Circuitous Action: Revenge Cinema

Abstract

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004) stands out as extreme exercise in genre pastiche, even considered within filmography of a director commonly described as pop auteur par excellence. The future of once named by Noel Carroll as a signpost of postclassical American cinema-with its penchant for homage, citation, and cannibalizations of past-comes to a head in Tarantino's manic referentiality, his self-conscious forging of a directorial style from intertextual network that extends downwards into trash bin of film history, as well as outwards beyond territorial borders of Hollywood.1 A grand collage of director's particular movie obsessions, Kill Bill exposes those cult affinities that inform Umberto Eco's definition of postmodern movie, quotation of topos is recognized as only way to cope with burden of our encyclopedical filmic competence.2 What makes this work hyperbolic even by standards of audience well habituated to production of meaning by allusion is idiosyncratic contour of its topos, running to Chinese martial arts films, historical swordplay and gangster films from Japan, Italian and American westerns, and horror. Kill Bill's cult affinities are of a global order. We are confronted here with not only burden of a collective cultural memory, but a challenge of translation, of navigating across multiple lexica and regional traditions, of treading uneven textual surface that spans disparate geographies.The film's sprawling field of reference is held together by a simple story line: a woman, introduced simply as the Bride, awakens from a coma after a vicious assault on her life on her wedding day and, one by one, hunts down and kills her five attackers. A shocking act of violence sets plot in motion and initiates a series of violent counteractions. The stacked odds of initial confrontation, where we see lone victim outnumbered by her assailants, become seed of amplification and escalation of narrative actions. Underlying spectacular death scenes that many critics denounce in film is hyper literal algorithm of vengeance wherein injury requites injury in kind. In revenge stories like Kill Bill, not only does violence beget more violence, as saying goes, but does so according to a strictly predetermined logic as a reaction to and reinscription of initial cause, every turn of events a return to a founding event of violence. The vendetta in its formal contours thus entails, in words of John Kerrigan, an eye-for-eye attentiveness to lucid causal relations.3 To view narrative operations of revenge in such terms-as what Kerrigan calls impulse towards structure-is not to deny excess bred of its compulsion towards reprisal. Kill Bill aptly demonstrates tension between linear drive to rectify order and cyclical endlessness both imbedded in concept of vengeance, its protagonist's single-minded purposefulness finding expression in a mind-blowing frenzy of killing.4If revenge is red thread linking film's disjointed episodes and stylistic vagaries, it also weaves throughout generic tapestry into which film inserts itself. Tales of vengeance are backbone of western, and several of that genre's most memorable treatments of theme- The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956), Death Rides a Horse (dir. Giulio Petroni, 1967), Once Upon a Time in West (dir. Sergio Leone, 1968)- leave visible and audible traces in Kill Bill. Revenge also features prominently in Japanese historical costume drama, or jidaigeki, particularly in samurai swordplay pictures from which film borrows both its main object signifier, sword, and mode of that object's animation, swordfight spectacle. A standard story template of thejidaigefy, in which a swordsman or swordswoman must set their skills to test of avenging wrongful death of a master or family member, appears with equal frequency in Chinese martial arts swordplay genre, or wuxia pian. …