Dangerous Dames. Heather Hundley
a sword. In fact, according to special effects artist Christopher Nelson, over 540 gallons of fake blood were used in the two films (Kill Bill trivia, 2003, para. 9).
Beyond excess and spectacle, viewers possessing popular cultural capital can easily identify additional signifiers of postmodern aesthetics, pointedly, the films’ nostalgic intertextuality and pastiche. The Kill Bill films are a “postmodern barrage of references to other filmic sources” (Grady, 2014, p. 70). These include nostalgic intertextual throwbacks to grindhouse films like Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns,7 Bruce Lee’s kung-fu films, and blaxploitation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Additionally, the soundtrack comprises a pastiche of hip hop (The RZA’s “Banister Fight”), rockabilly (Charlie Feathers’ “That Certain Female”), Latin funk/soul (Santa Esmeralda’s “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”), soul/funk/disco (Isaac Hayes’ “Run Fay Run”), instrumental (Vincent Tempera “Ode to O-Ren Ishii”), and 1950s pop (Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang”) music.
The films’ production values and narrative cement their postmodern aesthetic. Specifically, Tarantino’s signature nonlinear narrative style unfolds in a series of flashbacks, with each scene titled as if it were a chapter in a book of one’s life. The subtitles provide markers and insights for audiences, establishing expectations and navigation for the complex storyline. For example, the first segment after the opening scene is simply called Chapter One, and it shows The Bride confronting Vernita in her Pasadena home. Chapter Two occurs four years earlier, when the sheriff enters the bloody chapel. Then the film jumps to The Bride laying comatose in the hospital. As Elle prepares to kill her, Bill calls and cancels the mission. Next, The Bride awakens from her coma, four years later. Chapter Three, subtitled Origin of O-Ren goes back in time to trace how she came to power. This story fragment juxtaposes anime-style visuals with spaghetti western music. At the end of this segment, audiences are thrust thirteen hours forward to the hospital’s parking garage. ←29 | 30→The remainder of the film and its sequel continue to employ this postmodern aesthetic and narrative structure, jumping back and forth in time, changing from color to black and white, and fragmenting the story into chapters with sectional subtitles.
Finally, Kill Bill signifies postmodernity by seemingly embracing and celebrating difference. Of the four female-bodied DVAS members, Elle and Beatrix were white, Vernita was African American, and O-Ren was Chinese-Japanese American, but all the characters had equal status. Gilpatric’s (2010) content analysis of violent female-bodied action characters from 1991 to 2005 found Asian and Latinx people were missing from U.S. American cinema; however, in the films under investigation Asian characters and cultures are especially prominent. Myriad Asian characters were included as audiences learned O-Ren’s backstory and Beatrix travelled to China for training and to Japan to obtain her katana and then to take on O-Ren’s posse, bodyguard, and ultimately defeat O-Ren herself. Beatrix and others also oscillate between speaking Japanese and English in Chapters Three, Four, and Five of the first five-part movie. In the second film, Beatrix and her sensei Pai Mei speak Cantonese and English in Chapter Eight.
Moving beyond the fact of inclusion to consider how the characters were illustrated, non-white characters were not only featured but often respected as powerful, dangerous, and dignified. For instance, white characters Bill, Elle, and Beatrix all sought instruction from a Chinese mentor, Pai Mei, and DVAS members prized the work of a Japanese swordsmith, Hanzo Hattori. Hence, the films portrayed the value, skill, and respect of people of differing ethnicities and cultures without trying to impose Eurocentric norms or standards on Others. This suggests that Kill Bill’s postmodern aesthetic celebrates multiculturalism by engaging in representation without assimilation.8 Thus demonstrating that white people accept, appreciate, and accommodate Others. Simultaneously, the films also at times reproduce stereotypes, such as the gendered, racialized stereotype of the Dragon Lady fulfilled by O-Ren’s portrayal (Shah, 1997), and the focus on martial arts as the enabling vehicle for Asian representation.
Similar to the postfeminist portrayals of gendered and sexual equity, the films’ postmodern construction of multicultural characters as equally or more powerful than white characters simultaneously suggest that we live in a postracial society as well. In a corresponding logic to postfeminism, postracialism dangerously implies that racism is an obsolete concern not applicable to today’s culture. Yet, upon deeper reflection and analysis, both the postfeminist ←30 | 31→and postmodern elements of the films merely serve to conceal more problematic representations.
Specifically, the postmodern aesthetic curtails women’s empowerment when considering Baudrillard’s (1995) fourth phase of media transformation. Baudrillard posited that mediated images make us think they represent reality, but, because the real and the image have imploded, they are hyperreal. Kill Bill’s hyperreality is evident in the films’ shift from live action to anime, where the use of real people and animated characters flow seamlessly. Hyperreality is also evident in the characters’ accomplishing of impossible feats that exceed reality.
Beatrix engages in several impossible feats. In Chapter One, she dodges a bullet at close range, responding by throwing a knife killing Vernita. In Chapter Five: The House of Blue Leaves, the fight scene changes from color to black and white, from real time to bullet time, and includes gravity-defying action. In this scene, Beatrix effortlessly spins and flips through the air and easily jumps to a second floor bannister while combatting the Crazy 88s. During the battle, she catches a hatchet thrown at her head, splits a man in half length-wise with her sword, stands on one man’s shoulders while stabbing another man, and holds up a dead body with her sword, using him as a shield. Most of this fighting takes place on a dance floor reminiscent to the iconic scene in the 1978 hit film Saturday Night Fever while the 1960s Isley Brothers’ pop song “Nobody but Me” plays in the background, reinforcing the postmodern pastiche. The action continues as the battle appears to take place on stage, with opponents in silhouette with a blue light outlining their figures and a blue grid background providing the backdrop. Such imagery suggests a theatrical performance and hails Elvis Presley’s “Jail House Rock” performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After defeating over 30 attackers, Beatrix faces one final member of the Crazy 88, who stands shaking in fear. Demasculinizing him to validate her conquest, Beatrix spanks him and tells him to “go home to your mother!” She then demonstrates amazing balance by standing on the second-floor railing and telling everyone still alive to go but to leave their dismembered limbs behind because “they belong to me.”
Beatrix repeats her ability to defy reality in Chapter Seven: The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz and Chapter Eight: The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei. After being shot in the chest at close range with a shotgun loaded with rock salt, Beatrix is tied up and buried alive. Fortunately, because of her training, she was able to punch her way out of the pine coffin and break through the soil, freeing herself. In the following chapter, viewers learn that Beatrix ←31 | 32→acquired her gravity-defying acrobatic skills from her elderly trainer, Pai Mei. When she meets him to begin training, he demonstrates his gymnastic moves while testing her fighting abilities. In addition to successfully dodging her attacks, he effortlessly jumps in the air and lands on her extended sword, five feet above the ground, parallel to the earth. Later in this test of her skills, he throws his sword up in the air and catches it with the scabbard strapped to his body. This ancient artist, with long white hair and an equally long white beard, apparently defies time, space, and gravity.
Beatrix similarly defies physics and demonstrates impressive martial artistry adding more examples to the excess and spectacle apparent in the films. In Chapter Nine: Elle and I, the