© 2013 by James Clark
The Hunger Games is a lavishly and subtly eccentric film. It bursts into view for us in the course of setting in relief the function of the work of Robert Bresson. As recently embraced here, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs also speaks to the urgency of dialogue with Bresson. It goes to cataclysmic lengths to get some blood moving in Bresson’s cadaverous discoveries about resentment and bathos as ravaging world history.
With The Hunger Games, director Gary Ross brings off a cinematic coup that could keep us busy fathoming for a long time. Gaining entry to a conventional novelistic template for eliciting the vaguely subversive longings of school children, Ross reconfigures the premise to bring to bear an interpersonal climate approaching perpetual, absolute zero, and, thereby, Bresson comes to Hollywood. Bresson does come to Hollywood by means of Tarantino as well; and the compelling differences of these transmissions can, I think, be vigorously explored by means of that mountain of malice, titled, Kill Bill (2003, 2004).
Whereas Ross is entirely at home with the gritty and gentle drift of his protagonist, and thereby conveys a remarkably rounded phenomenon of fully-challenged physiological and social equilibrium, Tarantino devises a juvenile scenario he purports to love to death while sketchily overseeing the matter of maturity. Kill Bill sees its marketing edge in elegant and innovative martial dynamics as sending forth topspins that could (but seldom would) come to bear upon an agenda of sub-human sufficing in revenge. Its protagonist, the Bride (only very late in the saga acquiring the name, Beatrix [a tricky Beauty indeed]), fills its four hours with hardly believable feats on behalf of survival and dominance, ripping out torrents of incredulity to match the attendant rivers of blood. But, in having repulsed and precluded most of the market for incisively recognizing the heroine’s gaping deficiencies, Tarantino provides the spectacle of being, in his own inimitable way, almost as incomprehensible a stiff as Bresson.
The virulence of the auteur’s self-promotion has to be confronted at this stage of our survey, because it threatens to obviate a brilliant and heartfelt engagement of a dangerous crisis, thereby withdrawing from functional service an elicitation of active viewers to assimilate a level of perversity foreshadowing systematic foreclosure at a pitch far less civil than the ascendancy of small hopes introduced in The Hunger Games. Tarantino’s severity knows itself to be valid (putting itself far ahead of those arch-sensationalist fans unconcerned with how closely the amusing murderousness here engages the self-serving energies of mainstream life); but in putting it into circulation he sees fit to insinuate himself into the phenomena of cinematic interchange as a camera-savvy hipster entirely devoted to the same fractious amusements available to all suburban adolescents. Thus he presents a scenario of a bride gunned and beaten down at her wedding along with the groom and the rest of the wedding party, including her fetus, by an irate former lover and the gang he commands (to which she once belonged), recovering from her wounds and wreaking vengeance on the perpetrators. And while the mature provenance of that conflict traces to Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), the boy next door claims it all came to him from cool Japanese comic books and kung fu animation; and, he has gone on record with bullshit on the order that he had never heard of that possibly embarrassingly over-achieving entry.
As it happens, the history of The Bride Wore Black entails an even more messed up auteurial disposition than Tarantino’s—one more reason for the latter’s having combed through the rhetorical minefield it represents. Being at heart a facile sentimentalist, Truffaut came to feel that the noir vehicle he first imagined to be a smart change of pace for his career was too rough for his thin skin, and consequently the production was marked by long binges of squabbling with associates about how to provide it with a safe heart. Jeanne Moreau, his star here, was also a veteran of working with the likes of those dare devils, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Demy; and she became the de facto navigator, not at all squeamish about descending into unconventional energies, in order to bring to a murky surface traces of verve and elegance that call into play monstrously difficult, virtually unmanageable syntheses. It is in Moreau’s activation of that bedrock in that context that Tarantino recognizes a path well worth revisiting. It is not, however, entirely due to Jeanne Moreau that The Bride Wore Black could provide, from out of its unpromising hardness, a twist of compelling overtones. The musical score by Bernard Herrmann (enlisted by Truffaut to enhance the Hitchcock dimension—Herrmann having scored most of Hitch’s suspense films—of his supposed mainstream melodrama) graces the outraged and vengeful energies of the widow (losing her consort to a bullet finding its mark on the church steps pointing toward a loving future) with a lilting charge speaking to her capacity to be more than obtuse exterminator. And so it is, with respect to such an association, that, the bride being found to have survived, in a comatose state, the El Paso wedding massacre, one of the superstar killers approaches, in nurse’s garb, the intensive care unit whistling a Bernard Herrmann song, “Twisted Nerve,” from a movie by the same name, and released in the same year (1968) as The Bride Wore Black. Twisted nerve is a principal keyword of our questionably modulated heavy hitter of a movie. That the one-eyed assassin is interrupted by phone in her move to inject poison into the Bride’s Pick line, by someone rather smarmily reminding her that, “We owe it to her. With a bullet in her head her heart just kept on beatin’. Killing her this way would be becoming a filthy rat. That would lower us…” poses what seems little more than a terse cliché to offset myriad punishing tornados, a lurid display of nerve the twistedness of which totally eclipses any righting impulses.
Edited to run about four hours, the Kill Bill vehicle was split into two releases, “Volume One” seeing the light of day at the end of 2003, and “Volume Two” (the archaism of this demarcation saying something about the prevailing energies) following , early in 2004. Our account must, right off the top, cut through the sprawling desert of self-consciously diverting violence and mutilation to concentrate upon the grown-up demands so bemusingly buried beneath a circumspective rationale for implacable hostility toward virtually everyone alive now, alive in the past, and alive in the future. Thus we seize upon a scene that lasts about seventeen seconds, right at the end of this Midnight Madness. Beatrix has killed Bill, her Beast and former lover (at his palatial lair, a suite in a luxury hotel), and she’s discovered that he’s had that fetus induced and that she’s the mother of a picture-perfect little girl. Coming along with that picture-perfect is the child’s proneness to stomp to death her pet goldfish. But, far more tormenting to our Beauty, there is the girl’s appetite for cutesy affection and cutesy cartoons on TV. During the dust-up with Bill, she had been nicked by a “truth serum,” whereby she had to admit to him (and to herself) that the prospect of domestic sweetness with her fiancé, helping him sell second-hand records in El Paso and contemplate the riches of music, leaves a lot to be desired. She had bolted away from the funky sheen of being a member of the Number One assassination agency, and from a Bill the impressiveness of whom he amply (in the course of puling out saccharine, sophomoric, education-proud rubrics—never more vomitous than when sucking away on Steely Dan flute motifs) demonstrates to be infested with chronic retardation. (Not far enough into his Dostoyevsky, he declaims, “There are consequences for breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.”) He had put to her what a bore her bid for “a clean slate” in the form of modest affection must boil down to , and she had to recognize that her own “hopes” (to borrow a useful trope from Hunger Games) were—along with Katniss—of the big, rather than generally revered, little, size. Thus it comes to pass, in the midst of Happy Faces between mother and daughter (a smiling Roy Rogers blesses them from the media centre), that Beatrix lies on the locked bathroom floor, clutching a Teddy Bear, and her face, though not for a change chopped to pieces, is a study of despair.
Before expiring, Bill had gently tried to get at the nub of something his studious former consort (a martial arts grad of the most demanding and prestigious super-school) had glossed over—something, perhaps incredibly, even more demanding of sensual powers and courage than the war she had just won. She had declared, “I’m a bad person…” He had rephrased her self-scrutiny—“You’re not a bad person. You’re a terrific person… But once in a while you can be a real cunt.” His parting shot largely has to do with her tilt toward playing house. But, aiming in that direction, this guy with nothing but abortive answers alludes to a region without answers, only endless war far removed from the fantasy triumphs she’s just come through. The film signs off with Beatrix in her new game face (a carefully sculpted smile, replete with twinkly eyes) watching all that cool animation; and then there is the Coutts-Hallmark message, “The lioness has rejoined her cub, and all is well.” A send-off (or, is it better put, a send-up?) aimed at happy “action” fans. There is, of course, this being Tarantino, brilliant, rare action, rare dynamics, conveying an astonishing viscosity in historical existence. But it comes wrapped up in a nasty come-on, more deceptive than any of the patented kung fu histrionics.
The scene we’ve been scrutinizing includes, at the point when it dawns on the Bride her baby was not a miscarriage, a glimpse of a black and white photo of a woman on a Paris street, carrying a baguette. It seems to be Beatrix, on location at one of those supposedly glamorous assignments. But for us, that would be Jeanne Moreau, curtly stating the case for patrician restraint (not that she’s a consummate practitioner of it) in dealing with matters of an outrageously importuning social surround. Bill admits, “I overreacted,” in bringing together a team of elite killers that could have removed Bin Laden years ago, to massacre a small wedding party. She spits back, “Is that your explanation?!” And we are glad he went with that, because the whole damn movie is a vast study of overreaction, misplaying the delights and disappointments of being an active entity. Where Jeanne Moreau shines is the spot we must look to, in tracing the widely unsuspected burden of Tarantino’s work, as affixed to a suddenly, very surprisingly, inept Beatrix, the Beauty who might have seemed to have the world by its tail. That is, the light-as-a-feather tread of her Bernard Herrmann-enhanced trajectory, which keeps us abreast of a strange kinetic engagement to be given its due, as tempering even so calamitous an “overreaction” as she commits (an output she could appreciate, even if Truffaut, the nominal director, couldn’t).
Kill Bill helps us with this focus, by means of an epigraph, “Revenge is a dish best served cold” [with a reservoir of cool poise], and a song ushering in the complex data implicit in the credits, a song about violence, but a song sung with a palpable purchase upon deep spaces of gentleness. The Nancy Sinatra version of “Bang Bang” is psalm-like in its slight vocal echo and pronouncedly tremulous guitar line, an instance of the wavering energies of tremolo. Its horrific narrative comes to us bathed in regret for the lost possibilities of strange, deadly and gentle love. It also prefigures a bride torn away from a groom, and a regime of cosmic isolation.
“Bang bang, I shot you down
Bang bang, you hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, I used to shoot you down.
Music played, and people sang
Just for me, the church bells rang.
Now he’s gone, I don’t know why
And till this day, sometimes I cry
He didn’t even say goodbye
He didn’t take the time to lie…”
The visual starting point is the mutilated face (powerfully including smashed teeth) of our protagonist, shown in venerable black and white to set a tone of primeval violence toward those who would embark upon a course of innovative consciousness. We have mawkish commandant, Bill, babbling about where his sadist and masochistic energies are distributed—a consummate phony in urging upon everyone in sight the Old Testament charm of his moral generosity—“This is me at my most masochistic”—and we have a quick glance at her former colleagues sneering at her from above, where she hit the ground. This is what’s left of her attempt to put some musical poetry into a life hitherto absorbed with self-bloating virtuoso kinetics. Seldom would anyone have been dealt a hand so virulently unpropitious regarding a sufficing measure of serenity. But seldom, too, would there be a more vivid means of tracing a challenge of that equilibrium so primally conversant with courage, an equilibrium taking precedence, populist trappings notwithstanding, in the cinematic perspective of the closeted Francophile carrying us along.
Let’s take a look at the first two passages erupting from that doleful visitation, for the sake of stanching (with factors apt to be underestimated) the rip-roaring melodrama of the Bride’s appetite for revenge. (The little visit from indomitable Roy and his rip-roaring adventures would seem to be a word to the wise, against childish simplism.) All fixed up (physiologically, anyway), she parks in front of a bungalow in Pasadena, so redolent of doll-house design that the vicious knife combat that immediately ensues has, for alert viewers (those not sold on the spectacle of inventive hate and sensational gore), been measured against its cloying domesticity, as vying for validation in the eyes of a presumed flawless arbiter of self-worth. The predator and the housewife soon make rubble out of that cozy furniture, and then the resident child arrives via yellow school bus. The ladies, concealing their knives behind their back, go into Kindergarten register, the Mom directs the little girl to her bedroom, the fight resumes and Mom ends up on the floor (Bang Bang) with a dagger in her gut. Before the latter becomes part of a tally, the assailant pleasurably tells her taunting target, “I’m not lacking rationality [instrumentation on behalf of advantage]… It’s mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack.” That revelling in defying a world history stripped down to its stark antipathy to her hopes, crackles into view once more, before the coup de grace. The lady of the house assures her, “I’m a different person now…” and the Bride comes back with utter contempt for this reformation. “Oh, great!” She adds, “To get revenge here, I’d have to, after killing you, go up to the bedroom and kill your daughter, and then wait for Dr. Bell to get home from work and kill him too.” (Thus the implication has been put into play that her making the rounds regarding very poor wedding etiquette does not begin to settle things with history in its having been exposed as universally incapable of satisfying what she needs.) We take special delivery of the nature of this violent impasse—given constant carnal exposure by the Bride’s proclivity for head-on mayhem—at a point exposed later but in fact [Tarantino drawing upon David Lynch’s scene-shuffling in view of perpetual returns of the same] occurring earlier, in the second, flashback, passage, where she lies comatose in a hospital with memorably uncaring and invasive personnel. First there is the faux-nurse, whistling “Twisted Nerve.” Then, four years later, on being wakened from her long slumber, along lines of Sleeping Beauty, but here, as signalling a more divided and earthy prince, by a mosquito bite (the flesh of her arm and the scales of the bug shown with magnification), she learns about having been used as a sex toy all the while. Certainly one of the most disorderly orderlies brought to the screen, there is Buck, bringing a client into the supposed sanctuary. “Price is $75 a fuck my friend!” The friend gets his French-kissing tongue ripped out (an ironic touch apropos of the parson’s having warned, at the wedding rehearsal, the happy couple against such ardor during the ceremony), and then, having relieved him of his jackknife, she relieves Buck of his life and the keys to his expensive, financed-by-her, truck, rather First-Amendment-cheekily parked with the medics, in its bright colors and logo, to wit, Pussy Wagon.
Now we all love to cheer unequivocal bounders getting their comeuppance; and the visceral triggers Tarantino designs do open floodgates to combative comportment far contravening humanistic civilization. Hence this is a movie so mordantly impressed by a wall of bad behavior, redolent of an informing cowardice, that its factors attending to that operation with respect to nonviolent options have to be critically placed on life support to bring the vehicle into precincts of adult sanity (that sensual equilibrium being overrun here by instances of cannily balanced martial arts).
Punctuating the Bride’s superhuman rampages are two encounters with masters of design which elicit a marked change of pace, very consequential even if much of the audience use the lull to go for more popcorn. By way of the Pussy Wagon, she heads for an airport and a flight to Okinawa (the only one of her targets readily Googled being by this time a high-profile crime boss in Japan). Her destination is, however, the home base of a legendary artisan whose swords, in the right hands, are as close to automatic weapons as such ancient objects can get. He now operates a less than awesome sushi bar (with an egotistical associate never failing to rattle his legendary aplomb), due to having departed the field in a spate of disgust toward settling matters by mortal combat. On learning that she’s after Bill, a former student of his and self-evident “vermin,” he comes out of retirement and produces for her what he can call, “without ego,” “my finest sword.” “I have done this because philosophically I am sympathetic to your aim.” It is the premium upon philosophy, amidst this tempest of impetuous results, which burnishes Kill Bill to a presence not simply allusive but specifically directional. A state of “without ego” he may aspire to. But his underling can undermine that; and, flushed with the loftiness of his latest work, he ventures into hyperbole, but also into a sense of transcendence suggesting he’s done more than sell sushi over the past years. He tells her, “If on your journey you encounter God, God will be cut.” After slaughtering much of the Tokyo underworld, homeward bound with the addresses of those others who must die (Bill’s whereabouts still unknown), she, also a bit flushed, recalls some wisdom the metalworker imparted to her. Its meaningfulness to her, however briefly grasped, is captured by a glimpse of her, smiling beatifically, asking, “How did you find me?” The weapons expert, well aware of the perils of resentment and its proneness to bathetic self-aggrandizement, resorts to metaphor in a bid to bring her alive to a difficult struggle with herself. “Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And, like a forest, it’s easy to lose your way… to get lost… to forget where you came in.” That the Bride is far from out of the woods has been impressed upon us by the way she acquires those addresses. The right-hand woman of the now-deceased scourge of Tokyo and Beatrix’s wedding, a French, former girlfriend of Bill, also came along to El Paso, to gloat; and, on coming within range of her (she being, as always, unarmed) at the scene of the showdown, the Bride slices off that right arm, bleeding like an oil spill. After erasing the armed members of the gang, she derives the information to kill some more by promising that more features of her body would disappear were she to withhold her cooperation.
The second light coat of reflection, thinking to effectively stand up to a hurricane of schoolyard fantasy, comes as a flashback to elucidate the Bride’s escaping being buried alive in Texas (a “Texas funeral”) by Bill’s white trash, but wily, brother, also on hand at the memorable day of love (though, intriguingly, now no longer doing assassinations-for-hire and recognizing, in face of Beatrix’s campaign, “we all deserve to die”), and her killing Bill with her bare hands, a manoeuvre known as “the Five Point Exploding Heart.” The guru of successful fighting she is introduced to by Bill is a Chinese greybeard with adolescent muscles and ant-adolescent priorities—“No sarcasm, no backtalk…” Bill prefaces her big chance with a hitherto lone-wolf master along a sightline that activates (superficially, of course) interpersonal rigors which Beatrix (seemingly the consummate student and consummate warrior) demonstrates, right to the end, never getting the hang of. “When they become old they get lonely.” The boot-camp from hell he puts her through particularly raises the question of attaining to a fluency with material and social obstacles which changes monstrous odds to become favorable to an individual instrumentally to some significant extent a cosmic rather than human force. Thus she bashes her fists to bloody pulp, becomes unable to use her chopsticks to feed herself and is driven (“…if you want to live like a dog…” [eating face-down in a bowl]) to will a transcending dexterity from out of the temptation toward relentment.
The real gain, therefore, for her duel with the one-eyed former nurse (soon to be no-eyed, and flailing about in the vicinity of a deadly animal), is learning that the protagonist’s name is Beatrix Kiddo. Her subsequent anguish at Bill’s implies that, for all her spectacularly twisted nerve and magnificent preparation (both gurus coming up empty in pulling those powers into a fruitful unity—the flawless fighting master also being viciously and childishly disposed toward “Japs,” Americans and women), she’s still a kid, still facing a sensuously hard road far beyond mayhem, but a road deeply bound to an as yet unimagined warfare.
