By Zach Campbell

Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is an interesting return to the arena after an absence of six years.  Revelling in the most outlandish of his previously established grab bag of influences, Tarantino has given us a film that is in turns a chop socky bootleg video, a secret agent reverie, an ‘80s-retro Puma commercial, a love letter to Uma Thurman’s ass, a violent cartoon, a Bressonian fascination with shots of feet, and a retread of various Tarantinoesque tropes (doorbell ringing, car trunks, violent shifts from domestic naturalism to stylized movie madness, and back again).  It is an insomniac channel-surfing, as deliriously fascinating as it is awkward and problematic.

As we learn, in a fragmented nonlinear way of course, Uma Thurman plays an assassin codenamed Black Mamba (the film censors her “real name” the few times it is spoken).  For reasons left unclear in Vol. 1, she was betrayed by her boss, Bill, who had the other members of the Deadly Viper Squad murder her (and several others) in a small Texas chapel on her wedding day.  The background information remains scarce throughout the film, and most screentime is devoted to extreme, cartoonish violence.  In Tarantino’s earlier films, particularly Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, the violence itself is in fact not pervasive in the considerable running times of the films.  In Kill Bill, Vol. 1, it is.

And Tarantino has a few different kinds of violence he likes to work with, too.  Sometimes he likes to disturb, either through agonizing suspense (the ear in Reservoir Dogs), sometimes through shocking transgressions of an otherwise “normal” scene (Bridget Fonda’s demise in Jackie Brown, John Travolta’s death—as well as his freak killing of the prisoner in the car—in Pulp Fiction).  But much of the time the violence is not particularly disturbing, and Tarantino lets the audience take some pleasure in its promise, as he does when Bruce Willis spends time selecting a weapon in the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction. 

In Kill Bill, Vol. 1 most of the first kind of violence is directed at Thurman’s Black Mamba, and is generally presented in short, visually obscure passages (often black-and-white).  The second kind of violence is reserved for Thurman’s vengeance.  What can we infer from this?  For starters, Kill Bill confirms that Tarantino is a moralist.  He’s always setting up audience sympathies and letting them groove on protagonists’ vindication, redemption, and salvation.  Sometimes this can get into prickly territory, such as the homosexual rapists in Pulp Fiction: is it a judgmental portrait of perversity, playing off of leather-bondage gay stereotypes to pit the anxiously heterosexual viewer against the deep dark kinks of Zed’s basement?  I wouldn’t deny it, and it’d be erroneous for anyone who thinks of Tarantino as a serious artist to absolve him of any of these appeals to conventional morality. 

But Tarantino also delights in attacking morality and good taste: he does need his moralism as a pillar, but we can’t reduce his films solely to this pillar.   For Tarantino’s work (his art, if you’re in that camp) is, among other things, largely about the tension between conventional moralistic closure and violent perverse transgressive delight.  Kill Bill, Vol. 1 won’t win any detractors over to Tarantino’s camp (if anything it will give them their best ammo yet), but it provides insight for the viewer willing to play his games and find out what makes him tick.