Mommy Kills Daddy

Kill Bill: Volume 2

Mommy Kills Daddy

Tarantino finishes his therapy session by showing Uma what it means to be a natural woman. And, this time, it's a Western!

::: Mark T. Conard

In Kill Bill: Volume 1, the Bride (Uma Thurman) acquired the power necessary to reap her revenge on Bill (David Carradine) and the DiVAS, but she acquired it in a way that it alienated her from her own essence and nature. She took up a Hattori Honzo sword, a masculine symbol of power, indicating that the way a woman gains power is to become like a man, but in being so empowered, in becoming like a man, she is alienated from her true nature as a woman. Thus all the women in Volume 1 are powerful, but, having gained power in the same way, they're also all psychotic, having apparently been psychically deformed by that empowerment.

In my earlier piece on Volume 1, I argued that the film was a kind of therapy session for Tarantino, that he was recreating his past in order to grasp it more realistically, with the father absent and the women powerful, and that he would ultimately perform the Oedipal act by having the Bride do in the father for him.

In Kill Bill: Volume 2, Tarantino fulfills this promise by having the Bride kill Bill, the father. But before she can complete the act, two things have to happen. First, the Bride has to reject the masculine notion of power and become empowered as a woman, thus reconnecting herself with her true nature. Second, Bill, the father, godlike in Volume 1, must be humanized, must be turned into a man, in order to be killed.

The Cowgirl With No Name

In Volume 2, we return to the Bride as we left her. She's still a Samurai, and she's coming after Budd (Michael Madsen). As it turns out, Budd is Bill's brother, and like the other men in Volume 1 (except Bill), he's emasculated. He's a drunk who has given up his Honzo sword (his symbolic penis), and we see him taken down a notch by his boss at the "titty bar" where he works.

As the Bride hunts down Budd in his trailer, music from Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars plays. It tells us that while she doesn't yet realize it, the rules have changed. This edition (unlike Volume 1) is a Western. Her sword is no good here, and Budd thus gets the best of her with a shotgun blast of rock salt. He then takes the sword from her, divesting her of the earlier symbol of power, and offers to sell it to Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah).

On the phone to Elle, Budd refers to the Bride as a cowgirl. If she's a cowgirl and this is a Western--a Sergio Leone-inspired Western--then the Bride is the hero and she's playing Clint Eastwood's character, the Man with No Name. That is, she's the Woman with No Name. Appropriately, while she had many aliases--Black Mamba, the Bride, Arlene--up to this point she's had no real name of her own, no real identity, as a result of her alienation from her true self and nature.

In this new milieu, and without her sword, the Bride is powerless, and Budd proceeds to bury her alive. At the gravesite, Budd asks the gravedigger if she, the Bride, isn't the sweetest little piece of blond pussy he's ever seen. She has thus once again returned to pussy, receptacle, helpless without her symbol of masculine power.

About to be nailed into the coffin, the Bride struggles, and Budd threatens to burn her eyes out with mace. He gives her the option of the mace in the eyes, or a flashlight, but either way, he tells her, she's going into the ground. She chooses the flashlight--light being a traditional symbol of enlightenment, wisdom, and knowledge--and refuses to be blinded.

A Mystical Journey

Budd buries the Bride in the grave of Paula Schultz, a reference to The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, a 1968 comedy starring Elke Sommer and the cast of Hogan's Heroes. The heroine is an East German athlete who dares to wear miniskirts and ultimately escapes to West Germany. The reference thus brings back into play the East/West dichotomy so important in Kill Bill, along with questions and symbols of masculinity and femininity (there's also cross dressing in Paula Schultz), that are themselves crucial to the film.

Inside the coffin and under the ground, the Bride goes on a mystical journey, in the form of a flashback for us, to visit the Kung Fu master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). In front of a campfire, during former happier times, Bill plays the flute and tells the Bride a story about how the mythical Pai Mei received an insult from a Shaolin monk, and how Pai Mei repaid the insult by killing the entire order of monks. This is all nicely self-referential, given that David Carradine's character on Kung Fu was himself a Shaolin monk (and of course played the flute). This foreshadows the fact that the Bride will ultimately use the skills and techniques she acquires from Pai Mei to kill Bill. We then see Bill drop off the Bride at Pai Mei's temple. The master has agreed to give her training despite the fact that he despises Americans, Caucasians, and especially women.

On first meeting her, Pai Mei mocks the Bride's ability with the sword. He then forces her to learn to smash her hand through a thick piece of wood from just a few inches away. The process is painful, and her hand is bruised, bloody and nearly useless for everyday tasks like using chopsticks. But under his cruel tutelage, what the master teaches her is that her power and strength lie not in the sword but rather in her own hands. In other words, she learns that she doesn't have to take up the sword--the symbol of masculinity--to be empowered. She can have strength and power without denying her true nature; she doesn't have to reject her femininity, and thus doesn't have to be alienated or psychically deformed.

The Resurrection Name

Having made this mystical journey and learned this lesson, the Bride uses her hands, her own natural power, to break out of the coffin and escape the grave, as blatant a metaphor for death and resurrection as they come. The Bride has been reborn or resurrected and can now both wield power and be a woman and a mother, something she had previously thought impossible. Because of this transformation, because of her realization and connection to her true nature, she now gains an identity and can be named.

Back at Budd's trailer, Elle has arrived with a suitcase full of money to purchase the Bride's Honzo sword. Budd tells her about the Bride's fate and hands over the sword, but when he goes to count the money a black mamba snake (which we recall is the Bride's