Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (24 page)

This all may be more a confession about my own neuroses than about Tarantino and his film, but if this interpretation holds any water, then in
Kill Bill Volume 2
we would expect Tarantino to perform the Oedipal act by having The Bride kill Bill, the father. And this is in fact exactly what happens, as if Oedipus, directing the play himself, had Jocasta (mother and lover simultaneously) kill Laius in his stead.

As we saw, in
Kill Bill Volume 1
, the Bride acquired the power necessary to reap her revenge on Bill and the DiVAS, but she acquired it in a way that alienated her from her true, feminine nature. She took up a Hattori Hanzo sword, a masculine symbol of power, indicating that the way a woman gains power is to become like a man, but in being so empowered, in becoming like a man, she is apparently psychically deformed, alienated from her true nature as a woman. Thus all the women in
Kill Bill Volume 1
are powerful, but they’re also all psychotic.

In
Kill Bill Volume 2
, Tarantino fulfills the Oedipal promise by having The Bride kill Bill, the father. But before she can complete the act, two things have to happen: First, The Bride has to reject the masculine notion of power and become empowered as a woman, thus reconnecting herself to her true nature. Second, Bill, the father, godlike in
Kill Bill Volume 1
, must be humanized, must be turned into a man, in order to be killed.

In
Kill Bill Vol. 2
, we return to the Bride as we left her. She’s still a Samurai, and she’s coming after Budd. As it turns out, Budd is
Bill’s brother, and like the other men in
Kill Bill Volume 1
(except Bill), he’s emasculated. He’s given up his Hanzo sword (his symbolic penis), is a drunk, and we see him taken down a notch by his boss at the “titty bar” where he works.

As The Bride hunts down Budd in his trailer, music from Sergio Leone’s
A Fistful of Dollars
plays, indicating that what she doesn’t yet realize is that this (unlike
Kill Bill Volume 1
) is primarily a Western and the rules have changed. Her sword is no good here, and so Budd gets the best of her with a shotgun blast of rock salt. He then takes the sword from her, divesting her of the earlier symbol of power, and offers to sell it to Elle. On the phone to Elle, Budd refers to The Bride as a cowgirl. So if she’s a cowgirl, and this is a Western—a Sergio Leone inspired Western—then The Bride is the hero, she’s playing Clint Eastwood’s character, the Man with No Name. That is, she’s the Woman with No Name. Thus, while she had many aliases—Black Mamba, The Bride, Arlene—up to this point she’s had no real name of her own, no real identity.

In this new milieu, and without her sword, The Bride is powerless, and Budd proceeds to bury her alive. At the grave site, Budd asks the gravedigger if she, The Bride, isn’t the “sweetest little piece of blond pussy” he’s ever seen, indicating that she’s once again returned to pussy, receptacle, that without her symbol of masculine power she’s helpless. About to be nailed into the coffin, The Bride struggles, and Budd threatens to burn her eyes out with mace. He gives her the option of the mace in the eyes, or a flashlight, but either way, he tells her, she’s going into the ground. She chooses the flashlight, light being a traditional symbol of enlightenment, wisdom, and knowledge, and refuses to be blinded.

Budd buries the Bride in the grave of Paula Schultz, a reference to
The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz
, a 1968 comedy starring Elke Sommer and the cast of
Hogan’s Heroes
. The heroine is an East German athlete who dares to wear miniskirts and ultimately escapes to West Germany. Thus the reference brings into play the East-West dichotomy that so important in
Kill Bill
, as well as questions and symbols of masculinity and femininity (there’s also cross-dressing in the movie), which are also crucial to the film.

Inside the coffin, and under the ground, The Bride goes on a mystical journey, in the form of a flashback for us, to visit the Kung Fu master, Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). In front of a camp-fire, during former happier times, Bill plays the flute and tells the Bride a story about how the mythical Pai Mei received an insult from a Shaolin monk, and how Pai Mei repaid the insult by killing the entire order of monks. This is all nicely self-referential, given that David Carradine’s character on the TV show
Kung Fu
was himself a Shaolin monk (and of course played the flute). This foreshadows the fact that the Bride will ultimately use the skills and techniques she acquires from Pai Mei to kill Bill. Then we see Bill take the Bride to Pai Mei’s temple. The master has agreed to give her training, despite the fact that he despises Americans, Caucasians, and especially women.

Upon first meeting her, Pai Mei mocks The Bride’s ability with the sword. He then forces her to learn to smash her hand through a thick piece of wood from just a few inches away. The process is painful, and her hand is bruised, bloody and nearly useless for everyday tasks like using chop sticks. But under his cruel tutelage, what the master teaches her is that her power and strength lie not in the sword, but rather in her own hands. In other words, she learns that she doesn’t have to take up the sword—the symbol of masculinity—in order to be empowered. She can have strength and power without denying her true nature; she doesn’t have to reject her femininity, and thus doesn’ t have to be psychically deformed.

Having made this mystical journey and learned this lesson, The Bride uses her hands, her own natural power, to break out of the coffin and escape the grave, as blatant a metaphor for death and resurrection as they come. The Bride has been reborn or resurrected and can now both wield power
and
be a woman and a mother, something she previously thought impossible. Because of this transformation, because she realizes and connects to her true nature, she now gains her identity and can be named.

Back at Budd’s trailer, Elle has arrived with a suitcase full of money to purchase The Bride’s Hanzo sword. Budd tells her of
the Bride’s fate and hands over the sword, but when he goes to count the money a black mamba snake (which is The Bride’s codename, remember) appears from within the suitcase and bites him on the face. Elle collects the money and phones Bill to tell him that his brother is dead.

During that phone call, Elle uses The Bride’s name for the first time. Previously, whenever anyone tried to name her, to use her name, the sound was bleeped out. Now, after the Bride’s resurrection and transformation, Elle speaks her name: Beatrix Kiddo. The joke (and surprise) is that “Kiddo” was what Bill had been calling her all along. In other words, what we thought was an endearment turns out to be (or becomes) her real name. It’s as if Bill, like God, has the power of
logos
, the word, and the ability to name things.

When Beatrix returns to Budd’s trailer, she and Elle fight, and during the battle, Beatrix spots Budd’s own Hanzo sword sitting idle in a golf bag. The two women then face off, swords drawn, as if this will be another epic clash of Samurais, of the sort that we witnessed in
Kill Bill Volume 1
. Staring each other down, Elle reveals to Beatrix how it is that she lost her eye. It turns out that she, too, trained with Pai Mei and had the temerity to insult him, so he plucked it out. She then reveals that for that injury, she killed Pai Mei by poisoning him.

The two of them cross swords, but, again, this isn’t the Orient any longer, so there is no sword fight. Rather, Beatrix plucks out Elle’s other eye, drops it on the floor and squishes it with her foot. Elle is now completely blind, symbolic of her blindness to her servitude to a masculine conception of power, and to Bill, her master.

When the Bride first encountered Pai Mei, Bill was her master as well (she was enslaved to him) and then Pai Mei became her master. He, however, gave her the tools to escape her servitude, and now, especially since he is dead, she has no master. She serves no one but herself, having reconnected to her femininity and her true nature. She is now ready to confront Bill.

Kill Bill Volume 2
erases any doubt that Bill is indeed the father that Tarantino is symbolically killing in his Oedipal play. He’s the father of Beatrix’s child, and at the wedding rehearsal
Beatrix tells her fiancé that Bill is her father as well. But in
Kill Bill Volume 1
, we’re presented with a child’s view of the father—he’s godlike, removed, an ever-present threat; and as Tyler Durden so astutely reminds us, if our fathers were our model for God, and our fathers abandoned us, then we have to accept the possibility that God hates us.
¹²²

But, remember, when Nietzsche said that God is dead,
⁶
he didn’t mean that an actual being, the Almighty, the First Cause, an omniscient, omnipotent creator, had actually been killed. Rather, he meant that the idea, the institution of God ceased to have any meaning or relevance for us, because we simply couldn’t believe the fiction any longer. Similarly, killing the father means killing the father’s power over us, and that means that we have to stop viewing him as God, we have to reject that fiction, that misinterpretation.

And this is
exactly
what Tarantino does to the father in
Kill Bill Volume 2
. Bill, the father, God, is completely humanized. He’s turned into a mortal. Whereas in the earlier film, we barely saw him, and never saw his face, he just existed as an omnipresent threat, and a kind of puppet-master, pulling the strings of his DiVAS; now he’s locally and physically present as a man, a mortal. Now he has a brother; he plays the flute; he tells stories; he gets beaten up by his master, Pai Mei; he plays games with his daughter; his heart can be broken (and this is literally what kills him); he even makes sandwiches, going so far as to cut off the crust.

In fact, Bill becomes
so
human in
Kill Bill Volume 2
that we start to sympathize with him, almost to the point where we don’t want to see him die. He no longer seems worthy of killing, no longer seems to deserve to die. We know now that he never knew his real father, and that his own father figure—Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks)—is a pimp who cuts women’s faces when they’re disobedient. In other words, we see that his father is as big a prick as he (our father) is, and thus that his childhood was no doubt as perverse and dysfunctional as our own. This is that transforming moment when, as an adult, you recognize your old man’s frailties and his shortcomings. You
see him having trouble getting out of the chair, or see him drunk and acting stupid. You overcome your hatred and resentment and start feeling sorry for him. This is part of what it means to mature, to become an adult, and to see your father for what and who he is. It’s then that he loses his power over you. Symbolically, as the godlike threat, he’s dead. And now that Bill, the father, has been humanized, de-mythologized, he’s vulnerable and can be killed.

When Beatrix finally tracks down Bill, she discovers that her now four-year-old daughter is alive and that Bill has been raising her, playing daddy to her. Beatrix tells Bill that she ran away from him when she found out she was pregnant, believing that she had to choose between being an assassin (that is, powerful, which is part of her essential nature—Bill says she’s a natural born killer) and being a mother. But now, since her resurrection, since she’s found her identity, she’s realized that she can be strong and powerful as a woman; she doesn’t have to be empowered as a man. This is nicely symbolized by the fact that she now wears a skirt, and by the fact that she doesn’t need the sword to kill Bill.

Indeed, their final clash begins with sword play, but Beatrix’s sword is quickly flung away in the fight, and as Bill jabs his sword towards her, she sheaths it in the case she’s still holding. If the sword has all along symbolized the penis and the power it represents, then the sheath is symbolically the vagina, and consequently the pussy overcomes the cock in this fight, the woman,
as woman
, defeats the man.

Beatrix then uses the “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” on Bill, a move which Pai Mei taught her, but didn’t teach Bill. She touches him at five pressure points on his body, and as soon as he takes five steps his heart explodes, and he dies. She can now reclaim her daughter, and become a mother, as herself, as the strong, powerful woman that she always was.

So Tarantino succeeds in killing the father, but not, like Oedipus, unknowingly and tragically. Rather, by remaking his childhood and cleverly empowering his wife-mother to do the job for him—and thus recognizing her as the powerful, central
figure that she is—he escapes the unhealthy, self-destructive consequences. There’s no need to blind himself. His therapy session has succeeded .
¹²³

BENCE NANAY and IAN SCHNEE

 

 

 

One might easily think that Nietzsche—a philosopher constantly at odds with religion who urged his readers to transcend value judgments of good and evil—would be right at home in the morally ambiguous universe of Quentin Tarantino. Aren’t Tarantino’s films full of the violence and moral-suspending motivations that an everything-is-permitted Nietzschean would rush to the Cineplex for?
Reservoir Dogs
is a film about violence for personal gain.
Kill Bill Volume 1
and
Kill Bill Volume 2
are films about violence for revenge.
Natural Born Killers
and
True Romance
are films about violence and love-redemption. If one looks back at all the reviews of
Pulp Fiction
from 1994 and 1995, “violent” is the one word they are all compelled to use in characterizing the film—even though, as Tarantino likes to point out, most of the violence occurs offscreen.