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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repositorio Universidad de Zaragoza Undergraduate Dissertation Trabajo Fin de Grado “She’s a little blood-spattered angel”: The portrayal of Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill (2003-2004) Author Paula Wood Borque Supervisor María del Mar Azcona Montoliú FACULTY OF ARTS 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK……………………………………………………….4 2.1. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: FEMINIST WAVES………………………………..4 2.2 THE ACTION FILM………………………………………………………………..6 3. KILL BILL………………………………………………………………………….……9 3.1. FEMALE CHARACTERS IN TARANTINO‟S FILMS…………………………..9 3.2. WHAT‟S IN A NAME?………………………………………………………......11 3.3. WOMEN FIGHTING, FIGHTING WOMEN………………...………………......13 3.4. I WAITED A LONG TIME FOR YOU TO WAKE UP, MOMMY………….….19 4. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...24 5. WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….…….26 6. FILMS CITED…………………………………………………………………….……28 1. INTRODUCTION Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 are two films written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, released in the years 2003 and 2004 respectively. They belong to the category of action films or, to be more specific, to the category Yvonne Tasker (2015) calls “hybrid action movies” (157), since they use conventions from a number of different genres (such as the samurai, spaghetti western, martial arts and the rape- revenge) and they self-consciously incorporate many references to other movies and styles. Kill Bill was originally intended to be released as just one film, but since the movie would have been too long, it was released as two volumes. The films tell the story of Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), better known as “The Bride”, a woman who is a professional assassin in the DiVAS (Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) and who spends both movies taking revenge on those who tried to kill her and her baby. Beatrix is romantically involved with her boss Bill (David Carradine). When she finds out she is pregnant, she decides to leave her assassin life behind for the sake of her future baby, so she escapes without telling anyone and adopts a new identity. On the day of her wedding with another man, with whom she intends to live a normal life away from crime, her now ex-lover Bill shows up. With the help of other assassins, Beatrix‟s ex-associates, they kill everybody in the chapel and then shoot her in the head. She falls into a coma and, when she wakes up four years later, she realizes her baby is not there anymore and has probably died. As a result of this, she decides to take revenge on every single person who took part in the killing, leaving Bill as the last person to kill in her list. 1 The critical reception of these films in the years 2003 and 2004 was very positive overall. Many critics praised Uma Thurman‟s character, emphasizing the power that she emanated and describing her as a “warrior queen”, a “martial arts mom” (The Guardian, 2004) and an actor able to play “the most physically arduous female role” (Variety, 2003). In general, reviewers saw Beatrix as a feminist figure and highlighted how empowering it was for women to have a female lead in action films. As one article from The Village Voice (2003) pointed out – “if Kill Bill has a subtext, it‟s all about the danger of disrespecting women”. Interestingly enough, almost no review at the time called attention to the ambivalence that surrounds the representation of women in the two films. This ambivalence, however, was the focus of some scholarly work on the films in the years that followed. Some of these features include the films‟ view of maternity as the most important stage in a woman‟s life (Schubart 2007, Dawson 2014 and Platz 2012), the representation of female rivalry (Reilly 2007 and Schubart 2007) and the subordination of the female characters to a man (Roche 2018 and Prorokova 2016). So even though Beatrix is a very strong and determined woman who is able to kill anyone who gets in her way, the films also include some contradictory features that problematize the view of Beatrix as a feminist icon. As Reilly (2007) puts it “the film‟s title of course indicates the female‟s need to kill the patriarch responsible for putting a bullet in her head, but the textual evidence at work in both films points to a complicated view of patriarchal and feminist relations” (40). This essay explores the films Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 and their portrayal of Beatrix Kiddo. It starts with an introduction to the different feminist waves and the action film in order to provide a context for the reading of the film that follows. 2 The analysis of the films proper starts with a section on the portrayal of female characters in Quentin Tarantino‟s films and then looks into some of the ambiguities regarding this character of Beatrix Kiddo, specifically those regarding her identity, her relationship with other women and the role of motherhood in the film. 3 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: FEMINIST WAVES The feminist movement is not a static one. In fact, it has undergone so many changes since it emerged that some critics even talk of different feminisms (Krolokken & Sorensen, 1). This section is an overview of the three feminist waves. However, the ones that matter the most in this essay are the second and third waves, since their contrasting views regarding maternity and femininity will be relevant for the analysis of Kill Bill. The first feminist wave arose in the late 19th century in the Western world, and it was mainly concerned with obtaining equal civic rights for women. Women in several Western countries demonstrated for their right to vote giving rise to the suffrage movement. They finally won the vote in the 20th century (in 1920 in the United States). As has often been pointed out, first-wave feminism was exclusive, since it mostly consisted of white, middle-class, well-educated women (4). The main aims of this first wave were to confront the stereotype of “proper” feminine behaviour. Other aims were to challenge the assumption of women as belonging to the domestic sphere and at the service of their husbands, and to achieve the same treatment and recognition as men, with access to the same positions (5). The second feminist wave is associated with the feminism of the women‟s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s (7). It started with protests against the Miss America Pageants. Second-wave feminists denounced that women were oppressed by the beauty culture and that their looks were considered more important than their intelligence (Genz 53-56). An essential feature of this wave of 4 feminism was the idea of sisterhood, which promoted that women could collectively empower one another (Krolokken & Sorensen, 9). Another key issue was the right of women to have control over their bodies. Before, women had always been regarded as inherently linked to motherhood and the house sphere. By contrast, second-wave feminists saw sexuality as disconnected from the obligations of marriage and motherhood. They were also discontent with the lack of social power and political influence women had (11), and there was a demand of representation in public institutions. Along these lines, there was an explosion of research and teaching on women‟s issues, which developed into the field of feminist studies. The third feminist wave began in the 1990s. Third-wave feminists have the advantage of having been born with the privileges that first and second-wave feminist fought for (15). Unlike second-wave feminism, it does not reject femininity but regards it as one potential way of empowerment for women. In fact, the phenomenon known as “Girl Power,” which asserts sexual subjecthood and the right to the “pink things” of stereotypical girlhood, is one of the many faces of this third feminist wave (Genz 85- 88). This wave is also concerned with issues such as domestic violence and the oversexualization of women in the media. They also criticize previous waves for providing a fixed definition of womanhood (17). Second-wave feminists‟ views on motherhood, for instance, were revised by third-wave feminists, who started to regard women‟s capacity to bear life as unique and empowering. Another controversy they drew attention to was the sexist language and derogatory terms for women, which some third-wave feminists reclaimed and started using among themselves as empowering. Third wave feminism is also characterized by the debates surrounding the use of the term postfeminism. As Stephanie Genz (2009) points out, some critics refer to “postfeminism” as a kind of “anti-feminism”, due to the prefix post-, which “is used to 5 suggest that the project of feminism has ended, either because it has been completed or because it has failed and is no longer valid” (20). For those critics, the term postfeminism implies that the goals of feminism have already been achieved and, therefore, feminism is no longer necessary. Genz, on the contrary, relies on critics such as Patricia Mann and Ann Braithwaite and sees the term postfeminism not as a “denial (or worse, death) of feminism but to an altered stage of gendered conflicts and transformations” (25). Postfeminism is for her a “frontier discourse,” “a point of conjecture between a number of often competing agendas” such as the shifting relationships between femininity, feminism and female victimization (25). Postfeminist femininity presents, for Genz, multiple layers of female objectification that “oscillate between subject and object, victim and perpetrator” (26). Genz seems postfeminism as characterized by conflict, contradiction and ambiguity. This is a simplified summary of the evolution of the feminist movement, but it can be useful for the exploration of the ambiguities regarding the character of Beatrix in the two Kill Bill films.