href="#litres_trial_promo">12 This reifies the idea ←33 | 34→that women’s violence is permitted and forgiven if it is aimed at protecting children.
Women’s traditionally subordinate and stereotypical roles are further naturalized by reaffirming gendered stereotypes of domesticity that maintain patriarchal dominance. Specifically, two of the powerfully deadly women leave their profession to settle down in domestic roles. Beatrix leaves DVAS to marry Tommy, give birth to her child, and work at a video store in El Paso, Texas. Similarly, Vernita departs DVAS, marries Dr. Bell, and becomes a housewife and stay-at-home mother in Pasadena, California. How these women, who were globally feared and at the top of their profession, were content (or would be content) as domestic dependents is never addressed.
Even the fighting skills of female-bodied characters are partially demonstrated within the domestic sphere. For instance, two fights among women warriors occurred within homes—Vernita’s and Budd’s. In both instances, Beatrix prevailed. She defeated Vernita (an ex-DVAS colleague turned housewife and stay-at-home mother) in a fight beginning in the living room and ending in the kitchen, where pots, pans, and kitchen knives were employed as weapons. The fight culminated when Vernita secured a gun she had hidden and shot at Beatrix through a cereal box. After dodging the bullet, Beatrix retaliated by throwing a kitchen knife and ending Vernita’s life. In a later scene, Beatrix defeated Elle in Budd’s trailer home. While most of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat, Beatrix used a television antenna as a weapon, attempted to drown her in the toilet, and after resorting to katanas without the desired result, Beatrix ended up ripping out Elle’s remaining eye leaving her blinded in the company of a lethally venomous Black Mamba snake. In both scenes, Beatrix and her female-bodied adversaries channeled the weapons readily available to women in their stereotypical everyday life thereby demonstrating their comfort and superiority in domesticated space.
Hegemonic masculine messages are further reinforced as (white) female-bodied colleagues compete for their boss’s admiration, attention, love, and release. The film’s narrative centers heteronormativity. To begin with, Beatrix’s attempt to move on from Bill and the DVAS by marrying another man is thwarted by Bill’s attempt to possess her, which is exacerbated when he finds out she was carrying his baby and shoots her out of jealousy. Moreover, while Bill and Beatrix’s prior romantic involvement is the story’s catalyst, Elle also displays signs of being in love with Bill and envying Beatrix’s past relationship with him. When Elle poses as a nurse and prepares to kill the comatose Beatrix, her action is motivated by her interest in Bill. ←34 | 35→Elle’s attempt to take out “the other woman” goes awry, however, when Bill calls Elle to direct her to abort the mission. Bill claims, “one thing we won’t do is sneak into her room in the night like a filthy rat and kill her in her sleep. And the reason we won’t do that thing is because…that thing would lower us.” Although disappointed, Elle acquiesces to his orders, but before ending the phone conversation confesses to Bill that she loved him. Thus, despite its postfeminist façade, the dangerous dames of Kill Bill still vie for the love and approval of a man (Dow, 2006). Portraying the love of a man as the ultimate prize—or in Kiddo’s case, love’s reversal in the form of revenge—naturalizes heteronormativity and constructs women’s motivations as determined by men’s affections.
The Kill Bill films further demonstrate hegemonic masculinity by portraying a “man’s world” in which the dangerous dames of the DVAS are an exception rather than a rule. For example, the El Paso law enforcement officers sent to investigate the chapel massacre are father and son. During the wedding rehearsal, the obedient wife sits by her minister husband’s side. The strip club owner is a man, and his bouncer, Budd, and the strippers are submissive to him. Hattori Hanzo, who is the best swordsmith in the world, Beatrix’s and Elle’s kung fu master Pai Mei, and all of the Japanese mob bosses are men. Beatrix had to rely on another man, Estában, to help her locate Bill. Even though women engage in the majority of the action in these films, men thus retain their dominant place, serving as privileged leaders and expert artists who dictate and regulate women’s actions.
The films also reject feminist and postfeminist messages by duplicating rape culture reminding viewers that regardless of how powerful or dangerous women may be, they can still be overcome with the male phallus. For example, even while averting the female-bodied nurse stereotype, Volume 1 includes Beatrix’s nurse, Buck, who collected money from other men by allowing them to rape her while she was hospitalized in a coma. Between being buried alive and repeatedly raped while in a coma, the link between torture and sex reaffirm a masculinist heterosexual desire for maintaining patriarchal control. Brown (2014) notes how dangerous this can be: “When heroines are victimized in torture scenes, often to the point of actual rape, the films risk eroticizing images of violence against women, even if the women do eventually triumph over their torturers” (p. 47). Clearly, the fact that the “greatest warrior” in the world can be victimized and penetrated against her will demonstrates the phallic power perpetuated by patriarchy is greater than any sword or skill a woman may possess.
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Within the “man’s world” of the films, the dangerous dames’ access to power is, in fact, reliant on their ability to temporarily possess the phallus. Other scholars have interrogated filmmakers’ creation of female-bodied action heroes in men’s image as incorporating and reproducing masculine (fighting) behaviors (Brunsdon, 2013; Eschholz & Bufkin, 2001; Gilpatric, 2010; Grady, 2014; Halberstam 1998; Tasker, 1998). Kill Bill’s hyperreality, likewise, co-opts and caters to the norms of hypermasculine violence. The Kill Bill films celebrate and perpetuate violence that, even when perpetrated by women, is coded as masculine. Specifically, the female-bodied assassins engage in masculine fighting, serving as an example of female-bodied masculinity (Grady, 2014; Halberstam 1998) that reifies the preference for male norms and dominance that typifies patriarchal culture.
Not only do women fight like men in the films, their possession of the phallus is further evidenced by their targeting of male-centered weaknesses by kicking each other in the crotch. Early in Volume 1, for instance, Beatrix kicks Vernita in the crotch before dropping her through the glass coffee table. Later in Volume 2, Beatrix and Elle exchange kicks to the crotch as they fight each other in Budd’s trailer home. Continuing with their hand-to-hand combat, Beatrix plunges Elle’s head into the toilet yet Elle escapes by elbowing Beatrix in the crotch. Melding stereotypical hypermasculine violence with stereotypical feminine artistic expression, one journalist praised, “the bloodletting is so over the top it turns the carnage into a blood-soaked ballet” (Brown, 2006, p. 104), a comment that suggests that women’s violence is performative, stylized, and unnatural.
Finally, despite a superficial conclusion that the films affirm diversity through inclusion, this postmodern aesthetic disguises latent racism. That is, while the Kill Bill films suggest a postracial society by assembling a bricolage of film and music genres, geopolitical and ethnic identities, and different languages, the construction of apolitical difference (representation as a stand in for structural change) enables the reinscription of whiteness.13 Specifically, the inclusion of black, Chinese, and Japanese female-bodied characters support Tarantino’s postmodern imagery; however, they remain antagonists defeated by the white female-bodied warrior as Beatrix kills them all. Tierney (2006) notes that “the ability of the White practitioner to defeat Asians, using an Asian skill, in Asia, propagates the theme of ubiquitous, even inevitable White supremacy of global proportions” (p. 614). Beatrix’s emergence as a female-bodied
