Dear Comrades -
Thanks to Sarah for kicking off a KILL BILL discussion. Long may it run! The
film strikes me as a completely fascinating and quite masterful object. As
for what it 'means', I have yet to hear a persuasive case! (I try to pay no
attention to the ad hominem accounts which argue that Tarantino is a
charlatan, a loudmouth, a narcissist, etc - and it's also good to get beyond
either under-investing or over-investing in him as a figure/celebrity: the
von Trier syndrome).
However - and here I am not criticising anyone who has contributed to our
discussion so far - I am not sure that trying to weigh up the film in terms
of 'humanisation' is the best way to go. This tends to reduce film analysis
to the lowest common denominator of newspaper movie reviewing and idiot
fandom: 'can we get involved in the characters, do we care about them?' I
know getting engaged with characters is a significant aspect of movie
experience, but it is not a cine qua non (sorry) of that experience. That
criterion often fails spectacularly, as is the case with the year's most
underrated Hollywood film, Peyton Reed's DOWN WITH LOVE. Also - the terrific
term 'metric of evaluation' has appeared in the discussion, and we have to
be wary of such metrics. How would we 'measure' humanisation in a movie?
It's like that mechanistic mania that periodically grips academic film
studies: ten POV shots to a character means that character possesses 'the
look' and is the enunciator ... most movies are more complex than this, even
routine ones.
There are plenty of film forms and film directors that happen way beyond
humanisation, and KILL BILL is surely a supreme example. (Does Deleuze use
humanisation even once as a yardstick in his cinema books?) Besides,
philosophically, many interesting questions & explorations begin at the
point where we try to get past humanisation.
Adrian Martin
|