Do you find me sadistic?” These were the first words audiences heard 15 years ago as they stared at Uma Thurman’s bloodied face, which winced as the speaker’s hand reached out to touch it. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill might have been shocking then, but — arguably in light of recent events surrounding the #MeToo controversy — it is even more so today. On its 15th anniversary, I sat down to to re-watch Volume 1 to see how it stands up in the face of what we know about its making now.
Originally released in 2003, Kill Bill quickly became notorious as one of the most gruesome movies ever to have made it to general release. Volume 1 follows Thurman’s character, referred to only as The Bride, after she is brutally beaten and shot in the head on her wedding day. The film picks up when she wakes from a coma and embarks on a mission to exert revenge on whoever tried to kill her. The violence is martial-arts in form and grindhouse in scale, with swords severing limbs into volcanoes of blood. Although at the time of its release, the contemporary classic ruffled more than one or two critic’s feathers on account of its gratuitous spattering of gore, its real moment of controversy came just a few months ago when it became a touchstone of the #MeToo movement. Like many of Tarantino’s movies, Kill Bill was produced by Harvey Weinstein — a man who needs know introduction when it comes to violence against women — who Thurman revealed sexually assaulted her shortly after the release of another Tarantino movie, Pulp Fiction.
Since then, Tarantino has come under heavy criticism too for keeping quiet about his longtime collaborator’s attacks, including that of Thurman. If that wasn’t enough, Kill Bill made headlines earlier this year also when Thurman opened up about an incident that had happened on set. For one of the final scenes, Tarantino insisted that Thurman drive a rickety car down a dirt road that hadn’t been test-driven. She expressed concerns about the safety of the car and asked to have a stunt double do the take, but instead Tarantino convinced Thurman to do it herself. Disturbing grainy footage shows Thurman steering the suspect vehicle at breakneck speed before crashing into a tree, damaging her knees and leaving her with a concussion.
With all of this now out in the open, it’s hard not to read the movie’s opening lines as prophetic — or, more frighteningly — as a release valve for an unspoken truth. “Do you find me sadistic?” This is probably the central fact of watching Kill Bill in the wake of #MeToo: its place within the movement is all the more significant because the film itself resembles a funhouse mirror held up to the abhorrent matter of violence against women.
Now, that Kill Bill occupies such a key place within public debate, it’s ironic that Tarantino made the action film — a homage to spaghetti westerns, Kung-fu movies and grindhouse — to get away from the dialogue tangoes that characterised his early classics like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. For Kill Bill, he wanted to focus on blunter pressure-release systems of violence and mounting tension. In this sense, the movie stands up like tempered steel — if Uma Thurman’s yellow motorcycle suit and katana appeared iconic in 2003, now we recognize them as Hollywood canon, seared into the mind’s eye of a whole generation of moviegoers. The same goes for the fight sequences, especially the go-for-broke melee between The Bride and dozens of Yakuza swordsmen; the scene is wild the first time you see it, but is as equally as electrifying on the second, third, and tenth watch.
Although the legacy of Thurman’s and Tarantino’s professional relationship has been tainted in light of Thurman’s revelations, their relationship is still one of the great actor-director partnerships in cinema history. Part of the reason why Kill Bill was such a cinematic success is that it was made collaboratively — both Tarantino and Thurman gave a lot of themselves in the process. Tarantino insisted on the main role going to Thurman, delaying production for months while she was pregnant with her second child; meanwhile Thurman let Tarantino stay at her house while he worked on the script. She went through intense physical training to prepare for the role, and of course, saw the film through the end of production despite the pair’s falling out following her car crash.
All of which makes for a blistering hundred-minute ride from that dusty chapel on the border of Mexico to the snow-covered Tokyo shrine. And even though relatively little really happens narratively speaking —The Bride gets shot, she wakes up, she gets a sword, she uses the sword to chop people up — the movie hooks you in and holds you.
Still, it’s hard to say, even — or especially — now, what can be excused as creative friction, what crossed the line, and how any of it should impact on the experience of watching the movie today, knowing what we now do. If Weinstein and the car crash weren’t enough, it recently emerged that Tarantino spat on Thurman’s face for one of the scenes and choked her with a chain in another. Both director and star have made it clear that this was well within the bounds of what they agreed on; Tarantino has said that Thurman was actually the one who suggested the chain. But, yet again there is a mirroring effect — a sense of porousness in the boundary between the fiction of the movie itself and the facts of how it was created.
15 years on, there are still scenes that make me squeamish, but not because of the blood and guts. Before it was possible to take refuge in the idea that the film’s narratives of brutality — particularly the brutality one man inflicts upon one woman —could be relegated to what happened on screen. In light of recent history, it feels far more real: you watch Thurman get hit and imagine what happened in that hotel room with Weinstein; you watch her speeding down the road with the hard knowledge that she really did crash.
In this way, Kill Bill is a living text — it has expanded and grown outside of its original production, and probably will continue to do so. By reading it through the prism of the Weinstein revelations and Thurman’s own admissions, the story takes on a new power and sinister significance — it’s fluid rather than fixed, rippling under the weight of fresh information. If we may have initially watched Kill Bill as a form of pure, unbridled entertainment, it’s impossible to watch it now with innocent eyes. Its plot about a woman exerting revenge on a man, who violently attacked her, is darkly timely in the #MeToo era, even more so at time when a man accused of assault can take the highest seat in the American judicial system. The Bride becomes a locum for all of our anger in a way, a woman hellbent on inflicting pain on the man who did the same to her. But if we’ve learned anything in the 15 years since the release of Kill Bill, it’s that violence never really solves anything — but that justice must still be served.