October 21, 2003
Blood on Your Popcorn?
Whether you blame it on a messy accident or simultaneous bloodymindedness, one thing is clear at the movies this fall: Violence is back in a big, big way. The number one movie in America two weeks ago was Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 1, which has been described as the most gory movie in American cinematic history. I doubt this claim, but Kill Bill certainly has more than its share of defenestrations, flying limbs, fountains of blood spraying into the screen, and the always charming sight of parents being stabbed to death in front of their children. Its box office title has since been wrested away by a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I sadly have not had the pleasure of seeing, but appears to have been designed as a diet aid for those who never want to eat anything, ever again. Roger Ebert, who did not like it one little bit, described it as follows: "This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it?"
As the question at the movies this fall has quickly become, "Do you want blood on your popcorn?," many critics have begun to decry the moral emptiness of Kill Bill and its chainsaw-wielding friends. Natalie Binder writes in The Simon that "the violence in Kill Bill challenges no one. There is no reason for it to be there. The Bride and her compatriots kill, slash, and smash each other to no great consequence... The gushing, spraying, exploding ultraviolence in the film is simply another effect."
It's pretty darn difficult to argue that Kill Bill is anything but amoral, stylish garbage, and even though I've skipped watching the antics of Leatherface, I suspect that Chainsaw doesn't even have the redeeming quality of being stylish. Which means that your blockbuster choices these days are pretty well limited to watching a steaming pile of human entrails or checking out a really cool steaming pile of entrails.
It says a certain something about the state of American culture, then, that these piles are exactly what filmgoers ought to see, what they need to see. For the visceral violence of a film like Kill Bill, no matter how streamlined for nifty effect, has an undeniable impact. In a scathing review of Bill, the New Yorker's David Denby writes, "And yet, entering into the spirit of Tarantino’s video-store fantasy of martial arts, we may still have a little problem. It’s this: a filmed image has a stubborn hold on reality. An image of a rose may be filtered, digitally repainted, or pixilated, yet it will still carry the real-world associations—the touch, the smell, the romance—that we have with roses. Tarantino wants us to give up such associations, which means giving up ourselves."
What Denby may not realize is that, in dissing Quentin's morally vapid world, he has in fact given the greatest justification for the film's existence. Kill Bill is so immediate in its violence, so head-slammed-in-a-door shocking, that a jaded viewer notices it. And the thing he notices actually connects to the reality of violence. You can't ignore Tarantino's anime sequence, in which heads are crushed in a man's fist, a prepubsescent girl disembowels her enemy, and the camera follows the path of a rifle bullet through a man's brain. And even as you say "cool" to all that, something in your stomach tightens. Something feels wrong. The violence can't be completely dichomized from real life, and it starts to bother you.
And it's about time Americans started feeling a little bothered. This summer's movies featured, almost without exception, aggression without visual human consequences. In The Matrix, Neo exploded buildings and wrecked trucks -- and if anyone died, well, they weren't crucial to the plot, and we didn't have to watch them shuffle off this mortal CoIL. He battled hundreds of enemies at once, without aparently shedding a drop of even virtual plasma. The computer-generated chaos of the Matrix was strangely soporific: with all the talk of battling machines, nothing really human felt at stake in all the CGI fistfights. And while the unreality of The Matrix was at least part of the plot, almost every other summer box office success, from Anger Management to The Hulk, featured heroes saving society through increased agression, all without causing any noticible damage.
This trend reached its nadir in Bad Boys II, a movie that featured its protagonists driving their Humvee through a hillside shantytown in Cuba. Not a single death is shown in the exciting wreckage (were all the poor people out shopping?) and the incident is cheerfully justified with a casual one-liner: "Don't worry. This is where they make the cocaine." Well then! Let's smash some drug dealers with our big-ass American car! Bad boys for life!
It has been said that the most sociopathic of dictators are both sentimental and cruel. If that is indeed the case, then America this summer was rapidly becoming the land of the free and the home of of the wannabe tyrants. Nearly every movie we watched combined the most insulting romantic cliches with a gleeful but bloodless violence. Hulk smash! Hulk love!
And it's hard not to connect such entertainments with the attitude the majority of us took toward the war on Iraq. No matter your feelings on the war, there could be little doubt that American society was becoming comfortable with violence as a matter of public policy, so long as it stayed far from home. The films we were watching were the equivelant of bombs dropped from a jet fighter: we got the kick of attack, without having to see any results. And when we got home from watching the war with Agent Smith and watched the real war on TV, what results we did see on FOXNews were as sentimental as Neo engaging in candlelit passion with Trinity: happy Iraqi children embracing U. S. soldiers, and our tanks tearing down statues of Saddam. Fade to credits.
Compared to these films and news coverage, Kill Bill, for all its amorality, is a punch to the gut, a stong Bloody Mary chaser to a dreadful summer meal. Heck, Chainsaw is honest compared to The Matrix. When a film shows the results of violence, even in an exploitative manner, it dares us to look at what really happens when the Hulk gets angry, or when America charges into the desert. And no matter how you feel about the last year of U. S. foreign policy, it's becoming obvious that this fall is a time when we must consider what our planes and tanks have wrought.
Kill Bill isn't the most profound study of violence in theaters this fall, of course. That honor belongs to Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's quiet, hanting meditation on the futility of revenge. But odd as this may seem, right now Kill Bill is the more important movie to see. Both films contain shots of shots fired into the heads of victims. Mystic River's shot flashes to blizzard white with the crack of the pistol; Bill's anime scene traces the path of the bullet to the victim's head, which disappears in a miasma of bright red. But the crucial difference is that Mystic's scene is a point-of-view shot from the eyes of the pleading victim; it makes us feel sympathy and sorrow for the innocent, which is a fine and healthy emotion. Kill Bill does a more disturbing thing: it reveals the scene to us from the point of view of the bullet. It associates us with the firearm; implicates us in the joy of killing, and the awful mess Tarantino rolls in.
Kill Bill and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre appeal to the worst devils in our natures, that is true. But in a time when we've let those demons run and play unsupervised in the back yard, maybe Tarantino and other filmmakers pointing them out is a gift.
Posted by mesh at October 21, 2003 01:39 PM | TrackBackAs a point of semi-random trivia, the director of Bad Boys II is also the producer of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Posted by: maphet at October 21, 2003 03:02 PMNice thoughts Mesh. I think it will be really interesting to see where volume 2 of Kill Bill goes. To see if there is any point to Tarantino's mastery of violence, or if he really is as perverse as he seems.
I hadn't thought of Mystic River as meditation on revenge. But it makes sense as that. I had just been looking at it as a tale of lost community. But it probably works as both.
Posted by: matt at October 21, 2003 08:41 PMI saw Mystic River last week and really enjoyed it. I haven't seen Kill Bill, and to be honest, I wasn't really planning on doing so. Now I may have to.
Posted by: ryan at October 22, 2003 10:21 AMI toss in and say that I think Mystic River is a medition on revenge and a story of lost community, but that those are incidental (especially the latter) of the central theme which I think is a study of the effects of violence on our psychis (dunno how to spell that). I think from that central thematic procedure flows insights into the issue of revenge (a theme central really to 1 of the 3 leads) and then eventually out/up to the loss of community (the breaking up more or less of the 3 frineds after the "incident" when they were 12).
If you recall, the movie did end with a poignant and important "community" image, that of an entire neighborhood in old south-side Boston watching a parade go by. An image that evokes certain sentiments in all of us, regardless of whether or not we've ever lived in an urban neighborhood. I think though, that this setting was incidental to the polarizing of the final two leads.
Ok, back to work
Posted by: JosiahQ at October 22, 2003 11:01 AMMesh are you coming down for the GW show in ATL?
Posted by: gosey at October 22, 2003 01:29 PMI am confused as to why we should regard Kill Bill as anything more than an elaborate, expensive, and excessive tribute to various other movies, particularly kung-fu stuff (though it is certainly an extremely accomplished tribute). Is it something Tarantino said? Or are we simply working from the assumption that, since his previous work seemed to be more substantial than Kill Bill seems, we must be missing something about Kill Bill if it seems to be little more than a tribute.
That said, I don't think it would invalidate your analysis of the meaning of Kill Bill for contemporary culture if it were true that Kill Bill is just a tribute; however, I do think that the movie is more enjoyable if it is treated simply as a tribute. If it is anything more, then I am afraid I found it more disturbing than anything else.
I haven't read much on Kill Bill, so perhaps someone somewhere has already answered this question...
Posted by: rob at October 23, 2003 11:05 AMI think this review, which I just read, says the same thing I wanted to, except a lot better.
Rob:
I don't think anything in the Tarantino corpus (pun intended), or in his interviews, suggests any meanings in Kill Bill deeper than homage to his favorite kung-fu and blacksploitation films. And I would agree that Kill Bill is best enjoyed on those levels. A part of me really liked the movie on that level. I got a kick out of the references I caught (I especially liked the use of Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute, on the soundtrack), and I thought much of the cartoonish violence (the House of Blue Leaves fight in particular) was so silly it was almost good, clean fun. But another part of me, when I reflected on it, found it, as you said, found it "more disturbing than anything else." Really sickening, in fact.
My argument isn't that Kill Bill is anything more that stylized, fetishized junk. It's just that the disturbing images it offers are too arresting to laugh off, even if Tarantino wants you to. And those images, and how enjoyable they are, made me start thinking about the violence inherent in me, and the people around me. I don't think Tarantino is trying to make audiences confront the implications of violence, I just think the graphic nature of his images makes it impossible not to.
Gosey:
I'm just going to catch the Gillian show here in ChattaVegas on Sunday night. I do want to hang with you in ATL sometime, though.
Posted by: mesh at October 23, 2003 02:32 PMThen you and I agree, I think. I've been bothered by reviews I've seen and people's opinions I've heard which seemed to suggest there was more to Kill Bill than just kung-fu action; but insofar as it says things about our culture, and about us, even things that Tarantino didn't intend to say, I think you're right.
Brilliant pun.
Posted by: rob at October 23, 2003 03:26 PMAuteurial intent be darned on this blog, that's my motto. Out of sheer curiosity, what critics have you seen try to make Kill Bill out to be more profound than kung-fu action? It would be quite a stretch.
And are you still scribbling for the TFP? Any chance you could get me hired as a movie critic there? :)
Posted by: mesh at October 23, 2003 03:39 PMnice review mesh, or should i say interpretation? personally, i have to say that my initial response to kill bill v1 is just plain disappointment. culture critique and cool kung-fu references aside, this film just can't hang with the likes of pulp fiction, reservoir dogs, or even jackie brown. and i'm not even saying that it attempted to - tarantino himself has admitted the intent behind this one is quite different from his other films. but his first three films show his true genius at crafting a film, and i had hoped that we might see more of the same here. we will, i'm sure, in future films - possibly even in v2, which may literally redeem v1 in my mind, but for now, i'm not running out to see v1 again.
Posted by: andy at October 23, 2003 04:40 PMNice post. Though I am by no means a Tarentino expert or even conosiour I have noticed a fairly violent trend in hios movies. I know no-one really respects my opinions on movies but I thought that the cartoonish violence was rather amusing though often kinda gross and that the main features that made this movei worthwhile for me was the soundtrack and all the little things tatentino does like changing form black and white to color in the blink of an eye (literally. I also thought the camer ashots were pretty cool (i.e. when it follows Uma Thurman around at the restaraunt, etc). Anyway thats my 3 cents.
Posted by: zach at October 24, 2003 10:04 AMThe soundtrack is indeed spectacular. "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" by Tomoyasu Hotei may just be the coolest song ever.
Posted by: mesh at October 24, 2003 03:14 PMHey, where's TRIF "Mesh bares his soul"? I need my fix!
Posted by: scott cunningham at October 25, 2003 05:25 PMRyan gave me a link so I could read this article. I have seen Kill Bill twice now and still can't put my finger on why I love it so much. I read the above listed links review as well and agree the many of the scenes were a sucker punch to my gut. The movie compelled me to feel and allowed me to feel, which was oddly cathartic and freeing. Would I have noticed with out all blood? I don't know yet. I am going to keep pondering for now.
Posted by: misslodico at October 26, 2003 02:49 AMHere's one and here's another.
From the second: "Bill re-establishes that Tarantino ranks with Boogie Nights' Paul Thomas Anderson as one of the few Hollywood filmmakers of the past 25 years with the stuff to win a lifetime achievement award."
Other reviewers got it. Probably most did. But seem people seem to think that Quentin's genius is proven by this movie, and I just don't think it shows anything more than a superb mastery of style and a commanding knowledge of obscure Hong Kong cinema.
Posted by: rob at October 27, 2003 10:38 AMI think the review is extremely insightful, but I wonder if Mesh gives us (the American movie-going public) more credit than we deserve. I loved Kill Bill. I’ve seen it twice already. It thoroughly disturbed me both times. I want to see it again. I don’t know why.
I think that when we see Kill Bill we're going to get hit in the gut and we'll be hurt, but we'll be more ready for the next shot. I think most of us are going to watch it, say “cool”, and leave the movie with our proverbial guts a little more hardened and wonder who’s going to hit us hard enough to make us feel it next time.