moving images of human cruelty. And we saw that it was good.
