critical notice: Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Quentin Tarantino is a fanboy idol sans pareil; the fact that I had until now never experienced one of his movies meant that my geek creds were in serious jeopardy. So while we were back home in the other Washington this past weekend I managed to persuade several family members into seeing Kill Bill.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret the fact that my mother-in-law enjoyed it more than I did.

The basic plot is the archetypal revenge story, lifted without substantial alteration from innumerable samurai flicks and Eastwood westerns. The main twist—the vengeful warrior is a girl—by now is more zeitgeist than novelty (see also: Buffy, Charlie's Angels [21st century version], and the bloody awful The Quick and the Dead). So Tarantino's mark must be made in the execution, the flash, the shock, the layered pop culture references, and, above all, the style.

Whatever. Certainly he knows how to put together a scene, and there were some amazingly beautiful sequences, such as a duel by blade in a wintry Japanese garden (well, beautiful up until one of the principals loses something she will sorely miss). But these were outweighed by some of the most hideous acts of barbarism I've ever witnessed onscreen. At least part of the reason why the backstory for Lucy Liu's character was rendered in anime must have been that a live action version would have guaranteed the movie an NC-17 rating.

Of course I know that Tarantino's taste for nihilistic violence is supposed to be interpreted as satire, that if you get below the surface, lay back and enjoy it, that it's all actually funny. And yes, (very) occasionally the film was hilarious in ways that outside a cinematic context would be horrifying. But satire or not, nihilism is still nihilism, in the same way that, during the Achtung Baby period, Bono's faux sexual posturing while in the character of Macphisto/The Fly was still sexual posturing, even if he wasn't getting it on with groupies after the show. I dunno, somehow it seems that satire is supposed to have a point, not just be a smug wink at your audience over your shared über-cleverness.

So what exactly is Tarantino's point? Tribute to his own influences, certainly: martial arts films, both Japanese and Chinese; the original Star Trek; a smattering of the aforementioned Charlie's Angels, The Godfather, and Monty Python (note to Q: the blood geysering thing gets old real quick). I'm sure that I missed more that I listed. Yet beyond such fanboy Gnosticism, however, the work is formless. Building one's oeuvre with such thin gruel is not really that far removed from the juvenile wordgames of academic postmodernists: everything becomes an exercise in social construction. In the end it seems that Kill Bill is a movie about nothing.

But will I see Vol. 2? Yeah, probably.

UPDATE: San Francisco Chronicle movie review Mick LaSalle has a similar reaction:

Once it was possible to assume that Tarantino's pop culture references were an ironic critique on the barrenness of media-age culture, but there's no mistaking it now: Tarantino's work is not a commentary on the barrenness. It is the barrenness.

LaSalle also has a few choice words about Tarantino's reinterpretation of the standard schoolgirl fantasy. (Contains spoilers; link courtesy CT's Film Forum.)