Momyer, Genre, Identity, and Ethnic
Representation in Tarantino’s Kill Bill
After watching Quentin Tarantino’s double-volume Kill Bill, I found myself
in the same predicament I usually am in after watching a Tarantino movie. On
the one hand, I’m a fan. I am drawn into the film through the action, the wit of
the dialogue, the composition of the frame, the soundtrack, and the violence, or
rather, through the sense of aesthetic in which the violence is presented. In terms
of the form of the film, I’m in love. On the other hand, I also feel a deep sense of
hypocrisy when I say that I am a Tarantino fan and that is because I would also
say immediately that I am a feminist and I am very aware of the personal and
political implications of representation. In the case of Kill Bill, I am stuck with
the question: How can I reconcile my response to the visual nature of the film, a
visual aesthetic that places violence into the realm of art, with my concern for
the film’s portrayal of women and cultural ethnicity. Or, how can I justify my
appreciation of a film in which the white blond female character murders
everyone except the woman who is most like her, another white blond?
The narrative structure of Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a divided and fragmented
sequence of chapters while the content focuses on the divided and fragmented
nature of identity. Each character plays multiple roles, designated by multiple
names and code names. The main character, Beatrix Kiddo, AKA The Bride,
AKA Black Mamba, AKA Mommy, carries the most names and in the film the
notion of a lack of central identity begins to be established. Already, identity lies
in its multiplicity.
For this reason, I am tempted to begin by suggesting that the question of
ethnicity is not a central issue to this film. In many ways, Kill Bill supports the
arguments made by some critics such as William Boelhower and W. Lawrence
Hogue who argue that ethnicity is constructed and therefore fictional. For
Boelhower, there is only the ethnic sign and performance, which he refers to as
ethnic semiosis and defines as “a way of thinking differently by thinking the
difference, and in the postmodern American framework, this may be all the
difference there is: a particular form of discourse, of evaluating the agency of
the subject, of holding one’s ground against the map of national circulation”
(Boelhower 143). In other words, ethnicity can only refer to the momentary
privileging of differential national origins and cultural traditions over all other
aspects of identity. While signifying difference, the ethnic identity presented
does not suggest essence, authenticity, or the real identity since these are
impossibilities. Rather, the concept of ethnicity is a part of an undefmable,
constantly changing whole.
However, while Boelhower and Hogue argue for the constructed nature of
culture and impose this concept onto ethnic identity in a manner that is similar to
the way that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. views blackness as a metaphor, the question