It's fair to say that any movie which begins with
“Revenge is a dish best served cold” – Ancient Klingon Proverb.
speaks in a vocubulary for the cinema fan. And how wonderfully articulate it is!
Kill Bill, vol. 1, has to have been one of the better products of American popular culture of the past, well, decade. Samurai swords, blondes, black and yellow Asics – what more could you ask for?
Oh, you wanted a work of art…
Fetishitic? No question. Vicious Parody? Yes. Brutal? Absolutely. Degrading? No doubt. Art? Well…
Others think not. For example:
Writing on Conspiracy Planet, Henry Makow, PhD says in Kill Bill: Tarantino's Satanic Indoctrination:
Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" was the highest grossing film in America this weekend. This film is Satanic fetishism dressed up as courageous, inventive entertainment.In the first scene, a flashback, a blood-scared, shackled and presumably naked woman played by Uma Thurman says, "It's your baby" before a gunshot explodes in our ears.
…
A narrator, sounding like an oriental sage says something like: "In the martial arts you cannot afford any compassion or morality. To accomplish revenge, you must be prepared to prepare to kill God Himself, or the Buddha."
Can they be any more in-your-face? This is the Devil telling us we can have whatever we want, and nothing can get in our way, especially not God. Just so long as our stupidity is accompanied by pretension and style.
This sick, shocking movie causes psychological damage. It portrays the disgusting and repulsive as normal and natural. It is a vicious parody of our vision of happiness and the good life. It makes a mockery of healthy and genuine values.
"Kill Bill" brutalizes and degrades. How much longer will Americans tolerate this Satanic indoctrination?
This Satanic Conspiracy succeeds only because people cannot believe something so colossal and monstrous actually exists.
I would disagree. Yes, the movie did not suffer a lack of pretension and style, but it was most definitely not stupid.
As for the charge of Satanism, I’m not sure if this is raising Tarantino to undeserved heights, or lowering the Devil to the level of a motormouthed aesthete.
But let’s turn to another foil, Gregg Easterbrook. He is a theolgian, an editor at the The New Republic, and the author of that most literate of sports columns, Tuesday Morning Quarterback (although his nicknames for sports teams leave a lot to be desired, he makes up for it with football haikus). According to Mr. Easterbrook:
All of Tarantino's work is pure junk. How can you be a renowned director without ever having made a film that's even good, to say nothing of great? No film student in 50 years will spend a single second with a Tarantino movie, except to shake his or her head.Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure--and that, for decades, has been what the least imaginative and least talented of Hollywood churn out. Supposedly it's "revolutionary," or something, that Tarantino films revel in violence to a preposterous degree, but that's like saying it is revolutionary for a presidential candidate to revel in complaints against Washington bureaucrats. Nothing about Hollywood is more hackneyed or trite than preposterous violence--and that's all Tarantino has ever put onto film.
…
Tarantino must draw his prominence in Hollywood, and among film-buff culture, from the very fact of his phoniness. First, his career says that you can do nothing but wallow in preposterous violence--Hollywood's cheapest and least original aspect--and still be revered. Second, his career validates the idea that you can accomplish nothing at all in any meaningful sense and yet acquire fame. The idea that you can get celebrity, money, and women through the movies without having any merits whatsoever is at the core of the Hollywood's conception of itself. Tarantino is its ultimate expression of this phoniness. Please don't tell me that makes him ironically postmodern.
Them’s fightin’ words, to be sure. While I’ll not smear Mr. Easterbrook with ad hominem attacks (he makes some unfortunate remarks about Jewish movie executives worshipping money above all else), you can follow the rancor here and here.
And what about the Big Media pros? Why at, MSNBC they say:
“Kill Bill” is an excess of excess that makes Tarantino’s earlier cinematic blood feuds look like pillow fights. Near the end of the film, Thurman surveys the sprawling carnage she’s wreaked in the climatic battle, a scene the “editing room called the not-since-‘Gone-With-the-Wind’-shot,” Tarantino said.
Also on MSNBC, Larry Terenzi offers the following insights on Tarantino’s impact on the cinematic enterprise: http://www.msnbc.com/news/977704.asp
You can spot a Tarantino-esque film from across the Cineplex. Along with the squirming comedy, mounting body count and Madonna references, they share certain characteristics:A cast with indie-hipster cred. The individual presence of Samuel L. Jackson, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Amanda Plummer or Tarantino himself indicates some correlation to the general attitude. Their number within a film grows in direct proportion to its authenticity. If they’re all cast in the same film, hot damn, you’ve got “Pulp Fiction.” Jackson nearly got booted from this group with his role in the very un-hip “Star Wars” sequels (which deserve a cap in the ass from a Tarantino hand cannon).
Body disposal is a major issue. Ever the dilemma of the gangster, cement shoes just won’t do anymore. It’s got to be gruesome and funny. Danny Boyle took a hack at it, literally, with “Shallow Grave.” So did Doug Liman in the best of the Tarantino knockoffs, the clever black comedy “Go.” Peter Berg’s “Very Bad Things” used it, very badly.
Plot is secondary and often ignored entirely. David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” is a good example, although in all fairness Lynch was busting convention and blowing minds when Tarantino was still getting wedgies in the schoolyard. Tarantino acolyte Robert Rodriguez also dabbles in this category, often unintentionally. Has anybody seen the genre sludge called “From Dusk Till Dawn”?
Sprawling stories and subplots and complex coincidences became the norm. John Herzfeld’s “2 Days in the Valley” examines the six-degrees-of-separation principle with a modicum of success; Leslie Greif’s “Keys to Tulsa” does not. Gary Fleder’s “Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” about five gangsters who botch a job, is an overwrought exercise in style but hey, so is the entire genre. Peter O’Fallon’s “Suicide Kings” is so random it just doesn’t amount to much.
Nonlinear narratives are cool. Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” employs flashbacks throughout, each one earlier than the previous. The aforementioned “Run Lola Run” entertains, but uses its alternate realities so gratuitously that it blunts the films impact.
And my favorite:
’Kill Bill’ is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap," the New Yorker magazine said of the movie
Well if the New Yorker formally knows it as decadent, then it must mean that Kill Bill, vol. 1, is indeed, a work of art.
Before I tell you how I see it a little digression. The German Philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002), based much of his work on an understanding of the aesthetic experience. His assertion is that the aesthetic experience has a claim to truth – a position that is based on an ontological “reading” of understanding. Or in plain English, understanding is found in our shared existence, specifically, in our being-in-the world.
This means that the fundamental operation of being towards meaning is one of interpretation of experience, not judgment or rationalizing. Since we interpret our experience, how we interpret it is paramount. To unfairly summarize, we come to make sense of what we encounter by pre-cognitive structures which he calls prejudices (a term which he rehabilitates, free from the negative connotation). Hence any meaning that we come to have from an encounter is a fusion of our prejudices and the new material encountered. This is the basis for his philosophical hermeneutics.
When it comes to art, there are two ways that we can encounter it. In his masterpiece, Truth and Method, Gadamer uses two forms of the German word for experience, Erlebnis and Efahrung. The former indicates a possession, something to be had, and thus, open to subjectivization, whereas Efahrung is something that is “undergone”, and indicates an “event” of meaning. This is indicative of the way in which one might attend a film, and leave, after having been engrossed in a big-budget spectacular, taking nothing away; or view a more a less sensational film, but one that demands of its audience an effort at interpretation, leaving with an insight, or increased meaning.
Which brings me back to Kill Bill vol. 1. Tarantino offers a most complex work in this chopsocky-cum-revenge flick. I would make the claim that what we find in Kill Bill is a work of art. The reason, quite simply, is that it engages the viewer, and forces him/her to interpret what is going on. The visual gags, motifs, stylistic cues, etc., all give rise to greater meaning than just an insipid narrative featuring some hot-chick-killing-machine (although, she’s hot, she’s a chick, and she is a killing machine) and three different kinds of fake blood (so sayeth the print edition of the New Yorker).
Put it to you like this – did you have to try and figure out Dante’s Peak? Rat Race? Star Wars? Smokey and the Bandit? Armageddon? No. That’s because those viewing experiences were pure Erlebnis – nothing but sensation. Kill Bill, on the other hand, forces you to interpret its meaning on its own ground, in all its onanistic, yellow jumpsuit, Samurai Disco glory.
Here’s why Dr. Makow and Messers. Easterbrook and Terenzi are important. If you read all of their reviews, the one thing that they all share is that their earlier judgments inform how they took the movie, as a Satanic Conspiracy, an amoral product of degenerate Corporate America, or the work of a self-referecing in-crowd of hipsters concerned with style over substance, the intricate details of body decomposition, and non-linear storytelling, respectively.
Kill Bill is art not because it speaks in the same language as Fellini, Scorcese, Godard, or Hitchcock. It is art because the work is rich with meaning, just waiting to be discovered, and the degree of discovery depends on the disposition and sophistication of the audience.
That’s great, you say – but what does it mean? I’m not sure that I can tell you until I see the whole work, but I think its meaning is the Erlebnis of cinema. The genius of the work is just that it presents us the sensationalism of movies in a whole new way, one that demands we translate it, so that we can live through the experience anew, in a fresh sense of wonder.
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