An email to a distant cinephile chum:
So I just saw Kill Bill 2 and got into a rather heated debate with two of my friends over whether or not Uma Thurman, when she’s in the coffin, engages in a bit of Freudian iconography with her flashlight. I argued that, given QT’s already wading knee deep in both gender politics (the use of the word “cunt”) and diva worship (yup), the way she tucks her flashlight well into her crotch and then, almost immediately afterwards, takes the shaft of it into her lips (not her teeth) is unmistakably sexually charged. Suffice it to say, the thought didn’t fly well with them and it all went downhill from there. I told them that a symbol is a symbol, not meant to be taken as an explicit thing to be taken as a byproduct of narrative “sense.” They told me it wasn’t there. I asked them when would it be a symbol, to which they replied if it was used in a sexual context, to which I retorted that it would cease to be a symbol anymore if it was connected with a literal sexual meaning. They suggested that I thought they were wrong and that wasn’t fair because they were just respectfully disagreeing with my “opinion,” which sort of pushed me a bit over the edge to the point I was saying stuff about how I wished they’d give me the respect of just thinking I’m wrong about something instead of giving me the pat-on-the-head “your opinion” bullshit.
I might be barking up the wrong tree (both with sniffing out subtext and in asking a vehement non-fan of the whole franchise), but I just I’d vent a bit and see what you thought. Actually, I already know what the deal is. I get bored with watching movies with friends who, though they claim otherwise, are perfectly content watching films on a totally surface level. Friend #1 (who was the most outspoken about reigning my psychosexual tangents back) has a habit of denigrating people like, oh say, her parents for watching movies in a passive manner. Yes, to the word, every time she wants to distinguish her viewing habits from others, she invokes the phrase “passive watching.” Seeing some of the films with her at the international film festival really crystallized it for me, given that the only movies she seemed to give a goddamn about were things like Zatoichi and Five Obstructions, both good movies, but also extraordinarily easy to unpack. I mean, it’s all fine and dandy that she didn’t like Distant or Crimson Gold or Decasia or even some of the ones I didn’t like (Struggle, for special instance), and I’m glad that I have a friend who’s willing to take a downright obscene chunk out of her non-cinephile life to watch ten movies in downtown theaters, but when her most incisive thoughts on Bilge and Jafar and Jørgen boil down to stuff that should be the jumping off point for deeper discussions. And now this, while I’m trying to get them talking about the uneasy way QT uses the “cunt” word and puts a metallic erection in Uma’s supine craaatch, she reverts to the most jejune readings of the scene that even her parents would be bored by (”it’s just a survival thing, she’s trying to escape and has to use the flashlight”) …doesn’t even allow for the notion that every fragment of the film represents a fetishization of Tarantino’s universe. (In fact, I honestly don’t know how anyone could really enjoy such a jagged collage of a movie without first getting into the mindset that the whole damned package is really a peak into QT’s cinematic sex toy drawer.)
I guess what I’m really ranting about is that I feel shitty that I might have offended the two of them for something so meaningless as a phallic image that, in all truth, only needs to be there for my convenience, not QT’s.
Perhaps it was just the chorus of groans the group of straight males I was watching this film with uttered whenever Gene Davis (playing the film’s psychotic killer) disrobed, but I’d swear Thompson was attempting to define his antagonist’s evil aura by hot-wiring it directly to his exhibitionism. (As far as I can tell, the film’s title is probably referring to which direction Davis’s cock is pointing.) I’ll admit that I am slightly sensitive to formalistic homophobia (and, to be sure, there’s no further evidence beyond the ass shots to implicate Thompson’s concern with painting Davis’s baddie as anything other than a hetero pervert), but something tells me that the film’s final vigilante-justice punchline is rendered satisfying not because Davis gets what’s coming to him, but because he’s cut down mid-streak. Even more oddly, Andrew Stevens (who as far as I’m concerned is the Sean William Scott of the ’70s, at least in terms of his body-type and trollishly good looks) keeps his shirt on for nearly all of the film and is an overly goody-goody type, for a change. I suppose the two together make perfect sense though, given that the film’s trying to distinguish him from the insane/evil nudity of Davis. Still, there is that one scene in which Stevens wears his trademark painted-on pastel polo shirt with absolutely taut khakis. We’ll call that “character ambiguity.”
I am still unresolved on the matter of whether the separate work of director/editor Morrison and composer Michael Gordon cohere properly, or whether they’re fighting for attention. For what it’s worth, Morrison was present at the screening I attended, and he admitted he felt his contribution to this film was, at best, only worth 50%. At any rate, this friction (beautifully decaying film stock accompanied by the sound of a paralyzed orchestra being murdered with their own instruments — Penderecki at 16rpm) counts for at least 50% of the panic-attack tenseness I felt watching it. Even if the music were removed (which would make the film more overtly director-centric, as well as make the notion of the film’s visual “movements” much less overt), I’d still be floored by the astonishing variety of different decomposition types: selective erasure (the missing boxer), warped strechmarks (turning faces into ectomorphic nightmare masks), and a sort of silver-nitrate decalcification (I’m making shit up, obviously) that turns a panorama of nuns in a convent into a moving, strobe-lit stained-glass window (accompanied by Gordon’s appropriately apocalyptic air-raid sirens).