Victoria,
I’m going to start by responding to your quote with another one, this time from Tarantino himself:
“I’ve had people write that I’ve seen too many movies. In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?”
I think those words, Tarantino’s own, speak to your point, and against DFW’s. Because you’re right - the source of Tarantino’s irreverence, in this film or any other, is a sincere love and affection for the medium of film, and for the kinds of stories film tells. It’s the same for French New Wave directors, like Godard or Truffaut, or for David Lynch for that matter. Director’s such as these, who imbue their work with evident discipline and attention to craft, simply don’t make film their life work if they aren’t in love with everything about it.
And again, you’re right, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is at its heart a love story, between Bill and Beatrix to a certain extent, but even more so between Tarantino and the silver screen.
My favorite way to think about this film, and its preceding volume, is as a postmodern movie about movies. The meta-narrative here is a revenge-fueled love story, which, in typical postmodernist fashion, is at once contradictory and profoundly honest. It’s worth noting how universally these emotions resonate, both in real life and across film history. Tarantino is showing us our basest feelings, the things that can be vulgar and beautiful and most profoundly human in us, and reminding us that these are the sentimental fuels powering most of the cinema we consume. This can be seen most clearly in the scene in which B.B. asks if she can watch Shogun Assassin, a notoriously violent film about a man avenging his lost love. B.B., already established as a kind of less-than-innocent innocent, desires this film because, as a human, it is natural to be attracted to this sort of narrative material. A viewer’s first response, “Shogun Assassin?” is necessarily followed by, “Of course, Shogun Assassin.”
The metatext of the film works its way out through a variety of styles and genres, moving from East to West and back again. Some of these are fun, some serious, and some absurd, but their points of connection are only possible because of the time and attention Tarantino has invested in knowing genre inside and out. I’m reminded of the aphorism that before you can break the rules you have to master them. Tarantino may not have mastered the “rules,” but he certainly knows them inside and out to the extent that he can play with them, bend them, and weave them effortlessly together with the conventions of other genres. He questions them pretty severely too, like in the scene in which Pai Mei, a supposedly ageless Kung Fu master, is poisoned by his vindictive pupil Elle. And why not? Pai Mei is a vulnerable human just like everyone else in the story, he’s just not thought of as such when figured into the genre conventions of a 70’s low-budget kung fu film.
It’s this type of irony that is so satisfying, and that the film utilizes to show us just how great movies can be. Movies can make ordinary men and women into ageless Kung Fu masters, or vengeful Bride assassins, or menacing crime-boss pimps. Films are where fantasy becomes reality, and vice versa.
Love,
Adam
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