I don’t like violence. I’ve gotten anxious when a fight broke out at a hockey game. How is it that I can sit enthralled watching people cut each other to ribbons in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill?
In one sense, there is no mystery at all. Whatever our preferred psychoanalytic theory, we can agree that aggression is basic to our makeup. Films mobilize that aggression by having the bad guys do terrible things, creating a wish for revenge. Guilt is tempered with the justification that those bad guys deserve punishment and that their evil must be stopped. Similarly, there must be no grief to interfere with our enjoyment of the violence. I have heard numerous times from combat veterans that they became aware of sympathy for their victims only after finding a wallet with pictures of loved ones. The bad guys, the victims of our violent fantasies (in this case the members of the “deadly viper assassination squad”) must be unlovable and unmourned.
But that does not really explain how someone who is anxious at seeing a fistfight can enjoy watching two films, Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2, in which bodies are skewered, limbs cut off and eyeballs enucleated. How does a film not only relieve our anxiety, but also turn it into pleasure?
Kill Bill begins with violence at it’s most frightening. We see a pale woman wearing a bridal veil (known to us through most of the two films as “the bride”) her face covered in blood, lying helpless while a man approaches her, wipes her face clean while speaking in a calm, soft voice, then shoots her in the head as she is trying to tell him, “Bill, it’s your baby.” We sense the woman’s fear and rage as she faces her would be assassin. The scene appears designed to let us as viewers experience facing death. We are partly reassured, as we always are, by sensing that we are only voyeurs who will live on to watch the rest of the film. That reassurance is subtly reinforced by the song that accompanies the opening credits. “I was five and he was six, we rode on horses made of sticks. He wore black and I wore white, he would always win the fight. Bang bang, he shot me down. Bang, bang, that awful sound. Bang, bang, I hit the ground. Bang, bang, my baby shot me down.” It is as if we are being reminded that this is a game, a movie for our pleasure, not a real scene of deadly violence.
There is a further reassurance. The bride is not dead. An entire wedding party has been massacred; but through the bride we begin to entertain a fantasy of indestructibility. That is reinforced in the next scene, in which the bride arrives at a suburban Pasadena home to avenge herself on one of her attackers, Vernita Green.
Vernita Green is now a housewife, in a neat, well furnished house, a contrast to the assassin who we see in flashback, striking at the bride. As soon as the two women face each other, they enter into classic martial arts combat using household furniture, frying pans and kitchen knives. At one point, Vernita throws a small wall unit with dishes on top of the bride. There is glass all over the living room floor. Yet neither woman appears to be scratched, bruised or even fatigued. It helps that we are culturally prepared by similar scenes in other films and TV shows. (My grandmother, from another culture, used to be horrified when the cowboy in the picture I was watching would hit the other guy over the head with his gun butt.) We are immediately caught up in a fantasy of indestructibility, one in which our identification with the avenging bride offers us relief from our fears of violence.
This relief of anxiety is accentuated with some comic relief. As they are dueling with knives in the living room, the two women see Vernita’s daughter’s school bus arrive outside the house. As the four year old walks in the door, Vernita gives a pleading look and the two women hide their knives behind their backs and act as if nothing has happened. Vernita introduces her old friend and sends her daughter up to her room, telling the unbelieving girl that her doll had created the unbelievable destruction. We are momentarily relieved of the violence as the two women talk about their differences and plan a nighttime battle over coffee. The truce is broken suddenly when Vernita attempts to shoot her old friend with a gun hidden in a cereal box and is killed with a knife thrown through her heart.
It is precisely because seeing a hockey fight break out can make me anxious that I can get particular pleasure from a fantasy of indestructibility. Real scenes of violence are frightening, even traumatic, for most of us. We often talk about “suspension of disbelief” in discussing fiction. This kind of film utilizes a balance between suspension of disbelief and suspension of belief. Like a daydream, it must seem real enough to engage our emotions, yet fantasy enough not to alarm us.
To this point, the violence has been of a general nature, but as the first film moves on it points us to a particular set of anxieties to be overcome. The comatose bride is awakened by a penetration. A mosquito sticks its needle-like sucker into her skin, causing her to bolt up. Feigning her coma, she learns that she has been the victim of numerous rapes during her four year hibernation. When an unsuspecting yahoo climbs on her and sticks his tongue into her mouth, she bites on his tongue. We next see him lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The neck of her hospital gown is blood soaked. She cuts down the orderly who has been selling her body by cutting his Achilles tendons with her knife, causing him to fall. Afterwards, as she sits in his car, labeled “pussy wagon,” she tells us the story of her first intended victim, O-Ren Ishii. We see her story in cartoon form. A young girl hides under a bed while her father is run through with a sword from behind, blood flowing dramatically as it can only in a cartoon. Her mother is then pierced with the sword, the bloody blade coming through the bed just beside the girl’s head. She soon gets her revenge (three years later in the narrative) as she catches the pedophile gangster who killed her parents in bed and runs him through with a blade to the groin to the same bloody effect. Penetration, rape, a tongue bitten off, deadly penetration with swords, pedophilia and more deadly penetration; we are now in the realm of sexual violence.
As the violence escalates, we are partly protected. We do not see the tongue being bitten off, although we hear a scream and see the blood afterwards. We do see O-Ren’s parents being killed in a bloody scene and we see her bloody revenge, but it is shown in cartoon form, a step removed from reality. We are gradually acclimated to increasing levels of violence with increasing reliance on the indestructibility of the heroine and the general remove from reality.
The final scenes of volume 1 are not presented in cartoon form, although we easily recognize a martial arts genre which we comfortably associate with a world of fantasy. The themes of violent penetration, sometimes with a clear sexual innuendo, and of castration (begun with the biting of the tongue and the cutting of the Achilles tendons) are in the forefront. As the bride stalks O-Ren Ishii, now the crime boss of Tokyo, we are introduced further to her and her gang. we see O-Ren cut off the head of a rebel Yakuza leader who has the temerity to disparage her American/Chinese/Japanese ancestry. We are introduced to her body guard, a teenage girl named Gogo, who asks a stupid looking young man if he’d like to fuck her. When he says yes, with a big grin, she runs him through with her sword, boasting that she has penetrated him. The bride begins her challenge with an amputation, cutting off the left arm of O-Ren’s lawyer and closest advisor, the beautiful Sofie Fatale. With Sofie lying on a dance floor screaming, blood coming out of the stump, the bride engages in sword play with O-Ren’s entourage, first one by one, then en masse, eventually killing virtually all of them, although humiliating one young man, in effect castrating him, by spanking him on the buttocks with her sword and sending him back to his mother
I’m guessing that the reader of this article is about to put it down in horror and disgust, but amazingly the film’s viewers for the most part were able to watch it all with a feeling of pleasure. One person told me that she found the big battle scene comical and laughed when Sofie’s arm was cut off. The artistry is in the suspension of belief. Like the fetishist, we do not believe what we are seeing.
We are also offered a further relief. The film increasingly provokes our castration anxiety, but through the character of the bride we can overcome our fear. She is an indestructible sword wielding “phallic woman” with whom we identify, in effect, identifying with the aggressor, the castrator..
Like the author of a sado-masochistic fantasy, we are granted the illusion of mastering our fears. Kill Bill actively engages us in the illusion of full mastery of our environment, the mythology of learning from and gaining the strength of a mysterious, powerful master. In volume 1, before the bride goes to Tokyo to attack O-Ren, she travels to Okinawa, to convince the legendary Hattori Hanzo (a character and actor taken from the sword play films that Tarantino loved as a child) to end his twenty-eight year retirement to create a perfect sword for her. When she first meets him, she plays the naïve American girl in a foreign country, but she soon wins his and our respect for her ability to handle a sword. In a solemn ceremony, with “Spaghetti Western” music in the background, he presents her with her sword designed to kill Bill. In the second film, our heroine is placed in a coffin and buried alive. We see her tearful and frightened inside the coffin, a victim once again. We enter her memories of training with the ruthless and seemingly omnipotent Pai Mei. In the flashback, she struggles with pain, trying to pound her fists through solid walls. Concentrating, she begins to pound her way out of the coffin with a background of inspiring music. We are pleased to accept the fantasy that if we work with enough determination and faith, we can overcome all material obstacles—and all of our fears.
As if to reinforce our sense of what we have gained in fantasy, Kill Bill presents other women, members of Bill’s gang, who show the effects of castration. One, of course, is Sofie Fatale, whose arm is cut off by the bride. Later, we see the bride threatening to cut off other limbs to get information about Bill and the Deadly Viper members.
The other is Elle Driver, a perfect contrast to the bride. Both women are tall, thin blondes (Darryl Hannah and Uma Thurman) who are confident and skilled in martial arts. But the whereas the bride is indestructible, shot in the head and left without a scar, Elle has been permanently damaged, having lost an eye. The bride can be enraged and vengeful, but she always appears to be secure in her self image and her ability to achieve her ends. Elle is petulant, jealous and sneaky. She hates the bride because the bride was Bill’s favorite, another wound that has left a scar. In an early scene, we see her enter the comatose bride’s hospital room disguised as a nurse, lightly whistling a tune. She is about to inject poison into a venous catheter, when Bill calls her cell phone to abort the mission. Elle is furious at first, but Bill talks to her as if he were talking to a child. He tells her to keep her voice down, then forces her to acknowledge that sneaking into the bride’s room “like a filthy rat” to kill her in her sleep would lower them. Like a child, Elle first says, “I guess so,” but Bill forces her to say that she doesn’t have to guess. Later, without Bill watching, she uses sneaky tactics to kill her former brother in crime, Budd, by planting a Black Mamba snake in money she gives him as payment for the bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword. She does not have an internalized ego ideal or a secure self-image. It is as if Elle is the heroine’s other side, the woman who does feel castrated and neglected, hateful and spiteful to the end.
Her end is symbolic of her role as the castrated woman. She and the bride face each other swords in hand.
Bride: “What did you say to Pai Mei to make him snatch out your eye?”
Elle: “I called him a miserable old fool.”
Bride: “Ooh. Bad idea.”
Elle: “… I killed that miserable old fool. I poisoned his fish heads. … That’s right. I killed your master.” (Echoing the role of a similarly spiteful woman in the Chinese film, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon.)
As the combat ensues, they lock swords. Then the bride suddenly plucks out Elle’s good eye. As the bride leaves the cabin, Elle thrashes about blindly, screaming impotent threats and curses while the Black Mamba snake lurks near her.
Sometimes in analysis, we detect a central theme before seeing the outline of a more specific fantasy. We gradually see a repetitive return to images of castration and violent penetration. We recognize a recourse to fantasies of mastery to cope with underlying trauma. Finally, we begin notice specific images that point to a particular fantasy or screen memory that encapsulates these dynamics.
As the plot of Kill Bill develops in the second film, we begin to get hints of a movement from generic martial arts action to a more personal family drama. We get a sense of how these characters are related. One of the assassins, Budd, is Bill’s brother. His Hattori Hanzo sword is inscribed, “To my brother, Budd. The only man I ever loved. Bill.” We even learn more about Bill’s development as a fatherless child, unofficially adopted by a fatherly neighborhood pimp.
Above all, we learn about Bill’s personal relationship with the bride. In flashbacks to their encounter just before the wedding chapel massacre, there is an intimation of affection with an angry edge. When she tells Bill that his sweet side was always his better side, he responds, “I guess that’s why you’re the only one who’s ever seen it.” In this, and other flashbacks to a happier time, he calls her “Kiddo,” in what sounds like an affectionate name. We later learn that that is her name, Beatrix Kiddo, but the name is only part of the intimation of affection. We see Bill playing a flute (perhaps a connection to the actor, David Carradine’s more sympathetic role as Kane, the Shaolin monk in “Kung Fu”) and exchanging smiles and laughter with Kiddo. We see him telling her a story while she smiles at him affectionately.
This is not merely business. It is very personal. As Budd locks the bride into a coffin, intending to bury her, he says, “This is for breaking my brother’s heart.” We learn from Bill’s first surrogate father, the elegant Mexican, that five year old Bill sucked his thumb compulsively on seeing Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, proving that “this boy was a fool for blondes.” We have known from the beginning of the first film, that the bride was bearing Bill’s baby when she was shot, and are told at the end of that film that she does not know that that child had survived the shooting. We expect to learn more of their relationship before the second film ends, but nothing has prepared us for the final scenes.
The bride, now known to us as Kiddo, arrives at Bill’s residence, somewhere in Mexico and enters stealthily, her sword strapped to her back. She pulls out a pistol as she moves to the back of the house. Gun ready, she opens a door and is confronted with a scene which neither she nor the viewer could have anticipated.
She faces a little girl aiming a water pistol, who says, “Freeze, Mommy.” Bill is sitting on the floor near the girl also holding a water pistol. He says “Bang, bang. Oh, she got us B.B.” and plays falling down, while continuing to direct the scene in a playful, fatherly voice. “Fall down, sweetheart. Mommy shot us. But little did Quickdraw Kiddo know that little B.B. was only playing possum.” Suddenly, we’re back in the child’s world of the song that opened the first film.
With tears in her eyes, Kiddo plays her part in the scene and begins to be introduced to her daughter. Bill tells her, “I told her that you were asleep, but that one day you’d wake up and come back to her. And she asked me, ‘If Mommy’s been asleep since I was born, then how will she know what I look like?’ To which I replied, ‘Because Mommy’s been dreaming of you.’” The dialogue continues in this vein, with Bill demonstrating that he is a loving father, who has encouraged his little girl to love her absent mother. He even tells B.B. that Mommy is angry with him because he had been a “bad Daddy” who had shot Mommy.
After Kiddo lies with B.B. as she goes to sleep, the parents have their confrontation. Kiddo explains that while on her last mission, she discovered she was pregnant, changing her outlook.
“Before that [pregnancy test] strip turned blue, I would have jumped a motor cycle onto a speeding train for you. But once that strip turned blue, I could no longer do any of those things. Not anymore. Because I was gonna be a mother. Can you understand that? “
“Yes. But why didn’t you tell me then, instead of now?”
“Once you knew, you’d claim her. And I didn’t want that.”
“Not your decision to make.”
“Yes, but it’s the right decision and I made it for my daughter. She deserved to be born with a clean slate. But with you, she would have been born into a world she shouldn’t have known. I had to choose. I chose her.” (The film gives us some evidence that she was right. B.B. has recently killed her pet gold fish, and she goes to bed watching her favorite film, Shogun Assassin.)
She then asks Bill why he tried to kill her. He explains:
“When you never came back, I naturally assumed that Lisa Wong (the target of her last mission), or somebody else, had killed you. Oh, and for the record, letting somebody think somebody they love is dead when they are not is quite cruel. (The film suddenly recognizes grief.) I mourned you for three months and in the third month of mourning you I tracked you down. I wasn’t tryin’ to track you down. I was tryin’ to track down the fucking assholes I thought killed you. So I find you. And what do I find? Not only are you not dead, you’re getting married to some fucking jerk. And you’re pregnant. I overreacted.”
“You overreacted? Is that your explanation?”
In the end, the entire plot of multiple revenge killings boils down to a custody dispute and a lover’s quarrel.
There are many films that juxtapose our everyday experience with elaborate fantasies. In this film, an unfortunately common experience stands beside, in a sense gives rise to, an elaborate fantasy of martial arts and stylized killing. The motivation is as mundane, common and true to human nature as the fantasies are fantastic and removed from any reality we know. Just for a moment, at the end of the film, the couple quarrels with the sleeping child in her bedroom. They eventually fight; Kiddo gets her revenge by killing Bill with Pai Mei’s “five finger exploding heart technique” in a bittersweet scene of love and hate. She then takes her daughter away to a motel in which we see her the next morning watching kiddy cartoons in complete happiness while Kiddo cries, then laughs in the bathroom. Again, there is a denial of the child’s grief. For me, the presence of the child broke the story’s suspension of disbelief. I could not help wondering how such a child would react to the loss of the only parent she had known.
Only now can we recognize that we have had intimations of this scene. Both Nikki, Vernita Green’s little girl, and O-Ren Ishii have been nearby to witness the violent death of a parent. It is a repeating pattern in the narrative, almost lost in the fast moving plot. As analysts we are trained to listen for such disguised patterns as a guide to an important fantasy or memory.
In each case, the film has attempted to deny the child’s grief and horror, replacing it with revenge. Nikki, Vernita Green’s daughter is seen watching with no expression, her mother lying dead in the kitchen with a knife in her heart. Kiddo apologizes for killing her mother in front of her, then tells her that if that is not enough, she can come after her when she grows up. It is as if revenge can wipe away grief. Eight year old O-Ren Ishii is seen as a cartoon character who moves immediately from grief and shock at seeing her parents’ violent deaths to revenge upon their murderer. In this respect, the film is truthful, documenting the cycle of violence, the victim becoming the attacker. But if we were hearing something like this from a patient, we might suspect a defense against awareness of fear and grief at witnessing such violence.
Bill and Kiddo appear to be loving, caring parents until B.B. is asleep. Then they quarrel and fight to the death. It suggests a more mundane domestic scene of a small child trying to endure and ignore the obvious hostility her parents feel toward one another. The parents try very hard to hide their hostility from the child, and they try very hard to ignore the effects of their battle upon her as well; but, the disguise is superficial, leaving it to the child’s imagination to play out the violence between them in the extreme terms of her unconscious fantasies and the vehicle of the action films she watches.
The films open to the logo of “Shaw-Scope”. The Shaw brothers were Hong Kong filmmakers who produced what are known as the “grind house” films of the sixties and seventies, involving martial arts and swordplay. In the DVD extras, Tarantino says that Kill Bill, particularly volume 1, was intended as an homage to these films that he loved to watch as a child. At the end of the film, we see Kiddo’s daughter, B.B., watching such a movie. In fact, there is a suggestion that Kiddo has taken her away to divert her from the violent interests of her father. Nevertheless, Kill Bill can be seen as a representation of a child’s fantasy of what it would be like had her parents been martial arts wizards, a blend of splendid athletic grace, perfect mastery, and ferocious hostility, directing their powerful rage and hers upon one another. Imagine the entire action of both films—the revenge, the hostility, the mutilation, the killing—through the eyes and imagination of a small child afraid of and perhaps excited by the projection of her violence onto her parents. Two entire films that offer a sense of mastery over violent rage and castration anxiety to a small child, lying in her bed, imagining the outcome of her parents’ violence towards one another after she is safely removed as a witness. After all, as we watch such a film as adults, are we not also seeing it through the eyes and imagination of an excited and frightened child?
by Herbert H. Stein
Published originally in the PANY Bulletin: Fall, 2004