Tarantino's Postmodern Propaganda

Tarantino’s mission, it would seem, is a sewing-up of this fabric of American cinematic violence, with its threads of European and Asian glitter, into a single meaningless quilt, an aestheticized violence which is relevant only to itself, which in fact seeks refuge from criticism in its own hermetic seal, its own self-referentiality, its pretence of internationalism. A movie about movies, a pop-up video about itself, an artwork which, supposedly, is completely disengaged from any political or social process, as the referenced genres are, supposedly, also disengaged.

In Vancouver’s Terminal City Weekly, a supposedly alternative paper, the film reviewer suggested that “as much as you want to criticise it (if you do), it doesn’t matter one whit, because those who offer up criticisms mark themselves as being outside its sphere of comment.” This vision of the film, and film in general, as a circular re-reading and re-issuing of old genres, stars, archetypes and heroes, as a cordoned-off interior of the imagination, contains an attempt to privilege the specifically American, Hollywood, industrial vision, to declare this vision as universal, and thus, to declare all other visions false, outside, “other.” A core and periphery of the imagination. In other words, Kill Bill is postmodern propaganda for U.S. cultural imperialism.

Well, luckily, there are those, like Michael Moore at this year’s Oscars, who remind us that Hollywood is actually a rather substantial industry, and that those on screen and behind the cameras are actually real people, who vote, raise children, and think about war and violence outside the cinema. And that not only is the production of Hollywood films engaged in a real-world political process, but the content of those films is therefore engaged as well.

Tarantino seems to be attempting to rehabilitate Hollywood violence by invoking remote epochs, geographically, politically and artistically, which he declares meaningless except in our visceral aesthetic enjoyment of their recordings. As usual in such nostalgic manipulations, he whitewashes. Violent as Kill Bill is, there is hardly one bit that really disgusts the way a family-massacre sequence in an old Hong-Kong revenge movie would. Even Uma Thurman’s rape in the hospital, suggested and hinted rather than painfully endured like in, say, “Gonin 2,” or most every anime, has little meaning. Her harsh revenge happens almost immediately, and seems to be coincidental to the main storyline. In earlier times, a single brutal rape could form the entire basis of a harsh, tortuous film about chilling revenge. Here, it’s more like a sight gag, a throwaway line. Tarantino’s gender politics are not particularly interesting; Thurman’s character, for instance, is identified only as “The Bride.”

The cartoonish fight sequence, in which dozens and dozens of hitmen are carved up by Uma Thurman, resembles a comic book rather than a real battle. Now that we can see news video of bodies littering the ground in Turkish tourist areas, Iraqi markets and in New York itself, it seems irresponsible to worry about what Quentin is putting on screen in his silly movies (has anyone other than a Tarantino fan warned you about the violence in Kill Bill? Has any such warning been taken seriously?).

But the yellow tracksuit Thurman wears, supposedly an ode to Bruce Lee, suggests the race politics of Kill Bill: she is yellow on the outside, white on the inside. This would be an insult, an epithet, in closed Asian culture; in Kill Bill, one of the villain / heroes, played by Lucy Liu, turns it into a triumph. Her half-American ethnicity is to be considered an asset to Japan, and any Asian who calls her out on this must be killed immediately. In a key moment in the film, Liu turns her attitude around and mocks Thurman for being a white woman playing with a Samurai sword. But she has to eat her words when she is mortally wounded, facing her impending loss in battle, and apologizes to Uma for the racial insult.

Why the focus on race? What is Tarantino driving at? Probably unconsciously, he is setting up a tableau of a very old racial hierarchy. A clear racial pecking order is established, but vocalizing this order is punishable by death: Caucasian, over Asian, over black. Why is Asian-American Liu a fabulously wealthy crime boss, while black Vivica Fox is a middle-class housewife – despite their equal partnership in the all-female assassin squad? Why does Liu fight honourably, even graciously, fabulously, and Bill decides not to murder Thurman in her sleep (“It would lower us”), but then Fox pulls an underhanded trick and tries to shoot Thurman during an informal truce? And she misses from point-blank range, as if the gods of war had cursed her for lack of chivalry, and dies instantly at Thurman’s honourable hand?

It seems there’s an extremely ethereal magic at work in this film, which we can map onto the current political situation. The supposed warrior-race, the Japanese, are powerful evocations of American might, defeated in open battle in World War II. The Samurai code, the honourable duel, is a tradition Americans can handle: the very tradition embodied in the high-noon Western shootout. As long as the Americans win, these systems are perfectly fine; Thurman, who wields a Japanese sword to destroy many Japanese lives, proves that America can beat anyone on the level playing field.

But the “sneak attack,” the ninja, the guerilla, the suicide bomber, these are abhorrent to America. Donald Rumsfeld bristles at comparisons of Iraqis with Vietcong. Though these were the successful tactics of the American revolution, the later Imperial America cannot make use of them, and so they become immoral. Almost the entire US media clucked instantly to compare September 11th with Pearl Harbor, but the more nostalgic Samurai vision of Japan defeated with honour serves Tarantino’s purposes better.

The fact that even the major villains of Kill Bill are superstars, they get sexy music when they enter a room, they get great dialogue, they get major talk-show appearances in the publicity campaign – these are not just marketing tools to squeeze every dollar from the public, they are also moral paradigms. This nostalgia for so-called honourable combat paves over “collateral damage,” conspicuously absent from Kill Bill. The most innocent victim in Kill Bill is, sinisterly, Thurman’s unborn child – the only true innocence, if you believe in original sin and hate a woman’s right to choose – but this was murder, not crossfire. No accidentally-maimed, armless Iraqi boys here.

This conception of violence is a nostalgic lie itself, and the messiness of the genres on which Kill Bill is based doesn’t quite make it to the screen in this version. The moral ambiguity of Woo, the questioning of civilization in the Western, the hollowness of revenge in Bruce Lee epics… Tarantino is more interested in the victory of Americans, the carefully constructed hierarchy of sexy Japanese schoolgirls, motorcycle gangs, urban black American women, and so on, to show a flicker of insight or remorse. He seems only to be rescuing those aspects of these genres which progressives have fought against for so many years, while ditching their more humanistic elements – the true difference of cultures, the pain which violence brings about, the bitter blackness of the heart which a lust for revenge creates.

Revenge in Kill Bill is only a video game cluttered with clichéd iconography.

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FLICK HARRISON is a filmmaker / writer in Vancouver. His digital feature film “Sex, Drugs, Love, Marx…” is available for screening anywhere! See his trailers, articles, and more at armed rabble.org! His column on politics and film appears biweekly on Vive le Canada.

Note: armed rabble.org