So I wanna talk about “Kill Bill Volume 1”, but first I gotta talk about the car ride home.
Went up to see the folks today, half hour north of me. (By contrast, it took me one hour and fifteen minutes to visit my brother 1 town over last night via the Boston subway system. The lesson, as always, is that getting around Boston just plain sucks.) Visited, did the laundry (you can do laundry at your folks’ place until you’re 30, I feel, and still not feel super lame), and then decided to catch the movie. Afterwards, the normally 15 minutes down Route 3 South took a terrifying 35. Visibility was at times “the car in front of me”, and that was on the times when visibility was relatively good. I drove in the left lane of a two-lane road, not because I was particularly keen on passing anyone, but because everyone in the right-hand lane has this knack of driving right on the hash line dividing lanes, and would occasionally sneak a left rear bumper in front of my right front fender. Not good times. Spin-out-on-the-highway-any-minute-times.
Point is, I’ve driven in bad conditions before, but “Kill Bill Volume 1” has me thinking about mortality in a way that I simply wasn’t prepared for when I bought my $6 ticket.
First off, yes, it’s just about the most violent thing you’ll ever see the MPAA put a stamp of approval on. Just outrageous. Know how “Pulp Fiction” seems really violent, but really, most of it happens onscreen? Well, in this case, it’s all on the screen. You’re not gonna imagine it. It’s there, in every severed limb, blood-gushing neck wound, samurai sword chop, and scalped head. All there. Can not believe what I saw at times. And yes, I’ll be seeing it again. Possibly a third time.
And yes, all the cool pop-culture stuff was in there. Tarantino does a great job in creating an alternative universe that’s just slightly skewed from ours, but internally logical. Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, and Mr. Blonde all inhabit this universe. The visual nods to his own films are readily apparent, from the “Reservoir Dogs” outfits of Liu’s street gang, to the large advertisement for “Red Apple” cigarettes in the Tokyo airport, which is the brand Bruce Willis smokes in “Pulp Fiction”. Uma wears the same outfit as Bruce Lee in “Game of Death” because both universes can share “Game of Death”. The two worlds are not mutually exclusive; theirs is just a more stylized, better-scored, hipper world than ours. Sadly, both worlds share a tendency towards extreme, sudden bursts of violence.
And here’s why.
Back when I saw “The Matrix: Reloaded”, I found that the fight scenes, while well choreographed, left me cold, because no one got hurt. Not a scratch. Constant block and parry. The two sides usually negated one another, leaving one of the two to generally run off to fight to a draw another day. In “Kill Bill”, we get a hyperviolent, hyperrealistic world, but we get one that has the same threshold for pain as ours. These fights HURT in a way I’ve just never seen onscreen before. The characters fight better than just about anyone you’ve ever seen, but they fight at a inch from death at every moment. The stakes, virtually nonexistent in “Reloaded”, are omnipresent in “Kill Bill”. Uma Thurman rocks, but is far from Superman. Her powers come from a far different source, which I’ll get to in a minute.
One could argue that the movie’s over-the-top blood takes away from the “realism” of the violence, and, in a way, I think that could be the point. But it’s a point that cuts both ways—the movie needed to be as violent as it is to be accepted. If the entire movie has been at the level of the first 3 minutes of the film (which I won’t give away, but holy sh#t), no one could have taken it. It would have been a Hollywood version of a snuff film. Tarantino uses multiple levels of violence in this movie, and hardly any of them are truly cartoonish. The sight of Lucy Liu through the filter of a geyser of blood is funny, but there’s absolutely nothing funny about her “apology” near the end of the movie in her duel with Uma. You find yourself chuckling at the body count and then sucker-punched by the emotional weight.
The emotional weight comes from the same place as Uma’s strengths: namely, the morality that’s infused throughout the movie. It’s a revenge movie, no doubt, and one in which our hero, The Bride, is really an anti-hero. However, since the only context we have in this world is that of assassins, we can view The Bride as the “hero” in that she adheres the closest of any character to the Moral Right of the universe that they inhabit. Each death, every act of revenge, is in the world of the movie absolutely just, and, as such, a “good” act.
“Pulp Fiction” also has its own internal morality, as did the gangsters in “Reservoir Dogs”. In the world of “Kill Bill”, the morality of the Samurai is the morality at hand. Now, I can’t speak from a knowledgeable position about Samurai code, but the movie clearly establishes ground rules for what it considers to be elements of this code. There’s a certain inevitability in the kills that The Bride makes, so long as she keeps her moral rectitude in focus. On several occasions, you wonder how in the blue hell she’ll recover from a certain injury. She recovers from superhuman strength, to be sure, but more from superhuman willpower providing that strength. The foes she battles simply do not have that reservoir to tap into, and, as such, hers will always be the victory. (Hattori Hanzo's fashioning of a sword, which is against his morality as a person, is superceded by his debt to Thurman's character, which adheres to the Code. A telling difference, I think.)
Interestingly, the “primary villains”, namely, the four assassins who tried to take her out, know they cannot tap into this morality. They have, in essence, become fallen angels, Lucifers to the Code. (I’d like to think that’s what the name “Viper” exists in their team name, but then again, I could be overthinking the point.) There are times in which the characters played by Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, and Michael Madsen all regret the choice they made against The Bride, but all consider themselves past redemption. They don’t simply lie down and commit hara-kiri; their pride denies them that even as they know of the perversion they have committed against the Code. (The Bride's treatment of children is especially telling in terms of morality: look at the way she treats the two children in this movie. I won't give it away, but the maternal side she has been denied comes out in extremely interesting ways, once in Chapter 1, and again in Chapter 5.)
There’s no reason to think that Thurman’s assassin is any more of a killing machine than the ones she encounters in this film, and that’s what so great about the fights. There are more shots of Thurman nervous, scared, panting, bloody, drenched in sweat, unsure of herself than of her fully confident of the situation at hand. She’s a woman with a goal she is far from certain she’ll achieve. She writes down a “Kill Sheet” near the beginning of the narrative proper, which actually happens near the cinematic end, of the people she needs to dispatch. It’s simple, color-coded, and to the point. Almost too simple. But it’s emblematic of the straight-forward purpose of her quest.
It also mirrors the nature of the morality she embodies. The rules for her are clear and declarative. The linear nature of her quests stands in stark contrast to the elaborate rules and defenses the other assassins have constructed to protect themselves from, in the end, both her and the morality they have shunned. Yet, The Bride cuts through these defenses in the same way that her sword can cut through bone. It’s that simple and that precise. Surgical strikes both physical and moral abound throughout the film.
The morality with which Tarantino infuses his films, for me, makes them stand out. It’s not the same as admiring the “hobbits good, orcs bad” morality of “The Lord of the Rings”, which is good but far from its strongest element. Only Tarantino could create a blood-drenched, “oh my God is this really on the screen” anime sequence involving the origin of Liu’s assassin and have you sympathize with one of our eventual villains. You’re repulsed both by the visual imagery as well as by the fact that her character was in fact not her choice; it was thrust upon her. Her decision to betray The Bride, however, was indeed a choice, and one for which, in the world of Tarantino, she must pay.
I’m interested to see how this morality pays off in “Volume 2”, especially given the very last line of the film. How and to what extent Bill himself has strayed from the Code has yet to be truly seen, just as his face has yet to be seen. In the first three minutes, he insists that he’s not actually “sadist”, he’s being “masochistic”. How true that statement is will hopefully be answered in the next film. (God, that last line is a doozy.) In any case, “Volume 1” was a mind-blowing experience, one I’d recommend to anyone with the stomach to take it. Hopefully, more people will look beyond the bloody surface and see what’s going on underneath---there’s the level I’ll be going back to see again and again.