Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (23 page)

Tarantino’s use of ECDS’s nicely bears this out. While it would be too much to conclude on the basis of Tarantino’s six cases that group rationality solutions never apply to ECDS’s, the examples presented by Tarantino nicely illustrate why they tend not to apply. Every ECDS is different. The persons in such situations are not always motivated by the same things. Moreover, persons in ECDS’s are not even always motivated to get out of them (except by maximizing their own interests or by having their goals satisfied). The upshot of this is that what constitutes rational behavior under such circumstances will vary from person to person. The group rationality solution, conversely, trades on the idea that what is rational to desire in a particular situation must be the same for all persons.

So, perhaps the only plausible solution to an ECDS is to avoid getting into one in the first place. I think Tarantino would agree with this.

MARK T. CONARD

 

 

 

Quentin Tarantino burst onto the Hollywood scene with
Reservoir Dogs
in 1992, which, despite its multiple perspectives and non-chronological ordering of events, is as blatant an exercise in brutal realism as they come. He solidified his reputation as a filmmaking
Wunderkind
and further stretched his cinematic muscles with
Pulp Fiction
in 1994, a film that brings into play more of a postmodern cinematic sentiment than his earlier effort, but one which is still realistic in its portrayal of violence and which sticks or conforms largely to a single genre or storytelling mode. 1997’s
Jackie Brown
was solid entertainment but lacked the spark and originality of his first two full-length feature films.

However, none of these earlier efforts could have quite prepared us for his next oeuvre,
Kill Bill
. Although he apparently conceived of the film as a single project, Tarantino released it in two segments, and those two parts are really quite different. While each is a blend of genres (unlike his earlier works), each likewise arguably has a primary genre:
Kill Bill Volume 1
is in large measure a Japanese martial arts film and is thus Eastern in its orientation, and
Kill Bill Volume 2
is mainly a Sergio Leone-inspired Western. Given these different generic orientations, the pacing of the two volumes is vastly different, the first segment being rather frenetic, and the second being much slower and more deliberate. In fact, the two parts are
so
different that it can be difficult to understand how they might fit together as one work.

Like so many of us, Quentin Tarantino not only grew up with movies, he lived vicariously through them. They were an integral part of his childhood and adolescence, providing word and image to act as fodder for his imagination and his fantasy life.
¹¹⁸
Further, as we know, movies provide for children images of gender roles, expressions of value and meaning, and safe glimpses into a large and dangerous world. In
Kill Bill Volume 1
, more than in any of his other films, Tarantino revisits those movies and movie genres that he so loved as a kid, particularly the martial arts films and the spaghetti Westerns (with cartoons and “blaxploitation” films thrown in for good measure). He even includes the grainy “Our Feature Presentation” graphic from those good old days at the beginning of the movie, and thus we in the audience are instantly transported with Tarantino back to childhood or adolescence.

But he doesn’t simply revisit or recreate the films or the film genres of his youth, he changes them in significant ways. First, he fuses the genres into a kind of postmodern collage, with a storybook fantasy feel to it, and with wildly exaggerated confrontation scenes and violence. Imagine if, as an adult, you took from your childhood and adolescent memories the images and sounds that had the greatest impact on you—a childhood and adolescence lived vicariously through movies, remember—and you condensed them into a two-hour experience, and all in the exaggerated and fantastic way in which adolescents and children view the world, but also in the somewhat confused manner in which the mind often recalls events, fusing disparate and distinct scenes or images into one picture or idea. The result would be something very like
Kill Bill Volume 1
. It’s short on plot and character development, and is rather made up of a
series of spectacular individual scenes—just like the conglomeration of your childhood memories probably would be.

But the changes in these early memories go beyond simply fusing movies and movie genres; Tarantino changes them in other significant ways. The most important alteration is clearly the fact that he’s put women in most of the lead roles. In
Kill Bill Volume 1
, women are now the heroes and villains. True enough, it’s Bill (David Carradine) who pulls the strings, and more about that below, but every member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS—an acronym that obviously suggests femininity), save one, is a woman, and the man (Budd, played by Michael Madsen) hardly appears in the film at all. And not only are the main roles filled by women, but Tarantino also plays with traditional gender expectations and stereotypes. O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) is the head of Tokyo organized crime, in a reversal of traditional Japanese sex roles. Further, and perhaps more interestingly, Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) is the hot young Japanese schoolgirl, the object of our fantasies and our porn, the epitome of passivity and little-girlish taboo sexuality. Only here she’s empowered, strong, aggressive. Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) dresses in a nurse’s uniform—again, a typical male porn fantasy, except that she’s an assassin. Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) plays the traditional housewife and mother role, but is likewise strong and self-assertive, protecting her home and family in the way that a husband might—with physical strength and violence.

However, despite these reversals, there is perhaps an underlying conservatism about gender and sex roles at work in the film. Note that, at the time of her wedding, The Bride (Uma Thurman) is pregnant and is thus poised to take on the traditional roles of wife and mother, and it’s when she’s prevented from doing so, by her attack, that she becomes enraged and without pity (“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality,”
¹¹⁹
she says to Vernita), as if taking on those traditional roles is what
would have made her happy and complete. Further, yes, Gogo is strong and self-assertive, but she’s also psychotic. She asks the Japanese businessman if he wants to penetrate her—of course knowing the answer already—and then she penetrates him with her sword, suggesting that when a woman is empowered, becomes too much like a man, there’s something terribly deforming about it, that it goes hand in hand with psychosis.

Further, playing the lead doesn’t necessarily imply wielding power, or at least ultimate power, here. This latter is symbolized by the pussy-cock distinction. When she awakens from her coma, The Bride, as she attempts to regain the use of her legs, says, “I could see the faces of the cunts who did this to me, and the dick responsible: members all of Bill’s brainchild, ‘The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.’” So in other words, though deadly, the DiVAS are underlings—they’re pussies, while Bill wields the real power—he’s the cock. In order, therefore, for The Bride to be able to reap her revenge, in order to overcome the DiVAS, and ultimately Bill, she must transform herself from pussy to cock.

Let’s consider how this transformation takes place, how it is that The Bride becomes empowered in the film. This is symbolized in a sequence of events and images, beginning with the “Pussy Wagon.” In the opening scene, after the lead-in and the credits, The Bride shows up at Vernita’s suburban home, in order to confront her. Having dealt with Vernita, she leaves, peeling out in her truck, and we get a glimpse of the truck’s emblem, announcing that it’s a Pussy Wagon. We’re thus led to believe at first that this is The Bride’s vehicle. In other words, we’re led to believe that she is still a pussy, and is in fact the pussy in question. She is, perhaps, offering herself up as receptacle, albeit in a dramatic, self-conscious way.

We then learn through flashback that while she was in a coma, after her attack, she was in fact pure receptacle. The hospital orderly, Buck (who’s “here to fuck”), was selling her as a catatonic fuck doll for seventy-five dollars a pop. Further, he mentions that she’s barren, and this inability to produce a child is further evidence of her status as a simple receptacle (“Her plumbin’ down there don’t work no more, so feel free to
cum in her all ya want,” he says).
¹²⁰
When The Bride awakens from her coma, she dispenses with Buck, and then steals his truck, the Pussy Wagon. In other words, “Pussy Wagon” refers not to the pussy offering itself as receptacle. Rather, it refers to the cock (“here to fuck”), ready to take all comers. It refers to the fucker rather than the fuckee. So by killing Buck (or at least smashing his head in), and stealing his truck, The Bride begins to transform herself from pussy, the receptacle, to cock, the one in charge and in power. She’s now out to fuck someone else.

Next, The Bride goes to Okinawa to procure a sword from Hattori Hanzo, played—significantly—by Sonny Chiba. That is, Sonny Chiba, once Tarantino’s martial arts hero (he’s referenced both in
True Romance
and in
Pulp Fiction
¹²¹
), is reduced to a supporting role. Further, and importantly, we see him working in a Japanese café/sushi house, and in a relationship that has definite homosexual overtones. He and his male partner (in business, at least) squabble like an old married couple. When Hattori Hanzo calls to his partner in the next room to bring the tea, the latter calls out that he’s watching his soap operas. And when he finally comes into the room, the two of them have a spat over their respective roles in their thirty-year relationship. In other words, not only have the women been thrust into the leads and the men reduced to supporting roles in the film, the latter have been emasculated as well. Hattori Hanzo hands over his sword—symbolically, his penis—to The Bride. She is now fully empowered and ready to reap her revenge. She’s been completely transformed from pussy to cock, from fuckee to fucker. And it’s only then that she seeks out O-Ren Ishii, the first target on her revenge list. (The confrontation with Vernita actually occurs later in the narrative, but appears earlier in the film, because of the way the film is chopped into stories and rearranged. This non-chronological ordering seems at first gratuitous, but seen in the light of this process of empowerment, the move from pussy to cock, it makes perfect sense.)

But why? Why has Tarantino done all this, recreated his past but inverted these male-female roles? Because
Kill Bill Volume 1
is in a sense his own therapy session. We all realize that our childhoods are formative, that we develop our neuroses due to those unhealthy childhood relationships, neuroses that we have to deal with in our adult lives, and that if we’re going to understand ourselves as adults, we have to address those childhood issues. Tarantino is here not only confronting his past, in good psychoanalytic fashion, but remaking it at the same time.

As kids, we saw our fathers as heroes. My dad
was
Clint Eastwood to me. (When I was too little to know better, he used to tell me stories of having fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn—
sorry, dad
—and I believed him and was enthralled by the tales, just as I was enthralled by Sergio Leone’s westerns.) Our mothers, on the other hand, played supporting roles. They were passive, loving (if we were lucky), trying to make up for our fathers’ short-comings. Now, as adults, we realize that (for most of us) our fathers were simply absent, removed, distant (if there at all), and a threat.
Just like Bill
. In the film, we don’t see Bill. He’s in the background, removed, but ever-present as an ominous threat. Bill is the father—our father, Tarantino’s father, and, significantly and symbolically, the father to The Bride’s unborn child.

In
Kill Bill Volume 1
, Tarantino is reliving his childhood as a pastiche, a postmodern fusion of the different styles that he loved and that gave his life meaning, all with an air of unreality—of the fantastic so characteristic of a child’s imagination—and at the same time he’s recreating his past in a more honest way. He’s depicting his father as the removed, distant, danger that he was. And he’s recognizing his mother as the central figure that she was. For so many of us, our mothers were the heroes and villains of our lives. They were the leading players, the ones who held everything together in our fathers’ absences. What’s more, Tarantino not only remakes this past according to this more mature perspective, but also according to his desires. Uma Thurman is not only his substitute mother and ideal actress, but also his dream lover. Who didn’t fall in love—or at least lust—with her, watching, say,
Henry and June
? I know I did. So, interestingly, despite its unreality, and its storybook character, the film is a truer-to-life version of our childhoods
than what most of us remember. The fathers are out as heroes; mothers have taken their place, as the central figures struggling for power we now recognize them as. And it’s all tinged with an air of blood and violence, symbolic of the unhealthy, neurotic character of the entire history.

Consequently, the film’s apparent conservatism about gender may in fact represent the very enlightened view that, in those leading roles, the women in our lives were psychically (if not physically) deformed in their struggle to gain the power that they needed to perform those roles and that was due to them.