Five Favorite Things... Tarantino #2

 

Of swords and hands - Kill Bill

Are my tears due to the greatness of Kill Bill or the cumulative effect The Bride’s journey has had on me over the years or my having had kids of my own? After The Bride has triumphed over O-Ren Ishii – her greatest rival – in the falling snow, I’m unable to move. When Bill wonders if she knows her daughter is still alive, I weep.

As The Bride follows her path of revenge towards Bill, she charts a classic trajectory of going after what she wants, first the wrong followed by the right way. Duels in wintery Japanese gardens are typical of what happens to heroes at the midpoint of their journeys, halfway to discovering the wrongness of their ways. For The Bride, it’s an empty, unsatisfying, false victory. Watching her beaten and bloodied figure collapse on a bench, her sword falling from her hand, I’m unable to move because I read her thoughts. O-Ren deserved to die, but not by having the top of her head sliced off from six feet away by a sharp and shiny manmade extension of The Bride’s body.

The first half of Kill Bill is about the lengthening of The Bride’s blade. It opens with her and Vernita Green having a knife fight in the latter’s suburban home, ending with Vernita’s death while her 4-year-old daughter watches. We next sit back and take in the story of how O-Ren became The Bride’s greatest rival. As a child, she’d witnessed the deaths of her parents at the hands of a Yakuza boss, one and the other run through the heart with a samurai sword. The Sword becomes O-Ren’s means of revenge and she completes her rise to power in her world of men by bringing a meeting of Tokyo underworld heads to an abrupt, blood spraying adjournment by taking one of those heads as a trophy.

When it comes time to cross O-Ren’s name off her death list, The Bride’s plan is to convince legendary samurai sword master Hattori Hanzo to craft for her his life’s greatest work, one that’ll make her a match for O-Ren and everyone else standing between her and Bill. It’s what it’ll take to defeat O-Ren. We see Bill’s hand fondling a sword throughout the entire first half of Kill Bill. And having a super sword of her own comes in handy as she acrobatically battles O-Ren’s Crazy-88 sword-wielding bodyguards.

Of course, wherever blatant phallus substitutes are found, castration is soon to follow. O-Ren’s fiercest bodyguard, schoolgirl-costumed Gogo Yubari, makes short work of disarming The Bride using her fearsome, more than six foot long ball and chain, resulting in the finale of their fight unfolding within arm’s reach (foreshadowing the second half of the movie). When The Bride turns to face a member of the Crazy-88 who is but a mere boy, she chops his sword down to a nub in his trembling hand, takes him over her knee, spanks him with her blade, and sends him home to his mother.

And that’s when The Bride and O-Ren Ishii come face-to-face in a snowy garden. They’re two warriors of near equal strength and ferocity, both clutching steel blades honed by men as their assumed way of asserting power over the men who have treated them horrendously. There’s a pause in their battle where they acknowledge each other with mutual respect.

What are we doing? I hear them thinking. Have we forgotten the strength we were born with?

Sure, we learn Hanzo steel is priceless and worth a suitcase stuffed with a million dollars cash, but as swords are revered during the first half of Kill Bill, they’re denigrated during the second as the movie maps The Bride’s rising awareness of the power she’s always held in her hands.

Next on her kill list is Bill’s brother Budd and she finds him alone in his trailer. He’s been fired from his job at a titty bar and is rocking in a chair to the tune of “A Satisfied Mind” sung by Johnny Cash. He’s the spitting image of pathetic and barely even worth killing – not by the world’s greatest warrior. But with Hanzo sword in hand she throws open his trailer door to cross another name off her list and…

KABOOM!!

Waiting patiently for her, Budd greets her with both barrels of a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Her sword goes flying and Budd kicks it farther away still. In this half of the movie, swords are no match for men with guns. Budd hops on his cell phone and calls Elle Driver – the eye-patch-wearing #4 on The Bride’s list – and offers her the sword for $1,000,000. She agrees. (Budd used to have a Hanzo sword of his own, but he pawned it for $250, or so he says.)

Budd proceeds to try to kill The Bride in the most cowardly way imaginable. He buries her alive, nailed within a wooden coffin, her feet and wrists tied together, with nothing but a flashlight. She panics, at first, anyone would, but she settles down – and we learn how she’s able to arrive at such a state of calm.

The movie flashes back to a time deep in her backstory before she became an assassin. Bill arranged for her to be trained by one of the legendary Five Elders of the Shaolin Temple, Pai Mei, and his tutelage is legendarily cruel. She finds herself in a different world of fighting skills than she’ll experience with Hattori Hanzo. Pai Mei mocks samurais and their swords. He challenges her to touch him one time with her blade. He ends up making a fool of her by standing upon her extended sword as if he’s light as a feather.

He proceeds to break her physically, mentally, and spiritually to less than zero – and recreates her. He trains her to use her hands as powerful, lethal weapons. It’s painful. He expects her to punch through an inch of wood from mere inches away.

“What if your enemy is three inches in front of you? Curl into a ball?” Pai Mei asks.

Her hands are bloodied. The skin on her knuckles peels away. She becomes hopeless – or more hopeless than usual, I suppose – at using chopsticks to eat rice. Pai Mei smiles at her progress and tenacity. He hates Bill. He’s fond of her.

The flashback has revealed the reason behind her calm. She works her feet free, retrieves a straight razor from her boot, cuts the ropes binding her wrists, and thanks Pai Mei as she punches her way out of the coffin, claws her way upward through the falling soil, and bursts out of the earth gasping for breath. Her escape from being buried alive is one of the finest sequences of “All is Lost,” “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and revelation and rebirth I’ve seen.

She walks back to Budd’s trailer to finish the job and finds Elle, smiling over Budd’s dead body. She’d stashed something else in the suitcase besides cash, a black mamba. (The Bride’s assassin code name is Black Mamba. She didn’t have to stoop to kill him. Her namesake did the act for her.)

And Elle and The Bride have their long awaited showdown, Elle armed with The Bride’s former sword, The Bride empty-handed. And the ensuing fight is the funniest and most telling scene in the movie. When Elle attempts to draw the sword, it bumps into a wall. She raises it and it’s stopped by the ceiling. The sword has become useless within the close quarters of Budd’s filthy and pathetic trailer, but they battle anyway, smashing through one flimsy wall after another – until The Bride spies it, Budd’s Hanzo sword. Budd lied. He didn’t pawn it after all.

Each with sword in hand, The Bride and Elle approach each other, Elle ready for the kill, The Bride confident as well. And as Elle readies to strike with her blade, The Bride plucks Elle’s remaining eyeball from her skull, drops it to the floor, and squishes it with her foot. The Bride leaves the trailer and a screaming Elle behind to begin the final leg of her journey – to kill Bill.

She tracks him down through a sleazy whorehouse proprietor (all the men she’s met by way of Bill are skuzzy) and drives to his home in Mexico. She slips inside, sword still in hand, searches, hears a sound on the back patio, and turns the corner to face the final and most important figure on her revenge schedule – and this is the moment when she learns her daughter is still alive. Her whole world changes in an instant. Instead of killing Bill, she finds herself playing “Bang Bang, You’re Dead” with a 4-year-old, watching Bill make sandwiches (even removing the crust for his little one), and putting a daughter to bed she didn’t know she had an hour ago.

Once her daughter is asleep, The Bride is all business once again. Bill has been admiring her sword and wonders how she talked Hanzo into making another instrument of death, something he’d sworn never to do.

“I just dropped your name, Bill,” she says.

Bill shoots her with a truth serum dart, he tells her a story comparing her to Superman, and they head outside to duel in the moonlight. They fight until her sword, again, goes flying. Bill goes in for the kill with his sword, but, instead of finding flesh, it slides harmlessly into her scabbard. She makes the move Bill wasn’t anticipating. Pai Mei also did something for her he swore he would never do. He taught her the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, the deadliest thing a person can do to with one’s hands. As blood drips from his mouth, Bill knows he’s a goner. He also knows The Bride warmed Pai Mei’s heart like no other. He stands, takes five steps, and drops dead. The fall of the sword and rise of the hands is complete.

My tears I mentioned at the onset are a reaction to one thing, an awareness of the scenes ahead between The Bride and her daughter. After more than three hours of mayhem, I embrace the final image of them seated on a bed watching cartoons with open arms. Sure, not all will be pleasant in their future. Vernita Green’s 4-year-old daughter will seek revenge, Elle isn’t dead, merely blind, and, under the effects of the truth serum, The Bride admitted she’s a natural born killer, but all the same, the ending has a sweetness Tarantino wouldn’t match again until Sharon Tate invites Rick Dalton into her home in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.