Last weekend, I went to see Kill Bill, vol. 1, and I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it. I think, in the end, I liked it, but certainly not unreservedly. As one might expect from a Tarantino effort, it has remarkable visual style, a quirky but interesting soundtrack, and a dark strain of humor that caused me to spontaneously smile more than once. It also has a lot of violence. No, more than that. It has a whole fucking lot of violence.

I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to fictional violence. I enjoyed Robocop, for example, and Night of the Living Dead. If anything, I prefer films that show really violent violence over the ludicrously unrealistic violence of the average action movie, where bullet-wounds have about the effect of a mosquito bite on the hero. A few movies (Goodfellas and A Clockwork Orange when I watched it in German and couldn't let myself be seduced by Malcolm McDowell's rendition of Natsat) have actually managed to upset me up with their violence, but in those cases, that's been more or less the point.

The violence of Kill Bill is of a different sort. It is cartoonish, over-the-top. The truckload of severed limbs and gallons of blood (a colleague of mine called it "Crouching Tiger, Spurting Blood") owe more to Monty Python than to either the action or drama genres. But the relentlessness with which Taratino piles it on removes it from the realm of humor. When The Bride (played, as everyone must know, by Uma Thurman) stands over a roomful of dead and maimed opponents and tells them that they may escape with their lives, but must leave the limbs they have lost behind ("They belong to me"), it is both laughable and demonic.

I think what is most disturbing about Kill Bill is this ambivalence of tone. It would be easier if the film were just a parody of Hong Kong action flicks. It would also be easier if the it seemed to explore violence from some sort of critical distance. But Tarantino is clearly fascinated with violence, painstakingly and lovingly weaving it into the fabric of his film until it almost seems to be the raison d'etre of the movie, but is smart enough to realize this fascination is dangerous. I'm not entirely sure this works, but I find it at least interesting.

Incidentally, let me note the brouhaha sparked by Greg Easterbrook's angry diatribe against this film. Mark Bernstein has a reaction and a pretty good compendium of others' reactions to Easterbrook's baffling remarks about the Jewishness of the executives ultimately responsible for this film. Easterbrook has since apologized, though not before losing a gig he had writing for Disney-owned ESPN, for the anti-Semitic content of his rant, though not for his hatred of Kill Bill. Easterbrook decries the glorification of violence in film, referencing "psychological studies showing that positive depiction of violence in entertainment causes actual violence in children." I wonder how he feels about the glorification of violence in news reporting. Maybe we should do a psychological study of that. Maybe we are doing one already.