How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (20 page)

A similarly gleeful defiance of PC attitudes colors virtually the entire novel, from its adolescent vision of its female characters as either helpless damsels or busty dominatrices to its offhand references to—well, the barbarian East. “Sin City falls away behind me,” goes one of Marv's reveries. “Noisy and ugly as all hell. The Mercedes hums and handles like a dream. She may look like some Jap designed her, but the engine's a beauty.”

To be sure, Miller is working here within a well-defined noir tradition and taking it to an extreme. But it's hard not to feel that the defi
ant swagger he so admired as a boy, on seeing
The 300 Spartans
, has been internalized and then expressed in heightened aesthetic terms in his work—and not only in the Thermopylae-themed
300
, which everywhere betrays the same heated investment in exaggerated masculinity and, ostensibly, heterosexuality. (The Athenians are ridiculed by the Spartans as being effete “philosophers” and “boy-lovers”; in the case of the latter, given what the historical record indicates, this is demonstrably an instance of the pot calling the kettle black-figured.) The emotional core of the book—more, even, than of the movie, in which the character of the Spartan queen has been enhanced—lies in this relentless celebration of the defiant, strutting, physically superb Spartan male. Miller and Snyder might be startled to learn that Aristotle, in his
Politics
, describes the Spartans as
gynaikokratoumenoi
, “ruled by women.”

 

The film's pubescent preoccupation with magnificent male musculature becomes, indeed, a crucial plot-point in its retelling of the old story. In Herodotus, we learn that the man who betrayed the secret back route to the Greeks' position was a local named Ephialtes, who like many other residents knew the location of the path, and who expected to be rewarded for his betrayal of his fellow Greeks. In the Miller/Snyder version, Ephialtes is, significantly, a grossly deformed, hunchbacked Spartan who betrays his countrymen because they won't let a physically inferior specimen fight for them. Given the film's overwhelmingly young, male audience, it is hard not to feel that this fetishizing of masculine posturing and masculine physiques, rather than its representation of the Persian enemy, is where a good part of its appeal resides.

And even this may not be the real key to understanding why
300
is the biggest movie of the year. Critics who have disdained it as bloody and visually cartoonish have gone out of their way to deride it as (unsurprisingly) the cinematic equivalent of a comic book: flat, episodic, lurching from one visually explosive moment to the next. But what's really striking about the film is that it doesn't even have the aesthetics of a comic book, to say nothing of a graphic novel—the best examples of which, at least, show considerable concern for subtle narrative rhythms. Apart from the awkwardly larded-through story of Ephialtes and the equally clanking, meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch subplot about Gorgo (who in
this version uses her considerable rhetorical and sexual wiles to manipulate the Spartan senate into sending reinforcements to her husband's outnumbered band—
gynaikokratoumenoi
, indeed),
300
consists primarily of consecutive scenes depicting the Spartans mowing down the ever more scary-looking Persian antagonists who keep coming at them. First there are the ordinary Persian foot soldiers; then the so-called Immortals, here inexplicably represented as wearing metallic, vaguely Kabuki-like masks that conceal grotesque mutant faces and slobbering, fanged mouths; then the freaks and elephants and monsters, all culminating in a last defiant stand in which Leonidas wounds Xerxes himself before being annihilated in a shower of Persian arrows.

As I sat watching this progression during my first viewing of
300,
I was reminded of something, but it wasn't comic books. It was only a few days later, when I was playing video games with my kids, that I realized that the experience most closely approximated by a viewing of Snyder's movie was not even that of reading a comic book, but that of playing one of the newer, graphically sophisticated video games. In such games—for instance,
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast,
a favorite of mine—the player is often an embattled warrior, charged with making his way through enemy territory in order to reach a certain goal (a spaceship, a treasure, etc.). In order to reach the goal, of course, you have to eliminate vast numbers of enemies—aliens, robots, freaks, whatever. These latter are, with each successive “level” of the game, increasingly powerful, scary, and difficult to defeat; the game gets harder as you progress through its imaginary world. There's no plot or overarching structural dynamic involved; the only meaningful activity is killing a sufficient number of enemies to get to the next level. It's true that there's usually some background, some history that seems to provide a kind of “plot” for the proceedings, which comes in the form of a narrative voice-over that plays before each new level of the game begins. (In
Jedi Outcast,
for instance, you're told that your mission is to prevent the villains from decimating the Jedi Academy on planet Yavin 4.) But these token narratives, such as they are, are discrete elements detachable from the experience of playing the game itself—indeed, you can just skip over them and go right to the slaughter that is the real point of the game.

All this is as good a description as any of what
300
is like. Whatever
its intermittent and feeble preliminary invocations of noble sentiments such as “freedom” for the Greeks and the importance of “reason” as opposed to Eastern unreason (neither of which notions, it must be said, would likely have had much appeal to the historical Spartans, members of a slave-based and deeply, almost stupidly superstitious culture),
300
is wholly lacking in nearly every element we normally associate with drama in even its most debased popular forms. Gone are the distractions of motivation or character—or even dialogue, apart from posturing slogans. (“We are SPARTANS!!!!!” Leonidas screams as he pushes some Persian envoys into a well, a line that got a huge laugh both times I saw the film.) Gone, too, is any sense of a plot more rudimentary than the one you get in the setup for
Jedi Outcast
. Herodotus's narrative of the Second Persian War does have grand and overarching plots, although these clearly weren't interesting to either Miller or Snyder. For Herodotus there is, on one level, the great organizing moral dynamic, as predictable as physics or mathematics, of overweening pride laid low: in Darius, in his ancestors, in his son Xerxes, all of whom trust foolishly to wealth, size, power, the things that, as time and experience teach the wise person, are ultimately evanescent. And on the Greek side, the plot, indeed the drama, resides in the craftily, excruciatingly drawn-out uncertainty whether the perennially quarreling Greek city-states will ever become a coalition capable of repulsing Xerxes' army—a plot that is not only suspenseful but also deeply political.

What gives structure to
300,
by contrast, is not so much an evolving narrative as simply an increase in the number and ugliness of the combatants who keep pouring toward the Spartans, who blast their way through greater and more savage onslaughts of freakish enemies until the final, gory extermination takes place—all of it punctuated occasionally by slogans about freedom and so forth. But just to talk about “freedom” and “reason” is not, of course, the same as dramatizing the importance of freedom and reason. Snyder's film, like Miller's comic, lingers on the avenging violence while giving only the most superficial nod to the concepts that, we are constantly told, motivated that violence. For that very reason the violence, of which there is a great deal, isn't exhausting or affecting, because it has the candy-colored, hallucinatory, stylized quality that the violence in video games has; it hasn't been contextualized, it's not tethered to anything that we might feel.
It's just the colorful stuff that happens to the cardboardy figures on the screen before they disappear and new cardboardy figures need to be dealt with. And then—G
AME
O
VER
.

 

Something, indeed, seems to be over, if the extraordinary success of this movie is to be taken seriously. A curious part of the story of Thermopylae—a part that didn't make it into Miller's
300,
perhaps because it has to do with those boy-loving, philosophizng Athenians rather than the manly Spartans—concerns the origins of the tragic theater. There is a long-standing tradition that when Xerxes abandoned his forces and returned in humiliated defeat to Susa, he left behind his opulent tent, which was among the spoils taken from his general, Mardonius, when the Greeks finally vanquished the invaders at Plataea in 479. According to some sources, this fabulous trophy came to be used as the backdrop in the theater of Dionysus at Athens; the Greek word
skênê,
from which we derive the word
scene
, in fact means “tent.” Another fascinating, if perhaps apocryphal, story holds that timber from the Persian ships destroyed at Salamis was used in the construction of yet another theater.

The presence of Xerxes' tent on the Greek tragic stage—a visible (if eventually fraying) trophy snatched from a hubristic imperial overlord—would have constituted a remarkable material symbol of the interweaving of history, politics, and art that you got in the then-new genre that came to be known as tragedy. At the very least, it would certainly account for a number of striking references in early Greek tragedy to opulent Eastern cloths and weavings. In Aeschylus's
Agamemnon
(458
B.C
.), for instance, the returning Greek king's hubristic decision to tread on a sumptuous carpet—fit, as the text reminds us, for an Eastern potentate—heralds his imminent demise; in the same playwright's
Persians
(472
B.C
.), there are repeated allusions to the soft, lush, ornate fabrics with which the Persians adorn themselves. All such references would, of course, have taken on powerful additional meaning for the original audience if the very artifacts of Persian hubris were visibly present in the theater.

This is merely a way of saying that it's quite possible that the battle that inspired Frank Miller's comic book, and now Zack Snyder's movie version of the same, was intimately tied to the origins of the Western
theater itself. If so, the connection was not merely a superficial, material one (the tent, the broken planking) but rather something larger. For the grand themes that seemed to inhere in the lived history of the Persian Wars—the foolishness of overweening arrogance; the way in which moral conviction can be a match for sheer power; the dangers inherent in underestimating a disdained “other”—were to provide tragedy with its own grand themes over the seventy-five years of its magnificent acme: a period that began with the end of the Persian Wars and ended with the exhausted conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in which, as Herodotus seems to have foreseen, the Athenians themselves eventually came to resemble the blustering, despotic Persians of old. To better serve its themes of spectacular rises and terrible falls, the tragedians honed and perfected the array of elements and techniques that became the cultural inheritance of the Western theater: the organically coherent plot, which suggests that endings are the logical and necessary outcomes of beginnings; character development as expressed in both monologue and dialogue; the meaningful dynamics of entrances and exits, of visual spectacle counterpointed by lyric rapture.

To various degrees, these elements have provided the underpinnings for every kind of theatrical entertainment ever since, from Venetian opera to soap opera, from Shakespeare to
Star Wars
. That Zack Snyder's flatly stylized
300
—which invokes the dramatic history of the Persian Wars but which has no quality of drama, no serious interest in history whatsoever—has packed some of the largest audiences in movie history into our theaters makes you wonder whether the tradition that began at Thermopylae might well have ended there, too.

—The New York Review of Books,
May 31, 2007

K
ill Bill: Volume 1
, the fourth movie to be written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is about a number of things, but violence isn't really one of them. This isn't to say that it is not a violent film. Of the various controversies that have surrounded the movie since it began shooting—the first over the surprise announcement by the producers that they were going to cut what was to have been one movie into two parts (
Volume 2
will open in February)—none has been as fierce as the one that has raged about the extent of the movie's graphic gore. In
Kill Bill: Volume 1
, you get to see (among other things) a fight to the death between two young women, one of whom ends up impaled by an enormous kitchen knife before the wide eyes of her young daughter; a pregnant woman being savagely beaten and then shot in the head at point-blank range on her wedding day; a man's tongue being pulled out; a graphic decapitation with a samurai sword; torsos sliced open; impalings with various instruments; and, in a scene that you'd be tempted to call climactic if the movie had any kind of narrative arc whatsoever, a twenty-minute-long pitched battle between a lone American female and dozens of Tokyo gangsters, in which the limbs of a great many of the latter get lopped off. It's saying something about the sheer amount
of battery and bloodletting that Tarantino works into this film that the final act of killing comes almost as something of a relief, and strikes you as being almost dainty: a young woman in a kimono has the very top of her head sliced off, quite neatly, in a tranquil, snow-covered Japanese garden.

A good deal of intense brutality is, of course, nothing new to Tarantino fans.
Reservoir Dogs
(1992), the first feature that he both wrote and directed, contains an almost unwatchably savage torture scene that, at the time, seized the imagination of audiences and critics and has become infamous ever since: in it, a sociopathic petty criminal slowly cuts off a young policeman's ear, to the accompaniment of some upbeat pop music, and afterward, he douses the cop with gasoline, meaning to burn him alive. This was a harbinger of things to come; since then, all the films that Tarantino has either written or directed are characterized by scenes of a sadistic and quite graphic violence, set in the context of random and, sometimes, unmotivated crime.

True Romance
, the first commercial feature that Tarantino wrote (in 1987; it was directed by Tony Scott and released in 1992), features a stabbing with a corkscrew and the prolonged beating of a young woman; both
True Romance
and Tarantino's breakout popular success,
Pulp Fiction
(1994), show men being kicked and shot in the genitals;
Pulp Fiction
ends with a scene of S&M torture and homosexual rape. (It also famously depicts a man plunging a syringe full of adrenaline into the chest of a woman who has OD'd on heroin.)
Natural Born Killers
, written in 1989 and directed by Oliver Stone, was about an amoral young couple on a crime spree;
From Dusk Till Dawn
(1995) is a gory vampire extravaganza set in a Mexican cathouse, in which an unsuspecting pair of criminal brothers—one's a bank robber, the other's a sexual predator played by Tarantino—are waiting to meet an associate. All of Tarantino's movies are, in fact, about low-level criminals involved in complex crimes that get fouled up, and it's not hard to see why: double-crossed thieves and drug dealers tend not to have many scruples about observing the Sixth Commandment.

What has upset many people about the violence in Tarantino's movies isn't the violence per se—as bloody as they are, they're no more brutal than, say, the typical
Terminator
movie, and no more repellently graphic than any of the
Alien
films, which are far more popular—but
rather the offhand, occasionally even comic fashion in which the violence in his films is presented. To many critics of Tarantino's work, the violence—like the ear-cutting in
Reservoir Dogs
—has too often seemed gratuitous, included not so much to further the plot or illuminate character, as to punish the audience—to see how much it can tolerate. This notion may seem outlandish, but it gets support from Tarantino himself. “The audience and the director,” he recently asserted in a
New Yorker
profile that was timed to coincide with the release of
Kill Bill
, “it's an S&M relationship, and the audience is the M. It's exciting!” Both the content (“the audience is the M”) and the tone of the remark (“it's exciting!”) are revealing: watching Tarantino's films, it's hard not to wonder whether the “S” is not somehow compensatory, betraying the kind of anxieties about masculinity and, indeed, about sexuality that you associate with high school locker rooms. In
Reservoir Dogs
, one of the thieves is vexed to learn that his alias will be “Mr. Pink”;
True Romance
and
Pulp Fiction
feature telling scenes in which male characters react violently to homoerotic teasing. (The latter is the film whose climax is a homosexual rape.)

Because of a violence that is presented without any apparent moral comment, because of the embarrassment about adult sexuality in his films, Tarantino—who was born in 1962 and is thus of the first generation of directors to have been raised on cable television and video recordings, with their promise of endless repetition—has become, in the minds of many, the poster boy for a generation of Americans—mostly male—whose moral response to violence, it is feared, has been alarmingly dulled by too much popular entertainment.

 

Hence it's easy to see why
Kill Bill
has aroused enormous controversy and attracted an unusual amount of attention in the press: it's been taken as a kind of culmination, the most violent film yet by a filmmaker with a known penchant for violence. Nearly all critical comment about the film, whether laudatory or disapproving, has focused on the moral and aesthetic implications of the film's martial-arts sequences and its scenes of baroque bloodletting. (Tarantino has often asserted that, for him, the violence in crime movies is analogous to the dance sequences in musicals.) In general, the critics have fallen into two camps. In the
first are those who see the film's lavishly choreographed scenes of violence as a symptom of a cultural malaise. Anticipating a defense of the film based on the fact that its violence is too stylized to be taken seriously, David Denby argued, in his review in
The New Yorker
, that there is a “little problem” with this position, which is that a

This is, essentially, a Platonic argument—one that worries about the tortured relationship between sophisticated imitations of reality and reality itself. It is an argument that the film historian and critic David Thomson also advanced, in a long and ambitious piece in the
Independent
, when Tarantino's film first came out. In that article, Thomson explored, in considerable detail and with unconcealed anguish, the relationship between the violence to which young consumers of popular culture are regularly exposed and the violence of the society in which we now live:

The moral argument inevitably fuels the aesthetic objections: Thomson makes the point that while all of Tarantino's films were violent, at least the earlier ones were “about people”; he goes on to bewail the way in which, in the new movie, Tarantino has chosen to “ignore character and conversation” in favor of what he calls “‘pure' cinematic violence.”
This allows Thomson, in turn, to dismiss the new movie as “a streamlined version of a kids' video game.”

To these old-fashioned arguments, another, perhaps hipper group of critics has objected that it is precisely as a game that we should see
Kill Bill
; that, because the movie's violence is, as the author of the
New Yorker
profile put it, so “stylized and funny,” so over-the-top, so cartoonish, its rivers of blood so obviously fake, its killings so unrealistically elaborate, we can't really take it seriously. So, for instance, Richard Corliss in
Time
observed that the film is

There is some truth in this; a well-documented aspect of Tarantino's biography is that he worked for five years as a clerk in a California video store, where he acquired the dazzlingly encyclopedic knowledge of genre films—Asian, Mexican, American—that has influenced all of his work, which is full of intricate allusions to, and direct quotations of, other films. It's no accident that the characters in his films talk obsessively, even manically, about popular movies, TV shows, and songs.
True Romance
begins with its boyish hero making an impassioned paean to both Elvis and the Japanese martial-arts star Sonny Chiba (who appears in
Kill Bill
as a master sword-maker).
Reservoir Dogs
opens with a group of thieves arguing about the meaning of the lyrics to Madonna's “Like a Virgin.”
Pulp Fiction
features a crucial scene set in a restaurant whose waiters impersonate Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly (the maître d' is, appropriately enough, Ed Sullivan);
Jackie Brown
(1997) starts out with a gun dealer, played by Samuel L. Jackson, discussing the influence of “Hong Kong flicks” on his clients' buying habits. “The killer [in a movie] had a .45,” he observes, “they want a .45.”

And yet it's possible that the “movieness” of Tarantino's work, the endless invocations of other motion pictures, is itself a far greater problem than its violence. Indeed, if you forget for a moment about the con
tent of Tarantino's latest film, about the violent acts that it so ornately represents, you're forced to wonder what it is, precisely, that his movies' endless reflections on, and references to, the culture of popular entertainment give you—apart from an appreciation for Tarantino's inexhaustible ability to quote from and allude to the thousands of movies that he has seen and seen again. The answer to that question is more troubling by far than the sight of a few heads lying on the floor.

 

Certainly
Kill Bill
offers few of the traditional satisfactions of drama—even genre dramas such as martial arts or spaghetti Westerns. This is strange, given that it takes the form of that most satisfying of narratives, the revenge saga. (A title that appears just after the opening credit reads “Revenge is a dish best served cold.—Old Klingon Proverb.” The reference to the villainous alien race in the
Star Trek
series will remind cognoscenti that this proverb was quoted by a character in the second of the
Star Trek
feature films.) Its heroine is a young woman known only as The Bride, a former member of a squad of female assassins that's called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS)—the kind of girl gang that certain Seventies TV shows, like
Charlie's Angels
, celebrated. In
Pulp Fiction
, a drug dealer's moll, played by Uma Thurman, who here plays The Bride, tells another character that she'd once appeared in the pilot episode of a series called “Fox Force Five,” which was about “a bunch of foxy chicks” who are a “force to be reckoned with”: one blond, one Japanese, one black, one French, one who specializes in knives, etc. DiVAS, which consists of just such an assortment, is, therefore, in the way of an in-joke, an elaborate self-reference for Tarantino fans.

For reasons never explained in
Volume 1
, perhaps because of the tardy division of the film into two parts, The Bride has abandoned her life of professional crime, and presumably because of that decision is gunned down, along with her husband-to-be and the rest of her bridal party, on her wedding day by the other DiVAS and their ringleader, Bill. (We know this because, in a flashback, we see their bodies on the ground.) Although she's been shot in the head at point-blank range by
Bill, The Bride survives, awakes after a four-year coma, and plots her terrible revenge.

The action of
Kill Bill
covers two of these retributive murders. (At least two: when The Bride wakes up from her coma, she first kills the corrupt hospital orderly who, as she overhears, has been renting out her immobile body for sex.) Tarantino is famous for his temporal scrambling—he often shows you something happening, and only later provides a flashback that illuminates why it's happened—and
Kill Bill
is no exception: the second of the revenge killings to take place is actually the first one you see. At the beginning of the film, The Bride enters the home of one of her former colleagues, Vernita Green (code name: Copperhead), played by Vivica A. Fox, and after a brutal hand-to-hand fight ends by knifing Vernita as her young daughter mutely watches. We then see what has preceded this: The Bride journeying to Tokyo in order to track down and kill another of the DiVAS, O-Ren Ishii (a.k.a. Cottonmouth, played by Lucy Liu), who now reigns as the boss of all bosses in the
yakuza
underworld. (Her surname, in another bit of Tarantino film-buff allusiveness, is a tribute to two Japanese filmmakers: Teruo Ishii, who directed
yakuza
films in the Sixties, and Takashi Ishii, who directed the female revenge movies
Black Angel Volume 1
and
Volume 2
.) The Japanese portion of the film features a flashback, done in the style of Japanese anime cartoons, to O-Ren's traumatic childhood: her parents were killed by a
yakuza
boss before her eyes when she was seven, and at the ripe old age of eleven she dispatches him in a suitably grisly manner.