Kill Bill, Volume 1

I know I’m the last person to see this in the theater for the first time who hasn’t already seen it. I know, because the theater was largely deserted last night, save for Doyce and myself.

Last week, I’d commented that everyone seemed to think KB was either grotesque or brilliant or both, and that I needed to figure out when Margie and I were going to go to it. Jackie kindly called up that evening and offered to watch bambina while we did so. Margie decided to decline on the direction of the offer, but not the substance; instead, she and I went to dinner.

All told, probably the right move on her part.

Margie finds some violent imagery to be mentally persistent, and, for obvious reasons, that bothers her. Me? Not so much. Most violent scenes in the media don’t stick with me (I save those persistent images for really stupid things I’ve done and said, but that’s a different story).

Anyway, Margie gave”permission” for me to go see KB with Doyce last night. So I did.

(No spoilers below.)

It is grotesque. And brilliant. I don’t know if Tarantino is a genius or a fraud, or a genius of a fraud for making us think he might be a genius, or a fraud of a genius for making us think he might be a fraud.

Whatever. I’m not a fan of what’s sometimes called “gratuitous violence” — where the director or writer throw in some extra blood and gore to cover up that the plot is getting thin or to keep the audience interested. I wouldn’t call the violence in KB gratuitous — because, to a large degree, it’s about violence. Without the violence, there’s not much there.

Yet the violence, as drenching (literally) as it often becomes, retains a cartoon-like quality (indeed, some key scenes are done in an anime style). Limbs don’t just get hacked off — the pirouette through the air, blood spraying Black Knight-like with such velocity, it almost draws giggles. It’s a delicate balancing act between repulsion and humor, switching between the believable and the unbelievable just often enough to keep interest during both of them. If played absolutely straight, the movie would have been a horror. Played just for laughs, it would have been a travesty. This manages to avoid both.

I mean, it’s not like I haven’t seen truly, movingly horrible and violent films before. I have, and this isn’t one of them. It’s not about violence, it doesn’t use violence, it is of violence. It’s not a celebration of violence, though. Violence is not seen as a good thing, or a positive thing, or even something worth emulating. Violent people come to violent ends, violence begets violence, and people shouldn’t start down that long, bloody road, unless they’ve been thrown onto it; then all bets are off.

Instead, it’s — I don’t know, a ballet of violence. Violence is the medium by which the characters act, interact, progress. Yet, all the time, with a sense of unreality. A scene of mass, bloody, tragic murder is created by folks with comic book names, who utter clichés in oddly stilted language. You never know whether the laugh in your throat is about to be choked off by a gasp, or vice-versa. And they both usually are.

In many ways, KB is a return to the anti-hero of 60s/70s film — the bad guy who does bad things to worse guys for good reasons. That’s fitting, since there’s so much else from that era slathered on the screen, from music — the Ironside and Green Hornet themes, not to mention various Japanese samurai flicks — to imagery. Tarantino mines so many visual and audio tropes, it’s not clear even he knows what he’s doing, but like a massive collage, it somehow works.

Knowing that this was just “Volume 1,” I was ready for the ending to occur in media res — just like the beginning did. Indeed, I was waiting for the right moment, and it happened right when I was expecting.

Ultimately, is it a great work of art? How the heck do I know. My impression, last night as I drove home, was of a wildly elaborate set of cake decorations, colors and shapes and forms, gorgeous to the eye, but all of which are inedible, just for display. There’s very little “cake” there, but a lot of decor. This movie will not be forgotten, but I doubt it will make anyone’s best 100 films of the century, or even the decade. It’s a gorgeous piece of wax fruit — lovely to look at, ultimately unenriching. Don’t try to make something out of it that it isn’t, but accept it for what it does well. And that’s probably more profundity than the whole flick is worth. Still …

I have no idea where Tarantino is going with this. But I plan to watch the next one. I might even watch this one with Margie — some day. Maybe when she gets fed up with me repeating lines from it …