KILL BILL Decoded: From Pastiche to Incoherent Postmodernism

It’s clear that Quentin had some iconic scenes and characters in mind, which he then placed in the trailer. The problem is that between those scenes, there had to be some filler, and the characters needed to have meaningful dialogues. This is where things get tricky because both the filler and the dialogue, to put it mildly, leave a lot to be desired. I’m curious about one thing: at what point did Tarantino believe that some magic spell during the making of Kill Bill would transform this trash into an artistic movie full of laid-back fun—when he invited the cinematography guru Robert Richardson to collaborate, or when he entrusted the editing of his drivel to Sally Menke?

I fully realize that by disapproving of this particular film, I’m fighting a losing battle. Quentin has always dismissed criticism. In his fourth consecutive film, he perfected his signature method (he should patent it) of masking the fact that he’s suffering from creative decline. As is well known, Kill Bill is a peculiar mix of comedy and revenge cinema. On the one hand, it easily covers up the script’s weaknesses, and on the other, in case of a flop, the creator can always explain it away as a genre pastiche. If I weren’t naturally cynical, I’d say that Quentin in Kill Bill masterfully dresses up a dull plot in a brilliant blend of visuals, dialogue, and editing, loosely inspired by Asian themes.

I’d go even further in my praise: from the first few minutes, you can see that the director is in love with the genre, while simultaneously maintaining a certain distance, which gives the events a nice, conventional charm. I would wrap up my review with the favorite catchphrase of many writers, that it’s a “joyful pastiche of the highest order” or something along those lines. The trouble is, I am naturally cynical, and I intend to use this trait of mine to undertake the most daring act in the history of modern criticism—I intend to prove that Kill Bill has nothing to do with pastiche and represents the descent of a director who has enclosed himself in a cocoon of cult status, naively believed in it, and shamelessly puts his name on trash to cash in on his past commercial glory.

According to plan, I will first tackle (though not alone—I’m too timid for such a charge) the myth perpetuated by the mass media that Kill Bill is a pastiche of anything. The term is thrown around by everyone as it suits them, including Quentin himself, often unconsciously confusing pastiche with parody or simply using it as a synonym for things that are funny. Even Microsoft Word has trouble identifying it—while writing this text, I curiously right-clicked on the word “pastiche” and summoned the thesaurus. Guess what word my eyes saw at the top of the list?

The sad moral of the above is that in common understanding, pastiche is equivalent to something light, funny, and grotesque—in short, anything that’s funny and not taken too seriously will be called pastiche, in opposition to solemn seriousness. And one could leave it at that without comment because does the average Sunday moviegoer care about the technique in which a film is conceived? Of course not. The point is that distinguishing between pastiche and parody poses problems not only for Microsoft programmers but also for educated professionals who are paid to evaluate works of mass culture. And that’s an issue irritating enough to require some correction.

To be clear: I don’t suspect anyone of bad intentions. Had my teachers in my youth not forced me to visit public libraries, I would probably be spreading the same falsehoods today. However, not every film that references other films and not every meta-creation has the right to claim the honorable title of pastiche. You have to earn that.

The paragraph you’re about to read with bated breath originally contained a lot of mumbo jumbo from applied poetics. However, in the interest of your mental health, I’ve taken steps to simplify the academic jargon that made up its content and compressed the whole argument as much as possible, so I hope that getting through this part of the review won’t cause anyone’s mental gears to grind.

As Jerzy Ziomek (may he rest in peace) states in his flagship volume titled Rzeczy komiczne (The Comic Things), which every humanities student has likely stumbled upon, pastiche is a forgery. But a special kind of forgery—it does not imitate a specific work or piece together fragments of a work, which is precisely what Quentin did in Kill Bill. Instead, the person doing the pastiching, often completely unaware that what they are doing is technically called pastiche, creates a previously nonexistent work, imitating the productive forces inherent in a given poetics. In cinematic terms, pastiche is about making films that were never made. It’s akin to the process of art forgery, involving the imitation of a painter’s style. The more skilled the forger is in the art, the sharper their eye, the more perfect the imitation they create.

In the spirit of “constructive imitation,” Quentin’s three most mature works to date were born, which are excellent testimony to his extraordinary directorial (and imitative) skills and his profound understanding of the rules of the poetics he imitates: Reservoir Dogs as the offspring of imitative reproduction of the style of Asian crime thrillers about mafias, gangsters, robbery, and shooting; Pulp Fiction as a pastiche of cheap, sex-and-violence-soaked crime stories; and finally, Jackie Brown, a creative paraphrase of blaxploitation cinema and simultaneously a successful adaptation of a literary original. Let’s repeat: a film pastiche equals making films that were never made, and Tarantino emerged in pop culture as a pioneer of pastiching cinematic trash. After internalizing these two rules, life becomes simpler.

There’s something else worth mentioning in the context of discussing pastiche, which is often forgotten. Pastiche has been considered for centuries the most distinguished stylistic technique, and this is not without reason—it forces the creator to have an understanding of the material far beyond the primitive skills of a parodist. Unlike parody, pastiche is not designed to mock anything or to amuse the audience. Sure, Pulp Fiction or Cervantes’s Don Quixote from literature are at times overwhelmed by brilliant humor, funny genre scenes, and the author’s distance from the surrounding world, but laughter is rarely provoked in them deliberately for the sake of mere amusement. It is more of a side effect of the events taking place than a central element, and, to speak philosophically, it arises from the tragicomedy of life, its perversity, and randomness.

At least, that’s how I see it—when watching Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs (since Jackie Brown is probably Quentin’s least “funny” film), I sometimes laugh, but then comes a moment of reflection, and I can’t answer what I was laughing at. Sure, I’m amused when Vincent blows off the face of a Black man with a gun, and I slap my thighs with laughter when Don Quixote charges at windmills, but in essence, the “content” of these scenes is far more serious than farcical. My private theory is that the laughter here arises as a defense mechanism against absurdity—as a method of drowning out the tragedy of the situation being observed. And that’s good—it takes a truly exceptional understanding of the human soul to provoke such feelings in the viewer. Narratively, Reservoir Dogs consistently rides on the absurdly desperate circumstances: after a botched jewelry heist, gangsters gather in a garage outside the city to figure out who hid the loot and what to do next. It’s hard to suppress laughter when you watch these otherwise grown men gradually sink into deeper psychosis, accusing each other without hesitation of betraying criminal ideals. It’s simply great cinema.

Now, compare that to Kill Bill and its crude, forced, and stupidly humorous scenes of cutting down hundreds of identical-looking enemies—practically every swing of the katana here results in dismemberment combined with a multi-liter spray of blood, and the main character, like in a video game, cuts her way to the boss through hordes of massacred opponents. No one will convince me that this isn’t a qualitative drop of at least several levels—to cinematic kindergarten. And the fact that it’s well-shot is no argument for me, just a pathetic attempt to justify shoddy work.

At this point, a dilemma arises: should we label Kill Bill as a full-fledged parody of Asian cinema, given that in those films, churned out one after another, it’s commonplace to see craziness like slicing a neighbor in half with a sword or taking out a dozen enemies in one leap? According to Jerzy Ziomek, no—we cannot. And I agree with him. For a parody to be perceived as something meaningful, it must mock a pattern that is of higher status. Parodying stupidity, however—which Kill Bill somewhat aims to do—is pointless from a genre, substantive, and common-sense perspective. This was empirically verified for me while watching the film, as I kept wondering, “What’s going on, Quentin?” The parodied model in terms of narrative, situational, and choreographic absurdities is no worse than your Kill Bill, and if I wanted to laugh at idiocies, I’d just turn on some Hong Kong film.

Now we just have to wait until, in a burst of inspiration, the guy makes a parody of the Turkish version of Rambo, setting himself the task of outdoing the original in terms of the nonsense presented. Of course, we can find parody interpretations of such timeless masterpieces in Anglo-Saxon culture as Rambo III or the early works of Sensei Seagal, and these are fully justified parodies, because no one in their right mind would negate the Rambo trilogy or call it trash—it’s an unrivaled classic of action cinema and the progenitor of films about a hunted commando in the jungle! And to completely put down Quentin’s cheerful creativity, I’ll say in passing that, for the first time in this director’s career, the form of his film turned out to be inadequate to its inspiration—Kill Bill is simply too pretty, too polished, too meticulously studied, and disgustingly over-stylized with outrageously bright colors.