Kill Bill Weds The Familiar With The Banal (But The Music Is Cool)
by General Stuff
American aphorist Mason Cooley once wrote, “Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.” Somebody tell Quentin Tarantino.
Kill Bill (volume 1 – wait until February for volume 2, which suggests a fragment of the film makes as much sense as the whole film), Tarantino’s homage to grindhouse cinema, contains plenty of imitation, tightly choreographed and lovingly executed, but very little innovation, unless you consider a pastiche of scenes from genre films of the seventies innovation. The General does not. The General salutes Stanley Kubrick, by comparison.
First things first. Kill Bill is a funhouse of blaxploitation, spaghetti western, and chop sockey conventions, all jeering at the audience in mock celebration. It even references Tarantino’s own films, inserting ads for Red Apple cigarettes, echoing Uma Thurman’s character and dialogue in Pulp Fiction, and catching Lucy Liu’s character in a slo-mo strut with her bodyguards flanking, a la Reservoir Dogs.
The Bride (Uma Thurman), you see, was almost killed on the day of her wedding. After lying comatose for some time (and being raped by truckers who tip the night nurse – a gag Tarantino plays for laughs), The Bride awakens ready for a bloody rampage, seeking vengeance on the people who tried to assassinate her.
You don’t need to know much more of the plot; there really isn’t any. Each scene of the film replicates the look and feel of a particular grindhouse genre. The opening tussle with Vivica A. Fox resembles the conventions and tone of a blaxploitation film; the closing swordfight with Lucy Liu is Tarantino’s version of a Sergio Leone gunfight. Film geeks may get off on playing “name that film,” but for intelligent viewers like The General the splatter of cinematic allusions proves only that Tarantino knows imitation better than innovation.
And don’t even try to explain away Tarantino’s limited talent by casting him in the mould of some form of postmodernism in which imitation is all there is, and the more the merrier. And don’t tell The General (fuck you very much) that grindhouse genre films are supposed to be poorly made and derivative – that’s what makes them so much fun – because The General loves classics like Five Deadly Venoms and Fistful of Dollars, and there’s a difference between them and Kill Bill.
The problem with Kill Bill – and Tarantino’s movies in general – is that they not only partake of genre conventions, they celebrate their complete absence of originality. These are not genre films: They are imitations of genre films. One leaves Kill Bill entertained, for sure, but also wondering: Why didn’t I just rent the originals? I’ve seen this before.
A recent article on Tarantino in the October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker celebrates the very attributes of his films that make them second-rate genre films. Writer Larissa MacFarquhar explains, “One of the reasons that Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second.” Well, no, bitch, that just means The General could write one of his movies. What makes a good filmmaker is that he is a filmmaker first, untalented audience member second. If Hollywood only made films audience members want to see and are capable of making themselves, it would be all amateur porn all the time. While The General loves his porn, he doesn’t consider it “filmmaking.”
Tarantino embodies the gluttonous and indiscriminate consumption of culture that is ruining North America. For Tarantino, watching films doesn’t seem to be an aesthetic experience marked by selection, but rather a fix for an addiction. He doesn’t want films; he needs them.
Why celebrate the mindless imitation of more talented predecessors? Why not celebrate selectivity and innovation instead? If I want to watch Psycho, I don’t scan the shelves of the local Blockbuster for the Gus Van Sant shot-for-shot remake.
Tarantino is to film what P. Diddy is to hip hop. I’ll take Outkast instead, fuck you very much.
Is it any wonder that, as we learn in The New Yorker piece, Tarantino was “a maniacal Brian DePalma fan,” and not “a great fan of Kubrick,” and that the claustrophobia of Reservoir Dogs was inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing? The latter is a remake, I might add.
DePalma is a shameless imitator, a hack who has been sampling Hitchcock and himself for decades now. Carpenter has been making the same film for over twenty years, and like DePalma, Carpenter has more than a passing interest in kitsch, pretentious bad taste. Tarantino follows in this tradition, but as a director I don’t think he has the talent of a DePalma or a Carpenter (Tarantino is a decent writer, which is where he should have stayed).
MacFarquhar describes Tarantino’s aesthetic like this: “He is interested in the phenomenon of what might be called the good-enough movie: the movie that is basically terrible, but just good enough – its characters just lifelike enough, its plot just intelligible enough – to make you care.” Well, if that don’t describe the Hollywood aesthetic, I don’t know what does. The Hollywood culture machine has been churning out “good-enough” movies for years, movies that even their own creators would be ashamed to watch, but movies that barely qualify as trailer snuff, with enough footage to compile a reasonably compelling two-minute commercial, but not enough intelligence and coherence to capture the attention of The General.
Gary Groth made this case years ago in The Baffler (#8, 1996), in an article titled “A Dream of Perfect Reception: The Movies of Quentin Tarantino.” Groth argued that Tarantino’s films (he was writing just after Pulp Fiction) created such an insular world of Hollywood self-referentiality that their success simply mirrored the success of the culture industry ideology, “a symbol of Hollywood Triumphant.” This is the real reason Tarantino is celebrated by would-be movie critics and film school dropouts: He embodies the un-self-conscious regurgitation of commercial cinema; his films are “empty rearrangements of Hollywood banalities.”
Groth’s comments apply to Kill Bill, seven years after he originally wrote them: “Dialogue that goes nowhere; scenes borrowed in their entirety from other movies; endless invocations of TV past: The Tarantino aesthetic is a concentrated and streamlined rendering of the larger aesthetic of the culture industry.”
He even provides examples of the fine line Tarantino walks between plagiarism and homage. Consider this dialogue from Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers, and the dialogue from Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick:
(From the screenplay of Natural Born Killers)
Movie Mickey: Listen to me, Jimmy Dick! I want cash, lots of it, cars, fast cars! And I want it now! Not later, now! I wanna wail, baby, wail!
(From Charley Varrick)
Harmon: I got something I want to hang onto you, Jimmy-Dick! I’ve been waiting all my life to make a score like this, I ain’t waiting no more. I mean, I’m gonna wail! And I’m talking about chicks, cars, clothes, a box at the races, and beefsteak three times a day!
Exactly what does it prove if the writer/director can create shameless copies of film and television scenarios? Is this what makes him, to use The New Yorker’s ambiguous words, “as good a filmmaker as he is”?
The General says (write this down), If you are going to work within a film genre, either create something relatively new, or use imitation to comment on the nature of the genre. The best examples of the latter are Stanley Kubrick and the Coen Brothers. Consider Kubrick’s The Shining (since Kubrick seems to embody the kind of formalism Tarantino dislikes).
The conventional horror film represents “horror” as something external to the protagonists, a foreign invader that must be defeated so the family unity may be restored. Kubrick uses the Freudian notion of “the uncanny” to invert this generic convention. According to Freud, the things that are horrific are inside us but repressed, not external and alien. Freud calls this “the uncanny.” In The Shining, the repressed rage that resides within the family returns through the isolation of the Overlook Hotel. The Oedipal struggle between Jack and Danny represents familial unconscious rage and violence. Kubrick uses the occasion of Jack’s alcoholism and writer’s block to signify the return of the repressed, and the film is littered with horror film archetypes, from the discussion of cannibalism early on to Jack’s cry of “I’ll huff and I’ll puff” as he axes the door to the bathroom in which Wendy is hiding. These archetypes don’t simply exist in a walled-off world of Hollywood clichés: they service Kubrick’s exploration of the horror film genre.
The Coen Brothers have used genre filmmaking to their advantage on many occasions, testing the boundaries of the detective genre (The Big Lebowski) and film noir (The Man Who Wasn’t There), for example. Often in Coen Brothers movies it is the clash of genres that creates comedy, or reflection on generic conventions.
Unlike Kubrick or the Coens, Tarantino offers no such innovation. He trots out staple characters and subjects them to familiar treatment, occasionally offering some wry dialogue, interesting casting, or evocative musical selections, to add a scent of the original to what is otherwise just the daydream of a video store clerk without a vision of his own.
9:21:20 PM 
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