Adam,
Now for a movie I’d seen that you hadn’t seen.
Since I’ve in fact seen Kill Bill: Vol. 2 quite a few times and could talk about it at quite a length, I’m going to TRY to focus my discussion by opening with a relevant quote:
“In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption.”
That quote comes from David Foster Wallace. I’m very curious to know what you think of it. For me, as much as I want to honor the graveness and moral urgency with which Wallace undertook his role as cultural commentator, I think here he is totally wrong.
Irony is a terribly misunderstood idea, too often construed as a lack of caring rather than as an alternative mode of caring. That’s why it’s a mistake to regard Tarantino’s work as the result of a cynical or affected or opportunistic detachment, as DFW does. On the contrary, the kind of irony practiced by Tarantino is not only compatible with sincerity, it’s what makes a true, deep, committed sincerity possible.
The basic impetus behind Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is love—the most sincere, least constructed of emotions. The movie brims over with it. Love for cinema, love for genre, love for ‘70s soul songs and comic books. And what you might miss if you get too hung up on how irreverently Tarantino expresses his many loves is that, at heart, Kill Bill is itself a love story, a fact established in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, but whose emotional resonances only become fully clear in this second volume.
In spite of the heightened circumstances surrounding it, the relationship between Uma Thurman’s Beatrix and David Carradine’s Bill is played emotionally straight. They’re two characters with history and baggage, not unlike any other couple. (It’s also worth noting that Kill Bill initiates a string of movies in Tarantino’s filmography that all deal with the theme of revenge. But unlike Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, Kill Bill deals with revenge, not as a social or historical phenomenon, but as a personal relationship between individuals, romantic love being the most intimate and high-stakes of that kind of relationship.)
My favorite sequence in the movie is the Esteban Vihaio scene, featuring a terrific, sleepy-eyed performance from Michael Parks as the courtly, quietly menacing pimp/crime boss. When Beatrix arrives to question him about Bill’s whereabouts, she is surprised to find him all too accommodating.
“How else is he ever going to see you again?” It’s an unabashedly romantic idea. Giving someone else the power to kill you simply because you love them.
When Tarantino takes a fairly standard tale of wronged love and explodes it to mythic proportions, embellishing it with samurai swords and truth serums, he’s taking advantage of the capacity of art to understand situations through metaphor. He takes something that could read as cliched or overly familiar and, by making it unfamiliar, renews its impact.
Because who hasn’t had or known of an ex that you wished you could just annihilate?
One last scene, which SPOILERS BELOW occurs at the end of the movie, during Beatrix and Bill’s climactic encounter:
“You’re not a bad person. You’re a terrific person. You’re my favorite person. But every once in a while, you can be a real cunt.” If that isn’t the perfect summation of irony and of love: multiply valanced, full of both humor and hurt.
Love,
Victoria
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