Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (14 page)

Although it’s Hattori Hanzo who provides the Bride with her “instrument of death,” he is, in fact, the moral conscience of the film. He offers several observations on the nature of revenge in vivid aphorisms. (There’s a reason why the sage who creates the flawlessly piercing sword is Hattori Hanzo rather than Pai Mei.)

The first moral crisis comes when the Bride kills Vernita in front of Nikki. She knows her actions will have repercussions, perhaps even guaranteeing her own death at the hands of an older Nikki. As we see her troubled expression, we hear Hanzo describe the single-minded blindness of revenge: “For those regarded as warriors, when engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God, or Buddha himself.”

On her way to kill O-Ren we hear Hanzo warn: “Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in.” These words echo Aristotle’s qualification of revenge: “it is not easy to define how, with whom, at what, and how long one should be angry, and at what point right action ceases and wrong begins.”
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Finally, while handing her the sword he’s made (something he’d vowed never to do again) he says, “I can tell you with no ego, this is my finest sword.” He continues, with a touch of regret in his voice, “If on your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut.” It’s a subtle indication that her mission of revenge may well cause pain to more than just her victims.

“When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge,” the Bride tells us, “it seems proof like no other that not only does God exist, you’re doing his will.” Clearly the Bride identifies herself as an agent of God, and in the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Prophets, she’s right. Well, partly.

Personal identification with God, whether conscious or unconscious, is a common literary motif in the stories of the Old Testament. The story of Samson, for example, is that of a man continually betrayed by the women he falls in love with. This story is set in the larger context of the book of Judges which relates how Israel (God’s Bride) continually breaks God’s trust. By sympathizing with Samson’s heartache the reader sympathizes with God.

Identification is a recurring theme with Jules Winnfield in
Pulp Fiction
, in which Jules sees himself as an agent of God’s wrath. During his religious epiphany he consciously seeks to re-interpret his situation from the divine point of view. This divine empathy culminates in Jules’s pardon of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. This act of mercy changes the way he interprets his Ezekiel 25:17 speech. He takes on the merciful rather than the vengeful perspective of God. When Jules repeats Ezekiel 25: 17 to “Ringo,” there’s a surprising tenderness to his voice, though his conclusion is no less dramatic. He even changes the impersonal “my name is” and “thee” it to the more direct and intimate, “you will know
I am
the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon
you
.”

Like Jules, the Bride identifies her actions as a personal expression of God’s anger. “Her revenge is very Old Testament,” Uma Thurman herself has noted.
⁵⁹
The Hebrew Prophets often indicate that God makes certain nations and people instruments of his wrath against Israel, and vice versa, implying that the avenger “is doing God’s will.” But God’s wrath, according to the Prophets, is far from simple. There’s a dual nature to God’s wrath as sharply delineated as the two sides of a Hanzo sword. Vengeance in the scriptures (as Jules and Dante understood) is always a paradoxical act of love. And mercy is always a paradoxical act of wrath.

The prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah all predicted judgment would come upon Israel for idolatry and social injustice. But as one Old Testament scholar clarifies, “‘Judgment’ is not a negative concept in the Bible; it is an intervention by which justice is brought about by punishing evildoers and
upholding the righteous.”
⁶⁰
Even so, the Prophets usually portray God as reluctant to punish.

This reluctance can be seen in the story of Elijah. When Elijah impatiently demands that God reveal his true self, God tells him, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by.” As he waits, Elijah sees the characteristic symbols of God’s wrath: wind, earthquake and fire. But, as the account goes, God was not in any of these signs. To Elijah’s surprise, “After the fire there was a still, small voice.”
⁶¹
At this moment God passes by and Elijah witnesses God’s essential nature.

The story of Jonah is another instance where a prophet is angry at God for being merciful. After preaching God’s impending judgment to the people of Nineveh they repent and are forgiven. Jonah’s furious response is comical: “This is why I fled when you first called me. I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe to punish.”
⁶²

Herein lies the ethical divide between divine vengeance and human vengeance. Human vengeance is never borne of a pure and holy love for the purpose of repentance and forgiveness. We also don’t patiently wait as God does; we typically want our bloody satisfaction right now. It’s a forest, as Hattori Hanzo says, that obscures the true way, like the forest at the opening of Dante’s
Inferno
. Dante portrays the vengeful in Hell as forever wallowing in sludge. Eternally tearing each other to pieces, their anger is never (and could never be) satisfied. In Dante’s
Purgatorio
, the vengeful are made to wind their way slowly through a thick cloud of smoke that chokes their lungs and stings their eyes. They are barely able to make out their path. Even if their wrath against their neighbor was just, it was inevitably polluted by an emotionally constricting desire for injury that is ultimately sadistic. “The wrath of a man does not accomplish the righteousness of God,” the Apostle James said.
⁶³
And the full text of the golden rule, which is seldom heard,
urges the reader: “Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your fellow countrymen. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
⁶⁴

The Bride has a right to her vengeance, but sometimes the ethical choice impels us to act more freely than our rights demand. To continue the cycle of violence, as the Bride does when she makes the innocent Vikki motherless, is to participate in the very evil that is being redressed. In the words of the prophet Bono: “We must not become a monster in order to defeat a monster.”
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Sometimes the ethical choice is inherently unfair. But self-surrender and the extraordinary act of forgiveness are, in fact, the end of violence.

After the bloody adrenaline rush of
Kill Bill Volume 1
, moviegoers eagerly anticipated more retina-searing action in the sequel. It was natural to assume that Tarantino would conclude the epic with a jaw-dropping battle between the Bride and Bill that no one could foresee. Tarantino delivers, but he does so by confounding the audience’s expectations.

In contrast to
Kill Bill Volume 1
,
Kill Bill Volume 2
portrays the Bride in a position of weakness rather than strength, of defense rather than advance. Though she certainly tries, she fails to land a single blow with her sword. As far as her “kill-crazy rampage” goes, the only person she kills in
Kill Bill Volume 2
is Bill, and even then, her deadly blow is an act of self-defense (Bill, without warning, swipes at her with his sword). In fact,
every
killing by the Bride, in both movies, is an act of self-defense. The only exception is her one-on-one duel with O-Ren, which they mutually engage. Even when she kills Vernita it’s a reflexive act (Vernita surprises her with a gun hidden in a box of cereal). According to Aquinas, she’s at least partially off the hook since “the act of self-defense,” he states, “can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”
⁶⁶

Contrast that with the other murders in the film: Matsumoto’s unprovoked and gratuitous murder of O-Ren’s parents, Gogo Ubari’s absurdly random killing of a Tokyo businessman, O-Ren’s furious beheading of Boss Tanaka. As for numbers three and four on the Bride’s list, Budd is killed by Black Mamba (the Bride’s code-name), just not the Black Mamba we expect. And, oddly enough, the Bride doesn’t grace Elle with a noble samurai death. Instead she plucks out her other eye and leaves her humiliated and flailing about in rage.

The biggest surprise of
Kill Bill Volume 2
, however, is the Bride’s discovery of BB. In a movie where The Bride is constantly caught off guard, she is totally unprepared for the shock of suddenly realizing her daughter is still alive. That she pretends to die of a bullet from BB’s imaginary gun underscores the fact that this vengeful, seemingly indestructible woman we feel we’ve come to know, has “died.” We find out that BB is both the reason why the Bride “quit the life” and the reason she went on a “kill-crazy rampage.”

These details come into the light thanks to Bill’s “truth serum.” As Bill interrogates the woman whom we now know as Beatrix, she’s forced into an act of confession, contrition, and penance—a cathartic process that prepares her, and us, for the final confrontation. As Bill drills her, he insists that underneath all her ruses, Beatrix is in essence a “natural born killer” (a reference to Tarantino’s eponymous screenplay). Beatrix concedes this fact, but she goes on to relate how her discovery that she was pregnant changed her so fundamentally that her new identity as Mother supersedes all other identities. It’s a conversion epiphany similar to the one Jules experiences. Just as Jules goes from The Tyranny of Evil Men to The Shepherd, Beatrix goes from Killer to Mommy.

Finally we come to the sublimely anti-climactic duel between Beatrix and Bill. By this point the film has all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. There can be no turning back for the Bride, and Bill has destroyed any chance of regaining her trust. “You and I have unfinished business,” Beatrix tells him. “Baby, you ain’t kiddin’,” Bill responds as he slashes at her unexpectedly. Stunned, Beatrix falls back on her chair desperately trying to wield her own sword. She never gets the chance. After Bill knocks her sword away, Beatrix is left holding nothing but the sheath. In an absurdly witty re-enactment
of their sexual romance, Bill thrusts at her while she very skillfully sheaths his sword. She then proceeds to break his heart—literally.

In a masterful way, Tarantino infuses this deadly scene with grace and humor. When the Bride hits Bill with the deadly “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique,” he has a few seconds left to make his peace with her. His death becomes, in this moment, their reconciliation, and there is a look between them of mutual forgiveness and tenderness. Her revenge, it turns out, is bittersweet. Earlier in the film, Budd, assuming that Beatrix is dead, asks Elle, “So, which one are ya filled with: relief or regret?” It’s clear by the look in Beatrix’s face, as she watches Bill die, that it’s quite a lot of both.

In the final scene of
Kill Bill Volume 2
, we see Beatrix lying on a bathroom floor as she finally releases all of her conflicting emotions, crying out repeatedly the last words of the film: “Thank you.” It’s an expression of gratitude for the hope of a new life beyond violence. It’s the moment when the film transcends the boundaries and limitations of its genre. And like Jules’s conversion in
Pulp Fiction
, it comes as such a surprise—a tender heart within the context of a brutal and standoffishly cool genre—that its very existence seems miraculous.

“This film is about justice and redemption,” Uma Thurman has stated.
⁶⁷
In an interview concerning the redemptive value of
Pulp Fiction
Tarantino revealed the heart of his approach to screenwriting: “I never said, ‘I’m gonna write a redemption story.’ But . . . that’s what ended up coming out, because that’s what I really believe in.”
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By the end of the film, it begins to look as though The Bride really has, in the words of Hattori Hanzo, “encountered God.”

In a world without grace, everyone in
Kill Bill
gets exactly what they deserve. The surprise of the film is that grace somehow pries its way in, without seeming obligatory or contrived. When Beatrix prayerfully whispers, “thank you,” it’s the film’s still, small voice.

JOSEPH ULATOWSKI

If they hadn’t done what I told ’em not to do, they’d still be alive.

—Mr. Blonde,
Reservoir Dogs
(1991)

Whoever has committed Murder, must
die
.

—Immanuel Kant,
Metaphysics of Morals
(1797)

 

None of the memorable scenes of Quentin Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
have affected viewers so much as the one in which Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) tortures a cop while dancing to “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealer’s Wheel. Some viewers have argued largely on the basis of this scene that the violence in
Reservoir Dogs
is entirely gratuitous and that the film is thus morally indefensible as a work of art (call this the “orthodox view”). Oliver Conolly writes:

We can easily see that this must be mistaken. The fact that a person would gleefully cut off someone’s ear gives us a great deal of insight into that person’s psychology, just as the differing
reactions of the other members of the gang to this action give us insights into theirs.