Perspectives | Lecture 1 - 5 Ways 'Kill Bill' is Postmodern

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Genre -
Throughout the film, Tarantino takes inspiration from a variety of different genres, including horror, action and Japanese cinema, never sticking to one and instead meshing them all together to create an original melting pot.

Animated Scene -
Perhaps the most immediately noticeable example of disjointedness in Kill Bill (2003), is the heavily Japanese-inspired animated scene which introduces O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). While it still maintains the same directed style and over-the-top gore with a sense of humour as the rest of the film, the fact that one section suddenly switches to being animated feels very strange, both while watching and after the fact.

Music -
The clearest examples of this are all in the final act, when The Bride (Uma Thurman) goes to the Japanese inn to confront O-Ren Ishii. When the viewer is first introduced to the historical and very traditional inn, all that can be heard is a small Japanese band performing songs in a modern Western style. Then, a while later during the final confrontation between The Bride and O-Ren, where you might again expect traditional Japanese music, Tarantino chose to use an upbeat Spanish-style soundtrack instead, almost creating the feeling that the visual style is butting heads with the audio.

Discontinuity -
Tarantino frequently delivers a discontinuous narrative as he not only stops the film to label what Act the viewer is witnessing, but he also shows the story in a disjointed way, as the film starts with The Bride killing Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), the second planned kill on her list. After which, Tarantino switches to show how The Bride was almost killed a number of years ago and her waking from a coma, before progressing with the first kill on her list, O-Ren Ishii.

Humour Within the Gore -
Kill Bill (2003) is a bloody and gory film throughout, with the vast majority of the scenes featuring blood spraying from someone's lost limb. In fact, it's so gory that Tarantino had to make the Crazy 88 fight scene black and white as a means to censor it. But despite this, Tarantino gave the gore a comedic quality with how excessive it is, even including lines of dialogue in an attempt to give the scenes comedic effect, like this for example: https://youtu.be/NJbo_8mKG-c

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