The key to the treasure is the treasure

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2003)

The ample fun and excitement Kill Bill provides don't result from the fact that it's `about' anything, that its characters have motivations, or that its plot makes sense, but from the way it takes us deep into movies. And, in doing so, it also takes us deeper into the peculiar movie-loving mind of Quentin Tarantino. There are endless references to other movies, most of all the Shaw brothers and Bruce Lee and other martial arts extravaganzas and Sergio Leone. Perhaps more interestingly, since this is the first Tarantino effort where he lets himself go again with his own writing (after the more disciplined exercise of adapting Elmore Leonard in Jackie Brown), Kill Bill contains endless references also to Tarantino's own more personal movies, and particularly to Pulp Fiction.
Kill Bill's star is Uma Thurman, who above all is the most delightful, fun person in Pulp Fiction -- Mia Wallace, the wife of the awesome crime boss, Marsellus Wallace, and Vincent Vega's (John Travolta's) dangerous dream date. Don't think for a minute that there's none of Mia Wallace in The Bride/Black Mamba, Uma's role in Kill Bill. When Black Mamba comes to life and begins the chain of revenges Kill Bill chronicles after being teased by a mosquito into awakening from a four-year coma, she pops up exactly the same way Mia did after she got the hypodermic needle of adrenaline to the heart. It's a direct visual echo.
Of course, Kill Bill is a homage to a different kind of pulp, and it hasn't got the amusing dialogue Pulp Fiction has. But we can see the same thought processes at work in the way Kill Bill is put together. There's a prologue (equivalent to the diner holdup scene with Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) that begins Pulp Fiction, which leads into the background of the wedding murder scene with its stylized Wild West imagery and Sergio Leone overtones.
From then on Tarantino thinks in big setting/action blocks: (1) the hospital sequence where Uma comes to and takes charge of the Pussy Wagon we saw her using in the prologue; (2) the Samurai sword/Sonny Chiba Okinawa sequence where Black Mamba gets her magic, invincible weapon; and finally, (3) the long Tokyo sequence. This is divided into four parts. a) two background sequences on O-ren Ishii/Cottonmouth, first (a) one distanced by discrete anime where we witness O-ren being turned into a killer as a child by being attacked by a pedophile grandparent, second (b) a scene of her with her Yakuza subordinates where she beheads one who objects to being led by a woman who isn't even pure Japanese. This is followed by the two big final sequences of (c) the interior of the restaurant/disco/nightclub where Uma/Black Mamba confronts O-ren's posse and wipes them out, and (d) the exterior snowy garden where she takes on O-ren herself and Vol. 1 comes to a astonishingly peaceful and beautiful end.
It's not only the higgledy-piggledy time sequence that has a lot in common with Pulp Fiction: there are more specific echoes. Besides the "awakening" of Uma, the showdown `in medias res' between Uma and Vernita Green/Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox) which serves as a prologue feels strangely similar to the Kahuna-burger sequence with Travolta and Jackson, the exploded head in the car, and The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) calmly supervising the tidying up of the bloody vehicle at Jimmie's (Tarantino's) house in Toluca Lake. In each case, it's ultra-violence abruptly breaking out in a bland, mediocre suburban setting as professional killers take revenge, with interruptions for brief spurts of terse dialogue. And the blank reaction of Copperhead's pretty little daughter to the mayhem and her mom's extinction reminds one of the small boy in Pulp Fiction who gets the long narrative from Christopher Walken about his grandfather's watch. Kids in Tarantino-land are innocent victims and affect-less onlookers.

Others may delight in the faultless choreography of Tarantino's martial arts sequences. For me the hospital sequence stands out even more brightly. Here again there are elements that rhyme with Pulp Fiction, because the way Uma's character brutally punishes the crude orderly who's been renting out her inert body, stabbing him and bashing his head repeatedly with the door when he falls, and the way she then painstakingly escapes to the Pussy Wagon and rids her nether limbs of `entropy' by sheer patient power of thought, recalls the patient, methodical Butch in the prizefight Zen/Maynard pawnshop sequence, retrieving his watch, escaping his tormentors, freeing Marcellus Wallace to revenge his sexual assault by `getting medieval' on the hillbilly pervert's ass, and then returning to Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) on the commandeered `chopper' -his `Pussy Wagon.'
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is more highly stylized and ritualized homage than Tarantino has ever done before: it's interesting that the greater artistic freedom and budget he has this time has led him, in a way, to restrict himself more.
The movie's idiosyncratic plot sequences fit in with Tarantino's mentality as described in Larissa MacFarquhar's excellent New Yorker magazine article, `The Movie Lover" (October 20, 2003); she emphasizes that Tarantino has an incestuous familiarity with an almost endless quantity of beloved pulp movies. Favorite movie sequences exist in the cyberspace-like limbo of Tarantino's insatiable visual memory as if he had a head full of videotapes hanging half spent and never needing to be rewound. Somehow, somewhere, his plots all mesh, but it's the furiously engaging set pieces that stand out both in his mind and in the movies he makes.
Tarantino is a `movie lover' and there's no irony in his homages. `The problem with the irony charge' against Tarantino, MacFarquhar says, `is that pop culture and life are not separable for Tarantino.' Therefore any homage to pulp is a homage to movies and a homage to life. That granted, Kill Bill becomes life affirming - and also art-affirming. `What is Kill Bill about? is an irrelevant question. The key to the treasure is the treasure. Statements to the effect that Kill Bill is `smart, but.thin' (J. Hoberman), `brilliant' but containing `no story' (Ebert), or worse yet `decadent' and `crap' (Denby) miss the movie's affirmative aspects and try to make it seem cold when it's bubbling with enthusiasm and joie de vivre.