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kill bill
OK, time for the big Kill Bill writeup (contains mild spoilers):
As expected, this movie is not about people, it is about other movies. Most of the characters have no interiority whatsoever, and those that do only have the bare minimum necessary to create pathos or to advance the ruthless machine of the plot. This is a questionable tactic, especially when dealing with a film that features members of another race—I have long believed that racism in representation begins at the exact moment when an artist denies interiority to the racial "others" that they represent, and indeed, some have condemned Kill Bill for what they perceive as its racism.
It's worth noting that Tarantino is by no means the only filmmaker of recent years to deny minority characters their interiority: one need only look to Lost In Translation or some of the films of Wes Anderson to see other examples. To me, these other examples are more troublesome because those other filmmakers don't share Tarantino's larger project of exploring genre, or his repeated explicit underlining genre as artifice, an end to which the clever usage of stereotype is in fact the very means. It's true that when we watch Uma Thurman mow down eighty-eight Yakuza, those Yakuza aren't granted full personhood—but the whole set-piece during which this occurs is patently fantastic. Nothing in it bears any resemblance to a recognizable reality. The characters (inasmuch as they are "characters" at all, I'm more prone to describe them as "signifiers") reference not real-world Asians, or real-world assassin-women, for that matter, but rather these same signifiers as they appear in other films. And in this I think Tarantino is enormously successful.
This film also continues the project of exploring the cultural politics of authenticity, a project begun in earnest in Jackie Brown. Asianness is Kill Bill's version of Jackie Brown's blackness: the exotic ethnicity that has the power to connote authenticity. Witness the scene where "The Bride" is in Okinawa: when she poses as a tourist just learning Japanese she comes across as flaky, but when she reveals that she is actually fluent she seems serious and sober; hard-core, authentic. Another example would be the Hattori Hanzo katana she attains, which has the literal stamp of authenticity upon it. Etc etc.
Jackie Brown takes a naturalistic approach to critiquing the notion that authenticity can be derived through cultural affiliation. Kill Bill takes the opposite approach: critiquing it by highlighting the lunacy of deriving our sense of the authentic from something that is so clearly artifice. By straight-facedly amping up the cartoony elements of the film, Tarantino makes it impossible for us to use the film to shore up our sense of our own authenticity. The metacommentary happening in the film functions the same way: by casting Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo, it makes it difficult for us to see Hanzo as a "real" Asian savant. We look at Hanzo but see Chiba, star of a hundred kung-fu movies.
(Jonathan Rosenbaum, of the Chicago Reader, treats Kill Bill as a response to Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, and I think the contrast between the films is fruitful: I love Jarmusch as a director, but I think his use of Asian and African-American culture as markers of authenticity is far less complicated, far less critical, than Tarantino's.)
Inasmuch as they are films about "Asianness" and blackness, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown are also both films about Caucasianness. Kill Bill refers repeatedly to Uma Thurman's blond hair and blue eyes; at one point Lucy Liu refers to her explicitly as a "Caucasian girl who likes to play with samurai swords." Swap "boy" for "girl" and Tarantino emerges. And I'm beginning to think that Tarantino's ultimate point is that the defining feature of Caucasian identity is its capacity to appropriate, its ability to select from all available genres. (Consider Tarantino's oft-praised ability to create eclectic soundtracks.) Perhaps Tarantino sees a chameleonic nature to be, in fact, the only identity that rings "authentic" in an market-driven, postmodern, imperialistic society, a kind of "meta-authenticity." (It is worth pointing out here that part of why a lot of people (myself included) admire Japanese film and music is less because of its authenticity and more because of its appropriative qualities: it may not be an accident that Kill Bill prominently features the 5,6,7,8s, a Japanese girl-rock band.)
This of course raises a whole set of thorny questions about who has the power to appropriate, but the crazy network of cross-cultural appropriation is material for a whole nother set of posts.
Anyway. I hope the second volume of Kill Bill will be as interesting as this first one: I am especially interested to see what Tarantino is planning to do with the Michael Madsen character, who briefly appears in Kill Bill Vol. 1 looking exactly like Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, down to the cheap suit and everything, leaving me wondering whether Tarantino was preparing to meta-reference his own oeuvre, which, as you can probably tell, would thrill me. Labels: media commentary, race |
Monday, October 20, 2003
3:23 PM
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