The Laissez-Faire Sexism of Kill Bill Redux 

Quentin Tarantino revives his two-part Kill Bill series as Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair just in time to match the racial, sexual foolishness of One Battle After Another. At least QT doesn’t politicize his wanton adolescent sex fantasies as Paul Thomas Anderson does, yet certain social and cultural stereotypes connect the two filmmakers.

Consider how QT’s action-thriller went off the rails when Uma Thurman’s Vengeful Valkyrie viciously dispatched Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), her black co-equal in the Deadly Vipers assassination squad, in front of Green’s school-age daughter, Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley). It remains the most heartless moment in all of QT’s filmography — shifting his jokey sadism to an unexpected level of cruelty. His extended revenge-killing format suggested that Nikki might return to exact her own vengeance.

That’s where PTA, in One Battle After Another, picks up the grand narrative ball, with Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter of black activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Willa becomes PTA’s mixed-race, grievance-fueled Valkyrie/Amazon/Black Pantheress who vents her fury against white America.

Both black female figures Vernita and Willa emerge from the adolescent American male subconscious. Vernita flips the racial fetishization that characterized QT’s view of 1970s Blaxploitation actress Pam Grier. (“She’s the queen of women!” he told me in an early interview.) His 1995 Jackie Brown only cemented that fetish — especially for other white post-adolescent males, though the movie never became an authentic cultural favorite like Grier’s Foxy Brown or Sheba Baby! Neither Willa nor Perfidia is a genuine black cultural figure; their freaky status belongs to that species of degraded females who excite PTA’s Pygmalion complex, as shown in Punch Drunk Love, Boogie Nights, The Master, The Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza.

Just as Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair showcases the idea of female heroism as extravagant malice, the QT and PTA notion of female agency appropriates feminism for the purpose of Millennial political favor. This is specifically racial exploitation, also seen in the peculiar example of Cynthia Erivo’s casting as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked, whose green skin codes as black, a matter of physiognomy and a key to the narrative’s revisionist, progressive ideological intent. (It’s a bizarre twist, much like racializing the Indian-Jamaican Kamala Harris as a black woman.)

QT and PTA manipulate black female behavior, using girliness against established white male authority. Not surprising for the Me Too era, yet it remains a chauvinist exercise — a laissez-faire sexism that media institutions promote, even granted approval by famous female media personalities.

The Hollywood trade press greeted QT and PTA’s devious ploy with its strangest, most damning acceptance, crossing professional lines to justify PTA’s fabricated political lineage from Perfidia to Willa. Praise for the activist characterizations invoked Anderson’s mixed-race marriage to biracial comedian Maya Rudolph. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman cited: “Anderson, who has four children with Maya Rudolph, has crafted the movie as a nearly confessional homage to a flawed father, and he may be more ambivalent about the ideological purity of his revolutionaries than he at first lets on.” Similarly, The Hollywood Reporter’s Richard Lawson preened, “Anderson seems incensed and horrified by the current American moment, frightened for his own mixed-race wife and children, and for all marginalized people being so stridently attacked and demeaned across the nation every day.”

Confirmation bias of this sort traces back to personal motivation — filmmakers and critics responding to popular social conventions. PTA conjured Perfidia and Willa from the same template of racial, sexual exoticism that QT used, which bears a significant likeness to the racialism of novelist Thomas Pynchon, whom Anderson admires and cites as the inspiration for One Battle. Some Pynchon descriptions of black females replace old stereotypes with new sentiments: “They carried within them the memory of a world before the [Mason-Dixon] Line, before the surveying chain, before the Enlightenment’s cold geometry. . . . The Black women of the Market moved among the stalls like goddesses of abundance. . . . Her eyes held the wisdom of ages.” These quotes from Pynchon’s meta-historical race novel Mason & Dixon translate precisely to Taylor’s lascivious Perfidia. (The black female superheroines in Ryan Coogler’s Wakanda Forever are pallid versions of Pynchon’s reverent prose.) Critic John Demetry noted how Taylor “trills” her seduction of the white-supremacist Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Helpless before the powers of the black seductress, Lockjaw claims he was “reverse raped” by her.

It is Lockjaw’s paternity of Willa that gives One Battle its ultimate frisson — playing a trick on white gullibility when Willa is unsure whether liberal activist Ghetto Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is her actual father. She is his spiritual/political child, perpetuating the violent resistance that first brought Perfidia and Ghetto Pat together. Ghetto Pat’s commitment sentimentalizes their mission. Their radical cause uncovers a secret cult of black women, Sisters of the Brave Beaver, bank robbers led by Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle) — Perfidia hid out among them, according to Deandra “Lady Champagne” (Regina Hall).

Motherless Willa exemplifies the “continuity of mythic archetypes, psychological obsessions, and repressed desires” as outlined by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel. Both Kill Bill and One Battle are linked by these unconfessed erotic drives that are frankly adolescent and undeniably political.

QT and PTA’s casts of black female victim-warriors represent a complicated combination of sexual appreciation and political interpretation. The violence throughout Kill Bill expresses suppressed racial conflict (a social fact that Beyoncé and Lady Gaga satirized in Telephone, their music video parody of Kill Bill). Such fetishization is repeated in One Battle’s radical activism. The return of Kill Bill and the exorbitant praise for a movie as deeply flawed as One Battle prove that certain questionable political notions embedded in reviewers’ unconscious go unquestioned.

Laissez-faire sexism and racism explain how QT famously extolled Vivica A. Fox’s Two Can Play That Game performance in 2001, yet then relegated her to Special Guest Victim status in Kill Bill. That scene that remains perhaps the low point of QT’s career, just as machine-gun firing Willa in the climax of One Battle represents the low point of PTA’s jokey-sadistic vision of America’s fate.