Stepped in so far, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.– William Shakespeare,Macbeth act 3, sc.4, l. 136
Everything means something, I guess…– Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The first quotation comes from a wellknown tragedy by that most celebrated English bard; the second comes from the seminal 1974 splatterfest directed by Tobe Hooper, loosely based on real-life serial killer Ed Gein. I’ve never watched Shakespeare’s play on the stage and only read it as part of the syllabus in college. (And it has ever since struck me as Shakespeare’s most depraved work.) I was never allowed to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre until I was old enough to visit the Betamax-rental shop myself. (Of course, the stories about the film’s grisly horrors were enough to convince me this was the most depraved film ever.) However, the two are inextricably linked in my imagination, warping me as a child.
Another confession to make things clearer: Up until the fifth grade, I thought Macbeth was by Roman Polanski.
Before Oscar accolades and respectability tamed him, the Polish director was indeed a purveyor of the nasty. Films like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant are all art-house favorites, the more respectable cousins of Italian Giallo films and American drive-in B-movies. In 1971, however, Polanski set his sights on adapting Shakespeare’s text and proceeded to paint it a lush, carnivorous red – eloquence written on the walls with blood. This one I was allowed to see (maybe a mistake for a 10-year-old), considering it was Shakespeare and thus evading parental monitors. (My father didn’t mind carnage from the written page.) In terms of the amount of murder and gore, Polanski’s Macbeth certainly competes with Leatherface pound for pound (of flesh). But the violence was more than just a ploy. It meant more; it was no accident and it cut to the jugular, making you bleed with the gravity of the drama.
Plus, it had cool lines like the one quoted above. (Of course, Leatherface dancing with his chainsaw is also cool but…)
In the cinema of Quentin Tarantino, there are a lot of cool dance moves and – even more – cool things for those dancers to say when they retire from the floor. Violence also plays its part, and Tarantino wields his weapon with relish. From sliced ears to exploding heads, he is an entertainer fond of the lurid and the crude, brandishing the joke’s punchline with razors between his fingers. It would be easy to just consign him to the rogue’s gallery of the Grand Guignol if not for the fact that he is probably one of the few directors to survive the 1990s independent boom bloodied but unbowed.
His latest opus, Kill Bill Vol. 1, is the former video store geek’s homage to Shaw Brother’s kung-fu flicks, Wu Xia films, samurai cinema and Spaghetti Westerns. Like his previous work that saw him riffing on Bande à Part (his production company’s name is also borrowed from Godard’s film), pulp novels and the blaxploitation genre, he now pays tribute to those grind-house movies he loved so much while growing up. Luckily one needn’t be familiar with Seijun Suzuki’s Gate of Flesh or Bo Arne Vibenius’ They Call Her One-Eye to get what Tarantino is up to.
It tells the tale of The Bride (Uma Thurman) who miraculously survives her wedding (never an easy thing) which turns into a massacre perpetrated by her boss Bill and his posse, the so-named Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DIVAS, geddit?). Suffering a bullet in her head, she stays in a coma for four years. In the interim, she is prostituted and abused by her nurse Buck who likes to… Well, she soon wakes up and starts to make sushi out of anyone in her way, working up eventually to Bill.
The film as its title suggests is just the first part. The act of dispensing of Bill will come in the next installment. (This is no spoiler: it’s the film’s title.) Here, Tarantino hinges the suspense and tension not on the outcome but rather on the inevitability of it. Writing about Macbeth Martin Parry comments: "Suspense is created, not by the sound of the first shoe dropping on the floor overhead but by the delay of the second." After killing Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), The Bride a.k.a Black Mamba goes to the car and crosses out her name. On the list, the name of Cotton Mouth a.k.a O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) is already crossed out but on screen time (this is just the second sequence in the film), it hasn’t happened yet. The battle between the two will come at the climax but we already know the outcome. To quote Parry again in his discussion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: "Thus the scenes of suspense tend to cluster around situations of which the audience has some foreknowledge…"
One of Tarantino’s heroes, Jean-Luc Godard, once quipped when asked why there was so much blood in Pierrot le Fou that "That’s not blood, that’s red." Indeed the America’s Moral Majority as well censors all over have deemed the film excessive. (The same response that minority have had against everything from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch to Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left.) Perhaps anticipating this, Tarantino took a cue from the late Alfred Hitchcock – who chose to film Psycho in black-and-white to make its gruesome imagery more palatable. In Kill Bill Vol. 1’s central set-piece, The House Of Blue Leaves sequence, the Bride takes on 88 Yakuza adversaries; Just before it gets bloody, the film’s color dissolves into B&W as the Bride – chic in her yellow track-suit – becomes a whirlwind of TV static hues. Sinews twist; geysers of blood erupt; limbs fall to the floor. (Interesting note: The sequence stays in full color for the film’s run in Japan.)
Yet, believe it or not, Tarantino is an artist of restraint (not subtlety, there’s a difference). For all the gratuity and stylish extravagance, there is a lingering sense that he hasn’t shown all he has to offer; the fact that it seems all over-the-top is only because the man has so much to show off. Not that the film pulls its punches; within the meager time allotted, you just get a sense that the best bits haven’t quite popped up yet, that for all spilt blood it’s just a flesh wound. (Conversely, in Hooper’s film, the modest count of onscreen killing does not detract from its horror as a "massacre.") What he holds back, just kills you to know more about.
Tarantino is hip at making cool worlds, with pop culture as its recognizable landmarks and giving us great – if sometimes one-dimensional – characters to live in it. Every nuance or remark all are part of a private kabbala that he encourages us to peruse, dropping allusions to devastating effect and impeccable comic timing. (He even prefaces the film with a Klingon proverb, proving that there was indeed a point in watching all those reruns of Star Trek.)
The only thing certain when you take a trip into this world is that the ride will be bumpy.
And that there are no accidents here.
Everything means something, I guess.