Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino is the ultimate Mr. Pop Culture Head, which for me (snobbery alert!) is a damning title. I have no problems with pop culture per se, or with film culture; I have problems if they are all you expose yourself to. In the pop culture hall of mirrors, we get reflections of reflections. Camille Paglia once complained that while earlier generations of rock musicians studied art and poetry, the new generation simply absorbs the earlier generation; actual knowledge is at an ever farther remove. It's like that with Tarantino. An earlier director such as, say, Douglas Sirk, knew "high culture," history, philosophy at an intimate level; Tarantino knows Sirk. When Tarantino talks about "mythology," which he will do, it is quite clear that he only knows about mythology in the refracted forms of Superman comics and spaghetti westerns and such. Of the source materials and theories of mythology, he knows nothing (or close to it). The danger is that his fans will think that what someone like Quentin Tarantino knows is all that there is to know.

I dismissed Kill Bill Volume One in a sentence, and later added a note about a particularly lame narrative strategy I took exception to. Kill Bill Volume Two is an improvement on Volume One (or, completing it, raises the whole a notch or two), but of lame narrative strategies there are, unfortunately, still plenty. The "super truth serum" that crops up in the final confrontation between The Bride and Bill is a very lazy trick. From my theater seat, Tarantino's besetting sin in Kill Bill lies in his failing to make me believe in and accept the terms of the "world" he boasts about creating in the making-of featurette -- a basic "suspension of disbelief" problem, in short.

The gears of this machine don't mesh properly. If Uma Thurman's The Bride is so damn smart, how can she allow herself to be so easily bested by Michael Madsen's Budd? Or, if there to more to Budd than meets the eye, which is plausible, what is he doing eating humble pie as a bouncer in Barstow? And so on: I won't run out the possible catalogue of WTFs. But there are dozens of them. And the "rules" of the Kill Bill world seem to change from scene to scene. (I am genuinely glad that it is not as easy to pluck out people's eyeballs and stop their heart with five fingertips in our world. There would be bodies on every street.)

A key to the problem is discernible in Tarantino-the-raconteur's over-frequent use of the word "cool." He collects bits from all over for their coolness, not for their usefulness. The theory seems to be that if you cram the maximum possible number of cool recyclings into one movie, you will wind up with the coolest possible movie. But such is not the case. Tarantino enjoys addition -- this plus this plus this -- but is less enthusiastic about and less good at subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Kill Bill Volume Two does offer an opening sequence, the bridal rehearsal massacre, in Tarantino's best manner, with the camera (always curiously sentient in QT films) taking a pass on showing us what then becomes offscreen violence, as happens famously more than once in Reservoir Dogs. That strategy was effective then and it is effective now. I would never deny that Tarantino is an immensely talented visual director (or a clever concocter of dialogue); I just wish his sensibility matched his skills. Tarantino is also a sensitive director of actors: Thurman, Madsen, and a devilish Darryl Hannah are quite good here, and David Carradine, given the plum part of Bill in part because of his own weight of pop culture associations (Kung Fu), rises to the occasion with a wily and compelling performance. I don't "like" the conception of Bill the death-master, who is a very movie-ish character, an aging alpha male living off the fumes of his own bullshit. But you can see where Tarantino would identify with such a character, and Carradine certainly makes the most of him.