Revenge is never a straight line.
---Hattori Hanzo, “Kill Bill, Volume 1”
And neither will be my review of “Kill Bill Volume 2”. In fact, it won’t even be a review so much as a series of impressions as I sit down at my computer less than an hour after the closing credits began. I’ll leave the “normal” reviews to the Eberts of the world…the ones who get paid to look up the cinematic antecedents to this film, analyze the source material, and talk about its place in the ouevre of revenge films.
As for me, myself, and I…well, I’ll just pay homage by discussing the movie in terms the movie would understand. See, I love this movie. That’s all you need to know. You need to know that sliver of info as much as you need to know that the Bride’s been done wrong by five people she has to kill. Got those bits of info? Good. From here on in, just hold onto those two little bits and all will be fine, trust me.
Chapter 1:
If you have any sense of claustrophobia, this move isn’t for you. Plain and simple.
I’m not merely talking about the scene in which one character gets buried alive, although that’s reason alone for you small-space haters to buy a ticket to “Walking Tall” instead. Rather, this film, as well as “Volume 1”, revels in placing its characters into situations they simply can’t avoid or escape. Wheels are set in motion, quite often externally, that inextricably lead these characters into the positions in which we an audience find them.
It’s often hard to remember that, in fact, the Bride is not so much the protagonist of this tale so much as simply “the person through whom this revenge story is being told”. She is, by and large, a cipher, and while we as an audience know of her daughter throughout this installment, she in fact does not. Therefore, her actions, her Death List, and her systematic assassination of these people, has nothing to do with reunion and everything with revenge.
Chapter 2:
As I wrote in my review of “Volume 1”, morality lies at the center of this movie. It’s perhaps the one fundamental constant that unites them. After all, “Volume 1” feels like a po-mo kung-fu/blaxploitation turned up to 11, whereas “Volume 2” sometimes slows to a crawl, substituting swords for words. But in both cases, there is an unspoken, but clearly defined, mode of conduct that bespeaks of “nobility”.
I put “nobility” in quotes because, after all, we are dealing in a movie populated with what most people would kindly term the “scum of the earth”. They are not above doing despicable things, but there is a clearly defined sense that there is, in this world, a “proper” way to do them. Bill isn’t against killing the Bride; after all, he shoots her in the head due to a broken heart. But he does not advocate killing her in her sleep. Ellie, in “Volume 1”, thinks her mission is to kill The Bride, but in fact, Bill has sent her there purely for reconnaissance. To kill her while in a coma would “lower” their status, he says.
Ellie clearly does not subscribe to Bill’s logic; she merely acquiesces to his request because of her love for him. Ellie represents a character for which code and honor do not exist; only the kill itself does. As such, she marks herself, along with Vernita in “Volume 1”, as being particularly reprehensible characters. Vernita ignores the rules of engagement, and thus dies in front of her daughter. Ellie frames the murder of Budd on Beatrix Kiddo (I think it’s safe to use her name by now in the review), and tries to take credit for the murder of Beatrix herself to look good in the eyes of Bill. For these “crimes”—crimes much worse than simple murder—these women must be punished. All must die, but these two deserve a little bit more evil piled onto their plate.
Chapter 3:
So in talking about claustrophobia, what we have to talk about, at the end of the day with this film taken as the sum of its parts, is the notion of being trapped. Trapped in the literal sense, as in a box; being trapped by genre, which the movie and its characters are, and being trapped by family, which is the ultimate snare that envelops the characters in the film.
It sounds a bit odd, calling this ultimately a “family film”, but at the end of the day, that’s what “Volume II” shows the whole work to be. Tarantino’s applied the lessons of “The Godfather” as well as spaghetti Westerns and fashioned a world in which one woman seeks to break the cycle of violence by giving her offspring a chance. She holds no hope for herself; she admits as much to Bill in the final few minutes of the film, but shows this just as clearly in the beginning of “Volume II”, when the movie flashes back to the wedding rehearsal. Her eyes are too bright; they dart a bit too much. She’s in costume already, ostensibly because she senses Bill could arrive at any moment. And she knows she can’t escape him, and by extension, the life. But her unborn child might, and thus she risks the wrath of Bill to try and escape.
Those who are in touch with the “correct” morality have, in Tarantino’s world, also adapted a type of 6th sense….basically, they have The Force. Beatrix, Budd, Bill, and O-Ren Ishii all are shown to have, for lack of a better term, ESP when trouble is nearby. They can’t always put their finger directly on the danger, but they are aware. Conversely, Vernita and Ellie are surprised as hell by Beatrix’s attacks. I might be reading too much into this, but somehow I don’t think so. The world’s twisted morality rewards those who adhere closely to the code.
This code, Beatrix knows, is too deep within her to be fully removed. Bill keeps reminding her of her nature, but there’s also a great deal of nurturing that went into Beatrix’s transformation from doe-eyed Bill groupie to stone cold lethal killer. In “Volume 1”, most people chuckled when Beatrix declared the severed limbs of The Crazy 88 to belong to her; we learn in “Volume II” that she learned such notions of possession from Pei Mei, her master, who took ownership over her right arm on their first day of training. She's broken to the point where who she was before had died, and she must be rebuilt. The code, the way of life, the sensibilities…they cannot be unlearned by Beatrix. They are all she now knows.
Chapter 4:
But they need not necessarily be instilled in her daughter, either.
It’s what drives her from the very beginning of her journey, in an oddly funny, yet ultimately touching and telling scene, in which two women struggle with their assigned jobs (murderers) and their biological capabilities (childbirth) during an attempted hit. These women are capable of delivering life, yet have spent their lives dealing only in death. Both treat the pregnancy test as a message written in a language they barely understand, written long ago, which brings about a dull resolution buzzing in their heads. This resolution is not fully formed in either heads, but there is a primitive maternal instinct that wells up in each of them that marks the beginning of the end of the cycle for Beatrix. Both see the child as an innocent. Neither see themselves as anything but damned. And in that moment, they earn a little bit of redemption in the sparing of that child.
So much of what passes as “parenting” in this film is really tantamount to “instruction”. Children aren’t allowed to make decisions for themselves; rather, they are blindly schooled in the ways the adult thinks best. In many ways, Bill fathers the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. The movie goes to great lengths to show Bill’s seductive powers, but Beatrix gives the game away by introducing Bill as her father to her husband-to-be. It’s a cover story, to be sure, but one made up on the fly, perhaps born in the not-so-subconscious.
Chapter 5:
So, once again, we return to my previous thesis that these movies are in fact family films, structured primarily not around body count but in fact the relationship between parent and child. In fact, one could almost accurately rename this movie from "Kill Bill" to "Save B.B.".
To me, the incredible anime sequence of O-Ren Ishii’s childhood both needed to be that graphic and needed to be narrated by Beatrix. It’s necessary to understand Beatrix’s understanding of O-Ren’s origin for the same reason it’s important to her that she not kill Vernita in front of her child: she wishes her own daughter to be spared the horrors that other women (including herself) have faced.
O-Ren, in Beatrix’s telling of it, shows a women immersed in a world she didn’t understand, had no part in, suffered because of, and ultimately transformed within. By the time we see her in flesh and blood, the girl in the cartoon is long gone. In fact, she only makes one reappearance in the movie: at the end of “Volume 1”, after her leg is cut. We can see the façade fade away on camera, in one long shot, as years of revenge-driven rage fade from her face, leaving only the girl we meet beneath the bed at the beginning of the cartoon. And it’s the face of a woman who knows there is no turning back, knows redemption cannot be hers, and in fact knows many things except, curiously, the reason she’s ended up in a snow-covered garden about to die.
It’s an amazing moment, and one that undoubtedly has a great affect on Beatrix. By the time she finally meets her daughter, the effects of living with Bill have already begun to show, almost like symptoms of an oncoming disease. She plays with guns. She watches violent movies. And, most tellingly, she’s committed her first murder. All of these things are done in a nominal sense of innocence, but again, the nature/nurture element, coupled with the world of parenting in this film, makes it a precarious time for this little girl.
And so, at the end, we have Beatrix writhing on the ground of a motel. She’s clutching a teddy bear and sobbing uncontrollably. Depending on a particular breath, she’s either sobbing for joy or sobbing with grief. She’s in fact killed her father, and unsure of her abilities as a mother. But she has, finally, escape her family by murdering her siblings and ultimately her father. She’s escaped the confines of the revenge genre, which plopped her into awful situation after awful situation, with herself and her daughter intact. The rest is, for the first time, up to her. There’s hope in her eyes, but not for herself…rather, for her little girl. And in the last shot of the movie, the daughter’s off-frame. She’s already succeeded in escaping. Beatrix may be trapped in the frame, but she’s successfully moved her daughter from it.
And that’s her ultimate revenge, I think.