rhythm: from kill bill to reservoir dog

After a minor detour to the u-topos of theory, I return our conversation to the shifty territory of violence and film, and no name indexes the intersection of violence and film more eloquently than Tarantino.

The last post on violence and/in Tarantino offered a detailed reading of two scenes in Kill Bill. I would like to continue some thoughts that began to take form in that post, in addition to extending the discussion to Reservoir Dog, which remains, in my view, pure cinematic genius.

In Kill Bill the rhythmic and speed alteration from sequence to sequence is commonly expressed by the way the camera gaze pans and cuts. The uneven rhythm injects some degree of tension in a long sequence that otherwise remains utterly predictably. No one doubts that Thurman’s character, the master narrator in the movie thus far, will not perish imminently.

Moreover, the way rhythmic speed fluctuates within the same sequence points to the central space that time occupies both formally and thematically in most of Tarantino’s films, especially in Kill Bill. In “Childhood Living: James and Tarantino” Patrick O’Donnell argues that time is Kill Bill’s main theme: “Kill Bill is a film about wasting time, the wasting away of temporality, the time of wasting bodies, landscapes, cinematic repertories” (CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, N. 2, Fall 2009, 2). The excess that has come to characterize Tarantino’s overall style, particularly of his action-driven scenes of violence, goes hand in hand with the structure of waste that pervades his films, thematically and formally.

The stylization of violence, at least as it is executed in Tarantino’s films, not only presents violence within identifiable aesthetic norms (e.g. animation, farce), but also codifies it to circumscribe its possible repercussions to a deliberately limited frame. O’Donnell notes that in the Kill Bill films excess remains a central formal operation, frequently “backtracking and hypercitational excess” (4), through which theme and narrative become inhered in the structure of the films. In Tarantino, both style and script tend to exceed any standard of necessity.

Contrary to the accusation that some critics level against Tarantinesque violence (in that it beautifies, eroticizes, even glorifies it), the careful stylization that configures these scenes does not attempt to amplify the aesthetic and even affective impressions that they may elicit from the spectator, but to impose on them a certain discipline of perception. Tarantino’s choreographed sequences of inordinate violence reminds us of the old truism that represented violence is hardly the same as actual violence. Not only does represented violence differ from actual violence, but the representation of violence required that it be conceived, perceived, and consumed differently. In other words, the stylization attempts to suggest, at once didactically and playfully, how the spectator is invited to view such performance of violence. Perhaps engrossingly self-referential, not only do his films reference the cinematic universe, but they also set the coordinates for their viewing and critique.

The stylization (based on animation or hyperbolic repetition and intensity) recreates a distance that becomes Tarantino’s primary aesthetic and formal tool, which, instead of mythifying violence, presents it within a specific system of signs. In short, these two sequences in Kill Bill I illustrate how the overt violence in Tarantino’s films is generally codified to signal its own falsity. As some have argued, the overt violence in Tarantino can be considered the most tamed, cinematically speaking, of all the violent elements embedded in his film.

If we broaden our understanding of violence to include the experience of not only shock or outrage but also perplexity, confusion, and doubt, Tarantino’s films are indeed teeming with elements that perform an awaking violence on our perceptive capacities, which have turned either dormant or blindly susceptible to inherited aesthetic norms. Few other films disrupt the order of narrative events more adroitly than Tarantino’s, which constantly interrupt the causal lines of transition that conversely govern the structure of classical cinema. Broadly assuming the form of a jigsaw puzzle, none of his 7 films adopt even the semblance of a linear temporal structure.

Reservoir Dogs arguably presents one of the least disrupted temporalities. The film opens with the lengthy diner scene, in which a group of men drink coffee, smoke, and banter, and ends hours later, when not many of the group remain alive. What is surprising about Reservoir Dog’s more or less linear structure is that the central event that drives the narrative from the opening sequence forward is never shown. (I say more or less linear because on numerous occasions the main narrative line cuts to jump to the past to explicate how some of the individuals end up in the diner at the start of the film.)

After the dinner sequence, the film continues with a car sequence in which Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are frantically escaping from something or somewhere and speeding to the next destination. Roth’s character is severely wounded, and though he has not lost consciousness he finds himself in blinding, delirium-thrusting pain. He has been shot in the gut. Behind the steering wheel, Mr. White consoles Mr. Orange while nervously trying to decide what the best course of action is in the circumstances. Wasting irrecoverable blood, Mr. Orange lies in the back seat with his head against the left window. The car’s white-leathered seats accentuate the presence of Mr. Orange’s blood pretty everywhere in the back area of the car.

Because of the camera’s still position, the rhythm of this lengthy sequence is set by how Mr. Orange’s blood gradually stains the back area of the car. Tortured by pain, he recoils in his seat. He wants the pain to stop. He wants out. But the static gaze of the camera intensifies the fact that he is indeed going nowhere, and that the pain is getting only worse. For the duration of the sequence, he is stuck there, churning, turning, bending, folding, moving in damning pain.

Captured by a third-person point-of-view camera, the two men talk briefly about the blinding pain, possible survival, and the imminent help from someone named Joe. Something certainly has gone awry, but it is not entirely clear how, where or why.

The gap lingers as it also advances the plot. In fact, one could argue that the gap lingers to structure the plot, which assumes layered form insofar as the gap is preserved.

violence plus repetition minus realism

Continuing the thread on cinema and violence started last week, next I am focusing on how violence is figured, represented and thought in/by Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Some violent scenes in Kill Bill most evidently express that the hyper-stylization they undertake is precisely to deprive them of any lasting or meaningful capacity to shock. The two most eloquent are the sequence in which O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu)’s parents are savagely murdered while she, still a child, hides underneath the bed in which her mother is stabbed numerous time until the blade finally pierces the bed to land inches beside O-Ren Ishii’s head. As the story suggests, the gruesome experience gives birth to the assassin O-Ren Oshii, who soon enough gets her unequivocal revenge by lashing the blade that tears apart the body of the man who killed her mother and ordered the execution of her father.

These lengthy sequence of almost five minutes is animated, and the presence of blood here is considerably more voluminous and seems to be have adopted the ability to leap unimagined surreal heights. The inclusion of animation interrupts further the flow of the film, whose structure is already fragmented into chapters that carry a descriptive title. Tarantino slashes through linearity in the same way as his characters fictionally slash human bodies and things. It is precisely the animation that encapsulates what otherwise would be extremely unbearable scenes, aesthetically and morally, into the possibility of cinematic consumption. It is not an easy sequence by any means, but the animated action stamps it as fiction in very specific terms by which any possibility for transformative shock also gets irrecoverably diminished.

The animated-action demands that the violence be consumed, perceived, understood even, within the parameters of (melo)dramatic, emotive if not almost sentimental, and consequently tamed or domesticated fiction. As Tarantino’s stylization of violence heightens in such scenes and challenges the formal grounds that his previous films had achieved, any potential for shock, let alone moral outrage or deviance, plummets. In other words, just as his films build upon other cinematic traditions to offer inter-filmic works, his own filmography continues to set the signposts for how later films should or can be viewed, read, and even critiqued.

The other sequence of unbridled violence is when The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, goes to Japan to duel with O-Ren Ishii. To do so, Thurman’s character needs to battle with O-Ren Oshii’s modest battalion of furiously armed guards, who, one by one or in a bunch succumb to The Bride’s prodigious sword. Proven invincible, The Bride reaches the final target, O-Ren Ishii, and kills her in a sequence that dramatically changes pace, rhythm, and overall cinematic tone. Privileging long shots, the camera gaze of the duel sequence grows increasingly more static.

The final encounter between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii looks like a serene succession of beautiful paintings. Not unlike the earlier infinitely more frantic shots, these last ones, bathed predominantly in tones of blue, are also carefully constructed. In the first multiple-fight sequence, the camera hardly stays still. The film cuts sometimes gracefully, sometimes choppily to capture all the rapid movements transpiring in front of it. Shots from multiple angles shift places to capture the full magnitude of the fight.

Our eyes may not be able to account precisely for how the fights unfold, but The Bride’s blade strikes down every contender that meets her march: the ground, staircase, narrow pole, and even while taking a high and long leap on the air. Not one corner of the large hall is left untouched by the victims’ blood or covered by their limbs. It is so much, so increasingly over-the-top, that it is undoubtedly absurd. By the end of the mega fight scene, all of O-Ren Ishii’s mob soldiers have lost at least one extremity. They and their severed parts lie scattered in a thick mass of blood.

The exaggeration, undoubtedly, compounds the parodic, if not altogether farcical, under and overtones of the shots. The sequence, it must be said, asks to be taken at once skeptically and seriously. Serious entertainment; dubious drama. Another element that contributes to the farcical sequence of the sheer violence is editing. The sequence is undoubtedly a few minutes too long. The length is accentuated by the countless number of bodies that fall in dramatic quick succession.

The repetition of these bodies neatly uniformed helps to strip them of any individuading trait. Far from being individuals or even the mere shadow of ones, they are killing and dying automata uniformly dressed in white shirts and black suits. Even though the sequence is not animated as the earlier sequence in the movie depicted above, the governing tone of the sequence is one of pretense in which the meticulous choreography of the fights dominates the spotlight of the scenes.

The repetition predicated on the uncomfortably extended length of the sequence once again compounds the farcical composition of the sequence. If repetition sometimes operates to accentuate the subtle or metaphysical difference between one and another, in this sequence, conversely, repetition works to elongate the oppressive accumulation of the same. The repetition cues the audience to keep up, perception-wise, with the fast, thoroughly rhythmic configuration of the sequence while also accepting that there is no need to deem it too seriously.

Despite the vibrant color of the ubiquitous blood as well as the agility of the martial bodies, the repetition structuring the shots and scenes denies the sequence of gruesome violence, any real urgency. The sequence proves just as realist as the earlier animated part in which O-Ren Ishii becomes an orphan.

figuring (visualizing) violence in cinema

I will return to von Trotta’s film in the future, particularly to consider how Heidegger’s philosophy allows us to think (of) cinema. For now, I would like to write some thoughts about another favorite filmmaker of mine, Tarantino.

The question of violence is the specific angle from which I am to discuss part of his filmography in this post and few others to come. I am unsure about the title of this post. Figuring or visualizing fail to conjure up optimally what I am trying to express.

The criticism leveled at Tarantino’s films seldom strikes a balanced position. There is no possible neutrality when it comes to either the auteur or his works. Being enthralled or repelled pretty mush summarizes the more common responses viewers muster at the end of his films. His surreal violent representations in a movie that otherwise purports to be an example of realism, create a schism in the cinematic experience. Viewers rush to make sense of schism morally and emotionally rather than aesthetically.

Tarantino may be many things, but he is foremost a rigorous (as well as overindulgent) cinematic aestheticist. For that reason, his films demand that spectators respond on that level first. The moral and emotional perspectives ought to and will inevitably follow, but they must surrender first place. His films, as does perhaps any piece of representative work, contain some of the parameters by which their very critique will be rendered. That said, we’d be grossly mistaken to file Tarantino as a filmmaker who privileges form or style over narrative and character development. Undoubtedly there are plenty of the two, but his movies are also propelled by sophisticated character substance and narrative flow.

Following Daneyian wisdom, his characters remain always an enigma, and part of materializing that enigma drives the movie satisfyingly away from its starting sequence–away to places of saturated senses and even meaning. Even though there is plenty that thematize and represent the absurd, Tarantino is no Becket: a great deal does happen in his films. Because of this trifecta (character, narrative, and cinematic style/form), one can be simultaneously marveled, troubled, and fully entertained by any one of his 7 movies.

With his last two movies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino has proven that his style is hardly merely stylistic bravado, self-indulgent bluff, or manipulative affectation. In fact, one could argue that the crimson dyed sequences of violence in which falling bodies multiply exponentially, represent the most accessible form of violence in his films. If films that regard themselves as dignified or sober portrayals of violence always aim for strictly measured realism, Tarantino’s take on the overtly violent shots, conversely, straddles with discipline between realism and myth, and thus situate such violence firmly in the realm of fictional representation. In other words, such scenes make their artificial character disruptively undeniable.

Either by the use of color, formal style, or basic content, the sequences of overt violence remind the audience that they are not what they pretend to be. And by doing so, these predictably and almost parodic scenes of violence lose their ability to shock, perplex, and ultimately fail to alter the way perception, inside and outside cinema, occurs. We may choose to cover our eyes, but that is precisely because such scenes of gruesome violence are meant to disorder the realm of the visible.

This failure to shock, however, remains in itself perplexing because if Tarantino’s entire filmography can assume comfortably any claim is that it shocks, perplexes, and ultimately does alter how perception unfolds and the realm of visibility is organized; that is, how one views the universe inside and outside cinema. As it was suggested already, however, to the extent that his films confront the inner and outer makeup of perception, they do so in ways other than the loud and excessive scenes of violence, in which blood flows, splashes, and squirts upward and downward, defying gravity.

In Film Fables, Rancière analyzes a diverse gamut of films and filmmakers that have left their footprint in the variegated tradition of cinema. Examining Fritz Lang’s transition from his earlier phase led by M to his later years working for large Hollywood production powerhouses, Rancière argues that a shake-up in the realm of visibility can be evinced. Rancière describes that Lang “replays the same story of the chase of a psychopathic killer at two different ages of the visible: the first in M, where maps and magnifying glasses, inventories and drag-nets trap the murderer and prosecute him in a theatrical court; the second in While the City Sleeps, where all these accessories have disappeared and been replaced by a machine of vision, the television that places Mobley ‘face to face’ with the murderer and transforms an imaginary capture into a weapon for a real capture” (18).

Following Rancière’s thoughts on Lang’s two films, I propose that Tarantino’s films allow us to grapple not only with cinema’s capacity to represent violence (to render it visible) but also with cinema as a constitutively violent medium. Future posts will explore how Tarantino’s films may think and figure cinema as a constitutively violent medium.