Fangoria

YES, IT IS surprising that Quentin Tarantino has made a movie that’s short on both dialogue and story. The plot goes like this: Uma Thurman used to be a member of a gang of assassins. She met a boy, decided to get hitched, and hung up her spurs. Her old colleagues, led by her former boss, Bill, show up a the wedding, kill the groom and other assorted guests, and leave Uma for dead. After four years she comes out of a coma and vows revenge. To tell this epic tale we have “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and, coming next February, “Kill Bill: Volume 2.” It was, evidently, too much to compress into one sitting.

None of which is meant dismissively. Whatever else its merits, “Kill Bill” is an entertaining genre movie and a real high point in the wuxia oeuvre. It has, however, a certain grandiosity that, while not entirely unwelcome, is so self-conscious as to be a little uncomfortable. There are moments in “Kill Bill”–when, for example he bleeps out the name of Uma Thurman’s character or puts the opening credits in Japanese–that are so pretentiously stylish that it feels as though we’ve caught the director in flagrante with himself.

Thurman deserves some kind of medal for her work here. She does an astonishing job creating a trompe l’oeil, giving the appearance of depth where none has been written for her. Also, while Nicole Kidman’s bravery was endlessly praised for wearing a prosthetic nose in “The Hours” (because it made her look, you know, less pretty, which was daring), Thurman allows herself to be trashed onscreen–bruised, abused, bloodied, and disfigured. Few actresses of her stature would ever assent to being shot so unflatteringly. Good for her.

(The really revelatory performance, however, comes from Lucy Liu, as the assassin O-Ren Ishi. Liu, normally a blandly enigmatic presence, is given to tightly-controlled, robotic performances. Here, as a semi-psychotic Yakuza, she’s off-kilter and a little reckless; “Kill Bill” is much better for it.)

As much as for these performances, “Kill Bill” is likely to gain attention for its violence and gore. With good reason: “Kill Bill” is the goriest movie you’re ever likely to see. It vaults past the Japanese samurai movies it takes as its inspiration. There are plucked-out eyeballs and skulls punctured with nails, disembowelings and dismemberment, and everywhere great gushing geysers of blood. Tarantino tells Newsweek that most of this “is done for a comic effect.”

No doubt devotees of Eastern cinema will rush to Tarantino’s defense, as will sophisticated American critics. But it’s not clear from whom they’re defending him. After all, people concerned with violence and sex in film have largely given up the struggle–only ethnic and racial grievance groups attack movies these days.

And what a missed opportunity for the virtue police. “Kill Bill” is a powerful example of one indisputable fact: Violence is desensitizing. After 90 minutes of death and slaughter, you’ll barely bat an eyelash when one character is scalped and her pink, mushy brain glows faintly against the evening snow. Whether or not desensitization is a problem in the culture is another debate, but let there be no doubt that it is real.

ALL OF WHICH brings us to Tarantino himself. Several years ago there was an article in Esquire positing that Tarantino and Oliver Stone were cinema’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Tarantino was the elegant, sociable auteur, Stone the gruff, confrontational bull. Both pairs have notoriously bad feelings between them.

That analogy worked reasonably well in the late ’90s, but today the two filmmakers would appear to be converging. Stone’s 1999 “Any Given Sunday” was lyrical and philosophical enough to border on the sentimental, while “Kill Bill” resembles–at least on the surface–Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” the 1994 movie which created the enmity that exists between the two men. Both are kinetic and unconventionally lensed, both rely at times on animation, both are gruesomely violent, and both have directors who insist the violence is merely cartoonish.

But this reading would be a mistake. Stone is evolving as a filmmaker, growing and changing. Watching his movies you can discern an artistic arc. Tarantino is, by his own design, going nowhere.

Tarantino seems to have decided that he wants to be a genre director, or more to the point, a multi-genre director who never repeats himself. He has made four movies, each of which is a genre piece (gangster, pulp, blaxploitation, and now kung fu). Each time he throws his entire weight into the form and tries not to reinvent it, but to create a hipster archetype.

The only thread running through his work is a rigorous devotion to homage. It’s a truism that Tarantino cribs from scores of movies to create his own, and “Kill Bill” is no exception. From Uma’s yellow track suit to the sirens that blare when enemies confront one another, “Kill Bill” is chock-a-block with homage. It is also full of homages–some subtle, some not–to other Quentin Tarantino movies.

Again, nothing wrong with this. Spotting these rips and figuring out where they’re from is half the fun in a Tarantino movie.

THERE IS, however, a problem with cultural atrophy in the long-run. Most of the wit and intelligence in pop entertainments these days comes from spotting the homages, catching the references. It’s true in movies and television. It’s true of music, where songs with long strings of cultural references (i.e. Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week,” Bloodhound Gang’s “Ain’t Nothing But Mammals,” LFO’s “Summer Girls,” Eminem’s “Without Me”) often become hits. And it is becoming true in writing. What started with Brett Easton Ellis’s “Glamorama” has spread to the best-seller list and is now especially evident in online writing. Reference and homage is the sly way to be funny and signal to readers that they’re part of the in group while at the same time flattering them by suggesting the joke is probably flying over other people’s heads. Instead of writing something funny, writers drop in a “Simpsons” reference or make a knowing wink about Star Trek. Homage is the new humor, the new sophistication.

Consider, for example, “The Philadelphia Story.” Made in 1940, it is totally independent of the culture for both its humor and its humanity. There is not a single reference to anything outside its world. And because of that, every joke still works today, every reaction still rings true.

As the culture begins to lean more heavily on reference and homage, it ceases to be vital and dooms itself to obsolescence. Such a culture is incapable of producing anything with even the chance of becoming classic.

It would be unfair to hang responsibility for this decay on Quentin Tarantino or his new movie. Yet one hopes that after he runs out of genres to ape, he’ll set off for undiscovered country.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.