Crimes of Passion: Revenge as Retributive Justice in Kill Bill

To Aaron Barlow whose book on Tarantino inspired (the better parts of) this post

Revenge tastes sweet. And it is best served cold. This is the type of revenge in its purest and most crystalline form. It is also, perhaps paradoxically, the most exciting kind of revenge as it combines a lingering sense of anger and betrayal with the time and patience necessary to return the “favor.” Think of it as an amplified grudge underscored by malicious will directed towards the source who did us wrong.

It is the law of karma but a karma that lies within our own grasp and control; we take it upon ourselves, hence we take the law into our own hands so we can decide the specific time, amount and dose of our planned action. It is as premeditated as it goes, a calculation of hitting where it hurts most, often emulating the pain and suffering on an even higher scale, sometimes even tenfold, with the stakes raised significantly.

There are also other types of revenge, namely those that happen in the heat of the moment. This “hot-blooded” revenge is often referred to as a crime of passion. The element of justice makes its deliberate and intentional violence strangely enough a morally acceptable deed since it is a returned “favour” underscoring the laws of cause and effect of "what goes up must come down.” In a crime of passion, we may forgive the culprit because he might have caught his cheating partner in flagranti and in media res of the sexual act.

So in a temporary lapse of reason, he shoots them both. I am using the male pronoun because it is quite often combined with a supposedly male sense, and some may call it “duty,” of honor to punish both the wife and the intrusive lover for their wicked ways. Keep in mind that sexual infidelity is an evolutionary charged nightmare, especially for the male species.

This situation is generally associated with shame, dignity and wounded pride not only towards the person but also one's family, anyone who carries one's name. This is upheld by the belief that such a normally morally reprehensible action, the intentional killing of living beings may in this case right the wrongs and the line between victim and culprit may become distinctively blurred.

In a twisted way, we may sympathize with our victim here and give him a carte blanche believing that justice is served, though upon closer inspection a death sentence for sexual infidelity seems rather harsh. (Oddly enough, I would not feel much pity or remorse for a rapist getting shot by his victim.)

The claimant in our imagined crime of passion will say he lost his head; especially as a male, again evolutionary speaking, how could he possibly keep his cool under the circumstances, catching his wife red-handed and -faced screwing another man behind his back. So we forgive him and wish him better luck next time around when it comes to women and personal relationships.

But isn't the aforementioned calculated form of revenge, the dish served cold, not equal to premeditated murder in comparison? Of course, the avenger has been wronged previously, and we judge the act of vengeance in proportion to the previous harm done, yet the time it takes to carry out the act of vengeance and then to do so in a cold-blooded and conscious manner makes this type of crime less pardonable in my eyes.

Do we all subscribe to the maxim of “tooth for a tooth” and “eye for an eye”? If all society lived that way, imagine all the cases of dental work and reconstructive surgery. As Gandhi once said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind. So how come we turn a blind eye to revenge and even root for the avenger?

And then there was the Bride Beatrix Kiddo, a determined and highly skilled woman who is on the demonic prowl for revenge to eventually kill Bill, her source of once and continuous suffering. She has made her own personal hit list that builds up towards the head of the gang while leaving, of course, the most important and most guilty person for last on this bloody trail of hers: Bill, the man who pulled the trigger on her.

Our sympathy lies with the Bride because cruel Bill had sent his Viper Squad to slaughter this pregnant (!) woman on her wedding rehearsal day! Eventually, he shoots this defenseless and bloody body in front of him after she confesses that she is pregnant with his child!

Yet she awakes from her coma childless (at that time neither she nor we know that the baby is alive and in the care of psychopathic Bill). Yet it enrages us because Bill acted as a coward sending his most astute killing machines to attack a pregnant woman: On the scale of one to ten, this gets a full and rousing ten!

No wonder she made a hit list to get even (and she threw in perverse and odious Buck for good measure) and with each killing she gets closer to the ultimate show-down, Bill himself. As we are following this angry woman, we are given some back story, predominantly in the second volume, and suddenly we see that the whole issue was not as simple or black and white as it seemed at first.

Despite ourselves, we tend to “like” Bill because of his charisma and charm, and we understand how she could have fallen for him. We also, in a rather twisted sort of way, understand why he wanted to kill her; she had left him and preferred to start a new life without him and with someone else (remember the previous scenario of the hurt and vengeful hot-blooded macho).

When Bill caught wind of her whereabouts and her sudden intention of getting married to this ordinary Joe, in his view a nobody and an commonplace fool, Bill sees red and commits this brutal crime of passion. He insists on the fact that it is not a sadistic, but rather a masochistic act as he is supposedly hurting himself in the whole process.

In fact, Bill has been more than a lover, he has also been a father figure to her. He has taught her how to fight; Pygmalion-like, he has shaped her into the skilled and tough killer that she is. When she discovers that she is pregnant with his child, she decides to quit the killing business and to leave him, the biological father of her child. Thus, in an act of revenge, the roles are later reversed and suddenly the victim, our beloved Bride becomes the avenger. And, in fact, she also turns the tables on him and kills him, hence not only doing as he does but actually becoming (like) him.

Since we sympathize with the victim, we tend to overlook the fact that the victim not only commits cruelties like her opponent, but indeed surpasses him. On a symbolic and Freudian level, the act of killing her personal trainer / lover / father figure / father of her child, she (re-)incorporates all those facets within herself, the same way warriors of the past would eat the bleeding heart of their enemies to gain and transfer their previous strength.

However, the act of revenge turns into a difficult moral choice in the skilled hands of a director like Quentin Tarantino. The final killing comes not easy and Tarantino gives Bill an honorable and dignified exit with a death that is unusually anti-climactic considering the slow and steady build-up of the story.

But there was also part of me that again was taken in by Bill and as a viewer I wished they could simply get along, call it quits, kiss, hug and forgive each other by letting bygones be bygones. That a psychopath like Bill could possibly be a good and caring father is shown not only through the fact that he had managed to take good care of his daughter over the years, but through the simple yet tender action of gently cutting off the crust of his young daughter's sandwich. Such minor seeming details show us how much he is capable of caring for his daughter on his “off-days,” when he is not involved in the killing business.

Notwithstanding, since this is a tale of vengeance, he has to die; there is no way around it. His death and her subsequent freedom seal the deal. Revenge has been taken at last and all again is good and well with the world.

The Miracle of Life: How Existence is Connected and Interdependent

Our existence is a miracle. Although this word has strong religious connotations, I am using it here also in an atheistic and scientific manner. Miracle may also be called chance in this case, but the odds of it occurring are so slight and minimal that one has no other choice but to simply call it a miracle or a highly singular event. Imagine winning the lottery not once but a million times over. Then look at yourself in the mirror; these are the odds or the miracle of your existence.

The ideas I am going to present here are meant as encouragement for all of our species to cherish and celebrate life. This is regardless of social status, intelligence, success, or whether you personally think you are a failure or waste of space, nor does it matter whether you think you are useful to society or not.

It is, in fact, the ultimate kind of consolation, and I do not have to grab into the religious bag of tricks to convince. This is about our mere existence in the world, that incredible combination of events that led to the happy coincidence of me writing this post and you reading it.

In order to show how miraculous both our existences are, I would like to start from the present moment and move back in time. I will call this the time spectrum in which we will be moving forward into the future and backward into the past. Along the way, we shall go very far back to the very beginning of our existence, no not Genesis, but the Big Bang.

As to my own existence, it can be traced back to the moment of my birth. Especially after the birth of my own son, I hold the greatest appreciation and esteem for all the gynecologists out there since they are the important, sometimes even essential stepping stones to life in this world.

But my existence can be traced further back to my budding existence within the womb. I am not intending to get into the divisive pro-life versus pro-choice argument here and am not claiming that life happens at any precise moment. I am merely retracing the many steps of my current existence without any moral comment, intention or implication at this point.

So my existence has shrunk to its most minimal pea-sized point. In fact, and now I am feeling extremely uncomfortable, my very existence can be traced back to a precise and fateful night (or day for that matter) of my parents engaging in ... ahem ... a sexual act. I prefer not to imagine its details, and I am looking only at the cold hard facts.

Had they had sex at any other point, my existence would not have turned out the way it did, and I would have not been me but my own brother. Similarly, had another sperm won the rat race inside the womb, I would have been, at least slightly but still significantly different from who I am now.

Somehow two people, my parents in this case, met each other and decided to have a child (at least so I am told) and suddenly I appear on the stage of existence. What, who and where was I before my birth, my coming to this world? My four-year-old son has already stunned me with this question: Where was I before my birth? Not an answer we can google and no expert to give us a definite answer to this mother of Zen koans.

This line of generations will hopefully continue and expand evermore into the future. But it has its definite and firmly set and established roots in the past. My parents themselves were brought into the world by their parents who had met each other previously and their parents, my great-grandparents had come into existence via their own parents and so on.

The amazing feature of this tracing back is the fact that had one chain been even slightly different, should one person or even seemingly trivial or insignificant detail be changed, the whole set of future lives would collapse. This is what Michael J. Fox's character learns in Back to the Future where through sheer coincidence his parents failed to meet, and it completely changed his whole life story.

As if the whole apparently causal chain of existence were not enough, we eventually arrive at the moment of creation of the universe, the Big Bang. Whether it is a singular event or two dense entities or multidimensional strings bouncing into each other still does not diminish the fact that it is an amazing feat; whether it is a supernatural force or God or a host of coincidences does not take away from its awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping truth.

All of this is, however, only half of the story, its vertical part of interdependence across time and generations. But we are also horizontally interdependent and our existence is tied to and sometimes literally depends upon the relationships we have with others. Effectively no one is an island to themselves since it is not only the vertical relationship of the time spectrum ranging from the past to the present that has brought me into existence, but there is also the horizontal relationship between me and the universe around me.

Put differently, I could not have existed and cannot exist without being sustained by others. In my infant and childhood days (even adolescence to an extent) I was dependent mainly on parents for food, shelter and sustenance. Afterwards, it becomes the physical surrounding that takes on this position and fulfills a variety of these needs.

For instance, I work to earn money (a universally agreed upon and recognized symbol and unity) in what we call a society, which can be expanded to become a nation, a continent, the Earth, and yes, the universe again. In order to survive and to continue my existence in this world, I need to use this money to buy food for myself - and my dependents if applicable - and need to pay rent for shelter etc. All this is part of my subsistence. (Of course, I could imagine an alternatively different maybe hermetic lifestyle of hunting and gathering devoid of money and society.)

Thus, my own existence is indeed connected to others living with me in the current plane of existence. They range from family to friends to colleagues to acquaintances, and yes even government employees and tax revenue agents. All of these people constitute society in which I am embedded as one of its many unique members.

In fact, we are all interconnected; it is both on the deepest and on the most basic level. Go back enough into the past and we are all condensed and packed energy in the moment right before the Big Bang. In fact, it was tighter than any can of sardines you could possibly imagine.

This is our miracle of life. Imagine how many billions of coincidences had to occur for you and this moment to take place. Whatever is bothering you, relationship or economic problems, put them all on hold and into perspective and look at the big picture: It is simply a miracle beyond words that we exist.

Does God have a Sense of Humor?

Dancing Jesus Website from The Simpsons

Usually when we think of God an image of a stern, bearded old man constantly bitter about His flawed and never-learning creation comes to mind. We think in Old Testament terms where He does not think twice about nearly destroying all of humanity. We think of a school teacher or principal giving us the classroom rules of what we should and should not do. With the exception of the rare and admittedly rather humorless “prank” played on poor old Abraham and desolate Job, there seems to be very little indication of a sense of humor on God's side.

I have previously looked at religion and laughter and how Jesus, His son (out of wedlock!) is quite a fun-loving guy. His life obviously ended in pain and unbearable suffering, but he did seem to have a sense of humor, roaming the country and engaging and confusing people with mysterious parables, asking prostitutes and lepers to join his troupe and yes, even turning water into wine for the merry benefits of a wedding.

I can see Jesus laugh with a full heart; I can see him tell jokes among the Apostles; I can see his sense of satisfaction as he is watching the faces of the crowd when fish suddenly multiply or a “dead” man walks out of his cave. And after his own death, Jesus is said to appear in order to appease the heartache of his disciples and to remind them that he will be among people whenever food, wine and merriment are partaken, all of which provide physical and sensual pleasures.

On the other hand, his father and many of his equally stern followers need to cheer up a little. Religion is taken way too seriously today, while blasphemy is on the tip of many a devout person's tongue. It seems that most people are still holding onto the iron fist of the Old Testament God that makes demands, accuses each one of us to be a sinner at heart or to have a sinful nature and asks us to make amends and to repent by doing a number of impossible things, such as sexual abstinence.

Now where is the fun in religion? Of course, the more serious-minded church officials insist that life is meant to be suffering, that suffering is actually good and brings us closer to God. But if given a choice, a life of suffering is not something I specifically look forward to.

And why does it even have to be this way? Why give us a body and then curse it and call it a prison? Why should suffering be the norm and the given pathway to God? Why can it not be drugs and dancing? Or is it all simply a joke? Is this a case of dramatic irony? Are we all “punk'd” by the Almighty?

Or else, in a less blasphemous manner, is God misrepresented here? Is the joke ultimately on us with God laughing at how we are chasing our own tails down here? Or is He simply angry that He is being misunderstood and misquoted by those who claim to know Him?

I think one of the reasons why many people turn their backs on religion is its lack of fun. Going to church is seen as weekly duty, one imposed upon the good and (self?) righteous citizens of this world. But the moment laughter is introduced, when a sense of joy and merriment appear on the church floor, religion can revive and vibrate souls everywhere, while God can smile down on His flawed but still adorable creatures.