Feminist Appeal in Quentin Tarantino’s „Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair”

Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is made to be seen in one sitting since only thus can the whole bloody affair be fully grasped, as what it truly is. Vol. 1 is highly aestheticized, we see the Bride on a killing spree seeking vengeance, eliminating the Deadly Vipers under Bill’s command. Vol. 2 ties the whole story together in a fashion the point of which might be missed if the films are simply seen as an aestheticized revenge story. It cuts deeper than that. In the chapters which were originally released as Kill Bill: Vol. 1, at first we see the Bride waking from a coma, and that she was repeatedly raped while in that state. The whole thing was arranged by a member of the medical staff named Buck, who says of himself „My name is Buck and I’m here to fuck” as The Bride recalls later. She murders both the truck driver who was supposed to rape her and Buck himself, who drives a „Pussy Wagon”, and the Bride, ironically, takes it for herself. During The Wholy Bloody Affair, men primarily adress her in reference to her beauty, her blond hair, and other aspects of her appearence which are found appealing. She is reduced to an object of male desire, so driving a “Pussy Wagon” is her ironic way of confronting this. Later, near the end of Vol. 2 she says that it „died on her”, she is not stating what happened to it, it conveys the notion that she refuses to be seen as a mere object of male desire.

In Vol. 1 The Bride confronts O-Ren Ishii, a trained assassin and the boss of Tokyo criminal underground, half Japanese, half Chinese-American. There is mutual respect between them, but she is on The Bride’s killing list since she was one of the assassins who killed nine people at her wedding, all the attendants present, and participated in Bill’s attempt to kill her. She is also one of Bill’s Deadly Vipers, under his direct command. He is the one who invested considerable resources in O-Ren Ishii’s conquering of Tokyo’s criminal underground. In Vol. 1 Bill is this larger-than-life persona, a mysterious operative in command. We know next to nothing about him, we only see his gun in the opening sequence when he puts a bullet in The Bride’s severely beaten and bloody head, during the wedding rehearsal. When we finally see Bill in Vol. 2, we see him at the Bride’s wedding, casually talking to her as if nothing much happened between them, yet, she is carrying his child and is now marrying another man. Bill pretends it doesn’t concern him, the Bride kisses him, and soon, things get bloody.

It is worth noting that Bill’s name is a synonym for the word “receipt”. In order to get something, we must pay for it, and in turn we get the bill. Only when the bill is payed for, of course. The Bride, whose code name under Bill’s command was “Black Mamba”, the deadliest creature in the African savannas, collects things as payment for everything done to her during the wedding rehearsal. In some cases those are body parts, as in the case of Sofie Fatale, who was also among the murderers at the wedding, and is under O-Ren Ishii’s command. In most cases, it is the life of an offender which is collected as payment, as is the case with Vernita Green, whom The Bride kills at the beginning of Vol. 1, another of Bill’s Deadly Vipers. Bill’s codename is Snake Charmer, he is the one who lures the deadly women, and like some kind of a charismatic magician he enchants them, enthralls them to his command. In the case of The Bride, whom he calls Beatrix Kiddo, he becomes her lover.

As The Bride finally approaches Bill, the one who gives her his location is Esteban Vihaio, a pimp who commands his own death squad, and Bill’s mentor from his childhood, since Bill grew up without a father. The way Esteban treats women mirrors the way Bill treated The Bride. He says to her, after many compliments emphasizing her attractiveness, that if she did to him what she had done to Bill, he would “only” mutilate her face. Then, we see the mutilated lips and the face of a prostitute, obviously the one who betrayed Esteban. The Bride’s revenge streak is not done in the name of all women, it is done for her alone. In fact, she murders powerful women under Bill’s command, making the story a lot more nuanced. If The Bride’s claim for justice, understood as eye for an eye kind of justice, was universal, she would kill Esteban Vihaio as well, for what he had done to a woman who betrayed him. When we finally see Bill at his villa, we see him with a child, their child.

The child in The Bride’s womb survived the massacre, and is now with Bill for the last four years. We can see that she has been raised in a way children should not be, at tender age she watches movies full of killings, she steps on the goldfish, not because she is such by nature, but because Bill raised her in a way which exposed her to death very early, at least verbally or on screen. Bill casually tells their daugher that he tried to kill her mother. Before this encounter, we knew nothing of Bill, except that he was a powerful commander of a female death squad, a dangerous man who stops at nothing, but now we see him as a petty and selfish creature. He admits to The Bride that what he did was done out of jealousy, that maybe he “overreacted”. At this moment, what started as an elaborated revenge story which features the Chinese monk and martial artist Pai Mei, Hattori Hanzo, a master Japanese sword-smith, the Toyko underground, the Deadly Vipers and so on, now becomes a case of domestic violence brought to an extreme, which is highly relevant in a life without highly trained Chinese martial artists and masterfully made katanas. It is a real-life matter.

Similarly, the Russian band IC3PEAK, which deals with domestic violence in the song Boo-Hoo on their 2020 album Goodbye, the song tells the story of a woman fed up with crying and suffering in an abusive marriage. It deals with an extreme case of a woman murdering her husband in self-defense. A female voice sings, in line with the Bride’s character: ” My mother taught me to obey my man/ I don’t listen to her so I do as I want/ I don’t follow my father’s rules, too/ Instead of a star, I’m wishing on a grenade.” The Bride kills Bill in the end using a technique that she learned from Pai Mei. Ironically, Pai Mei, the one who Bill admired, shared his extreme sense of pride, and a certain contempt for women. The monk said to the Bride when she first met him, that American women only know how to spend their husbands’ money and eat at restaurants, although, gradually, she earned his respect. Pai Mei once killed 60 people in a temple simply because a monk ranked lower than him didn’t return him the greetings he offered.

Bill reacts in a similar brutal fashion when he is betrayed by The Bride. The men in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Wholy Bloody Affair are the ones with an extreme sense of pride, which is in many ways childish, except for Hattori Hanzo, who tries to make up for his mistake for being Bill’s mentor, by making a katana for The Bride. She shows tenderness toward Bill before she kills him, displaying the ambivalent feelings of a severely abused woman toward her former partner – she did love him after all. IC3PEAK’s Nastya also sings, now in a tender voice: “I wish to hug you as I used to/ Then I have to dig up your body/ Your cold bones are laying somewhere down there/ One day flowers will bloom in this mourned land.” The bill is payed, the story is concluded, and The Bride is in a small apartment with her daughter. Her child now watches cartoons children her age normally do, indicating that in the end she might have a childhood devoid of death, as any child should do.