Killing Bill
Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence
By: Breanna Rack
Violence
How would you define violence? How is
it constructed in our society?
Where are people abused?
What about neglect?
Who is abused
What does this abuse lead to?
Answer:
Violence: An intense, turbulent, or
furious and often destructive action
or force
Does this cover all possibilities of
violence?
Key Quotes
“This violence is personal, occurring outside ethical frameworks or
discourses of social or political justice. The revenge motive is depicted
and enacted with clinical coldness and shrewd planning. As the Bride
states very early in the film, it’s ‘mercy, compassion, and forgiveness’
that she lacks, not rationality,” (Couthard, 2007, 164).
“In Kill Bill the emphasis is on a nostalgia for nuclear family unity
freed from the concerns of patriarchal violence or female solidarity,
community, or public action. The Bride is reconstructed as a mother
and violence is justified as the world is placed in balance by the
valuation and establishment of naturalized, protective, nonviolent
maternity,” (Coulthard, 2007, 169).
“These violent heroines of contemporary popular cinema, then, are
suggestive of the kind of ideological masking that is at work in both
popular culture and postfeminism itself. In manly of these films, the
role of violence, and the revenge narrative in particular, is one of
stabilization rather than excessive transgression,” (Coulthard, 2007,
172)
Fight Scene Between The
Bride and Elle Driver
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y8V5laFhSE&fea
ture=related
Role of Violence in Film
“As the very terms gratuitous and excessive indicate, violence in film is
somehow essentially questionable or suspect; framed by ethical and
social responsibilities and issues, the presence of graphic violence is
thus frequently thrown into a discourse of justification or
condemnation based on its perceived relation to actual violence,
audience identification, and response or character, narration, and
style,” (Coulthard, 2007, 157).
Essentially, because of how we are socialized to feel about violence,
we determine the violence in these movies to be too much;
therefore, we try to rationalize reasons why film violence is
acceptable or unacceptable.
What do you think? Is intense violence in film acceptable or
unacceptable? Does gender matter? Does this perpetuate stereotypes
of violence or break them?
Domestic Violence
“The vengeful and bloody violence has been subsumed
in an ending that moves father and farther inward
toward the private, the domestic, and the essentially
nonviolent and moves so effectively that the opening
scene of domestic invasion and murder is rewritten in
the happy rebirth of the second mother-child
combination. The threat of female public, violent action
is subsumed by the private, essentially nonviolent
domestic space,” (Coulthard, 2007, 166).
Why is private life automatically assumed to be
nonviolent? Domestic violence is a huge problem that is
widely ignored.
End of Violence
“The end of the film offers a family devoid of its
patriarch, but the emotive and narrational force of
the film transforms this absence into positive
presence. The absence of patriarchy is an absence of
violence and threat, and the female violence is
configured retrospectively as temporary, aberrant,
obligatory, and curative,” (Coulthard, 2007, 170).
Do films that portray female violence send a
message that males are violent until death, but
females are only violent until conflict is gone?
Additional Questions
Does the location of the female fight
scenes (in the home, garden, ect.) send
messages about where women should be?
If not, why are these scenes in these
locations?
“Female-female” fight scenes are intensely
gory while “male-female” scenes are less
bloody. Does this show that women
cannot completely overpower men?