Violence In Cinema, or Quentin Tarantino: A Retrospective

With Inglourius Basterds coming out in under a week, I thought this would be a good time to talk about Quentin Tarantino movies. Then I decided that the real meat of what I wanted to say centered around cinematic violence, so now you get a discussion of violence in film using some Tarantino movies as examples. Sweet.

So what's the deal, modern society? When did we all decide it was okay to desensitize the population so hard? If you look at TV from the 70s, there's pretty much no graphic violence. The closest you get is this. Now we've got stuff like 24 and Lost flying around. Have you seen some of that shit? A friend of mine decided to play a drinking game while watching the last episode of Lost season 5 a few months ago. The rule was you drank whenever a bloody face showed up on screen, and when retelling this story this friend couldn't remember anything about the episode. And that's just the action shows. House is sometimes even worse; I just stop watching the screen every time they go into the operating room.

On a related note, why does every show need a torture episode now? Buffy the Vampire Slayer started this tradition for me with Spike getting brutally tortured in one of those later seasons, but Joss Whedon continued the tradition in Firefly when Mal and Wash get electrocuted until they bleed and then one loses an ear for a while. 24 has torture eps freaking all over the place, Lost had that one in season 2 or 3 where Sayid threatens to push sticks under Sawyer's fingernails.

Of course the torture phenomenon is not confined to TV. More and more movies are following suit. I'm not into the whole "horror that is actually just gross stuff" genre, but I think this whole thing started there. It first leaked onto TV, then into Bond movies. That scene in Casino Royal towards the end is just... painful. Then there's Se7en, Hard Candy (which I thankfully have not seen), and this preview I saw a couple days ago for one of those movies that looks like an hour of torture and an hour of car bombs. Gangster movies are up to their ears in it, and that's on top of the blood running down everyone's face from the action sequences. The same can be said for pretty much every genre. How has cinematic entertainment gotten so gruesome?

And yet... Not all the violence is completely unpleasant...

While I'd rather not watch Jack Shepherd get himself all cut up every week, there's a certain kind of stylized violence that I really enjoy. My favorite example of this is Kill Bill vol. 1. I watched the movie at a friend's house when I was young and even more sensitive than I am now, yet I came away longing for more. Kill Bill is a story about killing people. No matter how you look at it, the word "kill" is right there in the title. There's some guy named Bill out there, and this is a couple of movies about someone trying to kill him. The characters have some depth, but most of it doesn't come out until volume 2. Volume 1 just slaps a couple of good stereotypes on it's characters then delivers an hour and a half of people getting killed as The Bride makes her way towards Bill. That's it; that's literally the entire movie. The Bride kills a bunch of people. There's a slight twist at the end. Now go watch part 2.

It's horribly violent. The infamous Crazy 88 scene is so violent that it had to be shown in black in white in the American release of the film. Blood sprays everywhere. Limbs fly around the room like they've each been strapped with an individual jet-pack. Then after that, The Bride chops the top half of some bitch's head off revealing the brain. Holy SHIT, guys. That's it. That's the end.

Why is that entertaining? I walked out of my friend's house loving this movie, but I couldn't describe why. When people asked me what I thought of it I'd tell them that it was the best movie about killing people I'd ever seen. This is true. What separates this from the rest of the movies about killing people out there? I like action sequences, but I'm not a huge fan. It can't be action alone that turns me on to a film. I've already discussed the lack of an amazing plot. I enjoy the way Tarantino rearranges the sequence of his stories, but that alone doesn't make a good movie or everyone would do it. That's on the right track, though. What sets Tarantino's films apart is their style. What draws me to Kill Bill is not the fact that The Bride just kicked the shit out of 88 ninjas, it's that the way she did it was so fucking cool. You can kill people, or you can stab them with a fucking bad-ass katana in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack. Hell yeah.

Even that's not enough, though. Tons of movies come out each year with bad-ass weapon wielding heroes and heroines kicking the shit out of henchmen in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack, but few of them compare to the Crazy 88 scene. There's something more to Tarantino pieces. It's some combination of the way they're both completely serious and completely over the top at the same time. On the one hand, there's very little humor in the script of Kill Bill. It's dead serious about killing Bill. Few jokes, lots of tension, and death through the whole story. On the other, no serious film depicts someone getting their arm severed by the single swing of a sword followed by blood spraying out like a fountain. That's just not a serious image; it's absurd. Being both of these things at the same time gives the film a very distinct style. The violence being unrealistic makes it bearable to watch, and that all together gives the whole story a unique feel to it.

Kill Bill also pulls you in with its mythology. It's such a basic story, but that just makes it more accessible. Tarantino boils the plot down to its most bare bones. The Bride has been wronged by 5 people, and now she is going to kill all 5 of them. Bam. That's all the setup we need, it's all the setup we get, and it's executed with a sort of perfection that draws us in. It's simple, it's clear, and now we care. Now we want to see Bill killed.

That makes it sound like the stylized violence of Kill Bill is so compelling because there's a plot driving it. I don't think this is true. The plot helps, of course. If we didn't care about The Bride we might be rooting for the Crazy 88 the whole time. The reason I don't like this conclusion is how I feel about the story's end [spoiler alert]. Watching Bill take his final five steps is satisfying, but then what? After Bill is dead, the story is over. We have killed Bill. But on seeing this, instead of accomplishment I felt remorse that the story was over. There wouldn't be anymore killing. There wouldn't be anymore sleek yellow jumpsuits or ridiculous stylized violence. It was done. This means that the point was not to kill Bill, but rather the exciting story leading up to that final scene. The point was to have an excuse to show us the Crazy 88 scene, the buried alive scene, the opening hospital sequence, the shootout in the suburban kitchen, and all the rest. The style was the point.

Style. Modern action movies are supposed to entertain us, and some do that with violence. What I'm entertained by is not the violence, though, it's the style of the thing. It's the mood and the feeling captured by the film. Die Hard doesn't give us much beyond explosions, but Kill Bill gives us a polished product and a heart to examine. It gives us something more than just cool sequences.

I'm clearly still trying to pinpoint what exactly that is.

What is a movie like Kill Bill trying to say? It's not saying something in the same way that, say, A Clockwork Orange is. What is the point of all that violence? Why do I find stylized violence so compelling? Maybe when you take violence to the extreme, you can distill some sort of cinematic purity out of it. Maybe I'm wrong about that A Clockwork Orange comment.

Maybe it's just cool.