Jaded, TIM WONG attempted to revisit the year in movies that was 2003 – and found out it wasn’t all bad.


» Part A | [Part B]

THE ACTUAL long-term merits of Quentin Tarantino's latest entry into contemporary cinema are vague and just a little questionable at best. Yet, with its bullet-point transgressions and ruthless bastardisation, Kill Bill’s gratuitous strokes, slices and dismemberments are impossible to resist. The very notion that this former 3-hour act of self-gratification was condensed down to a pair of chunk-sized installments speaks volumes (no pun intended) of Mr. Brown, probably the biggest working film geek in the world. Most cine-nerds prefer simply to either dream about or watch movies, yet this video jockey does both and gets to make and recreate them too. Thus, this acquired – but not necessarily earned – status puts our employee-of-the-month in the enviable position of the exhibitionist endorsed to indulge in his own catalogue of guilty pleasures. Kill Bill is essentially just this: the literal realisation of an elaborate celluloid fantasy, sweaty fanboy lust, or even closer to the point, fetish with a vengeance.

This video store clerk turned irritable actor turned elusive wunderkind is but all along a spotty-faced, hairy-palmed boy of the VHS generation. This is not a form of mockery (we’ve all been that boy, haven’t we?), but a way of illustrating the context in which Tarantino’s films – especially this one – exist. Then again, to apply “context” to a Tarantino film is something of a meaningless exercise. Made exclusively for the Here and Now, here is a director whose films to date have been wholly insignificant or indicative of Time and Place, none so more than Vol. 1, which in its mish-mash composition, is rampant postmodernity in need of a queer makeover (lose the Pussy Wagon, for starters). There are so many clashes and crossovers of culture, genre and style – most of which do not need pointing out – that the film is a fashion and interior disaster waiting to happen. It’s also very messy – both in formula and blood-splattered look – which should be considered not criticism, but a term of endearment. Because as senseless and wildly unfocused as the film’s aggression is, it is also just about the most stimulating experience of its kind.

Certainly as far as 2003 was concerned, Kill Bill was the film that injected some much needed vigour into a year consisting mostly of things that blew up. Like a dose of Viagra, the first part aroused us enough to hold something back for the second. Its immediacy comes strictly from a man’s desires – the perky Japanese school girl, the sanitary white nurse’s uniform, the macho-fuck-pride automobile – yet this film too borrows from the best of Asia: the predominance of the woman’s role. Usually, the argument of objectification counts here – especially in anime, which makes no secret of its Hormonal Eye For The Straight Guy. On the surface, female characters might appear to over-populate Asian narratives for cosmetic reasons, yet more often than not, they’re empowered. Every single woman in Vol. 1 gets this, including The Bride, of which I’m nominating Faster Uma! Kill! Kill! as the film’s tagline – she’s like a Russ Meyer power doll, only with more grace and less impediment (of the upper variety). This is what Coline Serreau’s Chaos needed to be – self-affirmative feminism rather than the we-don’t-need-your-stinkin’-sperm variety.(1)

So even though Kill Bill’s discourse is spoken in the grammar of violence, we, as an audience of two genders, aren’t divided. This, I think, is because the film is a performance in fetish, something we all share and can relate too. Everyone must admit to having one vice – chocolate, alcohol, cigarettes, movies. For Quentin, it’s most definitely movies. Before Video Killed The Radio Star, the former hotshots of American cinema would study entire film style, language and text religiously, and if they were lucky, would get to view prints of these films too. Unlike Scorsese or Coppola, Tarantino never attended film school; instead, he’d play, watch, rewind and repeat if necessary, revisiting entire genres and subgenres in the process. Then there were the Grindhouses. It’s this instinctive act of obsession-compulsion that is duplicated in Kill Bill; like the cycle of playing and replaying, the constant fetish-upon-fetish translates in the film to a kind of hypnotic snuff loop. We’re utterly transfixed, and for the next 109 minutes discard the fact that there’s nothing remotely academic about the film, embrace that it’s little more than an aesthetic object, and are convinced – despite world turmoil and political correctness – that’s it safe to carry samurai swords in-flight and respectable to kill the mum in front of her kid.


Dogville, on the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced by. Lars von Trier's latest, and the first in a so-called "USA" trilogy of films, is often fascinating, only partially moving and occasionally very silly. That is, as much, Lars' point, although the arrival of James Cann's enthusiasm as he delivers line after line of conversational arc like he was Gloria Swanson and ready for his close-up, Mr. von Trier, upsets – for a brief moment – the mode of the film because for the first time, it's like we're watching an actual movie.(2)

Jimmy's proficiency is to be commended – while every other actor in this vast ensemble is so clearly in on the "joke" – Cann does what only actors do, and plays the scene straight. So straight, it’s diabolical. His turn as – surprise, surprise – a Mob boss, is regrettably yet another role in a long line of intentional and unintentional stabs at self-parody (or, self-typecasting), from Dick Tracy to Mickey Blue Eyes to everything else hardheaded and short-tempered in between. And so we laughed.

There's a right and wrong time for this in Dogville, and I hardly think Trier elected the Sonny Corleone moment as one of those. Not a comedy but a bedtime satire, the film is also, among other things, a badly disguised allegory for stringent anti-Americanism. So when the aptly-named Grace (Nicole Kidman), on the run from gangsters, is welcomed into the town of Dogville under an unreasonable proviso (pimped as the town slave-girl, supposedly the only logical way to win over this skeptical lot), comes to naively accept their enforced standards (this is the land of second chances), and then submits to their eventual barbarity and exploitation, we find this laughable because there’s something quite unnecessary about the dilemma Grace has gotten herself into (at this point, reduced to the spectre of a caged and leashed animal).

Of course, Grace suffers immensely, is raped, betrayed, abused and subjected to a priceless moment of fem-cruelty. And she is every bit as remissive as her name suggests. But that we’re supposed to sympathise with Grace’s plight is hardly the point; told in nine chapters plus a prologue, this is nothing more than a painfully extended Aesop fable with some added moral ambiguity (the townsfolk are a pack of dogs, Grace is a stray cat, or something like that). And fables are designed to instruct us, not move us; Dogville as a result is a troublesome beast, removed entirely from Trier’s former expressionistic and hyper-realistic self. The film is didactic, but also bitter and twisted, and is probably too ironic for its own good. Still, this isn’t a complete self-lambasting by Trier; true-to-form, he’s making Grace into another one of his divine angels by grinding her down to a pittance. I suppose.

Martyrdom? Self-Sacrifice? Actually, there’s nothing of the sort. In the scene-stealing, slightly jovial climax, James Cann, our meet-your-maker crime lord and father to Grace, convinces his daughter in a matter of moments to acknowledge her arrogance – and then embrace it. Sure, we want the townsfolk of Dogville to be punished for their indiscretions, even suffer just a little for it, but a St Valentine's Day massacre? Not quite what we had in mind. But who am I kidding? This is a Lars von Trier film. Grace is daddy’s little girl and gives all-mighty vengeance the stand and salute (justified in terms of the world-will-be-a-safer-place rhetoric), prompting the Tommy Gun-toting mob to unleash their version of shock and awe upon the now terrified Dogvillians. Grace – making like she’s Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 – performs the last symbolic gesture by raising the phallus of a gun to the head of the town intellectual, leader and so-called friend Tom, and blows his brains out. Now that’s perverse.

It’s also deliciously funny. But it still begs the wholly unsavory question: what the fuck is Dogville anyway? A shattering of the American dream? An attack on foreign policy and Middle Eastern “liberation”? A cunning way of making the “U” outside of the “SA? All of the above, probably, which is why Dogville is at once both scathing in tone and problematic in reason. But I like the fact that the film is in opposition to something, including Trier’s own screw-the-movies manifesto. Dogville, believe it or not, can even be catagorised into genre: it’s a revenge picture, like Kill Bill, only inverted like Irréversible. And it also responds to the needs of the audience by giving us the dramatic plot twist that Hollywood and its precious classical narrative loves to call its own.

So now, I’m convinced that Kidman and Cann’s exchange, in the den-like backseat of his mobster limousine, was meant to be, because the perverted mood swing is the twist. Nicole could have been fed to the dogs – literally – and in the process canonised like Björk and Emily Watson before her. Instead, she’s in the war room of Gods and Generals with an executive decision to make. Grace, sweetie, you’re either with us, or against us. Oh, she’s with us all right. And so concludes this ironic, amusing, generally misanthropic fairytale, but not before one last encore: a musical message-in-a-bottle consisting of David Bowie’s jumpy “Young Americans” strung over a photographic coda of the Great American Degeneracy. It’s so Michael Moore, it’s not funny. Actually it is, but in an is-this-really-necessary kind of way. Well, according to The Church of Lars von Trier, it is.

» Part A | [Part B]