Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (13 page)

Elle isn’t much better. During Elle’s face-off with Beatrix, she tells her that she killed Beatrix’s former master. A look of terror crosses Beatrix’s face. Surely whoever was strong enough to kill Pai Mei must be the best warrior of them all. When Beatrix learns that Elle killed her master by poisoning his fish heads, however, the fear dissipates and she knows she can certainly take anyone who would stoop to that level of cowardice.

The theory that these assassins seem to take themselves as acting in accordance with is some bastardization of a Virtue Ethical theory. Virtue Ethical theories are present in both Plato and Aristotle. Such theories focus on building good character. According to this theory it is persons that are evaluated, not their actions. For Aristotle, human beings are able to flourish by living their life in accordance with reason. Not all people are able to live their lives in accordance with reason. It’s virtue that makes living a reasoned life possible.

For Aristotle, virtuous people will utilize reason to find what he calls the “golden mean.” The mean in this sense is not an
average, but rather the appropriate course of action that a virtuous person would engage in when utilizing reason in a particular situation. The appropriate course of action, in turn, will make reference to a pair of extremes, which the mean falls between. For example, let’s look at courage. I pick this virtue because it seems to be the one the Squad cares the most about. A courageous person will utilize reason to find the mean in a given context. Courage is a mean between the two extremes of cowardice and rashness. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is a group of well-trained warriors. They are proficient in many forms of combat. It is unnecessary for them to resort to killing people in the swiftest or easiest way possible regardless of the circumstances. So when any of them attempts to kill another member of the Squad in this way—by ignoring their proficiency—it is dishonorable. This is a code of honor that they have in virtue of their extensive training. When they ignore it, they are acting in an uncourageous way. Here, consistent with the Aristotelian version of the virtue theory, context binds courage to honor. Under these circumstances, they have not reasoned as a courageous person would. They have not found the mean; rather, they are acting in a way that is too close to rash.

Granted, this may not be the way that most people would act under the circumstances. However, the earlier quote from Bill seems to suggest that the Squad views themselves as being super-human in some way. A twisted virtue ethical system may support his claim. The Squad may be more virtuous, at least in terms of courage, than anyone else. Friedrich Nietzsche argues that most moral systems are antithetical to the flourishing of truly excellent human beings.
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He argues that a revaluation of values occurred which caused people to value things that do not contribute to the production of a higher class of people. There is evidence that the assassins see themselves as a higher class of people, people who are more virtuous in many ways than the average person. They don’t feel they need to value the things that common people value. In order to truly flourish as assassins, the Squad can’t look to consequentialism or deontology because these theories prevent the creation of people who
are truly great. A virtue ethical perspective allows the squad to flourish.

From Beatrix’s perspective, she must defend her honor. Bill disrespected her when he killed her friends and attempted to kill her. Beatrix is not only justified in seeking revenge; she would be cowardly if she did not. As a courageous person, under the circumstances, reason dictates that she should defend her honor.

At the end of the movie, after using the five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique on Bill, Beatrix expresses her concern about being a bad person. Bill responds by saying, “You’re not a bad person. You’re a terrific person. You’re my favorite person.” From their warped view of virtue ethics, maybe he is right.

TIMOTHY DEAN ROTH

 

 

“That woman deserves her revenge . . . and we deserve to die.” So says Budd, one of the five assassins singled out for destruction by the mysterious “Bride,” played by Uma Thurman. “But then again,” Bud continues after a long pause, “so does she.”

Vengeance is the theme of Quentin Tarantino’s
Kill Bill
, his most ambitious (and bloody) film. Betrayed by Bill and his mercenaries, the Bride draws up a “death list” of her five would-be assassins, who she believes killed her unborn daughter and nearly herself. Armed with the greatest samurai sword ever made, the Bride goes on a killing spree that brings a whole new meaning to the word “Mother.”

Tarantino exploits the revenge story in
Kill Bill
for maximum trash-and-gore effect. But behind what looks to be a straightforward revenge epic, Tarantino interjects moments of genuine emotional pain and glimmers of conscience that transcend the film’s grindhouse aesthetic. These moments introduce an ambiguity about the Bride’s murderous mission, uncovering the ethical questions posed by the act of vengeance.

Like all three of his previous films, Tarantino’s
Kill Bill
is filled with characters whose morally self-defined worlds inevitably come into conflict, revealing a more primitive and basic moral reality. Tarantino uses violence and human depravity as a kind
of crucible that burns away all superfluous concerns until all that’s left is an irreducible, and sometimes humorously unexpected, moral epiphany. This “moment of clarity” is a realization of the most universal and ancient “golden rule”: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” as the Old Testament has it.

Of all human impulses, the desire for revenge is one of the easiest to understand because it appeals to our innate sense of equity. There’s a reciprocity to evil action that’s a product of an unspoken understanding that we, as sentient beings who all feel happiness and pain, are equals. Thus the eighteenth-century B.C. maxim from Hammurabi’s law code—the simple but self-evident rule “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Revenge is itself an implication and extension of the golden rule. It’s something we all intuitively understand, which is why we find revenge stories so engaging. I drive a cab for Washington State’s Social and Health Services. On one recent trip to the hospital, two women were talking about
Kill Bill
. “It’s a woman getting revenge,” one of them said. “Bill went and messed her up good, so she went and messed
him
up good. That’s how it works!” See what I mean? (Incidentally, one of my regular clients survived a coma after she put two bullets in her head. Truth really is stranger than fiction.) The Bride’s revenge, according to this woman, needs no justification. It’s her natural right to “get even.”

There’s a rare Japanese poster for
Kill Bill Volume 2
that features Uma Thurman dressed in a white wedding gown and holding her samurai sword at the ready. In a superimposed banner lies the surprising tag line: KILL IS LOVE.

The phrase is reminiscent of the seemingly incongruous words that appear over the gateway to Dante Alighieri’s Hell:

These words are from Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the definitive literary synthesis of medieval ethical, aesthetic, religious, and political philosophy. It’s also a work that stands on the verge of Renaissance humanism. Tracing a thread through Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and Aristotle, Dante gets medieval on our asses by presenting a holistic inquiry into what it means to be fully human. Dante borrows heavily from Aquinas who believed that God’s very essence was his own Being. Aquinas’s idea, in turn, comes both from Aristotle’s conception of the “Uncaused Cause” and Exodus 3:13-15 in which God reveals his name as Yahweh—“I AM.” God’s nature, Aquinas and Dante believed, is Truth and Love, the two primary and essential characteristics of Being. Because humans are created in the image of God, one is only fully human, according to Dante and Aquinas, if one rightly exercises reason and love. To fail to do so is to deny one’s own humanity.

The degree to which one sins against love and reason determines the nature of the punishments described in Dante’s
Inferno
. There are several interesting parallels between
Kill Bill
and
Inferno
. They feature a heroine named Beatrix and Beatrice, respectively; both Dante and Tarantino adapt their aesthetic to fit the nature and place of the sinner; and both view vengeance as a logical extension of love.

Dante uses the method of
contrapasso
as the aesthetic principle that determines each sinner’s punishment. That is, the punishment is a concrete, physical embodiment of the spiritual condition (not simply punishment-fits-the-crime as many assume). The greatest sinners in Dante’s hell, for example, are forever encased in ice, a vivid and horrific allegorical statement that sin ultimately results in the reduction of all human freedom and possibility.
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Tarantino uses a similar method in his punishments, often, like Dante, with acerbic humor. The knife-fighter Vernita is killed with the Bride’s knife. O-Ren is killed by “Japanese steel” (those who live by the sword die by the sword). The loathsome, trailer-trash desert hermit, Budd, is killed by a snake. Elle Driver’s hubristic inability to see the generosity of Pai Mei’s “cruel tutelage” results in her blindness. And Bill, of course, dies of a broken heart.

Tarantino also adapts his aesthetic approach to each situation just as Dante’s poetic language differs according to each stage of his journey. And both exhaust every conceivable technique of their respective arts in the process. (The effortless versatility with which Tarantino does this is one of the great joys of watching
Kill Bill
.) The Crazy 88 chapter, for example, is respectfully parodic in its tribute to Japanese cinema. An astonishing animé sequence is utilized to tell the story of O-Ren’s childhood. The Budd scenes are presented in a style reminiscent of the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. And the Pai Mei chapter is shot in grainy 16mm film, with extreme camera zooms, typical of low-budget Bruce Lee films.

More importantly, both Dante and Tarantino view vengeance as a form of truth-telling. Vengeance presupposes one’s dignity by calling one to account for their crimes against others, and against their own humanity. The act of vengeance is an unambiguous declaration that evil is a reality. By contrast, the act of vengeance is also a statement that love, goodness, and righteousness are moral realities by virtue of the fact that they have been violated. The implication is that without the reality of justice there’s no reality to mercy.

Dante makes this clear in his depiction of the Lukewarm and their non-place in Hell. Because these indifferent people never chose good or evil in their lifetime, they occupy a nowhere-land where they forever chase a blank banner. For Dante, the Lukewarm would not understand the generosity and self-sacrifice of forgiveness and mercy, since they are unable to properly reflect on their own offenses. To punish them would likewise be a waste. “The world allows no glory to their name. Mercy and Justice alike despise them,” Dante concludes.
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Tarantino doesn’t make films about lukewarm people. He deals in the luridly entertaining lives of outlaws and assassins, thugs and thieves. The crooks in
Kill Bill
are fully aware that they “deserve to die,” as Budd says. Budd even seems proud of the fact that he “never cheats his way out of his comeuppance.” It’s a statement of his inherent dignity (what little remains, anyway) as a rational and autonomous moral agent.

The Bride’s revenge is, whether right or wrong, an act of love: for herself as one who is violated; for her missing daughter;
for her innate sense of righteousness; and for her emotionally necessitated reconciliation with her former lover, Bill.

It’s clear that the Bride “deserves her revenge,” that there’s a certain heroic righteousness in her quest to kill her tormentors, and that their deaths are just. Her vengeance is even potentially life-saving given that all her victims are hired assassins and gangsters. Why, then, might we conclude that her mission of “bloody satisfaction” is, in fact, immoral?

Tarantino suggests that it’s precisely because the act of vengeance perpetuates a never-ending cycle of violence. It’s also to commit the Dantean sin of reducing one’s self to the imprisonment of excessive passion. This obsession results in a continuation rather than reconciliation of the murderous act. Tarantino illustrates this cycle through multiple stories-within-stories of orphaned children who seek revenge for their murdered parents.

We first encounter the orphan story when the Bride kills Vernita in front of her young daughter, Nikki. “It was not my intention to do this in front of you,” she explains coldly. “But you can take my word for it; your mother had it coming.” Then with antithetical tenderness she tells her, “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” That Nikki
will
feel raw about it is implied by Tarantino’s placing of O-Ren’s orphan story shortly after.

As a child, O-Ren witnesses the ruthless murder of her parents at the hands of the evil Yakuza boss, Matsumoto. As a young teenager, she gets her revenge by killing Matsumoto at an “advantageous” moment. She goes on to become a skilled mercenary who forms her own Yakuza clan, the Crazy 88s.

There are subtle indications that the Bride, as well as Bill and his younger brother Budd, are also orphans. Bill is said to have been in need of father figures “like most men who never knew their fathers.” And when asked why her family won’t be attending her wedding, the Bride replies, “I don’t have anyone.” Later we glimpse the Bride as a child. She’s wearing the same pigtails that both Nikki and the young O-Ren are seen wearing. The dizzying effect of these stories-within-stories reveals the
dreadful and terrifying prospect of the proliferation of violence upon violence in a never ending whirlwind of hatred.