Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kill Bill: Vol. 2
2004 · Quentin Tarantino · Kill Bill: Vol. 2 on Sightlines
The screen goes black and stays black.
The Bride has been nailed into a pine box and lowered into the ground, and Robert Richardson does the thing a cinematographer almost never gets to do with a Panavision frame: he takes the picture away. What's left is a flashlight beam, a sliver of light in a black rectangle, and the sound of breath against wood. The widest format in movies, the one built for horizons, shrinks to the width of a coffin lid.
Ask what an action hero is supposed to do here. There's no opponent in the frame. There's no room to swing. There isn't even an image to read for information. Gilles Deleuze had a name for a shot that strands you like this: a pure optical and sound situation, a moment where the old circuit of see-something, do-something goes dead, and looking stops being the first step of acting and becomes the whole of what's available. He had a second name for the space itself, an any-space-whatever: a place that has quit working as a setting and become pure charge. A black frame with a torch in it is about as clean a version as cinema has produced.
What gets her out is not a decision. It's a memory. The film cuts away to a mountain training hall, to a white-browed old man making her punch through wood from three inches, and when we come back she has the punch. Deleuze called a dated, locatable flashback like this a recollection-image, and he tended to treat it as the weakest way a film can handle time, because it files the past under a heading and moves on. Tarantino makes it load-bearing instead. Through all of Vol. 2 the present tense is insufficient and the past comes in to do the work. The fight in the box isn't won by the woman in the box. It's won by the student she used to be.
That design explains why the two volumes feel like different species. Vol. 1 ran on what Deleuze called the large form of the action-image: an enormous situation presses down, a decisive act blows it open. House of Blue Leaves. The duel in the snow. Vol. 2 runs the opposite circuit, the small form, where the act comes first and what it discloses is a situation nobody knew was there. Every name crossed off the Death List Five buys a piece of withheld backstory: how she survived, what actually happened inside the chapel at Two Pines, where the training came from, whose child it is. The kills are can-openers.
Budd is the film's basement. Michael Madsen plays him as a man on a slope, a bouncer at a strip club living in a squalid trailer, the dignity long gone. Deleuze kept a whole category for this: the impulse-image, cinema in which the social surface is thin and what shows through it is appetite and decay following one irreversible downward line. The concrete setting is what he called a derived milieu; the savage thing underneath it, an originary world. Here that's the desert. Notice that this stretch of the film thinks in damaged bodies and charged objects rather than in tactics. Elle Driver's one eye. The Hanzō sword the film keeps returning to. Deleuze's word for a part-object that organizes behavior like that is fetish, and it's why the Budd chapter feels sour and heavy in a way none of Vol. 1's set pieces do. It isn't a duel. It's a food chain.
Then the film refuses the thing it has been promising for two movies. The Bride arrives for a swordfight and finds a living room: a sofa, a television, a five-year-old, a father making a sandwich. Tarantino's specific invention here is the monologue staged as a fight scene. Bill's weapon is a piece of criticism, the Superman speech, where he argues that Clark Kent is the costume and Superman the man, and that Beatrix Kiddo is assembled the same way. Deleuze had a name for an image that transposes action into figure and discourse instead of performing it: the reflection-image. The conflict stops being fought and starts being argued. And there's a finer point available. Bill's argument is made out of a comic book. Modern cinema, Deleuze noticed, fills up with characters who know they are moving among clichés and who use that knowledge rather than drowning in it. Consciousness of clichés is Tarantino's native air. Bill wins because he is the better reader of pulp.
Staging carries the rest. Deleuze borrowed the word gest from Brecht for a posture that exposes a whole social relation, and the sofa tableau is one: mother, father, daughter, television. Two assassins performing the body language of a family. Watch how much of the tension lives in where people sit.
None of it is invented from nothing, and Tarantino would be the last to pretend otherwise. The grammar of the finale is Leone's. Once Upon a Time in the West taught him that a face held in extreme close-up through a long slow conversation generates more dread than a shootout, and that a late flashback can retroactively change what the antagonist has been the whole time. Deleuze's term for a held face carrying a feeling that hasn't discharged is the affection-image; Leone built a career on delaying the discharge, and Vol. 2's finale is that method moved indoors onto a couch. The debt is literal in the score: Morricone cues lifted from Death Rides a Horse, whose flashback-driven list-of-targets plot is the Bride's structural template, plus the whistle-and-ocarina idiom of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly dropped in unchanged.
The other inheritance is Hong Kong. The Pai Mei passage copies the master-disciple ordeal of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, where training is the plot rather than a prelude to it, and the cruel white-browed master and the train-in-secret-to-beat-him structure come from Executioners from Shaolin. Then the sharpest citation in the picture: Gordon Liu, the star of 36th Chamber, plays Pai Mei. The tradition is physically standing in the shot. Tarantino runs the same move on David Carradine, whose slow aphoristic cadence from television's Kung Fu is deliberately summoned so Bill can speak as a philosopher-warrior. Casting as quotation, with plot consequences.
What the film did to filmmaking is mostly a matter of permission. Deleuze's crisis of the action-image is a story about belief collapsing: after the war, filmmakers stopped trusting that a decisive act could change a situation, and cinema learned to watch instead. Tarantino has no such crisis. He believes in the action-image completely, and Vol. 1 is the proof. He dismantles it anyway, on purpose, out of connoisseurship rather than exhaustion, and that is why the anticlimax detonates instead of deflating. The film earned the right to withhold by already delivering. Along the way it normalized several things that now read as standard: the compilation score as authorship rather than a budget workaround, a revenge climax spent entirely on talk, the two-part release as a shape. It also began the partnership that defines everything after it, Richardson shooting every Tarantino film from here, Sally Menke cutting until 2010.
One honest complication. Vol. 2 has this shape because a cut running well past three hours was cleaved in two for exhibition, and the unified version has barely screened. The slowed, verbal, elegiac register everyone praises is partly a consequence of commerce. So the open question is whether you're watching a designed dénouement or a compromise absorbed with unusual grace, and I don't think the film settles it.
Either way, rewatch it for the faces. Count how often the present is empty and something remembered arrives to fill it. And stay with the collapse at the end, when the woman who finished her list discovers her daughter alive and has nothing left to do but be a mother. The film never tells you whether that's the reward or the sentence.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsign/sonsign) — The buried-alive sequence: Richardson cuts to total black and holds, the frame lit only by a flashlight beam, while breath, the scrape of wood and buried silence carry the terror. Nothing can be acted on; there is only looking and listening.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The coffin converts the widescreen Panavision image into a claustrophobic sliver of illumination in blackness — a space that no longer functions as a setting for action, only as affective charge.
- recollection-image (mnemosign / image-souvenir) — The Pai Mei training flashback, cut in the punchy elliptical style of Shaw Brothers kung fu, supplies the three-inch punch that gets her out of the box; the Two Pines massacre is finally shown from the inside. Dated, locatable pasts doing the work the present cannot.
- action-image, small form (ASA') — The Death List Five structure: each confrontation discloses a partly hidden situation — how she survived, what happened at the wedding-chapel rehearsal, the origin of her training, the truth about her child — inverting Vol. 1's large-form set pieces.
- impulse-image — Budd as a study in fatalistic decline: the squalid trailer, the strip club where he has fallen to working, the parched desert Southwest read as an originary world beneath the genre's surface.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — Madsen's Budd is staged as an irreversible downward trajectory — a former assassin reduced to bouncer work and a trailer, with no possibility of ascent.
- fetish (part-object) — Recurring charged objects and body-parts organize the middle film: the Hattori Hanzō sword, Bill's flute, Elle Driver's one eye, the goldfish — props the dossier notes do quiet thematic work.
- the reflection-image / the Figure — Bill dies not in a swordfight but from a technique administered almost tenderly after a long conversation; the Superman monologue on Clark Kent as a critique of Beatrix's true nature replaces the duel. The withholding of spectacle is the staging.
- consciousness of clichés — Bill's climactic weapon is a piece of pop-culture criticism — a comic-book myth read back as a diagnosis of another character — inside a film built as ostentatious genre pastiche.
- the gest (attitude exposing a relation) — The finale staged as a chamber piece: a mother, a father and their daughter around a television and a sofa, with Bill making B.B. a sandwich, precisely where the audience arrived primed for a duel.
- affection-image — The Bill confrontation lifts Leone's grammar from Once Upon a Time in the West — faces held in extreme close-up through long tense dialogue before violence, the feeling registered and deliberately not discharged.
- crisis of the action-image — The dramatic engine shifts from 'can she win?' to 'what has her vengeance cost, and what is she returning to?'; exposition and confession replace action, and the revenge saga converts into a story about parenthood and the possibility of stopping.