Why Kill Bill? Revenge in two parts; “every action has an opposite and equal reaction.”

Why Did She Leave? We’re afforded a few brief glimpses in Volume One of what had happened at the chapel in Texas four years ago. “The Bride,” lying on the floor with a bloody face and bruised, breathing harshly in fear. Bill walks up to her and tells her that he is not a sadist. In fact, he says as he loads a bullet into his gun, right now he is at his most masochist. The Bride’s final words to Bill before he pulls the trigger and the bullet blasts through her skull are “it’s your baby.” We’ve only seen her face at this point, we immediately have given her our sympathy and we are angered at her treatment. No woman should be treated this way. Especially not one wearing her wedding dress. Who was she going to marry? Why has Bill attempted to kill her? We don’t know.

The bits and pieces trickle together slowly between the action of The Bride taking her bloody vengeance and her memories of the past. She discovers herself having woken from a coma in a hospital. She is disgusted to realize that the custodian of her body is a disgusting pervert named Buck who loves to Fuck. He keeps a grody jar of Vaseline in his pocket to lubricate her while he and his clients rape her while she is unconcious. His seedy operation is a cruel mockery of her own past as an assasian. We first get a taste of how badly she wants to find satisfaction because having just hobbled Buck, she drags him along the floor and slams the door on his head while shouting “WHERE’S BILL?” between whacks. Even newly resurrected from the dead and with her legs senseless from atrophy from not having walked in four years, she is still an efficent killer.

Forgoing a step-by-step discussion of the path she follows on her path towards revenge, we’ll contemplate the few clues shown to us. The first is that Bill doesn’t always have his retired assasins killed; as evidenced by Vernita “Copper Head.” She has a nice house in a suburb and a young daughter and is married to a dentist.

We’re also shown, in anime sequence, the motivations for Oren, another of Bill’s women. As a girl of 8, she watched the murder of her mother & father by the body guards of a ruthless crime boss of the Japanese Yakuza. At 11, she is in the crime boss’s bed and eviserates him with a katana; “fortunately (for, but not for him, he) had been a pediophile” and unfortunately she was his last and most fatal child to share his bed with him. She uses his body as a shield and ducks under the mattress. From this vantage point, she kills two body guards by first shooting off on of their legs each so that they fall to the floor, then putting a second bullet in each of their heads. At 21, she performs a kill using a sniper rifle. Standing on a roof, she shoots a bullet through the middle of a limousine and kills another lecherous old man who is sitting in the back seat & frightens his two lady friends. At 25, Oren takes part in the massacre. In anime, we are shown The Bride being kicked and punched by four attackers, staggering around as the monkey in the middle of their vicious circle.

In Tokyo, Japan, Oren is riding in a limousine. Like her second victim, she is in the backseat and sitting in the middle. The Bride doesn’t shoot her sniper-style, though, because The Bride isn’t yet arrived in Tokyo and is still in a jet flying overhead. And it also isn’t her style. Later, The Bride sees Sofie, Oren’s valet, and remembers seeing this woman talking & laughing on her cell phone even as The Bride fell to the floor from her beating. At the end, Sofie is left alive, but horribly disfigured so that she perhaps is better off dead.

In Volume Two, we learn that The Bride had been in a hotel and discovered she was pregnant. And uninvited visitor posing as a hospitality girl blows a hole through her hotel room’s front door, nearly killing The Bride. She tells the other woman to check the pregnancy test and just barely gets a truce. Bill, however, hears that she has been murdered. He mourns for her and tracks her down. He doesn’t know her reason for leaving him, he doesn’t yet know that he is the father of her child.

Bill’s Revenge. .Bill finds her in a chapel, having a wedding rehersal (Volume Two). She’s been working a record store and is about to marry one of the guys who she works with. He believes that this sniveling punk is the father of her child and he appears at the chapel. He speaks with the Bride and they do their best to remain civil. He is introduced to the groom rather insulting as her father and he asks the young man if he’s aware that it is bad luck for him to see a bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony. He doesn’t care. Then, the Deadly Vipers arrive to shoot up the place. After shooting her, he regrets his actions and elects to put her on life support in a hospital. He takes her baby and raises it as his own unbeknownst to The Bride who’d thought her child died on the day she’d been left for dead.

The Bride’s Revenge. Vernita, although second on her list, is the first target we’re shown in Volume One. The fight each other viciously and manage to destroy Vernita’s living room, but end a draw for the first round when Vernita’s daughter is dropped off by the school bus. Vernita sends her kid to bed and offers coffee to the Bride. They confront each other in the kitchen and a really sneaky move, Vernita tries to shoot The Bride with a gun hidden in a box of cereal, but misses. The Bride throws a dagger right into her heart. Her fight with Oren’s goons is majestic as she takes a few small wounds while killing most of the Crazy 88s and spanking a young, baby-faced boy and sending him crying for his mother. The Bride has another close-call as she is slashed across her back by Oren and just barely gets up. Oren apologizes for insinuating that she was a “silly Caucasian girl who fought she can fight like a samurai” and The Bride apologizes. The Bride slashes off the top of Oren’s skull and leaves her brain exposed.

She has a bad start when it comes to Bud, Bill’s younger brother & the only man in his squad besides Bill himself. Bill tells him about the slaughter of the Crazy 88s and offers his assistance. Bud refuses and comments that he’d pawned his Hattori Hanzo sword for $250. The Bride waits until night and slithers from under Bud’s trailer. She can’t decide what course of action to take next, so she tries to walk through the front door because she thinks Bud is sitting by the door and playing a guitar. It turns out he’s actually got a shotgun and he blasts her in the chest with rock salt. Then, he flips her over on her stomach and shoots a tranquilizer in her butt. It seems her luck has run out. She’d damn-near been killed by a clueless redneck hick with a shit-kicker cowboy hat who had a shotgun. He has his midget friend bury her alive in a coffin out in an old cemetary. He humiliates her by hog-tying her and calling her a “blond pussy” and forced her to choose between being maced & blinded or being given a flashlight to be buried with. She picks the flashlight.

While in the coffin, she reminices about the monk, Tai Pei, whom Bill had sent her to to be trained as a samurai. This is where she and all of Bill’s other Deadly Vipers learned their skills. Tai Pei is said to hate Americans, Caucassians, and Women… so The Bride was screwed in three parts. He also would snatch out the eye of anyone who disrespected him. This explains Elle Driver’s missing one eye. Using the skills he taught her, she eventually punches a hole through the thick wood of her coffin and climbs through the dirt. It seems she is in luck because after having walked through the desert, she’s in time to watch Elle arrive with Bud’s million dollars in ransom for burying her death. Elle kills Bud by hiding a Black Mamba snake in the suitcase (ironic because “Black Mamba” had been The Bride’s codename). Elle even tells us The Bride’s real name which had been bleeped up until that point: Beatrix Kiddo, but we’ll continue addressing her as The Bride. The third lucky break she gets is that Bud had not sold his sword. He just kept it in his golf bag because he just didn’t like using swords. Elle tells The Bride that she had poisoned & killed Tai Pei, The Bride plucks out her other eye and leaves her thrashing around and blind. Presumably so the snake can kill her.

When she sneaks into Bill’s apartment with a gun drawn, The Bride is shocked to find Bill playing with their daughter. The last moments in the movie are brilliant because we aren’t entirely sure what is going on. Is she going to reneg on her quest so that she, Bill, and their daughter can live as a family? Bill suggests that they fight on his private beach at sunset, but The Bride tries to snatch at his sword and he stops her by shooting a hole in the TV to pacify her. They seem to have forgotten the kid is sleeping in her bedroom or they have stopped caring. Bill tells her an analogy about why Superman is his favorite comic, that Clark Kent is Superman’s costume and his means ridiculing average men who aren’t like him (weak, cowardly, unsure of himself). He then compares The Bride to Superman and wonders how she would have hoped to live a life of boring mediocrity, the life he had saved her from living in her self-imposed exile by murdering all the new average people she’d adopted as a family. How could she stand to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing and no longer have all the excitement she would have had as one of his Deadly Vipers. 

So, by the end of the movie, as Bill turns his back upon The Bride and walking away from her until his heart explodes, we’ve had an incredible journey. The concepts of paternity, of family (Oren’s mother and father killed, who knows how many families have been sundered after the slaying of the Crazy 88s, Vernita’s daughter seeing her mother killed by a stranger and not knowing why,  another young girl’s father attempting to kill her mother, the mother coming back from the dead to kill her father & the only parent she’d ever known in her short life) and how the choices we make in life can have dire & drastic consequences given the right circumstances. We see one killer living alone in a trailer in poverty (sunk so low that he’s a bouncer in a club that never has any customers), another who lives as a middle-class wife & mother in the suburbs, and a third who lives as a wealthy & feared crime boss of a gang who runs with a fast, exciting crowd. During the credits, we see each of the chars again as their various identities are listed while they still are alive, yet Bill is shown lying in death. His codename? “Snake Charmer.” It turns out he dies nearly the same way his brother dies, “biten” by a Black Mamba.

The Bride drives away with her newly re-claimed daughter, having claimed a new title, “The Mommy.”

In Conclussion. Kill Bill is an incredible saga. It is told in two parts, told out-of-sequence in characteristic Tarrantino nonlinear fashion. If given chronologically, from beginning to end, we might have seen all four hours of the film. And if we’d had, it would have been a terribly boring four-hour epic. The wedding rehearsal would have dragged on as a beginning. Or our first introduction to The Bride could have been Vernita opening her front door and being punched in the face by a woman she knows but we don’t know. We could have even seen The Bride as being a villain at this point, especially as she walks away from a scared little girl, threatening to come back if the girl wants a taste of what her mother had gotten. That’s probably the only way they could have salvaged the Vernita sequence… Bill & Bud’s re-union apart from Bud’s prophetic words “that woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die” & Bill’s admission “there weren’t really 88 of them… I guess they just thought it sounded cool” was dull. Bud’s trip to the titty bar & being fired and on his way out, he has to unplug a toilet was tiresome. But trimming the fat from Volume One so that What-Happened-Before-The-Bride-Was-Shot? and How-Does-She-Deal-With-The-Rest-Of-Her-Targets? can be answered by Volume Two is superb. I won’t compare the two, won’t say “This One’s Better” yet I very much appreciate the two halves being brought together. Back to the Future One & Two had complemented each other very well. Key scenes were addressed several times over and the changes in the timeline from the actions of the chars upon history through the use and misuse of time travel were wonderfully explained. Kill Bill doesn’t use time travel in the traditional sense, but different events scrambled into a jig saw puzzle and having each succulent piece doled out and put together until we see the cohesive whole is a great accomplishment. So what we’ve got is “The Fourth Movie By Quentin Tarrantino” divided into two parts. Kill Bill Volume One isn’t his fourth movie and Volume Two isn’t his fifth, they’re both his fourth movie. The third BttF movie was superfluous, not entirely integral to the story. Heck, “Back to the Past” might have been a better title… or “Emmet L. Brown in the Old West” or something.