After having steeled my stomach through the sheer viciousness of “Reservoir Dogs,” the shock-for-shock’s sake of the overrated but still compelling “Pulp Fiction” and the dodgy blaxploitation-philia of “Jackie Brown,” I can say that I had not counted myself among those who took issue with the director’s wanton desire to piss off just as many people as he delights.
So, I figure, it makes sense that I find “Kill Bill” to be just about the worst piece of Orientalism to make it before discerning movie audiences in quite some time. It’s my turn to be indignant.
Jacking Off to Kill Bill
Among the truest and worst things you can say about this movie is that it is profoundly masturbatory. Its two hours and five minutes amount to a catalog of Tarantino’s cinematic and pop-cultural fetishes: a legion of profusely sexy female assassins, a prolific counter-culture of moral evil-doers, a population of black-belted warriors, and a climate given over to regular, strong gusts of nostalgia for the 1970s. There is nothing in this movie with which the director is clearly not enraptured, no corner of the film given up to anything but that which completely satisfies some well of fascination in his psyche. In most respects, this is good or even great, as it results in is a sustained masterwork, a real and unique vision writ boldly and without compromise on the screen.
Mysteries of the Muthaf***kin’ Orient
And yet, fetishism can be a foul spectacle, and that is the case with the character Tarantino created to dominate the second half of “Kill Bill” — O-Ren Ishii — and the actress he selected to play that part — the lamentable Lucy Liu. Ishii, as imagined by the director, is the petite, sexy and ruthless queen of a Seijun Suzuki-inspired Japanese underground, and she is flanked by a pair of petite, sexy and ruthless female lieutenants, and backed by an army of identically dressed, anonymous Asian gangsters.
This scenario is a ludicrous, racist and sexist conceit, and the Ishii role amounts to nothing more than a hastily sketched compendium of Asian stereotypes. None of them are blatantly insulting, but all of them are lazy and evince a complete lack of insight and imagination on the part of the writer-director. Add to this the meager talents of Lucy Liu, an actress making a career of bringing to life white men’s fantasies of Asian women — and who possesses not an ounce of charisma — and the result is supremely cringe-worthy. I spent every moment of Liu’s screen time groaning, and held out hope for a grisly and punishing demise.
If there’s a performance that redeems Liu’s, it’s that of the singularly beautiful Uma Thurman. Here, she is at perhaps the height of her craft, boldly and confidently chewing through Tarantino’s dense, sometimes unwieldy and sometimes brilliant dialog with real gusto. Thurman goes from grizzled to girlish with remarkable agility, and her willingness to get the shit kicked out of her and look like complete shit while doing it makes her beauty all the more indescribable. Her contribution is real work, and it’s sure to be underrated by most critics but also destined to be studied by any actress endeavoring to hold her own in an action movie.
The Tarantino School for Appreciation of Asian Culture
As a whole, I’m not sure that “Kill Bill” is entirely good enough to make up for its unreconstructed fantasia of the land beyond the Pacific, but I do know that Tarantino invests this film with enough enthusiasm that it’s never less than watchable. (It’s another of the increasing number of films that has been art directed within an inch of its life — with nearly every detail being meticulously absurd-ified — but done so more judiciously than just about any other i’ve seen, including Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.”) I would gladly see it again, as my only real reservation is the influence that this film will surely have on the character of Asian representation in films going forward. All of Tarantino’s films have been widely imitated, flaws and all, and I’m not looking forward to seeing cheap Hollywood rip-offs working off a similarly ridiculous idea of Asia. But, given the choice between a world run rampant with such rip-offs and one with no Tarantino films at all, I’d gladly take the later, painful offenses and all.
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