Kill Bill (and other past work)

By training, I am a specialist in American literature, not in cultural studies. My best scholarly work has been on African American literature, and when I have delved into less traditional sorts of works associated with cultural studies, it has usually had something to do with representations of race in American culture.

This blog is mostly going to reflect my ongoing observations of cultural (and particularly pop-cultural) specimens as they present themselves to me--not looking back, but looking around at what's happening right now. It's meant to be a blog, not a repository of previous scholarship. And, once the class begins in January, it will also reflect my students' ongoing observations and analyses of the surrounding culture.

To get things rolling today, however, I'm going to post a few highlights of my past work. These are based on conference papers I've delivered that either are not really publishable (due to being out of date, as in "Fear of a Black President," or because they pretty well tap out at conference-paper length) or that I don't think I'm going to get around to publishing. I'd rather put them here than just have them sit around on my hard drive.

That said, I realize that you probably don't have that much interest in reading summaries of my old conference papers. No hard feelings there. If you're interested, please read (and feel free to comment!), but if not, you have plenty of choices on the Web, like failblog, for your amusement.

For those who are still here, I'm going to touch base with three samples of previous work:

• "Kill Bill, Art, God, and Other Things That May or May Not Exist"
• "Citizen Kane and Race"
• "Fear of a Black President"

First, one of my favorite things I've ever done, "Kill Bill, Art, God, and Other Things That May or May Not Exist." I came up with this late one night (insomniac) as I was watching the DVD of Kill Bill, Part Two. I delivered the paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference a couple of years ago. Here's the abstract:

Abstract:
Kill Bill, Art, God, and Other Things That May or May Not Exist

Making Kill Bill, Parts 1 and 2, Quentin Tarantino has said, was an attempt to find out if there is any limitation to what he can accomplish in film, to see “if my talent has a ceiling.”[1] This paper explores the religious themes and motifs of Kill Bill, finding within its stylistic flourishes and frenetic references a meditation on human suffering and whether or not it can be overcome. With its exploration of sin, discipleship, death and rebirth, the film suggests that the only escape from the world’s endless cruelty and pain is a sort of studied transcendence which it codes as, at once, artistic and religious. And, if filmmaking is the religion suggested by Kill Bill, the only means of making sense of a chaotic and destructive world, then Tarantino (whose self-conscious artistic presence can be identified in every scene) is this world’s self-appointed God.

Of course, my aim is not to argue that Tarantino is a directing “God” or to resuscitate auteur theory, but to explore how Tarantino’s conspicuous gestures of auteurism, coupled with a religious motif running through both films, explain its employment of violence as spectacle. What commentary is implied by the highly aestheticized, ritualistic violence in the films? Rather than a traditional ethical response that might regard the violence as culturally harmful, or a detached critical assessment that finds its moral impact beside the point, I argue that Kill Bill is best interpreted as a commentary on—and enactment of—various philosophical positions concerning the nature of art and religious belief.

As Dave Eggers has written of Lorrie Moore, Tarantino plays “God to [his] characters’ Job, throwing at them every conceivable calamity or handicap. In exchange, they get the great lines.”[2] In the closing scenes of Part 2, Bill’s Nietzschean parable of Superman and Clark Kent—making the point that people are either killers or not, and that their actions are determined by this status—is resisted by The Bride, who implies a more traditional ethical world view when she articulates her disbelief that Bill can betray her. Ultimately, the film rather daringly suggests that neither ethical perspective is tenable in itself; instead, Kill Bill represents an argument that art and religion—modes of understanding that potentially contain various, contradictory philosophies—are our only possible sources of insight into an otherwise dismal, Hobbesian life.

In comparison to other violence-infused works, including Tarantino’s previous films, Kill Bill posits an ultimately orderly world, one that seems chaotic only because its underlying meaning is rarely revealed to us. (That violence is disproportionately enacted upon, and by, The Bride—who in the words of one character “must suffer to her last breath”—points toward a newly gendered response to a filmic tradition of “men … who can only find redemption through pain.”[3]) Rather than capricious, violence in Kill Bill suggests its practitioners’ adherence to a moral order that, at best, they vaguely understand, but which can be accessed—if at all—through an artistic effect that the film construes as something like a religious experience. Thus, in the film’s final moment, The Bride utters words of gratitude that seem equally appropriate to a performing artist acknowledging applause and a religious adherent at prayer: “Thank you, thank you.”

[1] Interview with David Ansen, Newsweek 13 Oct. 2004: 67.
[2] Rev. of Moore, Birds of America, Salon 2 Oct. 1998.
[3] Manohla Dargis, quoted in Kent L. Brinthall, “Tarantino’s Incarnational Theology: Reservoir Dogs, Crucifixions and Spectacular Violence,” in Crosscurrents 54 (2004): 66.