I’m a Tarantino-ite by default, of course. Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, a few months before I turned thirteen. I think that you can really pinpoint the year that I turned into a film buff as being 1995, corresponding roughly with David Fincher’s Se7en and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. I loved Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, but the fact that that film inspired an Ed Wood fad, got me to see Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Plan 9 From Outer Space, Se7en and Pulp Fiction. I’ve run through those tapes more than I really care to relate. I was that age where you start to get really serious about film, and obviously these three pictures were popular films that contained some sort of puzzle piece to the mystery that is Alex Jackson. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether or not Pulp Fiction is one of the best films ever made. I know that is probably a very good or great one, but I’m not sure it’s one of the best. I can recite all the dialogue by memory, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was thirteen when I saw it; I had never seen a real movie before that played towards my sensibilities, and in my inexperience I gravitated towards the picture. Tarantino created a whole new generation of cinephiles, and I’m one of them. It’s sort of embarrassing. But I don’t think that Tarantino really denigrated film love through the Pulp Fiction fad, as much as give it a face.

Personally, while I continue to proudly own almost everything that Quentin Tarantino has ever written and/or directed (excluding Jackie Brown, Four Rooms, the “ER” episode and My Best Friend’s Birthday), the six-year break gave me the opportunity to explore more and more films other than Tarantino’s meager five (three directed, two written). I can’t in good conscience really say that Tarantino is my favorite director. (Just as I don’t feel that I can say that any longer about Harmony Korine or even Terrence Malick.) I just don’t have any more of his films to discover, study or discuss, and I’ve moved on to other areas. And then here comes Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

The most impressive thing about the film is that it almost feels like we are discovering an entirely new director. You can tell that the film is from Quentin Tarantino, I suppose, but he’s gone into it more as a director than a writer. The film doesn’t have any of the focus on character that his previous films had. The dialogue doesn’t have the Tarantino touch, and there are no stories about Royales with Cheese in Paris. It more resembles True Romance and From Dusk Till Dawn than Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or especially Jackie Brown. I really liked Jackie Brown, but at the same time part of me was a little disappointed and I wasn’t really interested in owning it. I felt like Tarantino was making a “real movie,” meaning a movie that could actually win him some Oscars on the Oscars’ terms. He wasn’t a fanboy who got a chance to make a movie anymore, he was a real director. I’ve heard his style as being described by Siskel and Ebert and Tarantino himself as showing us all the situations, discussion and moments that are pushed out of the movie to make room for a streamlined plot. He made movies that were “all outtakes.” Critics and arthouse movie audiences love that kind of shit. They like the idea of seeing real people have real conversations. Sometimes they want messages and strong stories with plots in their movies also, but Tarantino was often a little too funky for that. These tastes are the remnants of a literary-based intellectual community, and as good as his Elmore Leonard-based Jackie Brown was, it sure as hell read as a book. Jackie Brown was character and dialogue at the purest form, and while lots of critics liked it, fans were more indifferent and the film didn’t carve itself into the popular culture the way that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction did. It seems that Jackie Brown ended that part of his development as an auteur, and in his six-year hiatus he took to re-inventing himself.

Describing his aesthetic in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino described a conventional plot in that these hired goons kill somebody in the beginning of the movie and then Arnold Schwarzenegger goes and kills everybody. Tarantino shows you what it’s like to be in the car with the guys who are going to cause the murder that sets the plot in motion. He was describing the plot to Commando and inferring that his film is a perversion and abstraction of Commando. With Kill Bill he seems to have set out to do Commando as well as he possibly can. I’m not really sure how much Tarantino likes Commando, but I understand that he feels that that is a solid revenge movie with no pretenses of being anything else and a film that doesn’t really add a lot to the table. He takes the basic structure of Commando and sets out to make the film as well as he can. The picture isn’t a clever postmodern dissertation of the Commando universe, it’s a totally pure thing. Cinematic adrenaline taken from the pituitary gland in liquid form and sold on the black market.

The admirers and detractors of the film both seem to agree on two points: 1. Quentin Tarantino is beyond a talented filmmaker, he’s a prodigy and 2. The film isn’t really about anything and has no real weight. Obviously critics differ on the comparative weights of these two aspects. As I think I have inferred before, I’m getting a little tired of seeing a film in terms of story, acting, dialogue, “theme,” et cetera. It’s not that it’s boring, it’s that it’s limiting, and it doesn’t adequately reflect why people go to movies. I’m not expecting to learn anything or develop as a human being, I’m simply looking into getting turned on by the movie. I don’t even particularly care what the film is turning me onto: Christianity, power, love, punishment, adventure, it’s all good to me. That’s the philosophy in which Kill Bill was made, and it has resulted in one of the best films that I have ever seen. There just isn’t really a way to adequately describe how powerful this film is. Cinematically, the film is very much unprecedented. Morally and artistically, however, it’s quite complicated. I had, in fact, planned on reviewing Kill Bill long before I saw it, and so I was nonetheless a little shocked and a little peeved to see that the film yet again illustrate the tenets of “feminist nihilism,” thus making me begin to look a bit like a broken record. Early rumors about the premise of Kill Bill identified Uma Thurman as a prostitute and Bill as her pimp. There are slight traces of this in the movie. For one, Thurman’s character, The Bride, is pregnant with Bill’s child when he kills her, and so we know that they slept together. Second, there is a scene later in the movie where Bill’s henchman California Mountain Snake (Daryl Hannah) is about to murder the comatose Bride when Bill calls her up and tells her not to. Her reaction to hearing Bill’s voice subtly implies that they know each other intimately. Bill is the leader of a gang of tough women, but he seems to have domesticated them by feeding into their need to be loved, in the same way that a pimp would. And so, Bill made The Bride his whore, and now The Bride will Kill Bill, and become her own person.

The five people responsible for The Bride’s near-death and apparent miscarriage seem to have gone their separate ways while she was in her coma. (…Or are they just pretending and Bill is still in charge, or were they just independently hired goons or what? I dunno.) We don’t really know why they killed her, but it may have something to do with her pregnancy and subsequent marriage, and her desire to “leave the life.” The film seems to have a traditional view towards gender roles. Essentially, the ideal dream for the Bride character is to settle down with a nice fella and start popping out babies. Vernita Green, the second on her kill list, is living the life that The Bride had taken away. She is married to a doctor, has a little girl and has a house in the suburbs. The Bride isn’t only changing her social situation through her pregnancy; she is, of course, going through a biological/spiritual transformation. Motherhood is an affirmation and glorification of her femininity.

Green and The Bride fight in this house, but pause when Green’s four-year-old daughter walks home from her bus stop. (That seems to be a little young to be bussed to and from school. I thought that school buses were for primary school, kindergarten and up, and most preschools were private. Do they bus in Head Start? Green's kid isn't in Head Start, is she? I don’t know.) The introduction of all this violence in the little girl’s world is funny, but it never really feels cruel. I felt that Tarantino has his moral foundation in this lifestyle. Being a mom is pretty cool in this movie and, I think, is the role that The Bride most wants to fulfill.

Why Green was allowed to have this life and The Bride isn’t very clear, but it does throw doubt on the theory that The Bride was killed because of her pregnancy and marriage. (I can’t defend my theory as being logical, just as in keeping in tone with the rest of the film. I’m reacting with my gut.) The movie very much wants us to like The Bride and be on her side, and so the idea that she somehow double-crossed Bill would make much more sense but would kill our sympathy for her. The only explanation that I can think of for why The Bride doesn’t just restart her life, as opposed to risking her life to get her vengeance, is that she instinctively realizes that Bill will not leave her alone and he and his gang must be destroyed. In the scene with California Mountain Snake, when she is in her coma, Bill tells California Mountain Snake that they’re going to hurt her, a hell of a lot more, but he wants a fair fight and so Mountain Snake should lay off.

Now, I’m not going to be as crass as to say that the revenge-bound version of The Bride is simply a means to fulfilling her mom-hood. No sir, that is not the entire truth. She’s awesome in this movie, and it’s exhilarating to see her kick some Yakuza ass. After she kills Green, The Bride tells the daughter that she “had it coming,” and tells the little girl to track her down if she “ever feels sore about it.” Tarantino is riffing on Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven here. That sure sounds like something that William Munny would say, doesn’t it? All four of Tarantino’s films are about bad guys desperately in need of retirement. They’ve seen too much killing to feel anything else but exhaustion about it. Unforgiven was a very moralistic film. Not a naïve one, mind you, or even a cheesy one, but a very moralistic film. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown were a little less so, they were a bit more snap crackle pop, but they were still in the same direction as Unforgiven in that the characters looked pretty exhausted and we understood that all the stuff that happened in the movie was a comedy at their expense. God was indeed telling Jules to get the fuck outta there. Kill Bill is not at all a moralistic film.

The climactic shoot-out in Unforgiven dumbfounded many audiences and some felt that it meant that the film lost its center, but it was indeed a transgression on behalf of Munny. Just because a film is moralistic, doesn’t mean that it can’t be pessimistic. Munny’s wife was dead, and with her went reason and basic human goodness. The film is lamenting this moral void, and the fact that William Munny could never evolve beyond a killer. Remember that he’s an awful pig farmer, and remember also that his nemesis Little Bill (both Munny and The Bride are targeting a man named Bill. I don’t believe that this is necessarily a coincidence) is an awful carpenter. Little Bill wants to build a house, but he’s not any good at it. He’s only good at killing. Now Kill Bill consists of little more than that shootout, and to say the very least, Tarantino does not have the same perspective as Eastwood does on any of this. Eastwood saw The Man With No Name as a limitation; he’s lamenting the fact that The Man With No Name cannot evolve into something greater. Tarantino sort of sees things this way also, but he really likes The Man With No Name. Heck, we’re calling the Uma Thurman character “The Bride” for a reason. Tarantino bleeps out her name when it’s uttered because he is creating a “Man With No Name” character, and he wants her to be referenced as “The Bride” in the film.

Similarly problematic is Tarantino’s treatment of the villains in the movie. The villains are pretty damn cool. One of them is called Gogo Yubari and she is the diabolical O-Ren Ishii’s henchman. Gogo is seventeen years old and dresses like a school girl. When we are introduced to her, she is in a bar where she asks a Japanese guy with bad teeth, “Do you want to screw me? Do you want to penetrate me?” He laughs nervously, and says yes. She then stabs him and says, “Or maybe I’ll penetrate you.” I’m not sure if she stabbed with a knife or sword, but here Tarantino explicitly turns both knife and sword into phallic symbols, by equating penetration with penis with penetration by blade. Later O-Ren makes a reference to The Bride’s sword as an “instrument.” That sounds pretty phallic to me! Women with knives. Tarantino gives them “penises as weapons of destruction,” making them hyper-masculine superheroes and arch-villains. The scene with Gogo is sort of frightening. The guy that she was talking to was a slimy leisure suit lizard, but he was decidedly unarmed and too shy to try anything rough on her, and she casually stabs him. It’s psychopathic behavior, but it plays like a joke and in some degree it’s celebrated as an affirmation of an identity beyond sex object. That’s what I’m referring to as true “feminist nihilism.” Tarantino gets pleasure out of every single aspect of this movie. Every single one. He loves the bad girls, and he loves the good girls. While I think that the film is very much pro-motherhood, on some level, yeah, it’s really sort of amoral. This is a truly feminist film, whereas we define feminism as the amoral premise that “a woman can be whatever she wants to be.” Mothers, superheroes, Yakuza bosses, psychopaths, even victims, it’s all good and all are valid. You can even get a little kinky thrill through the devotion in California Mountain Snake’s voice, and so yes, the film celebrates the woman as property as well. (Stephanie Zacharek, who is a woman, complained vocally about a scene where we find out that an orderly is pimping out The Bride’s comatose body. Yes, we laugh at that scene, but the film also has The Bride getting a very brutal revenge on her rapists and we laugh at that too. We laugh at everything; that’s the tone of the movie.)

The film has been split in two, meaning that an original cut would be three and a half hours long, but I thought it was pretty tight. I think that those who complain that it’s slow in spots are bringing too many preconceptions about a two-part movie to the table. The movie is indulgent in an entirely different way than Tarantino’s previous films. The only time that the film drags is during the Sonny Chiba sequence. Chiba played the same character, as the critic MaryAnn Johanson pointed out, in the TV series “Hattori Hanzo: Kage no Gundan,” a series that Johanson suggests Tarantino saw when he was a kid as a subtitled import on UHF. Wrong timeline (the IMDB lists the year of the show as 1980. Tarantino was 17 at the time. A kid? In her defense, it’s not unreasonable to believe that she read it in an interview and it’s Tarantino stretching the truth), but it’s the right sentiment. It’s one of the few fanboy indulgences that doesn’t pay off. Thematically, it adds some depth to the picture. I maintain that The Street Fighter was a comedy, and thus was a moral film. The Sonny Chiba character in that film was awesome to behold, but basically a thug-for-hire. He didn’t stand for anything; he was basically a good guy by default. Here we see him old and retired, reluctant to get his ass back in the game by making The Bride a new sword. It’s the closest that the film gets to having an actual William Munny-like character. I think that is, by the way, why the film goes dead at that point. (By the way, I don’t mean any offense in mostly reading Kill Bill in terms of westerns. I’m more than positive that the theme of the retired killer is a large element of the Asian samurai and “kung fu” movies that make up the make-up of Tarantino’s film. Bill’s gang even has a code, they don’t want to kill The Bride in her coma, and that is certainly more Eastern than Western. And let’s remember that Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is going to be more spaghetti western than samurai movie and that the soundtrack is very much inspired by Ennio Morricone.)

We have to talk about the violence. Before I knew the real reason, I played around with a scenario explaining Tarantino’s hiatus. After the Columbine massacre in April of 1999, he went underground to re-examine the sort of cinema that he’s been celebrating. He may have felt a chill, I theorized, when he heard that the killers hoped that he would direct their story. He was the poster boy for violence as nothing more than a cinematic device, and now here were two people who enacted it. The timeframe is about right, but I know that that was an absurd theory. But the fact that it’s an absurd theory is ammunition enough against Tarantino and the cinema that he represents. Kill Bill is violent, very violent. And it’s fun to watch, very fun to watch. I was in the Ain’t It Cool chat room (yeah, okay, you can stop laughing) and we were talking about how the film could be considered to be the most violent American film ever made. We decided that it could be argued to be the most violent R-rated film ever made, and we were hard pressed to think of an R-rated film that was more violent. I still can’t. It’s over-the-top, but it has weight. My wife hid her eyes during about two thirds of the film’s most gruesome moments, and the other third she laughed out loud. The movie plays you like a piano that way. I was seriously disturbed during the film’s anime sequence and Gogo’s killing, but I did enjoy the now famous climactic battle with the Crazy 88s. Especially fun is afterwards when she sends them all home without their limbs. A lot of them aren’t really dead, they just had their limbs cut off!! It’s actually very funny; the scene has the abstract feeling of a Japanese fairy tale. The violence, just like the feminist/spaghetti western/samurai/kung fu themes, is basically all effect. The past, off-screen rape and a scene where Thurman, looking like a heroine in the panel of a Manga rubs her hand over her tummy and screams and cries aloud to see that her baby has been lost; that’s all effect also.

I’m taking a deep sigh right now. I’ve based my entire theory of film criticism on the idea that movies are ultimately about the effect. I rather like character, story and message, but I don’t defend the idea that a film must have these things to be of worth. And Kill Bill is horrifying, funny, exhilarating, sad and even smart. It’s absolutely incredible, and wonderfully thorny. And it takes a whole lot of talent to pull something like this off. Compare with Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. But I don’t know if Kill Bill is great art. I think that we may need some sort of new term for it. Some people separate entertainment from art, but this movie goes both beyond and below the concept of entertainment. I don’t know what to make of it. For a shallow film, it’s shallow in a way that I haven’t ever seen before. In the future that I see, we’re going to see people argue Jackie Brown versus Kill Bill and both films are going to be seen as the ideal extremes of the Tarantino oeuvre. You can put me down for Kill Bill. We’re going to need another seven or eight years just to access what happened.