Killing Bill Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence

1. Killing Bill Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence By: Breanna Rack

2. Violence • How would you define violence? How is it constructed in our society? • Where are people abused? • What about neglect? • Who is abused • What does this abuse lead to?

3. Answer: • Violence: An intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force • Does this cover all possibilities of violence?

4. Key Quotes • “This violence is personal, occurring outside ethical frameworks or discourses of social or political justice. The revenge motive is depicted and enacted with clinical coldness and shrewd planning. As the Bride states very early in the film, it’s ‘mercy, compassion, and forgiveness’ that she lacks, not rationality,” (Couthard, 2007, 164). • “In Kill Bill the emphasis is on a nostalgia for nuclear family unity freed from the concerns of patriarchal violence or female solidarity, community, or public action. The Bride is reconstructed as a mother and violence is justified as the world is placed in balance by the valuation and establishment of naturalized, protective, nonviolent maternity,” (Coulthard, 2007, 169). • “These violent heroines of contemporary popular cinema, then, are suggestive of the kind of ideological masking that is at work in both popular culture and postfeminism itself. In manly of these films, the role of violence, and the revenge narrative in particular, is one of stabilization rather than excessive transgression,” (Coulthard, 2007, 172)

5. Fight Scene Between The Bride and Elle Driver • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y8V5laFhSE&feature=related

6. Role of Violence in Film • “As the very terms gratuitous and excessive indicate, violence in film is somehow essentially questionable or suspect; framed by ethical and social responsibilities and issues, the presence of graphic violence is thus frequently thrown into a discourse of justification or condemnation based on its perceived relation to actual violence, audience identification, and response or character, narration, and style,” (Coulthard, 2007, 157). • Essentially, because of how we are socialized to feel about violence, we determine the violence in these movies to be too much; therefore, we try to rationalize reasons why film violence is acceptable or unacceptable. • What do you think? Is intense violence in film acceptable or unacceptable? Does gender matter? Does this perpetuate stereotypes of violence or break them?

7. Domestic Violence • “The vengeful and bloody violence has been subsumed in an ending that moves father and farther inward toward the private, the domestic, and the essentially nonviolent and moves so effectively that the opening scene of domestic invasion and murder is rewritten in the happy rebirth of the second mother-child combination. The threat of female public, violent action is subsumed by the private, essentially nonviolent domestic space,” (Coulthard, 2007, 166). • Why is private life automatically assumed to be nonviolent? Domestic violence is a huge problem that is widely ignored.

8. End of Violence • “The end of the film offers a family devoid of its patriarch, but the emotive and narrational force of the film transforms this absence into positive presence. The absence of patriarchy is an absence of violence and threat, and the female violence is configured retrospectively as temporary, aberrant, obligatory, and curative,” (Coulthard, 2007, 170). • Do films that portray female violence send a message that males are violent until death, but females are only violent until conflict is gone?

9. Additional Questions • Does the location of the female fight scenes (in the home, garden, ect.) send messages about where women should be? If not, why are these scenes in these locations? • “Female-female” fight scenes are intensely gory while “male-female” scenes are less bloody. Does this show that women cannot completely overpower men?