Kill Not Really a Thrill: Musings on Kill Bill

 

Last week I spent nearly four hours of my life watching Quentin Tarantino's 2003 and 2004 Kill Bill, a hybrid action-adventure film, spaghetti western, dumb adolescent smart-arse snarky comedy film, reflexivity a plenty film, Italian Giallo cinema, Hong Kong martial arts film, Samurai film, and comic book film, to note a few of its borrowings. After watching it I came to the conclusion that Kill Bill proves once again that in post-Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood revenge oriented cinema is a dish served with oodles and oodles of hot rich spurting red blood revenge sauce, the plot such as it is of the film.

Kill Bill pointed up something else to to me once again. In the world of post-Jaws and Star Wars hybrid Hollywood reflexive cinema, form has triumphed over content. Tarantino, who became a star in the firmament of reflexive Hollywood cinema in the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, has long made a living by sampling other films just as Uncle Walt Disney made a living out sampling public domain fairy tales and disneyfornicating  or pollyannaising them in the process so he could sell them to the sentimental masses. Tarantino, you see, is another one of those reflexive post film brat film brats whose university was television, the cinema, and video store work, all in a reflexive key. The complex time structure of  Pulp Fiction and the references to Swiss art house innovative cinema darling Jean-Luc Godard, made Tarantino the latest hero-saint of those who actually did know something about the history of cinema and even more for those who liked their action-adventure snarky and bloody but who had little idea that European art films like L'annee derniere a Marienbad (1961), a film that played with time long before Tarantino did, had already done it, it being the playing with time bit. History and understanding, you see, have never been human strengths.

I thought Kill Bill was OK. As I said Kill Bill, like the films of another neo-film brat David Lynch, a filmmaker whose film work, for me, pales beside the films of Luis Bunuel and Dusan Makavejev, and his film's surrealism and absurdity for surrealisms and absurdities sake. How postmodern. Kill Bill seems to me all content, an emotional orgasmic inducing roller coaster ride from brutal murder to brutal murder, something that I am sure, pleased the I love buckets of blood crowd in the cinema going audience. Its character development is almost nil. "The Bride's" motivation is revenge pure and simple with the ultimate goal to kill Bill (David Carradine doing a kind of updated and somewhat inverted version of his character on the TV show Kung Fu), her former paramour. In this Kill Bill is quite different from Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a show I much prefer to the simulations of Quentin Tarantino. Whedon is another one of those post-Star Wars comic book reflexive neo-film brats though with a healthy dose of existentialism and Shakespeare, one of the fathers of multi-tonality thrown into the mix. Whedon's Buffy is cinematic and reflects Whedon's hours of film viewing. Buffy also, however, and this is critical for me, has a complex narrative, structure, complex characters and complex development, and intellectual heft, particularly when it explores the complex existentialist moral issues that are at the heart of the show (life as hell). Unlike Kill Bill, Buffy has both form and content. It reflects classical novelistic narrative storytelling and this, for me, makes Buffy vastly superior to Kill Bill, a film which seems to me all surface form and little in the way of narrative structure, complex characters, complex character development, and complex dealings with moral issues. The moral centre of Kill Bill, if it has one, after all, seems to be that payback, as the modern proverb tells us, is a bitch. Wow, heavy.