Transcript “There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.” Kill Bill The psychological interpretation of the classic revenge narrative Prof.

“There are consequences to
breaking the heart of a
murdering bastard.”
Kill Bill
The psychological interpretation of the
classic revenge narrative
Prof. Craig Jackson
Head of Psychology Dept.
Tarantino’s Filmography to date
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Kill Bill vol 1 (2003)
Kill Bill vol 2 (2004)
Death Proof (2007)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Django Unchained (2012)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Tarantino’s influences
Video Stores
Dropped out of drama college
“I didn’t go to film school, I went to films”
225 ‘F*&k’s in “My Best friend’s Birthday”
True Romance
Narrative of Kill Bill
Originally 4 hours
Reduced and split into 2 movies
The story of Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), a
former member of the elite, predominantly
female Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (the
DiVAS), on her quest for vengeance for the
presumed death of her unborn child.
Deadly Viper Assassination
Squad (DiVAS)
Comment on feminism (girl power)
Fraternalism
Woman’s Inhumanity to women
Chesler (2001)
Narrative of Kill Bill
Before the film begins, Beatrix, known initially
only as “The Bride” or by her code name “Black
Mamba” (when her real name is used it is
bleeped out), has disappeared.
Bill (David Carradine) her former lover and
head of the DiVAS, sets off on the trail of her
killers, believing her to be dead. Instead he
finds her alive, heavily pregnant, and in her
bridal gown at her wedding rehearsal.
Narrative of Kill Bill
The film begins just before Bill shoots Beatrix
in the head, having already killed the rest of the
wedding party with the help of the DiVAS.
Her final words to Bill (who speaks off-camera)
are that the baby is his. She does not die,
however, but is left in a coma for four years,
during which time she is raped repeatedly by a
hospital orderly and an unknown number of
men.
Main Characters of Kill Bill
Bill
O-ren Ishii
Gogo
Elle Driver
Budd
Vernita Green (DiVAS)
Narrative of Kill Bill
When she awakens, she goes on a “roaring
rampage of revenge,” killing first the hospital
orderly and Buck, one of her other rapists.
Beatrix then starts picking off each member of
the DiVAS in turn (all of whom participated in
the massacre at her wedding rehearsal - the
Massacre at Two Pines).
Narrative of Kill Bill
Finally, she turns her attention to Bill,
confronting him in his house in Mexico. It is
here that she discovers that her daughter, B.B.
(played by Perla Haney-Jardine), is alive and
well and living with Bill, her father.
Beatrix kills Bill, and mother and daughter are
united. The film ends happily.
Tarantino hallmarks – dialogue
Soliloquies
Tangents
Ephemera
Minutiae of life
Highly quotable
“Royale with Cheese”
“The metric system”
Captain Koons
Ezekiel 25:17
Tarantino hallmarks – stylistics
Conspicuous camera work
(jump cuts, intercut shots, beneath surface)
Sharp changes in film style
(from film to animation colour to black & white)
Soliloquies spoken directly to the camera
Over-the-top characters
Stylised violence / fight sequences
Tarantino hallmarks – non-linearity
Plays with time-frame of narrative
Allows viewer to know outcome of scene
Provides security of adventure for a while
Tarantino hallmarks – soundtracks
Eclectic
Synonymous with cool
Mix of retro, ethnic, old-time, ghetto sensibility
Often out of context e.g. Mexicana in Japan
Tarantino hallmarks – products
Introduces commodities into stories
Big Kahuna
G.O Juice
Jack Rabbit Slim’s
K-Billy
Red Apple
Tenku Beer
Tarantino hallmarks – casting
Ironic commentary on actors’ previous roles
Travolta – Pulp Fiction, dancing
Walken – Pulp Fiction, Captain Koons
Grier – Jackie Brown
Carradine – Kill Bill vols 1 & 2
Deniro – Jackie Brown
Tarantino hallmarks – cross-over
Crazy 88s
Gogo and Ganguro
Tarantino – Sham Auteur
Mindlessly reproducing cinematic formulae
Little thought or imagination
Tarantino hallmarks – Pastiche
Tarantino preserves and subverts the films and
genres he celebrates
Providing pleasure central to adaptation (and to
each genre too)
“A conceptual flipping back and forth between
the work we know and the work we are
experiencing”
Hutcheon (2006)
A mixture of “repetition and difference
Tarantino hallmarks – Homage
“Kill Bill reveals Tarantino as a sham”
An auteur ripping off Hong Kong action flicks
and 1970s B-movies for their surface frills
He’s the cinematic equivalent of karaoke or bad
photocopies, mindlessly adopting style while
forgetting the basic precepts of storytelling.”
Kipp (2003)
Comparisons
Alien trilogy
The Accused
Kick Ass
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Spaghetti Westerns
Sergio Leone
Blaxpoitation
I’m gonna git you sucka
Shaft
Superfly
Foxy Brown
Black Caesar
Japanese Jidaigeki
Period dramas
Relies on dramatic conventions
Make up , language, plot lines, catchphrases
“Chambara movies”
Chinese Wuxia Movies
Martial hero (martial, military, armed)
Fiction genre
Heroes originate from lower social classes
Codes of chivalry dictate their behaviour
Like Samurai Bushido, Knights or gunslingers
Revenge Fantasy
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Conventional tragic endings
Gangster films
Socially isolated figures
Audience feels an uneasy sympathy
Family reputation
Masculine codes of honour & Male violence
Body counts
Bleak and exploitive social world
Authority figures corrupt or absent
Griggs (2011)
Revenge Fantasy – Get Carter
Knights on a Quest in Tarantino films
Dinshaw (1999)
Revenge Fantasy – Get Carter
“is less a matter of satisfying the
demands of censorship morality codes than of
completing the structure of revenge
tragedy. Having fulfilled his task of vengeance,
Carter must die”
Murphy (1999)
Revenge Fantasy
The protagonist usually dies.
Attempts to seek revenge to change the
original outcome - “righting wrongs”
Beatrix survives, kills her enemies and is
reunited with her daughter
Bill wants to talk, Beatrix wants to fight
Bill injects her with sodium pentothal to force
conversation
Revenge Fantasy
Bill “things that are done can’t be undone.”
Not just victims who want to change events
Suggests perpetrators want to change it too
Haunted by what they cannot undo
Although obvious, it is understanding time’s
irreversibility that eludes revengers. Obsessive
contemplation of loss gives them a delusional
sense of the past’s proximity as a place that
can be returned to and altered.
Samurai Wuxia Approach
Violence lacks ethical ambiguity
Pulp Fiction, when Butch goes back to save his
former enemy, Marcellus, from the rapists, his
choice of the samurai sword (rather than the
hammer, baseball bat, or chain saw, which he
momentarily considers) is significant
Choice of the samurai sword marks a turning
away from meaningless violence to that which
is “an act of honour and friendship”
“Movie Movie” violence
For Tarantino the samurai sword thus
“represents a particular culture in which there is
(or was) in place a very rigid moral framework”
Conrad (2006)
Violence that is Honourable
Within this moral framework, extreme acts of
violence are aestheticized and performed
with joyful relish
Something that is “partly set up by an
alternative intertextual choreography of martial
arts action and anime”
Kinder (2004)
Justified Maternal Vengeance
Vernita acknowledges Beatrix’s right to “get
even”
Beatrix responds that she is in fact willing to
take less than what is owed her: “To get even,
even-steven, I would have to kill you,
go into Nikki’s room, kill her, then wait for your
old man, Dr. Bell, to come home and kill him.
That would be even Vernita. That’d be about
square.”
Justified Maternal Vengeance
Unlike the DiVAs, who kill everyone at the
Massacre at Two Pines, the Bride never
gratuitously directs her anger against anyone
except those directly responsible for her baby’s
death and so wishes to punish Vernita alone.
She initially respects Vernita’s wish not to fight
in front of her daughter, only killing her after
dodging an unexpected bullet. Vernita’s quick,
relatively-bloodless death; Nikki’s muted, blank
response to it;
Justified Maternal Vengeance
Beatrix’s subsequent words to Nikki all act to
blunt the disturbing nature of what we have
seen.
Beatrix tells the stunned Nikki: “It was not my
intention to do this in front of you. For
that, I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it.
Your mother had it coming. When
you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be
waiting.”
Justified Maternal Vengeance
Beatrix’s words are more than just a trailer for
Kill Bill: Volume 3: they suggest her
understanding of and adherence to the
underlying structure of vendettas, in which her
actions are subject to the same retaliation she
inflicts.
Revenge is “the work of mothers and
daughters, a kind of maternal legacy passed
from one generation to the next” Dancey (2009)
Ending
Bill is killed
Beatrix survives
Reunited with her daughter
Restorative & Redemptive ending
(Coultahrd 2007)
Daughters naturally belong with their mothers
Oedipal structure
Revenge and Romance narratives merge
Family drama
Differences twixt Vol 1 & Vol 2
Vol 2 is more dialogue-driven
Vol 2 more reflective contemplation of
character
Olsen (2003)
Vol 2 is more of a commentary on Vol 1
Surface Critiques of Violence
Tarantino’s films treat violence as the preserve
of white men
Taubin (2000)
Uses race as symbol of power, esp “blackness”
“Black Mamba. I should’ve been motherf*cking
Black Mamba”
Racially diverse characters
Female protagonists
Death and dying (thrice)
Beatrix dies at start of film
Beatrix dies again when buried alive by Budd
Beatrix dies a third time (plays with Bebe)
Plays around with sources
Opening title card of Kill Bill: Volume 1
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,”
is referred to as “an old Klingon proverb” and
referenced to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,
rather than given a literary attribution
Simkin (2006)
References
Conrad, M.T. ed. “Symbolism, Meaning, and Nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp
Fiction.” The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. 125-37.
Coulthard, L. “Killing Bill: Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence.” Interrogating
Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne T and Negra
D. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 153-75.
Dancey, A. “Killer Instincts: Motherhood and Violence in The Long Kiss Goodnight
and Kill Bill.” Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture. Ed. Hall AC,
and Bishop M. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. 81-92.
Dinshaw, C. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern.
Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
Griggs, Y. “‘Humanity Must Perforce Prey upon Itself Like Monsters of the Deep’:
King Lear and the Urban Gangster Movie.” Adaptation 1.2 (2008): 121-39. Web. 12
Jan. 2011.
References
Hutcheon, L. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kipp, J. “The Epitome of Soullessness.” Film Critic 2003:
Murphy, R. “A Revenger’s Tragedy—Get Carter.” British Crime Cinema. Ed. Steve
Chibnall and Robert Murphy. London: Routledge, 1999. 123-33.
Olsen, M. “Turning on a Dime.” Sight and Sound 13.10 (2003): 12-15.
Ruby RB. “Art House Killer.” Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader.
Ed. José Arroyo. London: British Film Institute, 2000. 126-30.
Simkin, S. Early Modern Tragedy & the Cinema of Violence. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
Taubin, A. “The Men’s Room.” Ed. José Arroyo. Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight
and Sound Reader. London: British Film Institute, 2000. 122-26.