Bloody hypocrisy

A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately stabs him in the stomach and, as his blood gurgles out, she says triumphantly, ‘How does that feel? Do you still want to penetrate me now?’ He falls off the bar stool, dead — and the audience laughs. A voiceover from a third character confirms that the scene is indeed supposed to be funny, and the murder cool, because the young man is hideous and stupid while the girl is utterly vicious.

This scene is but a few minutes in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume I, a two-hour orgy of violence in which evil is exalted as alternately admirable, erotic or funny. We are treated, for instance, to the sight of a beautiful woman writhing in agony because her arm has been sliced off, and to that of a man being killed by having his head repeatedly slammed in a door. The penultimate scene shows the heroine decapitating, mutilating and eviscerating scores of men in a restaurant, before dispatching their commander, a woman, by slicing off the top of her head so that her brain shows like that of a monkey in a Japanese restaurant. The audience sniggered at most of these scenes, as it did when the 17-year-old met her end by having her temples impaled by a wooden post with a nail sticking out of the end.