Why I still love Kill Bill

Revenge, deception, classic struggles of power and love. But there are new things I’m seeing in Kill Bill that I hadn’t before.

Disclaimer: Kill Bill heavily borrows from other cultures, stereotypes, and scenes to tell its story. This is a personal recollection of what it meant to see a female on screen.

My friend and I begged her cool dad to take us to see the Kill Bill Vol 1 premier in middle school. With all of my best most convincing abilities, I relayed a stream of reviews from Newsweek, where I had first seen Uma Thurman slashed across a glossy page in yellow, katana drawn. An antihero. A genre breaking film I could finally see in our suburban theater. I was just 12ish, carefully dressed in the least offensive Abercrombie and Fitch hoodie with a weird homemade t-shirt. Did we want popcorn? No, we shook our heads in agreement. We didn’t want to be fat, our exploding bodies uncomfortably putting fat where they liked.

Her dad sat behind us, and the was theater full so we were pushed to the front. Many people hate this position, but in this way the typography of the credits and chapters seemed to swallow us whole. I knew very little of kung-fu movies, the 1970’s references, or even human anatomy aside from health class, but the nuances, camp, and scenes didn’t escape us. After a lifetime of films designed to emulate Ron Howard and Spielberg with a tight wrap up of child flavors and themes, it was refreshing to watch something raw, interrupted and out of order, where the fight scenes weren’t clumsily CG, and the lone heroine was framed in black and white, silhouette, athletic gear, destroyed and built up again and again like blonde batman.

I looked over at my friend after the scene where O-Ren Ishii-i decaptitates Boss Tanaka, and her round face glowed red back at me, mesmerized.

Humming horneted music book ended scenes and the rush of revenge, righteous murder with real feelings instead of sappy seduction, sharp Americana and Japanese intertwined together.

Leaving the theater, her dad muttered that there was too much blood, but we were enraptured. The blood was fake, of course no one died. Was it violent? Yes. But it wasn’t saving Private Ryan violent, it was Girl Violent, Tarantino Violent. No sex, the main character isn’t taken over by a more handsome man like Leia or even Wonder Woman. Her origins were decidedly earned, she battled against things we had only been warned about: rape, sexual harrassment, gangsters, broken hearted men taking revenge. She didn’t use other men, money or guns, but her body. She wasn’t the prettiest, or most moral in every scene. She wore clothes I could wear to school. She spoke multiple languages. She listened to those who she wanted to learn from. She got angry at those who had wronged her, and did something about it. I vowed to up the number of sit ups I did per day to match Reese Witherspoon’s count.

Beatrix Kiddo became my superhero over the years. In an age where very few strong women were represented as good guys, with the exception of the ditzy Charlies Angels, Kill Bill represented a new era to me.

Even now, as I’ve sat through Marvel films or films about Superwomans and sexy villains, or cried as I’ve watched women be the central, strong focus in films the way I grew up seeing men, nothing has compared to Kill Bill except The Nun in Watchmen in terms of complexity, multi-dimensional feelings of love and grief and triumph. The film the Watchmen came out a few years after Kill Bill, and while it was terrific for the time, revisitng it feels brittle and listless, boring tropes and I don’t understand the fan’s need to defend it.

While I now know about the humiliation of Uma Thurman and the horror she has to go with Miramax’s monster Weinstein to be there making those films, and my love of kung fu, karate and martial arts films is more often what I watch than Kill Bill, once a year I still watch them again with the same anticipation and promise: a heroine that does not live or die by a man’s will. A heroine that rises again.

Note: I wrote this in 2018. I realize we need deeper conversations than love letters to pop culture, but it was sitting here almost all done and I decided to ahead and MAKE IT DONE.