Teatro Triste del Clown

I’ll try to keep this from reading like a paper for a Popular Culture seminar.

One of the complaints I keep reading about about Kill Bill is that it is somehow representative of morality going out of films. I couldn’t disagree more. I think Kill Bill, like all of Tarentino’s films, is thoroughly grounded in a world with a strict moral code. In Tarentino’s world, God is in his heaven and takes an interest in the lives of the heroes.

I think this is most clear in Pulp Fiction, where Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules goes through something of a spiritual transformation after a rain of bullets fails to kill him. He announces an intention to make a change in his life. His partner, John Travolta’s Vincent Vega, refuses to make a change in his life and, of course, pays for it. No more details for those of you who wish to watch it one day, but have not.

Redemption is a major theme in Tarentino’s work. In each of the film’s he’s written and directed, characters with a past of questionable ethics are forced to make choices that, ultimately, lead to their destruction or redemption - sometimes, as is the case in Resevoir Dogs, both.

Kill Bill, when seen as a whole, is no exception. Uma Thurman’s Bride is literally reborn in the film. It is no spoiler to say that she was left for dead, a bullet in her head, but manages to return and seek revenge after four years in a coma. That she survives and comes back at all is a Tarentino-esque miracle on the same order of Jules and Vincent surviving a hail of bullets in Pulp Fiction. That she is shot in a church is, I’m sure, no coincidence.

Revenge, of course, is not considered to be an especially moral thing. These days we have, in theory, courts to take care of the business of righting wrongs. However, in the world of the kung fu movie (or the western) there were no courts that could possiblely right those wrongs. They are lawless worlds, where villains make the rules until a hero fighting for a just cause rises up to take on the villains.

Tarentino has created a sub-culture in his films of characters who cannot reach out to the law to right the wrongs they suffer. The Bride is set up as a character with a righteous cause - these people killed her baby and her fiance. Who would not want revenge for the murder of one’s child? She is, due to her status as an outlaw, unable to appeal to the law for justice. Ergo, she seeks it outside of the legal system.

At least one of the characters she is coming to kill recognizes that she is behaving in a just way: Budd, Michael Madson’s laconic “titty bar” bouncer, comments along the lines of “that girl deserves her revenge and we deserve to die.” He adds, “but then again, so does she.”

Revenge stories are, classically, little morality plays steeped in karma: you do something wrong and it will come back to haunt you. The Bride was a murderer and, thus, “died” a violent death that also claimed her child, friends and fiance. She spent four years in a coma being regularly raped and whored out by a male nurse (”I’m Buck and I like to fuck.”). She returns, like the wrath of God, to rid the earth of a scourge - Bill and his Deadly Viper assassination squad. An assassin, she is reborn a mother and is the instrument that punishes those who deserve it.

Christian morality? Not that Christians would admit to. Never the less, there is a kind of fronteir morality evident in the films of Tarentino that is immediatly recognizable to anyone who is the least bit familiar with film history.

Oh, and boobies.