Encounterculture

A few notes before seeing Kill Bill

Everyone in the world who likes movies these days - or at least everyone who likes movies with whom I've recently been in contact - has been frothing at the mouth about Kill Bill; it came out yesterday, and I've already been peppered with opinions (or in some cases for opinions). I have not, as yet, seen the movie, nor do I intend to see it for at the ass-least, a week (but probably more like two weeks), and if you're wondering why, just reread that first sentence.

When a movie first comes out, especially if it's a movie with a heavyweight pedigree, the first few weeks are always the worst. I remember when Beautiful Cinematography, Boring Movie came out in 2000, I couldn't turn left onto Wilshire without four or five people bludgeoning me with a fully-fleshed-out account of their experiences with the movie. I don't begrudge any of them their experiences, of course, but on a very real level, they weren't talking about the movie itself.

Most of this can be attributed to the dominant mode of pop critical analysis today, which is basically to prize your own view of a movie above and beyond anything else. It's times like these when I'm glad that I get a kick out of language, because you can pick nearly any review written for a mass audience ever written, and if you look closely enough, you'll see that the critic is really just hiding behind language. The way they use verbs alone is pretty telling; frequently transitive verbs get employed as description, but who's to say that that description is the only one available to an audience? Lost in Translation's Tokyo was stunningly gorgeous to me, but I can also see how it could be taken as terrifying, lonely, and probably seven or eight other adjectives that never even occurred to me. And it's even worse how they use the passive voice; frequently it's just sleight-of-hand used to cover up what would otherwise be a blatantly fanboyish tautology.

Fuck that. I don't want to come down hard on fanboys, of course - god knows that Steven Soderbergh and Michael Bay don't have a bigger fan in the universe than me - but fanboyism is not criticism. Criticism, to quote Saint Nick, is predicated on the ability to describe what everyone can experience, not what you experience, and yet most people would argue the opposite. By doing so, all they're selling is their version of the movie, and although there's times when that can be interesting (depending on the person doing the selling, of course, and more precisely how interesting I think they happen to be), for the most part, it's just more advertising, and if there's one thing from which I could use a break, advertising's gotta be it.

Kill Bill, right now, at this very moment, is in the grip of some of the worst autocratic fanboy bullshit that I've ever seen in my life, and that includes the Star Wars movies. I can't go to a message board's movie section without being bludgeoned with orders to go see it, or that it's awesome, or in one case, that it's "the best movie you'll ever see in the theaters". If you're in the mood for some linguistic fun, and you think you're resistant to phenomenons of this type, go nuts. Count the number of times the word "great" (or some similar qualitative term) is thrown out in a comparable discussion of the movie, and then try rereading the sentence after adding the phrase "I think that" to the front. I'll bet you a steak dinner that there's not a lot of change.

I want, very badly, to bleat and moan and plaintatively ask why people do this, but in truth, I know damn well why people do it, because I'm in the process of unlearning how to be one of them. The thing about movies is that since they're both such a young medium and such a convincing representation of the real world, it's very easy to give in to the temptation to start talking about them like they're actual events, and prize your experience of "being there when it happened". There are occasions, of course, when reactions like this are perfectly legitimate; if you were there for the Pomona screening of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (one of maybe two times it was shown uncut to the public) or in France to see Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (one of the few cases where I'd be willing to admit that a film is a self-sufficient end-product, and that the presence of an audience is essentially negligible to justify it as art) or - god almighty - sitting with Hitler when he saw The Great Dictator, then yes, you were lucky enough to be "there". These are moments which extend beyond film history; these are moments in movie history, of course, but they touch human lives and real-world situations that don't necessarily have anything to do with the film itself, or even with film itself. If you're there when the film is incidental, a footnote in its own history, then yes, you can say you were there.

I think I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that none of that applies to Kill Bill. Of course, I'd also say that none of that applies to Pulp Fiction, or Contempt, or Citizen Kane, or even The Passion of Joan of Arc. Most movies, including if not especially most of the great ones, are simply case studies of the power of cinema as an artform, but because that particular power is so seductive, people often confuse its intensely personal effect with a more globally important one. Bull. I saw Pulp Fiction at the exact right age (middle school) in the exact right place (the cinematically gaunt Durham, North Carolina) at the exact right moment in cinematic history (I'd been aware of the decadence of contemporary movies for at least a few years previously - remember, that was the age of Dances With Wolves and Forrest Gump and such), but even in spite of all of that, I'm still not about to make any grand sweeping claims that Pulp Fiction captured the essence of the age or anything (well, not anymore). The truth is, it captured the essence of the age as I perceived it, and it certainly changed and affected the way I looked at both movies and the world, but it didn't go further than that.

But the ideology's already starting to seep into Kill Bill of it being a "return to form" or that it's rich in technically "perfect" moments, which is just a more academic way of saying I WAS THERE WHEN SOMETHING PERFECT HAPPENED NANANANANA. I fucked up and read an email from my friend David where he mentioned a beastly tracking shot, and all I can say is Dammit, because now that's at least one section of the movie for which I've got a framework fixed in my mind. (No, it's not his fault; I'm sure I've done the same thing to him in the past.) Recently, I watched Hard Boiled for the second time; when I saw it the first time I didn't even know what a tracking shot was, so this was the first time that I went in expecting to see The Tracking Shot. You know what happened? I spent the whole time waiting for The Shot, and then marveling at the virtuosity when it happened, ignoring anything that happened in the film in the meantime. That's no way to watch a movie, and that's exactly and precisely what I'm trying to avoid with Kill Bill.

If you're really going to talk about movies, or music, or anything, first you have to know what it is. I can't say for sure that I've got anything close to the answer (nor do I particularly want to be the one with the answer), but right now, the one definition that makes the most sense to me is the notion that cinema is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when your mind tries to reconcile your world with a convincing one that you're not in (i.e. the movie). If you accept that as your basic premise, then you've got to also accept that by definition, there can't be a Right way to look at movies anymore than there can be a Right way to look at the world; there's only the one that you have. There's other factors (especially social factors, which I'm still wrangling into the theory), but the fundamental attraction of cinema is one that's based on seeing the world, and I would just as soon tell someone to see the world my way as I would cut off my foot and boil it with a sprig of mint. I love cinema because it's so democratic that it allows five hundred people to see one movie and theoretically have five hundred different, equally legitimate interpretations, and yet now here's Kill Bill, out for two days and a party line's already starting to emerge.

Most people who read this, I expect, are rolling their eyes at me and flipping through their rolodex of witticisms to chide me for being too serious about something which shouldn't really have anything to do with the movie itself. They're right, of course; I am too serious about it, and that's the end of the sentence. You're either for cinema or against it, and I'm for it, to the extent that I'll give Jackie Brown a second chance and tell everyone how stupid I was to bash it the first time, or that I'll wake up at nine in the morning on a Saturday to stand in line with Fellini fans to see the new Dardenne brothers movie, or even that I'll wait two weeks to go see a movie made by the guy who, more than nearly anyone else, set me on the path I'm on today in 1994. I'm bitterly envious of the people who legitimately love cinema and don't have to deal with things like these, but fuck it, that's the way it is. I don't want to go in expecting history or perfection or ideology; I want to go in expecting cinema, a chance to see the world from another perspective, nothing more, nothing less.

In two weeks, time will have passed; most of the hipsters (and don't think for a second that their mere presence isn't another big factor in the two weeks wait. Ever sat next to someone who laughed at every single joke in a comedy simply because it was a joke?) will have likely dragged their girlfriends away from Hot Topic long enough to see it with them at least once more, and the realization should have dawned on everyone that yes, this is just a movie, just like Lost in Translation and Far From Heaven and all the other I Wuv Teh Movees of recent years. That's my cue to walk in and maybe have an experience that's worth something. Being a critic is essentially being an archaeologist operating within a much smaller timeframe; you've got to sift through the ideology to see if something means anything, even if it only means something to you. I want to be a critic because I love doing that, not because it's cool or any bullshit like that, and if that means two extra weeks of anticipation, sign me up.