Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (27 page)

This is a microcosmic example that reflects the macrocosm. You might notice that the method of investigation in assessing causality is very scientific—testing a hypothesis and evaluating the evidence—and includes the assumptions of psychological as well as physical reality. Have you ever felt like you had static in your head? A constant buzzing confusion that drove you crazy? Buddhism wants to show you the way to reduce the suffering caused by this static, to calm it down, to channel it and to transform it into happiness and enlightenment. Buddhists hold that negative emotions like anger, sorrow, pride, and annoyance are the cause of psychological suffering, mental static. Such emotions can potentially lead to physical suffering: anger commonly leads to violence, for example. A Buddhist, understanding suffering as an unwanted result, stops it at the cause, and is therefore on the road to enlightenment since (remember) the path to enlightenment is the path out of suffering.

Life for the Buddhist is impermanent, always in flux and never static. Not only is everything interconnected and related to everything else, but the “things” that make up the interconnected whole are fleeting, which is why when you try to obtain them, you suffer. You cannot grasp, strangle, or lock up the world. If you’re attached to something—an idea, a time in your life, a reality—you will experience suffering.

Are you the same person you were ten years ago? It’s safe to say that you’re much different, since your physical appearance, likes, and dislikes have changed. Are you the same person you were one week ago? Your life has changed since then too. And what about yesterday? Or one second ago? To a Buddhist, you’re continually changing. Buddhism does not posit a soul like the Judeo-Christian tradition; there is no concrete essence that makes you you. This is part of the Buddhist concept of
emptiness
, which is deeply related to interconnection. The world we experience is the connection and complement of “things” that are themselves relations of the whole. There is no stable thing “chair.” A chair is a certain relationship between yourself and the
material it’s built out of. This chair is made out of wood, but there are chairs made out of plastic and metal. This chair is brown, but there are black and red chairs too. This chair is tall and rocks, while other chairs are short and stiff. The chair is the relationship of properties and not a template that is filled by a catalogue of features.

Take Beatrix Kiddo. Who is she? What is she? Is she a mother? Is she a cute blonde? Is she a sword fighter? An American? Tall? Smart? To a Buddhist, Beatrix is not any one of these things. We can take away the characteristics, but we will not get to the one thing that defines Beatrix. Like the chair, she is impermanent, constantly changing. And, yes, even the object of our envy and admiration, the wise master Pai-Mei, is impermanent. There are two perceptions of reality for a Buddhist, known as the two-fold truth. There is the
partial
, material, independent reality where we find chairs, Kiddos, and Pai-Meis. Then there is emptiness, the
complete
level of reality where all things are, in fact, interconnected.

There are consequences to understanding reality only on the superficial level: when Beatrix finds out that she’s pregnant, Bill suffers as a result of her desire to change her life. Beatrix leaves him, and this brings great sorrow and anger to Bill. Trying to imprison Beatrix, to keep her in a changeless box—an impossible feat—Bill suffers immensely. His violent actions—shooting Beatrix in the face, among other things—continue the cycle of suffering, and in the end do not lead to Bill’s enlightenment (or even happiness in the Western sense of the word) but to his ultimate demise.

The Buddhist recognizes that she is suffering. She recognizes that she is in an interconnected world. She recognizes Karma. Part of her understanding of these things involves emptiness, the idea that everything in the world—her personality, the chair, Pai-Mei—is impermanent. With these understandings she can begin her path to enlightenment by cutting off the cause of her suffering.

What about Beatrix? Does she recognize her suffering? Is she part of an interconnected world? Does she understand Karma? Emptiness? Impermanence?

Beatrix is no stranger to suffering. From the first scene in
Kill Bill Volume 1
, the viewer hears her unsteady breathing, sees her bruised and bloody face: confined to a hospital bed in a darkened room, she’s like a goldfish out of water, desperately trying to breathe. She suffers physically—she was shot in the face by Bill, after all. And this causes her to suffer psychologically; it causes her to seek revenge. If she did not undergo psychological suffering, we would expect her to wake up in the hospital four years after the Massacre at Two Pines and simply get on with her life. But the first thing she does is cry at her memories, at the loss of her baby. What is causing her to suffer? She sees the cause of her suffering as Bill’s assassination squad. They’re the ones that killed her baby, massacred her wedding, and put her in a coma for four years. How will she alleviate her suffering? Like a good Buddhist, she will eliminate her perception of the cause. Namely, eliminate Bill and the assassination squad.

So Beatrix recognizes her suffering. But is the world of
Kill Bill
interconnected? Surely it is. Any fan of Quentin Tarantino knows and appreciates his use of nonlinear plotlines in the movies he directs,
¹³⁷
and the
Kill Bill
series is no exception. Although the plotline is nonlinear, it is by no means disconnected.

This doesn’t mean that the viewer will necessarily see the connectedness of the plot on the first viewing; it might take several. In fact, there are times when the plotline
appears
disconnected. For example, the viewer might wonder why Beatrix is in the hospital
after
killing Vernita in the kitchen. Has something happened to land her in the hospital since Vernita’s death?

But as the movie progresses, a seemingly disconnected plotline is shown to be connected, and the viewer is aware of being shown a connected plot in a disconnected fashion. The observant viewer will see that when Beatrix crosses Vernita off of her list, O-Ren
is already crossed off
. O-Ren’s death, of course, doesn’t occur until the very end of the movie.

Someone might ask how a nonlinear plotline even relates to interconnectedness. Is nonlinearity alone evidence for interconnectedness? The answer is no, not necessarily. But nonlinearity can be more conducive to revealing interconnectedness than linearity. By showing events out of a linear sequence, the relation between two events can sometimes be seen more clearly.

Budd captures Beatrix and gives her a “Texas Funeral” in which she is shot with rock salt and buried alive in a nailed-down coffin. We fear for Beatrix’s life until, in a flashback, we learn of the close-punch technique taught to her by Pai-Mei. Beatrix’s ability to escape Budd’s grave reverts back to her learning of the technique. That is, the result (Beatrix’s escape from the grave) is dependent on the cause (Pai-Mei’s teaching her the technique). Now, had these two interconnected events been shown in a linear order, they would have been separated by so much time as to make the connection between them less conspicuous.

One of the more memorable things about
Kill Bill Volume 2
is the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Besides being a cool-sounding phrase, the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique gives us another example of the interconnected world of
Kill Bill
. What allows Beatrix to dispose of Bill and complete her gruesome cycle of revenge is her knowledge of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. The result (killing Bill) is dependent on the cause (her learning of the technique from Pai-Mei). Again, would the connection between these two events be as obvious without Tarantino’s use of nonlinear plotting?

Karma, too (being related to interconnectedness), is significant. The movie’s story is a telling example of Karma. Beatrix suffers because she has been beaten and shot by Bill and his gang. How does she stop this suffering? She eliminates the cause. She eliminates those people who caused her to suffer. The actions of Bill and his gang have consequences: being hunted down by Beatrix.

Although Budd is on Beatrix’s list of people to kill, he is already the recipient of Karma in
Kill Bill Volume 2
. He was a murderous killer, part of Bill’s infamous gang. And where is he now? He’s a low-life living in a trailer park, working as a would-be bouncer in a less than auspicious titty bar. His boss, who
snorts coke and resides in a filthy office, barely treats Budd like a human being and is all over his case for being a few minutes late. Even the strippers disrespect Budd, one of whom tells him, “Hey Budd, honey, the toilet’s at it again. There’s shitty water all over the floor,” to which he can only respond, “I’ll take care of it, Suzy-Pie.” There are causes and results in the world of
Kill Bill
: Budd killed people; now he’s a low-life. His actions—since actions have consequences—led his life to its shameful conclusion.

Budd acknowledges both his and Beatrix’s place in an interconnected world. “That woman deserves her revenge. We deserve to die,” he says while talking to Bill outside his trailer. Curiously, he follows this up with, “Then again, so does she.” Budd makes it easy for us by pointing out the Karma. Sure Beatrix has been wronged, but she has killed so many people (she
was
a trained killer) that she is as likely to be hunted down and killed as is Bill.

So the world of the
Kill Bill
s is interconnected, so what? What does this say about Beatrix’s enlightenment? Well, part of being a Buddhist is having an understanding of the interconnectedness of the world, an understanding of Karma. There is evidence that Beatrix has such an understanding.

Beatrix kills Vernita in her own kitchen after Vernita’s daughter, Nikki, comes home from school. Afterwards Beatrix notices Nikki in the doorway—she has evidently watched the murder of her mother. While cleaning off her bloody knife, Beatrix says, “It was not my intention to do this in front of you. . . . When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” Beatrix’s words here imply an understanding of Karma and interconnectedness. In the same way that the cause of Beatrix’s suffering lies with Bill and the assassination squad, the cause of Nikki’s suffering lies with Beatrix. Thus Beatrix declares that she will be waiting.

Beatrix seems to indicate that there is no right action, only causes and results. We would expect Nikki to seek satisfaction in killing Beatrix. Beatrix acknowledges her place in an interconnected world of cause and result, even if she is the cause of another’s pain. We can see how two cycles of revenge interconnect:
Beatrix’s plot for revenge could cause the lust for revenge to grow in Nikki. (Will there be a movie called
Kill Kiddo
in which Nikki is the protagonist, relentlessly hunting down Beatrix?) This scene shows Beatrix’s acknowledgement of her status as a possible recipient of Karma, but she is nonetheless driven to end her suffering, to kill Bill.

Bill discusses Beatrix’s status as a killer in one of the last scenes of
Kill Bill Volume 2
. He tells a story of Superman and Clark Kent. Clark Kent, he says, was Superman’s disguise, and not the other way around. Superman was superhuman and so he felt awkward, out of place, a stranger as Clark Kent. In the same way, Bill continues, Beatrix is a natural born killer (Tarantino patting himself on the back for writing
Natural Born Killers
?)
¹³⁸
. He points out all the people she’s killed to get to Bill; he points out the sadistic nature of her past.

Bill is saying that people have a nature that cannot be changed. One is reminded of the nature-nurture debate that—when it does show up in philosophy—typically surfaces in the Philosophy of Science. The nature side says what Bill does: our genes and biological factors primarily determine our complex range of behaviors. The nurture side says our behaviors are determined, largely by our environment. It’s possible that the environment alone made Beatrix a killer, but Bill says “natural born,” clearly positioning him on the nature side.

As we said, to a Buddhist everything is impermanent, so Beatrix as a natural born (nature) killer does not make sense, nor would it make sense to characterize her as a naturally conditioned (nurture) killer.
¹³⁹
What Beatrix is is constantly changing, as the Buddhist world is constantly changing. So Bill is wrong here. Much as Clark Kent and Superman (or Peter Parker and Spiderman) are aspects of a single reality, Buddhism, as we said, posits the two-fold truth: the partial perception of superficial reality and the ultimate perception of emptiness. Beatrix
and Bill perceive the world only at the conventional level, that of stable and concrete independent things. They are ignorant of the great power they possess to transform themselves and their karma.

To illustrate, imagine that your mind is a plot of land or a garden which has been planted with positive and negative seeds. It is up to you to water the right seeds in order to convert anger, fear, and jealously into compassion and right actions. If you understand this, when your roommate yells at you for eating the last microwave burrito, you know she is acting that way because she is suffering. You can relate to her suffering, and instantly, you are closer and have compassion for the person. The knowledge of why someone is suffering—divorce, disease, attachment—creates empathy in you for that person, and you don’t return with negative actions. If Beatrix adopted this perspective, then she would water those positive seeds and not seek revenge.

In order to be enlightened, a person must be compassionate. Compassion is a natural growth of the understanding of interdependence. Buddhist compassion is not selective; a Buddhist must show compassion towards all living creatures from ants to aunts to elephants. She must also minimize the amount of suffering she causes to any sentient creature.