Thanatos

Greeting. I had to put this in a thread because I'm pretty excited. My prof says that he likes the thesis of one of my argument papers so much that he thinks with some extra work that it would be suitable to publish in our university's academic journal.
He said he'd be willing to sponsor the article.

I am not putting the topic in this thread yet (but in due time) because it's so damn cool, I don't want anyone to publish it before I have the chance. (At least my prof and I think it's cool).

This has been a post by JoeMetallic

Noctis Pallium Meus
_

Points: 1,600, Level: 22

Activity: 7%

knght990

Nice, can't wait to read it.

Personal DNA = Reserved Experiencer

I am the King acting as the Fool.

Im undereducated.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself. - Samuel Johnson

The vain man does not wish so much to be prominent as to feel himself prominent; he therefore disdains none of the expedients for self deception and self outwitting. It is not the opinion of others that he sets his heart on, but his opinion of their opinion. - Niezsche

Points: 820, Level: 15

Activity: 3%

WickedQueen

Cool! Congratulations!

Points: 1,364, Level: 20

Activity: 0%

lily~

w00t! *is excited with you*

♣♥♠

Points: 1,772, Level: 24

Activity: 0%

Thanatos

Here is my paper analyzing a moral lesson in Kill Bill. I didn't get to expound on everything I would have liked toward the end of the paper. That's because it was due the upcoming morning and I was trying to finish.

***

At its heart, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a pro-life story. Kill Bill is a tragedy, it is a story of protection, it is an exploitation film, but most importantly—it is allegorical to the effect that parents ought to raise their children in domesticity. It is an exploitation film that is violent in nature, and depicts a tremendous amount of killing. Exploitation films are the branch of cinema that exaggerates shocking subjects such as violence, rape and revenge, martial arts, etc. Eric Schafer, in his book Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 also lists further “forbidden topics” (6) that exploitation films satisfy such as “sex hygiene, drug, nudist, vice, and burlesque” (6). Kill Bill is a film that exploits revenge and female dominated violence (however without sacrificing femininity in most cases). Bosley Crowther condemns brutally violent films in his article “Movies to Kill People By” saying that although some believe these films “merely purge aggressive spirits, […] they are socially decadent and dangerous as LSD” (53). Rather, I think violent films are stories of protection—protection of what the protagonist values and holds dear. What Uma Thurman’s character, the Bride, values is motherhood and her unborn daughter. Although filled with gruesome killings, Kill Bill exemplifies the protection of unborn life at whatever the cost. The Bride protects her unborn baby by refusing to kill her would-be assassin in Volume 2, saying, “I’m the deadliest woman in the world. But right now, I’m just scared shitless for my baby.” The Bride then goes to protect her child by finding a new name in El Paso. The decisions not to kill and to relocate are decisions to migrate toward domesticity for the protection of her child. “She deserved to be born with a clean slate,” the Bride, says to David Carradine’s character, Bill, in Volume 2. Kill Bill, though a violent and murderous film, teaches that life in the womb is worth protecting, and that familial domesticity is more favorable than an exciting and dangerous life.

“It’s going to be a great environment for my little girl to grow up in,” says the Bride to Bill on the day he would shoot her in the head. It was El Paso, the place she had chosen to escape the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, headed by Bill, and marry a man who had a safe and conventional job operating a used record store. To which Bill replies, “As opposed to jetting around the world, killing human beings, and being paid vast sums of money?” It was this scene where Tarantino shows the Bride’s decision for a new life. She made a decision to enter a lifestyle of domesticity when she had been accustomed to assassination. This implies a tremendous sacrifice on the Bride’s part. She had been “jetting around the world,” staying at expensive hotels, and wearing Rolex watches; but “as soon as that strip turned blue” as the Bride says in Volume 2, she made the choice to transition herself from an exciting life where she exploited her talents into a domestic life to be “Mommy.”

The Bride seems to be hard-wired to value domesticity over her assassination squad lifestyle of killing. She has demonstrated her commitment to domesticity in many of her decisions throughout the two films. Even though the Bride in Volume 2 admitted (under a truth drug) that she did not think her life in El Paso was going to work, she still had full intentions of going along with domesticity. The Bride kills for only two reasons during the story: for hire, and for vengeance. Before Bill shot her in the head, her murders were occupational. After she awoke from the resulting coma her murders were vengeful—her first being Buck, the hospital orderly, for raping her and prostituting her body while in comatose, and the rest for the revenge of her broken El Paso life. Domesticity and motherhood are so valuable to the Bride that after they are taken from her it is worth killing everyone involved for free, except Sofie whom she maimed, Elle whom she blinded, and Budd whom Elle killed. Avenging something that she never thought would work is too large a reaction. Therefore, the magnitude of this vengefulness against the Deadly Vipers indicates her commitment to domesticity. Even if domesticity would not have worked, as she admitted, we can tell by her reaction that the Bride would have done whatever it took to make it work.

Another expression of the Bride’s preference to domesticity is the scene in Volume 1 in which she murders Vernita Green. Vernita’s yard is cluttered with toys that the Bride stops to consider before engaging the fight (no doubt realizing the implication that Vernita is now a mother). The fight is even interrupted by Vernita’s daughter, Nikki, arriving home from school. The bride was interrupting and destroying the very thing that she was avenging. She was breaking up a family, and killing a mother. Even in the midst of this, the Bride assured Vernita that she would not murder her before the eyes of her daughter; so she wants revenge even at the cost of potentially ruining the little girl’s life. At least the little girl would not be scarred by seeing her mother’s death. By the end of the scene Nikki does see her mother die by the Bride throwing a knife into her heart. However, the Bride expressed sorrow to Nikki that she had done it in front of her—the Bride’s only sorrow for murder in either of the two films. This sympathy to Nikki is not the maternal sort of sympathy, but does seem to come from the Bride’s tendency toward motherhood. In a rudimentary sense she is acting like a mother would to comfort a young child. Even though the Bride spoke in a rough tone when she said, “Your mother had it coming,” she spoke gently when she said, “When you grow up—if you still feel raw about it—I’ll be waiting.”

Tarantino curbs the perception of his violent female characters being viewed as masculine by displaying them in “catfights.”Kill Bill is Tarantino’s homage to exploitation cinema, and samurai and kung fu movies wherein men usually perform the majority of the violence. So, female aggressors are less popular being that they can lose their femininity in their aggression. However, the Bride as well as many of the violent females in Kill Bill successfully maintain and even accentuate their femininity due to the subtle suggestion of the male fantasy of a “catfight.” In John Webster’s play The White Devil, Isabella says, “O that I were a man, or that I had power to execute my apprehended wishes. I would whip some with scorpions” (62). Ania Loomba in her essay “Women’s Division of Experience” also refers to Webster’s Isabella when she says, “to assert this power is to deny femininity” (42). A “scorpion” is a whip of nine chords with sharp objects woven in for the purpose of tearing flesh from the torso. So then, this action, performing violence with a weapon, is to deny femininity. However I disagree with Loomba in the case of Kill Bill.

The female characters such as the Bride, Gogo, O-ren Ishii, and Elle who display violence with weapons during the films do not seem to have lost their femininity, but rather to have accentuated it. Neal King and Martha McCaughey in their essay “What’s a Mean Woman like You Doing in a Movie like This?” state “Perhaps women who kill become phallic, and thus sexy” (17). So then, women who pick up a weapon to wield it against someone are seen as masculine; as though these weapons were an artificial phallus. In the case of the violent women in Kill Bill they do not appear to be assuming a man’s role (becoming phallic), but rather appear to be handling a phallus which would be appealing to male viewers. Elle kills Budd with a serpent, a euphemism for the male member; Gogo attacks the Bride with a metal ball, the weight and power of which is a reference to a man’s idea of his own endowment; Gogo “penetrates” a man with her katana; and the Bride has swordfights with both O-ren Ishii and Elle. The Bride’s fights with these women accentuate their femininity because these battles are woman against woman and seen by men as “catfights.” In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry explains men’s fascination with catfights saying that there is a hope that the women “might somehow—you know—kiss.”

What Tarantino has created in the character of the Bride is a mother. Yes, a bloodthirsty assassin with prodigious talent for killing—but first a sacrificial, loving maternal icon. The Bride says to Bill in Volume 2, “I could no longer do any of those things,” referring to dangerous assassination assignments, “not now, because I was going to be a mother.” As I have discussed, two characteristics that the Bride represents are domesticity and femininity. These two characteristics are the foremost and indispensible antecedents for what we all know to be a mother figure. Amanda Davis, in her essay “Beatrix Kiddo: Popular Culture’s Deadliest Super-mom,” says that the Bride’s characteristics of strength, rationality, beauty, and emotion (20) make her modern society’s ideal “super-mom” (20). The Bride perhaps could be a “super-mom” although we only see her mothering for a short time when she finally discovers that her daughter, B.B., is still alive; wherein that time is only spent sharing affection. The Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary defines a super-mom as “a woman who cares for a home and family, is involved in children’s and community activities, and often also may be employed full-time.” I see the Bride as having been more of a “settled-down mom,” because she is seen having moved to a seemingly slow and desolate community in El Paso. If the Bride were a super-mom, she would make sure she took excellent care of her daughter, but at the same time operating in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad; thereby negating her qualities of domesticity and deleting her maternal persona. Instead, she is iconic to motherhood by living out the two characteristics of femininity and domesticity, leaving that which is “super” in the assassination realm.
The Bride exemplifies motherhood in the respect of maternal protection; even to two young people who are supposed to kill her. These two are Gogo and a young boyish-looking swordfighter; both of whom exude youthful callow. Assumedly, it is their apparent youth that inspires pity. These are the only two individuals to whom the Bride offers grace. Gogo, O-ren Ishii’s seventeen year-old bodyguard, gives a very obvious youthful persona. She is seen wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform and greets the Bride in a very juvenile and “cute” kind of way. We can reasonably guess that it was Gogo’s youthfulness that invoked the Bride’s offer of reprieve in Volume 1: “I know you feel you must protect your mistress, but I beg you—walk away.” She begs her to try to protect her. Gogo did not accept the offer, so the Bride killed her. The young swordfighter was one of the last men standing from O-ren Ishii’s personal army, the Crazy 88. It was he and the Bride alone in a room after she had slain a countless number of his fellows. He was shaking, noticeably terrified, and far too young to be among the other swordfighters. She bends him over her knee and spanks his backside repeatedly with the flat edge of her sword, and scolds him, saying, “Go home to your mother!”

We can infer that Kill Bill teaches pro-life values through the character of the Bride and her actions. Her decisions throughout the story demonstrate how both life in the womb and being a parent are valuable. She recognizes that the life growing inside her is a person, and that she is responsible to that person to do everything in her power to keep both herself and him or her safe. Moreover, she does not see abortion as an option; especially since it could be easy to think of this pregnancy as an inconvenience that would just make her slow and unable to perform her assassination assignments. Rather than considering inconvenience, maternal instincts of the most powerful sort express themselves through her talents, exploiting the profession of the Bride—stealth and assassination. Her pro-life and maternal instincts are so strong that she uses what she knows to flee the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and assume a new hidden and domestic life; even risking, and eventually succumbing to, the wrath of her former boss and ex-lover Bill. What Bill and the rest of the Deadly Vipers did on the day of the Bride’s wedding rehearsal was to step between the mother bear and her cub. This they did knowingly, because she was far enough along in her term that her pregnancy was apparent, so they were without excuse. Not one of them shared the Bride’s pro-life attitude. One Deadly Viper could have disagreed with Bill, noticing that the Bride was pregnant, and argued to spare at least her and the baby. Obviously this was not the case, and the Bride exacted the same kind of mercy on those five involved in the massacre of the wedding chapel that they showed her.

The definition of pro-life that the Bride implies is that lives that cannot speak for themselves, nor are capable of making moral judgments must be protected; while those that can make moral judgments are responsible for themselves and their comeuppance. Budd acknowledges this in Volume 2 in a discussion with Bill, his brother. According to Bill he and Budd have not spoken, and the last time they did speak “wasn’t the most pleasant,” as Bill said. “That woman deserves her revenge—and we deserve to die,” Budd said to Bill. “But then again, so does she.” There are two clues that this conversation gives the viewer. Budd knows that everyone involved in the massacre deserves to die, thus suggesting his tendency to being pro-life. Perhaps what started this animosity with Bill is that after the massacre Budd realized everyone’s wrongdoing and let Bill know it. Though it was never explicitly stated, it is a reasonable guess by means of this analysis of the film. The other clue that this conversation touches is that Budd recognizes that the Bride is responsible for destroying Vernita Green’s domestic life. It is likely that Vernita Green was the topic of conversation between Bill and Budd just a few moments prior to the scene actually starting. So, for this the Bride deserves to die also. Her view of pro-life responsibility is apparent when she expresses responsibility to Vernita’s daughter, Nikki, when she says, “When you grow up—if you still feel raw about it—I’ll be waiting.” Ultimately by her own rules, the Bride is responsible to Vernita’s family, Dr. Bell and Nikki.

This has been a post by JoeMetallic

Noctis Pallium Meus
_

Points: 1,600, Level: 22

Activity: 7%