[Coursework Essay 2019]: How Postmodern Ironies in Kill Bill Challenge Classical Narration

The following is a slightly edited version of one of my pieces of written coursework from my undergraduate university studies. I have posted it here with a slightly altered title alongside my later works for the purpose of showing the development of my academic research and writing skills.

I wrote and submitted the original version of this essay for university coursework in 2019.

Please keep in mind that my quoting any given author, critic, scholar etc. is neither necessarily an endorsement nor a disavowal of said person’s actions, statements, or views. Rather, it is solely to identify a particular viewpoint for the purpose of contextualising the discourse surrounding the text(s) central to my analysis.

Content Warning: the film central to this essay features depictions of violence and occasional allusions to sexual assault and child abuse; this essay references these scenes solely for analytical purposes. Readers who are likely to be distressed by these topics are advised to prepare accordingly.

Introduction: Defining Postmodern Cinema

If the purpose of Hollywood classicism is to standardise film narration, then the post-classical techniques that have surfaced since the 1970s denote attempts to diversify cinematic storytelling methods. Clearly, then, post-classical cinema defies the idea that films can only tell stories a certain way to be successful or worthwhile. Nick Lacey offers a layperson’s definition of postmodernism as a cultural movement which characterises it as a rejection of the “grand meta-narratives” designed to shape society according to some sense of universal meaning (2005, p. 97). This would help to explain why a standardised meaning of the term is so elusive. Cristina Degli-Esposti notes its widely contested origins and historically “fluctuating meanings” (1998, pp. 3-4). For Degli-Esposti, the difficulty comes from the various paradoxes involved in attempts to define or explain it, or even trace its beginnings. In fact, the oxymoronic is exactly what typifies the concept, synthesising both “high” and “low” art, and past and future periods in culture (p. 4). But by Lacey’s definition, postmodern cinema is a form of cinema that opposes classicism as a means of shaping film narration into a universal standard; an opposition manifesting in post-classical storytelling techniques.

Viewing Quentin Tarantino through the post-classical lens, as the following analysis aims to prove using Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), reveals a director who is archetypal of postmodernism. One who characterises a culture that “transcends the notion of the present” and “reaches back to the past and forward to the future trying to synthesise these two “imaginary places” in narrative fashion” (Degli-Esposti, 1998, p. 4). Tarantino’s films, especially the two-parter central to this analysis, encompass each of the movement’s oxymoronic characteristics:

Paradoxically using and exploiting the conventions of both popular and elite literature and culture, postmodern texts and generally concerned with the very act of telling/showing stories and remembering told/shown stories […] It uses strategies of disruption like self-reflexivity, intertextuality, bricolage, multiplicity, and simulation through parody and pastiche. But postmodern texts, both written and visual, may also use organisational systems […] that develop in hypertexts that include both several levels of reality and other texts storing great quantities of information (Degli-Esposti, 1998, p. 4).

Examples of Tarantino using bricolage to mix popular and elite cultural references include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and The Hateful Eight (2015). He pastiches entire genres in films like Jackie Brown (1997), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained (2012). Multiple levels of reality feature in several of his works, especially the hypertextual Pulp Fiction (1994) as well as Death Proof (2007) and his latest film Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019). But Kill Bill is the central focus here since it is in this two-part film, I argue, that maximises each of these essential traits of postmodern cinema in relation to post-classical techniques of narration. Later sections will, where necessary, elaborate on the postmodernist nature of Tarantino’s other works in service of comparisons to Kill Bill and the kinds of conversations Tarantino is having about cinema with this film.

 

Bricolage and Pastiche

Tarantino’s use of bricolage often involves both elite and popular art, such as the blend of the Agatha Christie whodunnit formula with caper film and Western traditions in Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight respectively, or the mixture of French New Wave cinema with the Hollywood gangster film in Pulp Fiction. Where Kill Bill differs is in the near-total dominance of cult film quotations. There are traces of “high” art, such as shot compositions from Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) and The Searchers (Ford, 1956), and the cascades of blood akin to Tsubaki Sanjûrô (Sanjuro, Kurosawa, 1962). Edwin Page (2005, p. 226) even interprets Bill’s room number, 101, in Vol. 2 as an allusion to the science fiction novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949). But these glancing comparisons aside, Kill Bill mostly borrows from the exploitation film genres of Hong Kong martial arts, Italian spaghetti Western, and Japanese samurai films. The main examples of each are the music scores, story themes (murder, rape, revenge), and even entire shots from Tian xia di yi quan (Five Fingers of Death, Jeong, 1972), Da uomo a uomo (Death Rides a Horse, Petroni, 1967), and Shurayukihime (Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld, Fujita, 1973).

Lacey argues that bricolage erases the original meanings of whatever practices and signs it appropriates or recycles (p. 94) and if done arbitrarily, that can certainly be so. But it is not so with Kill Bill. The frequent use of the Ironside (NBC Television, 1967-1975) theme tune when the Bride spots a target of her vengeful rampage creates a leitmotif as did the theme’s appearance in Tian xia di yi quan – which, in fairness, did remove the music from its original context. But it is because the music signalled the hero’s violence in Chang-hwa Jeong’s film that Tarantino uses it to foreshadow the Bride’s brutal revenge in Kill Bill. The same is true of the hypertextual use of the Ennio Morricone theme from Da uomo a uomo in the third act of Vol. 1 when the Bride publicly confronts O-Ren Ishii. Music that symbolises the theme of revenge in its film of origin plays in Kill Bill to convey that same theme. Lyrics from the Shurayukihime theme song Shura No Hana (The Flower of Carnage) allude to its vengeful protagonist, Yuki Kashima: “[the] woman who walks this path in life/Gave up her tears long ago.” The influence of Shurayukihime on Kill Bill is clear not only from its non-linear narrative structure but also from the use of this song to allude to Kill Bill’s vengeful hero, the Bride.

The bricolage in Kill Bill is unique in that, as with the above examples, it does not erase their original meanings. Rather, it includes these practices and signs specifically because of their original meanings which resurface even in their recycled forms. However, postmodernism often goes further than mere recycling. Parody and pastiche are, on the surface, quite similar: the imitation of certain artists, movements, or styles. But parody has the specific intention of satirically commenting on the original or humorously illuminating its faults. Frederic Jameson favours parody over pastiche, which he calls “a neutral practise of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives”, labelling it “blank parody” (1991, p. 17). Tarantino is not so much parodic because his films rarely, if ever, intend to comically undermine the films he mimics. Jackie Brown is not a parody of blaxploitation like, say, Coonskin (Bakshi, 1975); nor does Django Unchained aim to satirise the Western the way Blazing Saddles (Brooks, 1974) does, for instance. Tarantino’s imitations of bygone cult genres fall more into the category of pastiche: “the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (Jameson, 1991, p. 17).

However, Tarantino’s mimicry is not as empty as Jameson says of pastiche in general. Even ostensible low art must have some value if it is popular because, as Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau acknowledge, “[the] popular can refer to things that are commercially successful and/or to things that are produced by, or expressed thoughts, values and feelings of, ‘the people’” (1992, p. 2). In other words, popular cinema often resonates with the desires and values of its audience and contemporary culture. By replicating cult genre forms in films like Kill Bill, Tarantino expresses that they are worth preserving in the public consciousness; he conveys that, regardless of their quality, these films have value, at least to their fans like Tarantino. Far from imitation of dead styles for its own sake, as Jameson would suggest, a pastiche in earnest brings an exciting opportunity for post-classical film narration to speak to the value of storytelling modes of the past. And, as the below 1994 interview reveals, Tarantino, as well as Pulp Fiction producer Lawrence Bender and co-writer Roger Avery, appreciate high-quality storytelling:

The thing that you get in our stuff, I think, is something that’s otherwise lost in American cinema right now. Also, I’m not one of these independent filmmaker guys that just bashes Hollywood […] But the thing that’s really missing from the overall output, and that really comes home when you look at films of the ‘70s, is that we have lost the art of telling a good story well. There is no storytelling going on right now in 85 per cent of the movies that are made (Tarantino, quoted in Cheshire, 1994, p. 94).

What makes Tarantino’s observation unique is that, as one can tell by the bricolage and pastiche in films like Kill Bill, he finds these good stories well told even in exploitation genres of the past that decidedly bourgeois critics would more than likely dismiss. Non-diegetic sound as audience cues for key narrative events and thematically resonant leitmotifs are only some of the lessons modern cinema can learn from its past to avoid, as Robert McKee feared, becoming “little more than multimillion-dollar books-on-tape” due to an overreliance on verbal exposition (1998, p. 345).

 

The Post-classical Genre

The most blatant tension between classical narration and Kill Bill is Tarantino’s blurring of genre boundaries. For Rick Altman, the seven “Fundamental Characteristics of Genre Film” are as follows: the genre film, writes Altman, is dualistic; repetitive; cumulative; predictable; nostalgic; symbolic; and functional (1987, pp. 330-334). Kill Bill’s dualism takes the form of the protagonist herself: the Bride is a violent, vindictive protagonist who nevertheless has motherly affections, as the viewer sees when she finally meets her daughter B.B. Kill Bill is repetitive in that it reiterates conflicts and fundamental story patterns from past revenge films, albeit from a plethora of different genres. The repetition of icons (the assassin, the outlaw, the warrior), situations (martial arts fights and training), and themes (crime, duty, honour, revenge) makes the film cumulative, as genre films are (Altman, 1987, p. 331). Altman attributes the characteristic of nostalgia to a celebration of American history as the only ideal model of the present (pp. 332-333), but the histories to which Kill Bill alludes are also Chinese, Italian, and Japanese. There is a transnational element to the film’s nostalgia which therefore celebrates not so much American history, but the history of certain kinds of popular global cinema.

Tarantino fuses live-action genres with animation by depicting O-Ren’s backstory in anime form, which illuminates the film’s moral functionality as a revenge film. The cathartic, violent punishment of the murderous child molester Boss Matsumoto, whose crimes are so obscene they call for an entirely new level of reality via animation, symbolises the strict moral code in society that child abuse is unacceptable, and that justice awaits the abusers. This morality bleeds into the Bride’s eventual vindictive punishment of Bill and Buck who shot and raped her respectively. In terms of functionality, this story motif reads as an ethical condemnation of abusive behaviour towards women, albeit in a manner that nevertheless endorses other acts of violence. As morally contradictory as it is to conflate personal revenge with bona fide justice this way, the film at least underscores a vital distinction between the degrees of obscenity in human behaviour.

Kill Bill’s genre fluidity extends beyond the melange of action-related or otherwise violent genres like anime, martial arts, samurai, and Western. Kill Bill periodically shifts between comedic and dramatic forms as well. For serious in tone though much of the violence is (Bill shooting the Bride; Buck raping her at the hospital; O-Ren and Bill’s deaths) some of it is more light-hearted. In Vol. 1 when the Bride or O-Ren strike a victim with their katanas, for instance, the cascades of blood exaggerate the extremity of the violence to the point of being humorous. Other examples include Vernita Green shooting through the Kaboom cereal box before her sudden defeat, and the Bride’s showdown with Elle Driver building to the comical anti-climax of the Bride plucking out Elle’s eye, the latter then gesticulating in pain and screaming hysterically. These spontaneous tonal shifts, especially when anticlimactic, subvert the revenge film’s generic predictability; Tarantino enhances the fulfilment of violent catharsis by occasionally denying it to inject more light-hearted pleasures. Kill Bill proves Duncan Campbell’s (2003) observation that “Tarantino is happy to have his audience laughing one moment and revolted the next.” Tarantino confirms this with the below statement:

If I do have a special talent as a director, it is an ability to turn on a dime, to change the emotion you're feeling as an audience […] You're making them laugh and then it's horrifying and they become a conspirator in your own sickness and that's really wonderful! (Tarantino, quoted in Campbell, 2003).

Altman writes that traditional film criticism has defined genres as having “clear, stable identities and borders” (1999, p. 16) and that individual films “belong wholly and permanently to a single genre” (p. 18). Altman notes that genre films create meaning with heavy intertextuality and that “[whereas] other films depend heavily on their referential qualities to establish ties to the real world, genre films typically depend on symbolic usage of key images, sounds and situations” (pp. 25-26). But Tarantino’s films are usually generic hybrids which use intertextual references to a range of earlier films in each of the genres they combine. Pulp Fiction recycles images from Hollywood film noirs like The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) and Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955), as well as French New Wave films like Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders, Godard, 1964) and Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, Godard, 1965). Tarantino himself (Première, 2015) links The Hateful Eight to such “claustrophobic Westerns” as Hombre (Ritt, 1967) and Prega il morto e ammazza il vivo (Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead, Vari, 1971), and Agatha Christie mysteries like And Then There Were None (Clair, 1945) and Murder on the Orient Express (Lumet, 1974).

Kill Bill is the apex of intertextual genre hybridity in Tarantino’s filmography. Martial arts film allusions include the Bride’s “one against a hundred” fight (Tarantino, 2003) like in Long hu dou (The Chinese Boxer, Wang, 1970), her jumpsuit based on Bruce Lee’s in Game of Death (Clouse and Lee, 1978), and her Kung Fu training akin to Shao Lin san shi liu fang (The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin, Liu, 1978). Tarantino also embeds shots from various spaghetti Westerns: Blondie’s near-death look in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone, 1966); Frank walking into focus in C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone, 1968); and Da uomo a uomo’s violent flashback. Samurai film references include a reimagining of Shurayukihime’s duel in the snow in Vol. 1, both volumes’ storyline of a vengeful assassin like in Kozure Ōkami (Shogun Assassin, Houston and Misumi, 1980), and their homage to the combat in the opening sequence of Samurai Fiction (Nanako, 1998). All these symbolic revenge film images culminate into one unifying subtext: that the Bride is an unstoppable force out to get her imminent, brutal revenge on those who wronged her.

Ambivalence and Irony

Todd Berliner discusses a trend that arose in the 1970s when Hollywood filmmakers experimented with ambivalent meanings and unstable endings:

More so than films of the studio era, seventies films, at the moment of conclusion, refused to resolve or cloak the incongruous ideas generated by their narration […] seventies filmmakers created a trend in films […] that conclude with moments that are at the same time narratively decisive and pointedly irresolute in the ideas they provoke (Berliner, 2010, p. 120).

Berliner (p. 47) alludes to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese – whom he later details further (p. 150) – as examples of these directors. This is important to consider in relation to Tarantino who lists Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) and Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976) among his favourite films in a Sight & Sound director’s poll (Bell, 2012, p. 71). The inclusion of these narratively ambivalent and conclusively unstable films is highly informative of the influence that 1970s Hollywood has had on Tarantino. An interview with Graham Fuller (1993, p. 49-50) reveals that even Tarantino’s first screenplay, True Romance (Scott, 1993), takes after Badlands (Malick, 1973), another ambivalent Hollywood 1970s film. The conclusive instability and thematic incongruency of the films from this era manifest in Tarantino’s directorial works. It is not objectively clear what Pulp Fiction or Death Proof “means” per se; the endings to Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight do not suggest the absolute closure one would expect of studio-era films. Likewise, the storytelling in Kill Bill breeds conflicting and unclear ideas with some loose ends in the narrative conclusion, decisions which derive from Tarantino’s ironic personality as a filmmaker.

The narrative conclusion occurs at the end of Vol. 2 when the Bride, having exacted her deadly revenge on Bill and the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAs), reunites with B.B. ready for a new life together. A title card reads: “The lioness has rejoined her cub and all is right in the jungle” – a microcosm of the ending’s restoration of equilibrium. But this ending does not resolve all aspects of the plot. For example, the viewer does not see the death of Elle; the Bride merely blinds her and leaves her to a painful but unknown fate in Budd’s trailer. With this, as well as Elle killing Budd earlier instead of the Bride, Tarantino subverts genre conventions by having the main protagonist of his revenge film not kill all their targets (Page, 2005, pp. 223-224). Furthermore, in Vol. 1, the Bride accidentally lets Vernita’s daughter Nikki see her assassinate Vernita. Before leaving, the Bride tells Nikki: “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting.” This suggests that Nikki may one day exact her own revenge against the Bride. This allows the story to continue beyond the narrative constraints of the cinema and in the minds of the spectator with the added possibility of the story becoming cyclical:

Tarantino leaves the story somewhat open-ended (very postmodern) and gives it a chance to continue in our imaginations, unlike a lot of writers and directors who neatly tie up their narratives […] In this sense, the narrative is self-perpetuating. A female sought revenge prior to the Bride seeking hers, this being O-Ren, and beyond the film’s narrative we can imagine Vernita’s daughter taking on the revenge mantle (Page, 2005, pp. 189-190).

The film is also ethically and semantically incongruous. Tarantino frames the Bride’s revenge against Bill as morally right, but Bill’s violence against her was itself revenge for leaving him for Tommy Plympton. Reflective of this is Budd’s line in Vol. 2: “That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die. But then again, so does she.” Later, before burying her alive, Budd tells the Bride “This is for breaking my brother’s heart.” The truth is revenge is an exclusively personal kind of “justice” that seems morally right only from the perspective of whoever strives for it. That retribution can easily look evil and savage to the brothers or daughters of the victims. Similarly, Buck’s death is a superficial closure for the rape he and his customers inflicted on the Bride which could have been over all the four years she was comatose. But only two of the Bride’s rapists suffer punishment for it and their deaths do not necessarily atone for the psychological trauma they may have caused the Bride by objectifying and raping her. There is no explicit guarantee of these ensuing mental health issues, but her killing of Buck connotes that her rage is a result of the emotional pain that the rape precipitated. Either way, the film’s commentary on such a complex and violent crime is uncertain.

Of course, due to Tarantino’s ironic approach to tone (Campbell, 2003), viewers may not all agree on whether he intends the spectator to take these ideas and themes seriously. A Chicago Reader review of Kill Bill by Noah Berlatsky hints at the ambivalence that Tarantino’s irony breeds:

He doesn't want to make a Hong Kong action movie or a blaxploitation flick; he wants to have a conversation about one. And that's what his movies seem like: long, dramatic arguments with other filmmakers and other films (Berlatsky, 2004).

If Kill Bill is a conversation about revenge films rather than being a revenge film itself, it would be reductive to assert any objective or singular meanings that its ideas and themes may have for all audiences. Other than some basic character and story connotations Tarantino imbues the film’s narrative and visual associations with historical examples of its various interrelated genres, Tarantino’s ironic narrational and thematic incongruities make what Kill Bill objectively “means” unclear. Furthermore, these intentions of metatextual discourse raise considerable questions about what Tarantino has to say about cinema itself, specifically the films of the genres he imitates. But the multiple layers of reality and subjectivity with which Kill Bill plays can help to demystify Tarantino’s discursive commentary on revenge film genres.

 

Subjective Realism and Self-Reflexivity

Kill Bill combines both restricted and omniscient modes of narration; the former mode distributing story information according to only one character’s knowledge, and the latter mode detailing events beyond the limitations of that one character’s experiences (Elsaesser and Buckland, 2002, p. 173). The film primarily follows the Bride, privileging her individual perspective. Indicative of the extent to which the narration foregrounds the Bride’s perspective are the recurrent point-of-view shots, red-tinted flashbacks, and the sirens from the Ironside theme as a leitmotif. Despite the antirealism of excessive violence, these formal techniques convey the extremity of the Bride’s anger and thirst for revenge. Eleftheria Thanouli calls this “subjective realism”: the excessive and hypermediated yet still accessible and coherent representation of intense real-life experiences and psychological states (2009, p. 50). The viewer does, on the other hand, see several events that the Bride does not: Elle preparing to euthanise her while she is comatose at the hospital; Bill asking Sophie Fatale if the Bride knows her daughter is still alive; Bill warning Budd to prepare for her arrival at his trailer. All of which foreshadow upcoming events and breed suspense for the viewer.

Normally, omniscience builds this suspense from the knowledge that the protagonist lacks but the viewer has. However, Kill Bill inverts this strategy in many self-reflexive ways. One example is the Bride’s name. In Vol. 1, the name is bleeped out when the Bride and Vernita say it. In Vol. 2 when Elle speaks the Bride’s name, revealing it to be Beatrix Kiddo, the film cuts away from the action to a brief sequence of Beatrix responding to her real name in a classroom. Here, Tarantino pokes fun at the viewer’s hitherto ignorance of a relevant story detail to which the characters have access: the protagonist’s real name. This also, like the anime sequence, adds an extra layer of reality constituent of the film’s postmodern hypertext. However, the classroom sequence takes this further still: it depicts an event that did not actually happen in the story but serves as an ironic metaphor for the crucial plot revelation of Beatrix’s name. Few classical films, especially of the studio era, would manipulate narrational modes so blatantly or with such self-awareness. In doing so, Kill Bill exposes to the viewer its own artificiality and awareness of its construction. To further illustrate this, Tarantino amplifies the film’s self-referentiality by placing omniscience in Beatrix’s hands.

As her voice-over dialogue would suggest, Beatrix is the film’s narrator and there are many signs of her self-awareness as a fictional storyteller. In Vol. 1 she details in voice-over the “madness” of O-Ren’s bodyguard Gogo Yubari before a flashback shows Gogo savagely castrating a bar patron. The film cuts back to the scene and Beatrix says in voice-over, “See what I mean?” Earlier in the same scene, the Bride likens Sophie’s appearance to a Star Trek (NBC Television, 1966-1969) villain. This suggests that she is fully aware of the film’s audience and that she too can see the characters on screen. The opening to Vol. 2 reinforces this interpretation when Beatrix directly addresses the audience in a recap of the events from Vol. 1 in a manner that Page (2005, p. 212) compares to an opening text crawl from the Star Wars films (Various, 1977-2005). What confirms Beatrix’s self-awareness as the film’s narrator is the final shot in Vol. 2 of her winking at the audience. These sly acknowledgements of the spectator align perfectly with the constituents of a postmodern film narrator:

[T]he postmodern narrator is uncertain and often looks at the audience through the camera lens. His/her knowledge of the story is often ambiguous, ironic, and unpretentious and attempts to engage the spectator who is now cautious of the communicative game set up by the film. Where once, in modernism, irony was used as a distancing device, in postmodern cinema irony becomes a way of questioning truth and artificiality. Estranged by these new communicational relationships, the spectator is taken to another level of seeing. He/she is not only seeing differently but is aware of seeing himself/herself see (Degli-Esposti, 1998, p. 5).

Flashbacks and voice-over narration have been tools for conveying subjectivity in cinema since their apex in the 1940s (Bordwell et al, 2017, p. 477). These give the impression that the protagonist is – at least to some degree – in control of the viewer’s experience and reading of the film. The self-reflexivity of Kill Bill goes beyond this and the Bride’s occasional, yet noticeable, fourth-wall breaks are microcosmic of her being in full control of the viewer’s experience and reading. It is her story in the sense that the spectator gets the impression that she is knowingly the architect of its narration. Not only would this explain the intensity of the depictions of her subjective point-of-view but, as is quintessential of post-classical cinema (Thanouli, 2009, p. 176), it consequently heightens the film’s sense of realism as well. Judging by Beatrix’s Star Trek reference and Bill’s grindhouse film collection (they let B.B. watch Kozure Ōkami in Vol. 2), it seems Beatrix is a similar pop-culture expert to Tarantino. The Ironside theme and Ennio Morricone music could, therefore, be inside her mind when she is on her rampage; a subjective form of music exemplifying “internal diegetic sound” that only the character and the audience can hear (Bordwell et al, 2017, p. 291).

In each of these ways, Tarantino transgresses the boundaries of narrational modes and even diegesis itself to communicate the subjectively realistic extremity of Beatrix’s emotional and psychological experiences. He does so with the resulting connotation that the story is a construction of a design by its own main character who is both consciously open about its artificiality and, judging by her intertextuality, a metafictional embodiment of Tarantino’s own conscious use of bricolage and hypertext. So, his commentary on the films and genres to which he pays homage is that their characters and stories are a transparent extension of their creators’ (and audiences’) cathartic satisfaction at seeing the fulfilment of a vengeful quest. Beyond being itself an example of the corpus, Kill Bill is a self-conscious meta-analysis of the recurring human desires and pleasures that rebound in these films.

 

Characterisation and the Postmodern Human

Postmodernism implies that post-capitalist consumer culture has reduced everything, including people, to surfaces:

Our sense of ourselves, it is argued, is often derived from the media (for example, ‘lifestyle’ magazines), and our understanding of the world is (virtually) wholly constructed by the media (for example, news and documentaries). One of the more radical stances of postmodernism suggests that we are posthuman […] the postmodern human is a slippery concoction that denies the possibility of truly ‘knowing ourselves’ (Lacey, 2005, p. 93).

The apparatus of postmodern cinema, like bricolage and pastiche synthesising and recontextualising high and low art, erases the depth and boundaries of quality of the imitated texts. In Tarantino’s case, this permeates characterisation: the characters in Kill Bill are patchworks of archetypes from other films and elements of Tarantino’s own personality. The Pam Grier-style Blaxploitation hero (Vernita); the samurai (O-Ren); the Western outlaw (Budd); and the wise martial arts master (Hattori Hanzo, Pai Mei), to name but a few. As said previously, Beatrix herself is a melange of several of these archetypes and her story of revenge echoes those of the films featuring these tropes. The DiVAs (sans Bill and Elle) got their codenames from the Serpent Society which debuted in Captain America (Gruenwald, 1985) because Bill, like Tarantino himself, is a popular culture aficionado. Even some of the costumes derive from other sources. For example, Beatrix’s yellow jumpsuit is Bruce Lee’s from Game of Death and Elle’s black jacket and eyepatch resemble Christina Lindberg’s from Thriller - en grym film (Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Vibenius, 1973). The personae of the characters in Kill Bill are concoctions of pre-existing media images; they are posthuman.

If a character is “a work of art, a metaphor for human nature” and not a human being in their own right (McKee, 1998, p. 375), then a posthuman character is a metaphor for real-life humans who, due to hypercapitalism, similarly lack identities of their own. Judging by all the references, Tarantino has a blatant fixation with revenge films to the point that they define most of his filmography. But one could read his form of quotation as a statement on how overzealous media consumption defines its consumers, engineering their identities and values, and risks making human depth, individuality, and self-knowledge unattainable. The characterisation of Kill Bill is highly reflective of this: the spectator knows little about the DiVAs beyond the revenge film archetypes they each symbolise and the surface-level traits of being merciless, skilful assassins of (slightly) varying ages and ethnic backgrounds. The most the viewer learns about any of them prior to being assassins is O-Ren’s backstory during the anime sequence. Vol. 1 offers a glimpse of Vernita’s life as a wife and mother, and Vol. 2 briefly shows Budd’s job as a bouncer, but both happen after they retire from the DiVAs which makes this information more constituent of an arc rather than character traits.

In Kill Bill, the characterisation is limited, making the characters more mysterious but less deep than classical standards. Beatrix and Bill are notable exceptions: Beatrix’s sudden motherhood gives her a feeling of nurturing and selfless responsibility uncommon for a typical assassin. Also, in Vol. 1 she is on the verge of tears when preparing to kill O-Ren, implying an off-screen friendship that adds a layer of emotional nuance; albeit one that only Beatrix shows. Beatrix is the central protagonist, so, naturally, the most significant character arc is hers. She defeats the DiVAs and reunites with her daughter, reconciling the key conflicts: Bill’s attempts to kill her and the agony of losing her chance at motherhood; she merges her desire for revenge with her need to finally put someone else’s life before her own; she overcomes her flaws of being cruel and vindictive at the film’s end. Bill’s confession of “masochism” when shooting Beatrix in Vol. 1 and his interactions with B.B. in Vol. 2 show that he too feels pain and love that distinguishes him from a mere heartless killer.

Although, Bill is also a self-confessed consumer of comic books, exploitation films, and seventies soul music – which he mentions in Vol. 2 when Beatrix asks, “When will I see you again?” As a counterpoint to Beatrix’s individuality and nuance, Tarantino has constructed Bill as someone who has absorbed a smorgasbord of popular culture artefacts and as such has built his identity and worldview around media narratives, traits which have permeated the DiVAs. Bill claims in Vol. 2, “Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race. Sorta like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs Tommy Plimpton.” Likewise, Bill is Tarantino’s critique on the posthuman consumerist of contemporary society: someone who wants and even tries to have a meaningful existence but cannot escape the “meaning” that the media has constructed for them. Much like how Bill has constructed a team of assassins just like in his comic books and moulds who they are until they become facsimiles of those bygone media images and, to an extent, each other. Bill, like post-capitalist media, turns people into products.

Beatrix’s punishment for leaving the life Bill intended for her is death, but she later uses what that lifestyle taught her against Bill to forge a life of her own, a life with genuine meaning and value. This is what McKee would call the theme or “controlling idea” of a story: a clear statement expressing its meaning, as well as expressing how and why the teller believes life changes from one state to another (1998, p. 114-115). Beatrix’s triumph over Bill and the DiVAs is a metaphor for the following theme: “Humanity prevails because we as individuals withstand and overcome those who would control and destroy our personhood.” The characters in Kill Bill are metaphors for the media-constructed posthuman and Bill is a metaphor for the consumerism that engineered the reduction of human society to shallow imitations of media archetypes. Beatrix, however, is a metaphor for what is, hopefully, the triumph of personal identity over posthuman conformity. Her heroic role in the narrative and her ultimate victory is an endorsement of the quest for depth, individuality, meaning, and self-knowledge.

 

Conclusion: The Value of the Postmodern Film

To an advocate of classicism, it would be easy to dismiss postmodernism on the grounds of its ostensible vacuity. For McKee:

[Post-modernism] itself, by definition, means shallowness.  It means a satire of the techniques of writing […] Calling attention to the techniques of writing, and that, of course, divorces you from the content by the very nature of it (McKee, 2010).

Others such as Lacey, however, would argue that “postmodernism can also be used to suggest uncomfortable ‘truths’ about contemporary (western) society” (p. 95). The stigma of vacuity may be due in large part to its oxymoronic nature painting the concept and therefore the movement in general as indecipherable. But as Degli-Esposti wrote, its contradictions are the entire point of postmodernism. It is a form of irony that resurrects icons from the past to transcend the meaninglessness of the consumerist present and erases demarcations of class and quality by combining highbrow and lowbrow art. Being a postmodern film, Kill Bill does all this as a re-evaluation of characterisation, diegesis, genre, and narrational conventions. As an organisational system, classicism exists to authoritatively engineer a sense of meaning and value in cinema and define what film narration is (or should be) and is not (or should not be). Postmodern films, including those by Tarantino, diversify these conceptions beyond the mechanistic boundaries of classicism: postmodern films like Kill Bill advocate alternative narrational styles and argue that meaning and value are not exclusive to classical conventions. Post-classical film techniques are all part of Tarantino’s ironic dialogue with cinema.

Kill Bill is as postmodern as a Tarantino film has been since Pulp Fiction; only the latter rivals it in the extent of its hypertextual, non-linear, and self-referential design. It is a statement that dead and ostensible lowbrow genres are still worthwhile for how they tell their stories, that there are ways of building characters and their worlds that are unconventional, yet equally rich. Holdovers from classical design, such as the ethical functionality of its punishments for child abuse and misogynistic violence, are but small constituents of the larger metaphorical commentary. On the surface, Beatrix is a rampaging emissary of blood-soaked vengeance. Through the postmodern lens, meanwhile, she is a symbol of human depth and identity prevailing over posthuman acquiescence to the consumerist culture that would reduce people to surfaces. Of course, all that this analysis has claimed of Kill Bill and its “meaning” is a single, subjective interpretation arriving at potentially an utterly different conclusion to another reading, but such is the modus operandi of postmodern (and post-classical) cinema. Meaning is not the product of a mechanistic organisational system but in the mind of the individual audience member.

 

Filmography

Films:

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution/Alphaville (1965). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [Film]. France/Italy:  Athos Films.

And Then There Were None (1945). Directed by René Clair [Film]. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Apocalypse Now (1979). Directed by Francis Ford Coppola [Film]. USA: United Artists.

Badlands (1973). Directed by Terrence Malick [Film]. USA: Warner Bros.

Bande à Part/Band of Outsiders (1964). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [Film]. France: Columbia Films.

Blazing Saddles (1974). Directed by Mel Brooks [Film]. USA: Warner Bros.

buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Directed by Sergio Leone [Film]. Italy/Spain/West Germany: Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA).

C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Directed by Sergio Leone [Film]. Italy/USA: Euro International Film (EIA).

Citizen Kane (1941). Directed by Orson Welles [Film]. USA: RKO Radio Pictures.

Coonskin (1975). Directed by Ralph Bakshi [Film]. USA: Bryanston Distributing.

Da uomo a uomo/Death Rides a Horse (1967). Directed by Giulio Petroni [Film]. Italy: Titanus.

Death Proof (2007). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Momentum Pictures.

Django Unchained (2012). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: The Weinstein Company.

Game of Death (1978). Directed by Robert Clouse and Bruce Lee [Film]. Hong Kong/USA: Columbia Pictures.

Hateful Eight, The (2015). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: The Weinstein Company.

Hombre (1967). Directed by Martin Ritt [Film]. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Inglourious Basterds (2009). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. Germany/USA: The Weinstein Company.

Jackie Brown (1997). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Miramax.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA/Japan: Miramax.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2. (2004). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Miramax.

Killers, The (1946). Directed by Robert Siodmak [Film]. USA: Universal Pictures.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Directed by Robert Aldrich [Film]. USA: United Artists.

Kozure Ōkami/Shogun Assassin (1980). Directed by Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi [Film]. Japan/USA:  New World Pictures.

Long hu dou/The Chinese Boxer (1970). Directed by Jimmy Wang Yu [Film]. Hong Kong: Enchanted Filmarts.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Directed by Sidney Lumet [Film]. UK/USA: Anglo-EMI Film Distributors.

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Columbia Pictures.

Prega il morto e ammazza il vivo/Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead (1971). Directed by Giuseppi Vari [Film]. Italy: Independenti Regionali.

Pulp Fiction (1994). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Miramax.

Reservoir Dogs (1992). Directed by Quentin Tarantino [Film]. USA: Miramax.

Samurai Fiction (1998). Directed by Hiroyuki Nanako [Film]. Japan: Cine Qua Non Films.

Searchers, The (1956). Directed by John Ford [Film]. USA: Warner Bros.

Shao Lin san shi liu fang/The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978). Directed by Chia-Liang Liu [Film]. Hong Kong: World Northal.

Shurayukihime/Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld (1973). Directed by Toshiya Fujita [Film]. Japan: Toho Company.

Star Wars film series (1977-2005). Directed by Various [Film]. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Taxi Driver (1976). Directed by Martin Scorsese [Film]. USA: Columbia Pictures.

Thriller - en grym film/Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973). Directed by Bo Arne Vibenius [Film]. Sweden: BAV Film.

Tian xia di yi quan/Five Fingers of Death (1972). Directed by Chang-hwa Jeong [Film]. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers.

True Romance (1993). Directed by Tony Scott [Film]. USA/France: Warner Bros.

Tsubaki Sanjûrô/Sanjuro (1962). Directed by Akira Kurosawa [Film]. Japan: Toho Company.

 

Television Programmes:

Ironside (1967-1975). NBC Television.

Star Trek (1966-1969). NBC Television.

 

Bibliography

Books:

Altman, R. (1987) The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Altman, R. (1999) Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute.

Berliner, T. (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bordwell, D., Thompson, K., and Smith, J. (2017) Film Art: An Introduction (11th edition). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Dyer, R. and Vincendeau, G. (1992) Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge.

Elsaesser, T. and Buckland, W. (2002) Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. New York: Arnold.

Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lacey, N. (2005) Introduction to Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

McKee, R. (1998) Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen.

Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Page, E. (2005) Quintessential Tarantino. London: Marion Boyars.

Thanouli, E. (2009) Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration. London: Wallflower Press.

 

Book Chapters:

Cheshire, G. (1994) ‘Hollywood’s New Hit Men’, in Peary, G. (ed.) Quentin Tarantino: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 89–96.

Degli-Esposti, C. (1998) ‘Postmodernism(s)’, in Degli-Esposti, C. (ed.) Postmodernism in the Cinema. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 3–18.

Fuller, G. (1993) ‘Answers First, Questions Later’, in Peary, G. (ed.) Quentin Tarantino: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 49–65.

Comic Book:

Mark Gruenwald (1985) Captain America. 1 October, no. 310.

 

Interviews:

McKee, R. (2010) ‘Big Think Interview with Robert McKee’. Interview with Robert McKee. Available at: https://bigthink.com/videos/big-think-interview-with-robert-mckee (Accessed: 2 November 2019).

Tarantino, Q. (2003) ‘QUENTIN TARANTINO reveals almost everything that inspired KILL BILL in…The JAPATTACK Interview -01’ Interview with Quentin Tarantino. Interviewed by Tomohiro Machiyama. Available at: http://japattack.com/japattack/film/tarantino.html (Accessed: 20 November 2019).

 

Magazine Article:

Bell, J. (2012) ‘Director’s Poll’, Sight & Sound, (11 September), pp. 62–71.

 

News Articles:

Berlatsky, N. (2004) ‘Kill Bill’s Fatal Flaw’, Chicago Reader, 13 May. Available at: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/kill-bills-fatal-flaw/Content?oid=915462 (Accessed: 18 October 2019).

Campbell, D. (2003) ‘Saint Quentin’, The Guardian, 3 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/oct/03/quentintarantino (Accessed: 19 November 2019).

 

Web Page:

Première (2015) Les 5 films à voir avant Les 8 Salopards, par Quentin Tarantino. Available at: http://www.premiere.fr/Cinema/Les-5-films-a-voir-avant-Les-8-Salopards-par-Quentin-Tarantino (Accessed: 20 November 2019).