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Kill Bill - Mishmash or Masterpiece?

Orson Welles said that a film studio was the biggest train set a boy ever had, and the Kill Bill films, more than any others I can remember seeing, have that 'train set' quality in abundance.  With a train set you don't have to adhere to the rules of permanent way reality; you can mix different periods and regions; you can have the Flying Scotsman running next to the Eurostar, and in the end all that matters is how good an impression the whole layout makes. 

Backed by Miramax and a reputation as the hottest, coolest filmmaker of the moment, Quentin Tarantino could have done anything he wanted - and he used that freedom to the utmost, creating one of the most idiosyncratic movie packages that could ever exist within the commercial mainstream.  Love it or hate it, no one can deny it has the stamp of the auteur. 

By using the structure and methods of a modernist novel - different chapters, each with its own style, tone and measure of self-containment - the Kill Bill films thwart the internal lens selection facility we all use when watching films.  They make us very aware of the way we put on lenses to assimilate film content - 'thriller', 'action', 'serous drama', 'comedy', 'fantasy', etc. - and then judge what's there by how well it lives up to our expectations within those categories.  You can't do that with the Kill Bill films; you can't view them as you would regular films.  And this presents particular problems to the critic.  When watching the films I often had that displaced feeling where my instincts weren't sure which way to jump.  It was most odd to be faced with moments which seemed ropey or ridiculous interspersed with passages of cinema at its most dazzling.  It was at times almost impossible to know if these were ultimately 'good' or 'bad' films. 

Other critics had that problem too.  Comments about the films' 'unbelievability' flew thick and fast.  But it is fairly obvious that believability is of no interest to Tarantino here.  In fact on the believability front you can pull the films to pieces a million different ways…  How come no one checked the pussy wagon in the car park where Uma spent thirteen hours wiggling her toes after killing Buck and his client…?  And, much later in the timeline,  when she went over to Vernita's for a showdown, she was still driving the same conspicuous wagon - why?   In fact what happened to her estate while she spent four years in a coma?  Who had power of attorney?  And how did she move freely and get her hands on money to buy clothes, air tickets etc., when she was clearly the only suspect in a double killing?  Treble after Vernita with the daughter as a witness...?   Back at the chapel the lawmen scratch their heads over the bloodied form of the Bride, but in four years they make no progress in apprehending any of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the obvious suspects.  And how did Old Bill get his hands on the daughter, as yet unborn at the time of the massacre?  And then look at the grand ballet of swordplay that is the climax to Vol.1 - where Uma single-handedly kills or dismembers all of the Crazy 88 and dispatches O-ren Ishii with the baddest of bad haircuts - that could have been stopped at any time by one moderately competent shooter with one bullet.  But why spoil the fun?

There is simply no attempt to make the films 'believable' in conventional narrative terms.  Each chapter setting is nailed up flimsy and flat as a one-horse town on a Hollywood backlot, and any sense of 'flow' and 'connectedness' between episodes seems almost incidental.  But then the films have to be believable in pure film terms - that is in what we expect from films, the raw buzz, the myriad transactions in the currency of excitement and satisfaction, the quality of the lasting effect it produces.  Here, as we well know, the Kill Bill films reference not to external reality, but to film reality.  Though Tarantino goes further than simply to 'borrow': the interminable quoting and sampling of other movies is not just a device but the structural backbone of the films.  So then critically we should not even be judging the films as 'mainstream' or whatever, but as metafilm, experimental art which just happens to be sitting in the mainstream. 

Just as the Kill Bill films fetishize their sources, they also fetishize their performers - who they are, where they've come from, and what seeing them on the screen means to us.  The star of the show, Uma Thurman, is utterly fetishized, from the feet upwards.  So intent was Tarantino in having Thurman play the lead that he postponed shooting for a considerable period whilst she had her second child.  And why?  Because only her particular brand of screen goddesshood could do the job he had in mind.  His camera lovingly caresses that long, slender, slinky body; that face which could have been chiseled out by the finest samurai sword; those big nordic slanty eyes; and those cute irregularly-toed feet, which almost have a separate starring role independent from their owner.  And furthermore Tarantino is playing on Thurman's screen iconicity, as he has done with John Travolta and Harvey Keitel in the past.  She has been with us since 1987, when she debued in Kiss Daddy Goodnight; and of course we remember her as a heavenly Venus in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; stunningly swanlike as the seduced virgin in Dangerous Liaisons; honeyesque as the naïve hitchhiker in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; and at her most iconic, blackwigged and barefoot again as Mia on the dancefloor with Travolta in Pulp Fiction.  Then there were her ur-Bride roles: extra slinky in a black leather catsuit as Emma Peel in The Avengers, and groovy as the masked Poison Ivy in Batman and Robin.  Now matured into her thirties, she is a nymph of hardened steel and the only possible choice for the Bride, aka Black Mamba, aka Beatrice Kiddo, and so on.  The freight that comes with Uma Thurman is central to what the Kill Bill films are about.  Imagine Gywneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman or Cameron Diaz in the role.  An interesting exercise, but it doesn't quite work!

And let us not forget that much of the time in the Kill Bill films, Tarantino is simply doing more of what we know him for.  Another big criticism was that the package was far too long and self-indulgent, and it could have been pared down and made into a single film.  This seems to me entirely wrongheaded.  The final piece of genius is to make it two films instead of one.  This not only plays on the phenomenon of the sequel, the series, the multi-parter beloved of current cinema, but it gives Tarantino a master framing device over and above the chapter structure within which he can play more of the timeline-disruption games that made Pulp Fiction so striking.  Vol.1 thus becomes all rat-tat-tat action presented with comicbook shallowness, and Vol.2 becomes an opportunity for reflection, analysis and backstory, which throws an altered light onto Vol.1 and makes us want to watch it again, re-educated.  Can you say that about Rocky II or Jurassic Park III? 

Moreover the larger canvas makes room for those classic Tarantino 'moments'.  The most quoted passage in Pulp Fiction is the conversation about burger bars in Europe between Vincent and Jules on their way to a killing.  A beautiful character-building touch which became a legend - but is utterly irrelevant to the plot. Similarly in Vol.2 there is a marvelous scene where Budd arrives twenty minutes late for his job as a strip club bouncer, and is subject to extended bravura bollocking from his coke-fuelled boss.  This again is irrelevant to the plot, but great 'Tarantino'.  A single movie, shorn of these moments and tightened-up would bypass the entire point of the exercise.

But finally we have to ask the big question.  Do the Kill Bill films say anything worthwhile about revenge, and ultimately stand up as a piece of storytelling?  Perhaps amazingly, considering some of the convolutions along the way, yes they do.  The end confrontation with Bill, played by David Carradine with reptilian grace, is quite moving, even tear-jerking, and not the bloodbath which would have devalued the whole enterprise; and the well-telegraphed denouement is satisfying, loaded as it is with metaphorical import.  And still it functions as a meta-comicbook movie, treading that tightrope far more successfully than M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable.  And still it functions as a film about film, much less chaotically than Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. 

If everybody 'got' the films the moment they first appeared, then this would be a sign that the shock-of-the-new was lacking.  If all the critics lined up to praise them unequivocally, then this would signify their ultimate mediocrity.  Another of the criticisms leveled against the films is that their nudge-nudge wink-wink postmodernism is now itself old hat.  But they are so swimming in irony and knowingness that they actually ironize irony itself, and that has to be cutting edge! 

After allowing myself a few weeks to digest Vol. 2 and re-watch Vol.1, I am convinced that the 'mishmash' effect will come to be regarded as state-of-the-art montage, and overall the films will acquire the same classic, iconic status as Tarantino's other works.  As for being dubbed 'a masterpiece', maybe not quite yet, but give it five or ten years, and who knows?

© Roger Keen, June 2004