The premise of the movie is captured almost entirely in its two-word title. Truly, it doesn’t go much beyond that. Uma Thurman plays The Bride, a former assassin who is callously betrayed by her boss, Bill (David Carradine), on her wedding day. Bill and his gang of assassins, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad—played by Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen—manage to put a bullet in The Bride’s head after killing her husband and her seven wedding guests in an El Paso, Texas church. Four years later, when The Bride miraculously emerges from a coma, she swears revenge on her former boss and his minions.
Fans of Pulp Fiction will pick up on the similarities between the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and Mia Wallace’s description of the Fox Force Five, a failed television show about a group of women assassins: “Fox, as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there's one, two, three, four, five of us.” Indeed, thoughts of Pulp Fiction inevitably surface while watching Kill Bill, especially given that both movies were directed by Quentin Tarantino, and star the lovely Uma Thurman.
However, it would be a great mistake indeed to say that Kill Bill is just another Pulp Fiction. It is not. It is something completely different. Pulp Fiction was a movie about the mobster culture, and more specifically, about how that culture, however repulsive one may think it to be, is imbued with a sense of morality very similar to our own. Good deeds of loyalty were rewarded; bad deeds of betrayal were punished. Within the mob’s own world of coldhearted death, there was room for such things as ethics and spirituality. We could then relate to these horrible characters in a non-trivial way, even though they were killers. That was the genius of Pulp Fiction.
Kill Bill is not about mobster morality; nor is it a movie that allows us to relate to its characters. It is a movie about violence—make no mistake about it. The story is purposely simple, the characters purposely stylized, and the dialogue purposely sparse. This was Tarantino’s intention so as not to detract from the real focus of the movie—the violence itself. He uses the plot and characters as the thin skeleton supporting the meaty core of his vision. Such a monomaniacal focus on violence would naturally lead one to think of it as purely gratuitous, as merely indulging the base interests of social miscreants. This could not be further from the truth.
Tarantino manages to do something absolutely brilliant in this movie. He does precisely what Alex de Large was trying to do in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: he posits violence as a form of expressive art. The violence in this movie is graceful, visually dazzling, and meticulously executed. We watch in wonder and awe, not horror. Intellectually, we should be horrified by what we see. But the violence is so masterfully presented to us that our emotional and instinctual responses undermine any rational objections we may have. Tarantino is able to transform a thing of moral outrage into a thing of aesthetic beauty. Such revolutions of perspective are not easily accomplished in film—or any other media, for that matter.
In one telling scene, The Bride is confronted with a band of Crazy 88 Fighters—88 men and women who serve as the bodyguards of O-Ren Ishii, one of Bill’s cohorts. As The Bride skillfully slices and dices her way through all 88 fighters—somewhat reminiscent of Neo fighting the clones of Agent Smith in The Matrix: Reloaded—we get a sense that she is using them as a kind of canvas for her expression. She seeks revenge, and is best able to express this through the violence she creates. Much like an artist who expresses herself through brush and paint, The Bride expresses herself through sword and blood. Like all art forms, the violence in this movie serves a communicative purpose apart from its aesthetic value.
The performances by Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, and Vivica A. Fox are really what make this movie work. Their grace and composure amid the explosive energy of the ultra-violent themes in this movie precisely establish the violence-as-art metaphor. These women are regal in appearance, and amazingly deft in their physically demanding roles. Their performances even go so far as to add a genuine sense of humor to their characters. This is pivotal, for it informs us that the violence of which they partake is not so much morally reprehensible, as it is self-realizing.
After The Bride kills two of Bill’s assassins, the movie appropriately ends with a cliffhanger, as Vol. 2 will be released in February of next year. Presumably, Vol. 2 will reveal how The Bride kills the other two Deadly Viper assassins, and finally Bill himself. But even if Vol. 2 were never released, this movie has provided us with such a breakthrough ambience of violent artistry that it could stand confidently on its own. That said, if Vol. 2 is anything like Vol. 1, then Kill Bill will establish itself as one of the greatest aesthetic experiences in recent film history, elegantly blurring the now-fragile distinction between beauty and violence.
I'd give Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 an A.
"...one of the greatest aesthetic experiences in recent film history, elegantly blurring the now-fragile distinction between beauty and violence."
director: quentin tarantino
starring: uma thurman, david carradine, lucy liu, michael madsen,
daryl hannah, vivica a. fox
