Fascistic-Fetishistic-Cinematic-Cannibalism: Revisiting "Kill Bill"
“Quentin Tarantino loves movies like a dog loves meat" – [Redacted]
Ever since a filmmaker said the above to me a few years ago it has come to mind whenever I think of Quentin Tarantino. It has never rung more true than recently when I revisited Kill Bill for the first time in well over a decade, having watched thousands of other movies since (including many of its reference points that were previously blind spots). Tarantino's fascistic-fetishistic-cinematic-cannibalism has never been more purely indulgent than it is here. He robs his sources of their specificity and affect by way of superficial remix (often blending them together in almost curiously useless ways, aside from cribbing their potential for "cool"). And yet, it also occasionally finds the director more inspired than in anything made prior, if only in terms of staging—I’m thinking of the pre-battle scene-setting at the House of the Blue Leaves, for example.
Never a filmmaker with an eye for composition nor one who seems to give much significance to how images work together, he has always been a builder of narrative sequences that effectively build and burst. It’s rare to find a Tarantino movie that manages to make a film flow organically as a whole (Jackie Brown is one such exception). Typically, they operate as a collection of contained sequences with their own beginning, middle and end—almost like short stories. When they don’t revolve around an overt mechanism of suspense, he manages to mine tension from a sequence’s own construction, its pacing, its own meandering trajectory towards its point. He’s best as a filmmaker of scenes, ones that revolve around this suspense and tension according to their own internal logic and admittedly shallow impetus (to exist only to exist for themselves). That doesn't mean there can't be pleasure in such construction. Nor does it mean there can't be pleasure in vapid indulgence itself. Alas, hedonism has its appeal.
And the cannibalism of Kill Bill is pure hedonism. Perhaps this pervasive characteristic of Tarantino is best encapsulated in his JLG-derived production co. moniker, "A Band Apart"—a purposefully ignorant mistranslation and shameless appropriation, precisely what is at work throughout Kill Bill. Tarantino is a filmmaker of such false surfaces, surfaces that lack the formalism that would otherwise give them meaning (cinema is after all an art form of surfaces, but surfaces best when suggestive of that which makes them come to be). The absence of such significance is more present than anything visible or palpable in Kill Bill. But as The Bride destroys a black family from the outset and proceeds to slice through dozens of Japanese people as she carves her way to a showdown with her only equal—a white paramour who emblematizes Hollywood/Western culture (and is possibly the film’s closest proxy to QT himself)—there's something unusually, albeit inadvertently, honest and up front here for Tarantino (a filmmaker, who it is worth noting would go on to make films that are far more interesting and thoughtful).
Finally, how does one reckon with the fact that, after 3.5 hours devoid of thought, the palpable power and tenderness of motherhood hijacks the film completely. And that once the amoral, abhorrent, narcissistic Bill realizes his fate, the intense hatred between he and the (ultimately also abhorrent) Kiddo boils away, and he declares her to be his "favourite person". Pathos and catharsis in a way Tarantino is hardly known for. When the smoke clears, scores are settled, and we're humbled by what we denied ourselves to be, our love for our enemies shines brightest. Someone once told me, though I don't necessarily take it to be true, that we only truly come to hate those we allowed ourselves to love. The bloody reunion of these former lovers is, above all else, an affirmation.
There’s a difference between a lack of conscience and a lack of consciousness and Tarantino is fairly depleted of both, but never more so than in Kill Bill, which demonstrates so clearly that for all of his consumptive movie love, it’s another thing altogether to understand cinema—it’s more of dismembering than a splicing of influences—and yet what emerges in the movie’s strongest moments are the same old instincts unique to Tarantino that he has had since the beginning, and, in its final moments, a glimpse of something new.