I’ve spent the better part of this past year trolling through various movies, with the help of Netflix.com, the local arthouses, the well-appointed new Loews on K Street and a car.Of the many, from subte and profound to bombastic and Bruckheimerian, only one has truly captivated me: Kill Bill, Vol. 1.
The flash, the gore, the schoolgirls and the kitanas round the film out as a sexy genre homage, artfully rendered and stylistically dominant with loose threads driving the audience chapter by chapter into flitting asides and scattered histories. Even if you don’t care about the references, the musical subtleties, or the appropriated clich?, the film just has that certain essence, which was lurking in allusion and imitation since 1997. This is the first truly cool film in years.
It is well known that Tarantino and, on his coattails, Miramax opened the floodgates for independent and foreign filmmaking as viable genres in this country. Tarantino cut like a knife through the cinematic swill of the early nineties (which spilled insistently over into Armageddon, and the Jim Carrey canon) that dominated the mainstream and crowded out the able and bold peripher. Without the explosive opening of Miramax and the True Romance-Jackie Brown swell of Tarantino’s work in the mid-nineties, there would be no The Hours, Trainspotting, O Brother Where Art Thou?, or even Good Will Hunting or The Royal Tennenbaums. The doors opened by Pulp Fiction in October of 1994 ushered in an improbable trojan horse of indie, postmodern glitz that has made Sundance chic, and the Oscar race a contest of movies that are moderately relevant or challenging.
This is not to say that films that have captured the mass consciousness of Americana had not previously been awarded or recognized, but it was a question of the off chance a Martin Scorcese, Miles Forman, or Frances Ford Coppola film might creep under the radar, past the action vehicle or romantic comedy of the season, and often on the momentum of a cult following or critical acclaim rather than audience expectation or demand. And while a number of filmmakers and forces within the community converged to ratify the shift, Tarantino and, Pulp Fiction in particular, are the watershed. The scope, scale, and social impact of filmmaking in America has irrevocably changed with the advent of independent sensibilities (and the legitimation of it financial underwriting) so diffusely and fully that it seems difficult, particularly for our generation, to recall what it was like before that moment.
But at times like these, I do. Simply because I was at one of the first showings of Pulp Fiction in New Mexico when it was released in the autumn of 1994. At the time, I was living in rural Wyoming, where most young people focused their energies on rodeos and hanging out at the Wal-Mart. For my part, I was in a surreal and short-lived exodus from civilization until my Mom, tired of humoring my father’s mid-life crisis, yanked us back to reality. In the meantime, I was left to content myself with lifelines sub-culture drawn from film, music, and books. I bonded with other transplants over indie rock and tried to avoid antagonism at the local rec center, while doing my best to frighten the natives with shredded jeans, dyed hair, and book learning.
So it was a bittersweet blessing to make my way back to New Mexico, first on disguised scouting trips in search of homes and jobs with my mother, and then on a visit to what would be my new high school. Like any weekend, it was a intellectual and spiritual bliss that I knew would evaporate by Sunday night. But during that crisp October in Albuquerque, I was visiting for the last time before our return move I was finally getting my chance to be “cool.” The first taste of which came when my friend’s mother went against the collective will of the other parents and surreptitiously took a group of us to see that odd-looking movie with John Travolta and the good soundtrack (Urge Overkill covering Neil Diamond, 9:30 p.m. on MTV that month, parents telling at me to go to bed).
The guilty mom had to leave during the hick rape/kitana/Zed’s Chopper sequence, but the glee we felt at the spectacle of the work was irrepressible. Even at age 12, we felt connected to an image, a feeling and an ethos that would dominate film and culture and accent our lives in the decade to follow. The irreverent, hyper-cool, reflexive, DIY vibe that emanated from the perplexing sequencing, crisp audio, and retro detachment is now imitated and engrained beyond recognition, but at the time nauseated many of our parents and glistened with possibility for the post-boomer set.
And now I often feel like much of the subcultural, hipster, ultra-cool allure of that style has been diluted by the potent mainstream co-optation that it hailed, and my own insecurities and curiosities have lost their edge and taken me in different directions. I’ve immersed myself in many of those social and artistic groupings, felt my insecurity intermingle with my legitimate cultural sensibilities and social inclinations and forge variations of me that identified with those contexts. But I’m fatigued and nostalgic at this point, unphased by the offerings of pop or sub-culture. It’s all been done, and I am much more content to watch A Few Good Men for the nth time in my living room and unabashedly daydreaming of more “bourgeois” pursuits than I would have once admitted.
Then Kill Bill emerged on a wave of anticipation, and it blew me away. After nearly a decade of his style percolating in our collective and cinematic consciousness, Tarantino resurfaced, with the same recipe, same actors, and same time-skewed, ‘70s-infused aesthetic. My pent-up film nerd, kung-fu junkie, and aroused adolescent began to stir, nourished by a pop-cultural fix that had been absent for far too long. I haven’t been manhandled by a movie that way in years. For an hour or two there, I almost felt fourteen, salivating over a future-cool waiting to unfold.
Ian Bourland is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. Any complaints should be addressed to Bill Cleveland.
