I knew it!

Part anthropologist and part grifter, you like
impressionable young minds, firm young bodies
and dubious grant proposals. You are Lucinda
Nicholson.


Which second-string 'Beverly Hills, 90210' character are you?
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Kill Bill (no spoilers)

So I am not a huge Tarantino fan. I mean, I appreciate the man fine, I liked Pulp Fiction a lot, but did not cream my pants over it the way a lot of my friends did, I guess I felt detached from a lot of his movies, which completely makes sense, because his luddic postmodern schtick is a modus operandi that alienates me, for one, from the hyperviolence in his movies by keeping the only ways I could relate to that kind of on-screen experience--that is, a kind of cathartic empathy--at bay. When you are drawn into the story, but not lost in it, because the story is always reminding you that it's a story, it's hard to feel visceral connections to what's happenning on screen; and extreme ganster-style violence isn't something I can relate to from my daily life, and if I am analyzing it, it's from a detached perspective of a viewer placing it in the context of pop culture. Still, not something I can personally relate to, unlike, for example, extremely cold pomo flicks that keep humanity of their characters in some sort of subzero state, like "Rules of Attraction," which are hyperbolic in their disengagement, beyond even a rudimentary emotional atavism, which can nevertheless strike a cord with me, albeit on an allegorical level, but still something I can process as possible for me to relate to. Tarantino's movies are clever and have nothing to do with emotion, which is not a criticism, just a facet of the genre. They are seedy detective strips come to life. They simultaneously mock and reify the kind of simple destiny-based cosmology that gives the most inexcuable people excuses because they consider themselves people of a solid moral framework. They, in style and execution, represent the lack of accountability in their characters. They are fun. I enjoy them. I just don't find them to be particularly complex or intense, which is what I need in a movie to more than merely enjoy it. I am not turned off by ultraviolence, by the way; I just think it's hard to make an ultraviolent movie with a sustained complex moral center; excess violence is morally numbing; trying to elecic a reaction in that context is like running an ice cube up and down the back of someone who has a low-grade frostbite. In small doses, like at a climactic moment of the film, hyperviolence can shock someone into extreme emotion, but when it's gore and death from the get-go, it's hard to balance the wide emotional range. But when the kind of "shocking" violence that some people get disturbed and displeased does not detract from the emotional impact of the film, I applaud it. I was the only one of my friends who really liked "Hannibal," but I thought that movie did it well. And when a movie like "Kill Bill" is so violent, but you are actually drawn into it, rather than alienated from it, it's quite a feat. Part of it has to be that the violence/the revenge is the main character in a way, in this pure way, and everything emotional is amply present, but never highlighted, and thus never in a position to fail to capture the attention of the viewer--but it's seeping from the soundtrack, from the incredible beauty of the battle scenes, from Uma Thurman's exaggerated tall, thin physique--although at times she herself seems made of steel (metal plate in her aside), other times the fact that she could balance and wield her sword seemed like her fragility was possessed by mercurial magic. But it is subtext, all subtext; all "emotional" monologues and disclosures are done as homages, verging on parodies of different cinematic tricks and genres, in a typical Tarantino pomo way. But it did not matter because the film was so unbelievably beautiful. It's a monolithic tale of revenge, despite its fragmented structure, and while Tarantino shows that a monolithic narrative is a thing of the past, by mixing up the aesthetic styles in which it unfolds--everything from camp to Western, to, obviously, samurai movies, with some Joseph Campbell questing shit thrown in there--but he also resurrects it because with all the irony, the tampering with chronology, the obscene extent to which the suspension of disbelief is pretty much eliminated as a category, it's still a completely monadic story that draws you in just like any experience that is collapsed into one-note intensity does; like a moment of fear of death, or primal rage. But it's far from primal in aesthetic; although you don't think about it, the film implies pretty gruesome shit about human nature (I cringed at the scene where she first wakes up in the hospital), but you won't find any undifferentiated ugly-id Francis Bacon aesthetic here; it's about revenge as a total framework, in the Geertzian sense of religion being a model of culture. It dictates everything that happens, and we don't even know why The Bride was ordered killed from the get-go (or by the end of Volume I for that matter), meaning it's not ontologically important, it's almost irrelevant, it's a system that is in place when the movie starts, and it determines all dimensions and aspects of the world it creates. With incredible, frightening hypnotizing beauty.