Kill Bill

Tarantino rules

Kill Bill, Volume 1 
Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too.

Perhaps the title of Rodriguez’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, should tell the CC’s something. Remember Sergio Leone? The guy behind Once Upon a Time in the West, now a cult classic, when released widely regarded as B-grade trash? He also made the lush, rivetting Once Upon a Time in America with that incredible performance by James Woods (incidentally a favourite — see him steal the show in the otherwise trashyThe Specialist in which Rod Steiger makes a complete ass of himself playing a mafia don).

So when QT goes for broke with the violence what is he doing or saying, really? The simplistic answer is that he’s ‘paying homage’ to the King of B-Grade movies, Leone. But that’s just too facile. He’s doing more than that. He’s showing us the emptiness of, say, the Wachowski duo, with their balletic but increasingly absurd action sequences in the ‘Matrix’ trilogy. He’s telling us that, in his view, violence is one of the natural states of human existence and that revenge (‘a dish best served cold’) is peculiar to humans and, like cutlery, is what separates us from animals. Finally, he says that if you strip away the social morés, you’re left with something primal, compelling, bewitching — and perfectly understandable. That’s the point. Does any viewer go away feeling he didn’t understand the compulsions that drove QT’s characters in KBV1? He may not like their portrayal, but didn’t he believe?

There are those who say they didn’t ‘sympathise’ or ‘empathise’ with any character. Get a life, ladies. You weren’t meant to. No more than you were meant to in ‘Pulp Fiction’. These are not your friendly neighbourhood characters. They are the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or didn’t you get that)? That’s the second thing QT does. He takes comic book characters (see the anime in the film) and shows us that the nexus between art and reality isn’t tangential or tenuous. It exists, and the grim terrors of life reflect in the horrors that art shows us. Perhaps this is stretching it but as I see it every single work of art with any horror, terror or grief in it, from Munch through Picasso to Copolla, has been solidly relatable to a reality. A hundred years from now, they won’t be watching GWTW or the Sound of Music to understand their past. They’ll watch Pulp Fiction. Reservoir Dogs. Kill Bill.  

February 20, 2004 |  movies |   print