“I've killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point.
But I have only one more.”
Kill Bill’s The Bride made for an instantly iconic action hero—
resplendent in her bright yellow tracksuit,
wielding her deadly katana,
and shot through with Uma Thurman’s unflinching cool.
“Any more subordinates for me to kill?”
Many have also lauded her as a feminist hero.
But to what degree is Kill Bill’s feminist reputation deserved?
“Hay-colored hair, big eyes. She's a little blood-spattered angel.”
Revenge movies have traditionally been the province of men— and usually,
women exist in these tales only to motivate those men
through their suffering or death.
“If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it.”
“But if you don't, I will look for you,
I will find you, and I will kill you."
When Kill Bill arrived on the scene in 2003,
it was celebrated for putting a badass powerful woman
at the center of the story,
and showing her get the kind of satisfying, bloody revenge
typically reserved for popular male-led action flicks.
But if you look closer, the film still traffics in some of the
more exploitative aspects of the revenge genre— like the convention
that a story about a woman seeking revenge must revolve around
her being traumatized and assaulted.
“Man would have to be a mad dog to shoot a goddamn good-looking
gal like that in the head.”
Here’s our Take on how Kill Bill both defies and perpetuates
female revenge tropes—
and why The Bride is still such a force to be reckoned with.
“It's mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack.
Not rationality.”
“[sighs] That woman deserved better.”
It’s easy to see why Kill Bill was celebrated as a feminist movie
upon its release:
Not only does it feature a strong woman who triumphs
over her patriarchal abuser,
it finds her facing off against several formidable women,
from the sadistic schoolgirl Gogo Yubari to O-Ren Ishii,
to her fellow Deadly Vipers Vernita Green and Elle Driver—
dynamic, memorable characters who match The Bride
in skill and determination.
[Japanese] “Our reputations precede us.”
Kill Bill also doesn’t explicitly sexualize The Bride.
“I'm better than Annie Oakley and I've got you right in my sights.”
So in this sense, The Bride is freed from the most insidious aspect
of the male gaze, which so often undermines a strong female character’s
agency and power by objectifying her. The film arguably even portrays
The Bride fighting back against the male gaze.
As the Hopkins Cinema Blog observes, at times the film seems to explicitly
oppress the Bride with the camera (especially early on in the film);
she’s “often confined to the pressuring rectangle of the frame,
truncated and expressed as parts of her body.”
But the blog writes that The Bride “retains control of the camera
and restores her agency in many of the impressive kung-fu sequences,”
adding that in many sequences she is “empowered by the shot.”
Still, it’s worth noting that,
even The Bride’s story isn’t totally her own.
After all, that’s not her name in the title.
“You know I couldn’t believe that you got him to make you a sword.”
“I just dropped your name, Bill”
“That’d do it.”
As her lover, her father-figure, and her would-be killer,
Bill’s shadow looms large over The Bride long before
we actually meet him.
"Bill always said you were one of the best ladies he ever saw
with an edged weapon."
Bill’s also given a mythic sense of honor.
“I'm a murdering bastard, you know that.
And there are consequences to breaking the heart of
a murdering bastard.”
He stops Elle from killing The Bride while she lies in her hospital bed.
“But one thing we won't do is sneak into her room in the night
like a filthy rat.”
The Bride is immensely powerful, but Bill seems downright omnipotent—
a sage cowboy sensei who seems unfathomably deep compared to
the relatively underdeveloped Bride.
“I'm looking at the most beautiful bride these old eyes
have ever seen.”
Even in her final victory, The Bride finds herself very much
under Bill’s power.
“You’re a terrific person. You’re my favourite person.”
Bill isn’t the only man that The Bride must be subservient to.
“He hates Caucasians, despises Americans,
and has nothing but contempt for women.”
Enduring her trainer Pai Mei’s cruel torment is the price
The Bride is expected to pay in order to become powerful herself.
[Cantonese] “If you want to eat like a dog, you can live and sleep
outside like a dog.”
The idea that, for the Bride to become powerful,
she must voluntarily suffer the abuse of these powerful men,
took on a darker subtext after Uma Thurman revealed
how she herself was treated during filming.
In 2018, the actress told the New York Times how Tarantino
forced her to drive a stunt car that resulted in a serious crash,
one that left Thurman with permanent injuries—
and nearly killed her.
She also revealed how it was Tarantino himself
who spat in her face in one scene, and choked her with a chain in another—
much like he’d later strangle Diane Kruger for Inglourious Basterds.
Tarantino has called the crash
“one of the biggest regrets of his life,”
and defended the spitting and choking scenes as
wanting to take personal responsibility for them—
adding that he did it with Thurman’s consent.
Still, it definitely feels different to watch the film now,
knowing what she went through to make it.
Meanwhile, Tarantino’s treatment of Thurman
has attracted more retrospective criticism
in light of his long history of putting his woman characters
through violence—
one that’s only grown more and more extreme.
All of this has led some to question whether Kill Bill’s reputation
as a feminist movie is totally deserved.
In a series of tweets made shortly after Thurman’s revelations,
the actress Jessica Chastain asked,
“How many images of women in media do we celebrate that showcase abuse?
When did this become normalized 'entertainment'?
It is not empowering to be beaten and raped,
yet so many films make it their 'phoenix' moment for women.
We don't need abuse in order to be powerful.
We already are.”
This decades-old problem remains surprisingly common
across our storytelling.
Where rape and physical abuse are still used as a motivator.
“Without Ramsay and Littlefinger and the rest,
I’d have stayed a ‘little bird’
all my life.”
“I am every little girl you ever watched
touched, hurt, screwed, KILLED.”
From one of Kill Bill’s inspirations, Lady Snowblood,
[Japanese] “Look at me closely, do I look like someone you raped?”
to ‘70s grindhouse films like I Spit on Your Grave
and The Last House on the Left,
to even more modern iterations like Revenge,
the female revenge movie has almost always been driven
by sexual assault. “F--- you!”
“You already did that. I didn’t enjoy it much.
Now it’s my turn to f--- you.”
Kill Bill suffers from this as well: We learn early on that The Bride
has been taken advantage of while she lies in a coma,
with a hospital worker selling her body to random men.
“My name is Buck, [laughs] and I’m here to f---.”
And while the film dispenses with this literal rape-revenge tale
in its opening act,
[gently] "Your name is Buck, right?"
[getting angrier] "And you came here to f---, *right*?"
there’s a more figurative one that plays out over the main story:
Bill has robbed The Bride of her body and herself,
and the film is about her painstaking quest to take it back.
“Wiggle your big toe.”
Her quest isn’t just about taking her revenge.
It’s about restoring her true self— a warrior of consummate
skill and strength.
[Japanese] "Yellow-haired warrior. Go."
It’s the journey of someone who has been made to feel powerless,
vying to regain the respect she was denied.
[Japanese] “For ridiculing you earlier, I apologize.”
“Accepted.”
Kill Bill repeatedly makes a symbolic link
between sex and violence.
[in Japanese] “Do you still wish to penetrate me?
Or is it I … who has penetrated you?”
The more Freudian viewer might even see the swords that its characters
lust over as distinctly phallic objects,
representing the power that The Bride must reclaim
and turn against her attackers.
[Japanese] “I need Japanese steel.” But sexualizing the Bride’s revenge
feels strangely gratuitous,
as does adding a literal rape to a story about a woman
who was already gunned down
and left for dead on her wedding day.
"Actually, Bill's last bullet put me in a coma.
A coma I was to lie in for four years."
This emphasis on sexual violence not only links Kill Bill to those
exploitative grindhouse features it’s meant to be updating and subverting,
It makes this female revenge story,
once again, all about the men.
“How did you find me?” “I’m the man.”
The Bride doesn’t even *get* her own real name
until the second film.
“You will be standing at the final resting place
of Beatrix Kiddo."
This is in part because, like Lady Snowblood—
one of Tarantino’s direct inspirations,
most explicitly channeled in the tranquil,
moonlit duel between O-Ren and The Bride—
Kill Bill operates in a mythic, heightened reality.
Both films treat The Bride and Lady Snowblood
more like symbols than real people.
[Japanese] “Who are you?”
“Revenge.”
Still, the moniker “The Bride” effectively defines this character
almost entirely by the attack she experienced on her wedding day,
at least until she gradually takes her identity back.
Despite the movie’s flaws and disturbing history behind-the-scenes,
though, some have asserted that Kill Bill’s true feminist legacy
has less to do with Tarantino, and everything to do
with Thurman herself.
“But once that strip turned blue,
I could no longer do any of those things.
Because I was going to be a mother.”
There is also The Bride’s lasting power as a symbol:
As Thurman said in 2017,
“Women would come up to me and they would say….
that that film helped them in their lives,
whether they were feeling oppressed or struggling
or had a bad boyfriend or felt badly about themselves,
that that film released in them some survival energy that was helpful,
and that is probably one of the most gratifying things
that I have ever experienced in response to a piece of art.”
Among the people who covered up Thurman’s Kill Bill injuries
was producer Harvey Weinstein,
whose name has since become synonymous
with the abuse women face at the hands of powerful men.
It’s a sort of poetic justice, then,
that pop culture has taken its own revenge on men
like Weinstein with a new rash of Me Too-era
female revenge stories.
“Oh, no, you don't! Nah, you're going to feel it.
You're going to feel it!”
Movies like Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman
and Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. may offer some of the same
cathartic, female vigilante kicks as Kill Bill
and the many rape-revenge films that inspired it,
but they also grapple with thornier realities,
“It’s every guy’s worst nightmare, getting accused like that”
“Can you guess what every woman’s
worst nightmare is?”
like the impossibility of finding justice
within a society that’s designed to doubt victims and protect abusers.
“Or guys could just stop drugging and raping girls,
so we don’t need colour-changing nail polish.”
Notably, these are narratives made by women,
and they avoid mythic simplicity to deal with
real-world moral ambiguities
and the evils perpetrated by recognizably human men.
"And every week a nice guy comes over to see if I'm okay"
"Hey, you okay?"
Still, there’s no denying these modern women vigilantes
owe a considerable debt to The Bride,
who remains one of cinema’s most iconic characters.
“And every time you don't give me answers,
I'm gonna cut something off.”
Her legacy is such that Tarantino has said
he hopes to revive her for another sequel—
likely for a story
where the daughter of the murdered Vernita Green
seeks her own revenge against The Bride.
“When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it,
I'll be waiting.”
If so, it promises to add a new twist to the female revenge movie—
one with the potential to break completely
from the genre’s ugly past,
and to follow the future path The Bride carved out.
“I roared, and I rampaged, and I got bloody satisfaction.”