OT: While I understand why Spike Lee would take objection to what he believes Django Unchained's premise to be... criticizing Django for being a mindless spaghetti western would be like criticizing Spec Ops: The Line for being a mindless CoD-style shooter.
BrotherRool said:
When you talked about Tarantino using genres to heighten aspects of his own films, you flashed up Kill Bill, would anyone like to explain to me what was going on in Kill Bill? There's so much I#ve missed/failed to understand when watching these films
Holy shit I ended up writing way more than I intended. But yeah, I think there's a lot to dissect. While Kill Bill does have plenty of issues from a feminist perspective (the male gaze in that movie is off the charts), a lot of it is made up of conventions from Asian genre films recontextualized in a feminist light to subvert/defy what "should" happen in a Western film with this sort of plot.
On a subtextual level, a female character in a Western film typically would shed her femininity/sexuality and appropriate the trappings of masculinity to achieve her ends. But the film's conclusion would generally have her reintegrated into the patriarchal power structure (generally by giving her a male love interest) or killed. (Eg, Enough, where the female lead kills her abusive husband and winds up in a relationship with an old boyfriend, or Ms. 45, where a rape victim goes from targeted vengeance to senseless spree-killing until she is killed by another woman.) Neither one of these things happens in Kill Bill.
Beatrix is
already the person she needs to be to accomplish her goals, but her mission
doesn't necessitate neutralizing her femininity. The first two people she kills (chronologically) are her potential and her actual rapist, respectively, and the last is her daughter's father. Her motherhood is an omnipresent theme, but at the same time, it's not her driving motivation. (She doesn't know her child is alive until they meet.) Hints at this are present throughout both movies... for instance, the sheriff's infantilization of her ("little blood-spattered angel, who'd wanna shoot her, she's so pretty," etc) is met with her involuntarily spitting in his face, after which he retorts by offhandedly referring to her as a "cocksucker." There's Buck, not much else to say there. Pai Mei, Budd, and the Mexican pimp all talk down to her (at least initially) because she's a woman. The driving theme being that although she has appropriated male symbols of power (Hanzo's sword, Bruce Lee's jumpsuit), she
never sheds her femininity.
Both these ideas are best exemplified in one of Bill's last monologues. Not only is Beatrix the person she needs to be at the start of the movie, she
always was her whole life. Bill's whole argument is that she's a "natural-born killer" who, upon discovering she was pregnant, tried to hide her true nature a la Superman.
Hell, I'd argue the wedding massacre is an explicit rejection of the "strong female lead subserves a male love interest" ending. If you imagine the flashbacks as a conceptual Vol 0, its story arc would go like this: Beatrix becomes Bill's lover and employee, trains under Pai Mei. She does a bunch of assassin-type stuff. Then she discovers she's pregnant and decides to quit the life just as the Korean woman with the shotgun comes to kill her. Beatrix spares the woman, gets her to leave by telling her she's pregnant, and plans to settle down as a housewife. Bill comes to her wedding rehearsal and on the porch promises he won't interfere. The "he's my father" lie leads to a symbolic handing-off to her new husband and life. The end. This would make the wedding massacre the first action in Vol 1, as it is. (Also, Vernita Green is the first person Beatrix is depicted killing, a character who did the exact same thing as Beatrix in our hypothetical Vol 0.) Wedding massacres are common openings in HK revenge flicks, giving the male lead a motivation to do what he does in his movie. Here, that genre motif is taken and used to say something totally different.
Beatrix's situation is somewhat similar to the lead in a movie (based on a manga) called Lady Snowblood. In that movie, a woman is raped by several men. She kills one of the rapists and goes to jail for it. There, she seduces a guard to conceive a child, then after giving birth to a daughter, she tells her fellow inmates to raise the child to get revenge and dies. That character (Yuki) is similar to Beatrix in that she too is explicitly a "natural-born killer," having been conceived and raised for that task. (None of this is accidental: O-Ren Ishii was heavily based on Yuki. The fight in the snow borrows visually from Lady Snowblood. And the telling of O-Ren's backstory through comics was paying homage to Lady Snowblood's telling Yuki's backstory through frames of the original manga.)
While Asian films don't have the same problems with women avenging their honor while remaining women, revenge movie protagonists do tend to destroy themselves in the process. (That saying, "When setting out for revenge, dig two graves"? Western audiences tend to interpret it as meaning "don't set out for revenge." In its original context, it's more along the lines of helpful advice: avenging your honor is worth the sacrifice, and you should be prepared to accept that fact.) Kill Bill also rejects
that genre convention. Beatrix is efficient, remorseless, and above all else, she remains completely intact as a person to the very end.
(Trivia: Kill Bill also draws a lot from Lone Wolf and Cub, also based on a manga. That movie's setup is about a ronin avenging his wife's murder and his disgrace, while training his son. Kill Bill, Beatrix is essentially avenging her own murder. That movie was recut into Shogun Assassin for American audiences. The GZA sampled it on Liquid Swords. Fellow Wu-Tang member the RZA did a lot of Kill Bill's music. The movie Beatrix watches with Bibi before she kills Bill is Shogun Assassin.)
Also, couple interesting notes not really related to all that. IIRC, the only named characters depicted killing anyone in both movies are women. Beatrix kills a ton, obv. O-Ren kills a few people, Elle kills Budd and Pai Mei, Gogo kills the "do you wanna fuck me" guy. Bill and Budd both attempt to kill Beatrix but fail, and the wedding party massacre is never actually shown. And... in the first Kill Bill, Beatrix kills a ridiculous number of people, but never gets to Bill. In the second, she literally kills no one except Bill. Budd and (possibly) Elle are killed not by
the Black Mamba, but
a black mamba.
