KILL BILL Decoded: From Pastiche to Incoherent Postmodernism

…, with a particular focus on Kill Bill as the ultimate proof of the downfall of this once-great director. The idea for the film might have sounded super cool when told to a bartender in a drunken haze, but each subsequent stage of production, especially the screenplay writing, exposed all the flaws of this pseudo-story and led it astray, providing a perfect recipe for something that looks good in a minute-long teaser on YouTube but is simply unbearable to watch in its full length.

It’s clear that Quentin had some iconic scenes and characters in mind, which he then placed in the trailer. The problem is that between those scenes, there had to be some filler, and the characters needed to have meaningful dialogues. This is where things get tricky because both the filler and the dialogue, to put it mildly, leave a lot to be desired. I’m curious about one thing: at what point did Tarantino believe that some magic spell during the making of Kill Bill would transform this trash into an artistic movie full of laid-back fun—when he invited the cinematography guru Robert Richardson to collaborate, or when he entrusted the editing of his drivel to Sally Menke?

I fully realize that by disapproving of this particular film, I’m fighting a losing battle. Quentin has always dismissed criticism. In his fourth consecutive film, he perfected his signature method (he should patent it) of masking the fact that he’s suffering from creative decline. As is well known, Kill Bill is a peculiar mix of comedy and revenge cinema. On the one hand, it easily covers up the script’s weaknesses, and on the other, in case of a flop, the creator can always explain it away as a genre pastiche. If I weren’t naturally cynical, I’d say that Quentin in Kill Bill masterfully dresses up a dull plot in a brilliant blend of visuals, dialogue, and editing, loosely inspired by Asian themes.

I’d go even further in my praise: from the first few minutes, you can see that the director is in love with the genre, while simultaneously maintaining a certain distance, which gives the events a nice, conventional charm. I would wrap up my review with the favorite catchphrase of many writers, that it’s a “joyful pastiche of the highest order” or something along those lines. The trouble is, I am naturally cynical, and I intend to use this trait of mine to undertake the most daring act in the history of modern criticism—I intend to prove that Kill Bill has nothing to do with pastiche and represents the descent of a director who has enclosed himself in a cocoon of cult status, naively believed in it, and shamelessly puts his name on trash to cash in on his past commercial glory.

According to plan, I will first tackle (though not alone—I’m too timid for such a charge) the myth perpetuated by the mass media that Kill Bill is a pastiche of anything. The term is thrown around by everyone as it suits them, including Quentin himself, often unconsciously confusing pastiche with parody or simply using it as a synonym for things that are funny. Even Microsoft Word has trouble identifying it—while writing this text, I curiously right-clicked on the word “pastiche” and summoned the thesaurus. Guess what word my eyes saw at the top of the list?

The sad moral of the above is that in common understanding, pastiche is equivalent to something light, funny, and grotesque—in short, anything that’s funny and not taken too seriously will be called pastiche, in opposition to solemn seriousness. And one could leave it at that without comment because does the average Sunday moviegoer care about the technique in which a film is conceived? Of course not. The point is that distinguishing between pastiche and parody poses problems not only for Microsoft programmers but also for educated professionals who are paid to evaluate works of mass culture. And that’s an issue irritating enough to require some correction.

To be clear: I don’t suspect anyone of bad intentions. Had my teachers in my youth not forced me to visit public libraries, I would probably be spreading the same falsehoods today. However, not every film that references other films and not every meta-creation has the right to claim the honorable title of pastiche. You have to earn that.

The paragraph you’re about to read with bated breath originally contained a lot of mumbo jumbo from applied poetics. However, in the interest of your mental health, I’ve taken steps to simplify the academic jargon that made up its content and compressed the whole argument as much as possible, so I hope that getting through this part of the review won’t cause anyone’s mental gears to grind.

As Jerzy Ziomek (may he rest in peace) states in his flagship volume titled Rzeczy komiczne (The Comic Things), which every humanities student has likely stumbled upon, pastiche is a forgery. But a special kind of forgery—it does not imitate a specific work or piece together fragments of a work, which is precisely what Quentin did in Kill Bill. Instead, the person doing the pastiching, often completely unaware that what they are doing is technically called pastiche, creates a previously nonexistent work, imitating the productive forces inherent in a given poetics. In cinematic terms, pastiche is about making films that were never made. It’s akin to the process of art forgery, involving the imitation of a painter’s style. The more skilled the forger is in the art, the sharper their eye, the more perfect the imitation they create.

In the spirit of “constructive imitation,” Quentin’s three most mature works to date were born, which are excellent testimony to his extraordinary directorial (and imitative) skills and his profound understanding of the rules of the poetics he imitates: Reservoir Dogs as the offspring of imitative reproduction of the style of Asian crime thrillers about mafias, gangsters, robbery, and shooting; Pulp Fiction as a pastiche of cheap, sex-and-violence-soaked crime stories; and finally, Jackie Brown, a creative paraphrase of blaxploitation cinema and simultaneously a successful adaptation of a literary original. Let’s repeat: a film pastiche equals making films that were never made, and Tarantino emerged in pop culture as a pioneer of pastiching cinematic trash.

After internalizing these two rules, life becomes simpler.

There’s something else worth mentioning in the context of discussing pastiche, which is often forgotten. Pastiche has been considered for centuries the most distinguished stylistic technique, and this is not without reason—it forces the creator to have an understanding of the material far beyond the primitive skills of a parodist. Unlike parody, pastiche is not designed to mock anything or to amuse the audience. Sure, Pulp Fiction or Cervantes’s Don Quixote from literature are at times overwhelmed by brilliant humor, funny genre scenes, and the author’s distance from the surrounding world, but laughter is rarely provoked in them deliberately for the sake of mere amusement. It is more of a side effect of the events taking place than a central element, and, to speak philosophically, it arises from the tragicomedy of life, its perversity, and randomness.

At least, that’s how I see it—when watching Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs (since Jackie Brown is probably Quentin’s least “funny” film), I sometimes laugh, but then comes a moment of reflection, and I can’t answer what I was laughing at. Sure, I’m amused when Vincent blows off the face of a Black man with a gun, and I slap my thighs with laughter when Don Quixote charges at windmills, but in essence, the “content” of these scenes is far more serious than farcical. My private theory is that the laughter here arises as a defense mechanism against absurdity—as a method of drowning out the tragedy of the situation being observed. And that’s good—it takes a truly exceptional understanding of the human soul to provoke such feelings in the viewer.

Narratively, Reservoir Dogs consistently rides on the absurdly desperate circumstances: after a botched jewelry heist, gangsters gather in a garage outside the city to figure out who hid the loot and what to do next. It’s hard to suppress laughter when you watch these otherwise grown men gradually sink into deeper psychosis, accusing each other without hesitation of betraying criminal ideals. It’s simply great cinema.

Now, compare that to Kill Bill and its crude, forced, and stupidly humorous scenes of cutting down hundreds of identical-looking enemies—practically every swing of the katana here results in dismemberment combined with a multi-liter spray of blood, and the main character, like in a video game, cuts her way to the boss through hordes of massacred opponents. No one will convince me that this isn’t a qualitative drop of at least several levels—to cinematic kindergarten. And the fact that it’s well-shot is no argument for me, just a pathetic attempt to justify shoddy work.

At this point, a dilemma arises: should we label Kill Bill as a full-fledged parody of Asian cinema, given that in those films, churned out one after another, it’s commonplace to see craziness like slicing a neighbor in half with a sword or taking out a dozen enemies in one leap? According to Jerzy Ziomek, no—we cannot. And I agree with him. For a parody to be perceived as something meaningful, it must mock a pattern that is of higher status. Parodying stupidity, however—which Kill Bill somewhat aims to do—is pointless from a genre, substantive, and common-sense perspective.

This was empirically verified for me while watching the film, as I kept wondering, “What’s going on, Quentin?” The parodied model in terms of narrative, situational, and choreographic absurdities is no worse than your Kill Bill, and if I wanted to laugh at idiocies, I’d just turn on some Hong Kong film.

Now we just have to wait until, in a burst of inspiration, the guy makes a parody of the Turkish version of Rambo, setting himself the task of outdoing the original in terms of the nonsense presented. Of course, we can find parody interpretations of such timeless masterpieces in Anglo-Saxon culture as Rambo III or the early works of Sensei Seagal, and these are fully justified parodies, because no one in their right mind would negate the Rambo trilogy or call it trash—it’s an unrivaled classic of action cinema and the progenitor of films about a hunted commando in the jungle! And to completely put down Quentin’s cheerful creativity, I’ll say in passing that, for the first time in this director’s career, the form of his film turned out to be inadequate to its inspiration—Kill Bill is simply too pretty, too polished, too meticulously studied, and disgustingly over-stylized with outrageously bright colors.

Tarantino will show a similar inconsistency in the stylization of “Death Proof,” this time aiming for the shabby and toxic exploitation films of the ’70s, where such wonders as overly colored grimy frames, specks on the ends of rolls, missing frames, rough cuts, and intentionally poorly framed shots will be the hallmark of the first half of the film, only to disappear as if by magic in the second half. Digital simulation of grindhouse was much better achieved by Rodriguez.

After this typically dilettante lecture on poetics, it’s high time to answer the fundamental question: what is Kill Bill if it isn’t what it used to be? A collage of motifs, styles, and characters? An attempt to sneak in cheap action through the back door into high culture? A bid to elevate this work to the heights of cinematography? Pure fun, a unique phenomenon, a super cool movie? A self-aware monument to pop-cultural postmodernism?

I’ve heard these ramblings hundreds of times from Kill Bill connoisseurs, who intend them to work in favor of the film, but in reality, they make me increasingly dislike it. Let’s forget about genre classification for a moment. Ideologically speaking, Kill Bill reeks from miles away of some unused idea from Quentin’s infancy, when he was gorging himself on trashy movies until he passed out.

And framing it that way isn’t an exaggeration, because that’s exactly what Kill Bill reminded me of after my last viewing.

As a kid, I often started wars with toy soldier diapers. I would invent various sensational intrigues and try to mimic a film, more precisely: to mimic the flow of a film’s plot. However, it quickly turned out that I lacked the talent to bring a storyline to a proper conclusion—deus ex machina solutions would appear in my carefree play to redirect the action onto new tracks and sensibly finalize the chaos. In such situations, having gathered enough goodwill, I usually invented an extra character or event that pushed the whole thing forward. I could—like any child, after all—conjure up a solution to a troublesome situation and give the play an appearance of logic.

The starting point of Kill Bill (and I caution: the word “play” cannot be used as an excuse for shoddy work) was, of course, the assassination attempt on the bride. Then Tarantino invented increasingly ridiculous scenes, just to stretch the initial idea to full length. As the mental work progressed, he had an epiphany: since I’m such a film scholar, why not sell this crap to the public and squeeze some money out of them? A cult-looking, perfumed piece of crap will sell like hotcakes, even if it reeks terribly. So Quentin hastily scribbled a few new scenes, inserted them between the existing ones, stitched it all together with thread used for stitching up corpses in morgues, added a bunch of embarrassing monologues—rejected ones that didn’t make it into Pulp Fiction or that he discussed with his buddies over a beer, muddled up the chronology as usual, and then asked Richardson to shoot it nicely.

Thus was born Kill Bill—the first film in cinema history to be a tribute to childlike, untainted by the rigors of logic, primitive thinking. Sorry, Quentin, I haven’t seen greater creative impotence in a long time. I know you had great ideas and two or three key characters to develop, and then you built the rest around them, but this time you simply blew it. Even a moderately astute viewer, not blinded by the mythical cult status of the director, will realize by the end of watching Vol. 1 that someone is throwing salt in their eyes with the unbearable prolongation of what should last no more than half an hour.

The plot of Kill Bill is as simple as a rake handle, so forgive me for summarizing it in such detail. The Texas prairie on a sunny day. In an abandoned chapel, preparations for a wedding are underway. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad bursts in, fully armed, initiating a bloody massacre in which the pregnant bride dies. They even kill the organist—an absolutely cult reference to Quentin’s earlier films, since the role of the organist is played by prominent African-American actor Samuel L. Jackson.

Returning to the plot: after some time, it turns out that the bride didn’t die but fell into a coma. Four years of coma pass in a flash: the lady wakes up in the hospital and vows revenge on her would-be murderers.

Incidentally, the potentially mega-dramatic moment, the discovery after years that the child died as a result of the shooting, is treated by Quentin as yet another supposedly funny scene. For me, that’s an absolute low. In any case, from the above summary, what emerges is a spitting image of a female version of Hard to Kill. The catch is that by using a narrative structure known as the “night watchman effect,” which involves repeatedly twisting the simplest plots, the film based on a simple concept suddenly turns into something cosmically convoluted.

Of course, this is only apparent at first glance, because in reality, it’s still the same stupid story, just postmodernistically chopped up to make it seem more sophisticated. The worst part of all this is that the overly complicated narrative doesn’t intrigue at all. On the contrary, it mercilessly bores and tires, especially since after half an hour, the viewer can predict how it will all end, and in the end, they’re surprised that it did indeed end so cheaply. In this way, I managed to distill one of the components of Quentin’s poetics: non-chronological narration that distracts from an embryonic plot. While in Quentin’s previous films, the narrative minimalism wasn’t so striking because the director regularly smuggled in a ton of real, genuinely engaging human emotions into his stories, in Kill Bill all the flaws of such storytelling immediately come to the fore due to the unfathomable childishness of the concept, the theatrical absurdity of the acting, and the characteristics of the characters themselves, who are a hundred times more complex than they deserve to be.

Besides, how long can you keep rehashing the narrative trick of swapping the ending for the beginning and the beginning for the end? I recently watched True Romance with the new subtitle THE QUENTIN TARANTINO CUT, and it’s the same thing all over again—everything hacked according to the same scheme. Boring, man! Boring and predictable.

The second characteristic of Quentin’s work is my personal favorite: those endless, pseudo-intellectual, philosophical dialogues carried out by characters on the fringes of society. I’m not going to sugarcoat it—this particular quirk of Tarantino’s writing annoys me equally in every film he’s been involved in, with the exception of Reservoir Dogs. These long-winded discussions on such weighty topics as the superiority of Big Kahuna’s fast food over McDonald’s, vanilla shakes over strawberry shakes, film X over film Y, foot massages over massages in general—these have been driving me up the wall for years, especially since I grew up on Westerns where any dialogue containing more than a monosyllable was considered a sign of the speaker’s excessive verbosity.

But despite my aversion to drawn-out chatter, I managed to endure it—I’d grit my teeth and keep watching. Sometimes, I even chuckled at the occasional rude comeback. Because even though the dialogues were often watered down and spoken in contexts that seemed to demand complete, focused silence (like during an execution), when filtered through Quentin’s playful sensibility, they were always unique in their own way and revealed unexpected insights into the characters. However, what I could swallow without much effort, with just a bit of goodwill, in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, in Kill Bill has transformed into a caricature of its former self. Here, we witness an outright pile-up of genuinely pointless dialogues, which are nothing more than a cheap imitation of the director’s old style. How Quentin let them pass, and how a world-weary Michael Madsen managed to deliver them—I have no idea.

The lines in Kill Bill are so forced, so utterly devoid of wit, that I seriously questioned Tarantino’s mental state while writing them; they come across as fluff meant to fill the void left by a plot that never existed. And that’s not the end of the complaints. The worst part is that during these conversations, the action in Kill Bill comes to a halt, and literally nothing happens. And since the dialogues themselves are meaningless, what we end up with is a total disaster: not only is there a standstill on screen, but the spoken words lack even basic dramatic significance (they don’t drive the plot forward because they’re mostly quotes from other films or aimless monologues) and barely connect with the events.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you throw your hands up in despair as you listen to this empty talk.

Another unforgivable flaw of Kill Bill, which fortunately doesn’t fall under the global characteristics of the director’s style, is the incredibly irritating and obtrusive filming of people walking, vehicles moving (cars, motorcycles), and static objects. I don’t know if you noticed, but in Kill Bill, Tarantino goes to great lengths to fill the 200 minutes of screen time he envisioned at the start of filming—whether by playing some cult music, persuading Richardson to shoot a complex scene of the singing, dancing, and drinking clientele at O-Ren’s club in a single take, giving us a panorama of the desert, or framing the face of a person delivering one of those signature monologues about nothing, like the alter-ego of comic book heroes. It’s an overly comprehensive display of film techniques.

As far back as I can remember, Quentin’s typical musical cues—kicking in at just the right moment and perfectly capturing the atmosphere of the events—were a hallmark of his style. As you can probably guess from my wave of praise so far, the music in Kill Bill, which is excellent when listened to without the film, unfortunately becomes more annoying than enjoyable when combined with the images; it’s just a cheap attempt to buy time and distract from the pervasive dramatic and substantive emptiness, nothing more.

What can I say to further upset Kill Bill fans—maybe I’ll repeat for the nth time that this film is a significant step back from the first three—and I don’t hesitate to use a term from the top shelf—masterpieces of Quentin’s work, seemingly aimed only at moderately demanding enthusiasts of the director’s talent.

It’s obvious that when Tarantino made this dud titled Kill Bill, he wanted to say something about his camp and Far Eastern film tastes by putting them through a recycling machine. The problem is that this time, the results were disastrous—it seems the guy has aged, and sculpting nonsense isn’t as fun for him as it used to be. I don’t know if it happened due to a mental decline or simple creative negligence, stemming from being blinded by his own erudite cult status. But I do know that Kill Bill might be watchable at a wild party, but under any other circumstances, the viewing experience turns into something painful and hard to digest, even despite—or perhaps because of—the film’s deliberately light and trashy material. A spectacularly botched film.