Mommy Kills Daddy

Kill Bill: Volume 2

Mommy Kills Daddy

Tarantino finishes his therapy session by showing Uma what it means to be a natural woman. And, this time, it’s a Western!

::: Mark T. Conard

In Kill Bill: Volume 1, the Bride (Uma Thurman) acquired the power necessary to reap her revenge on Bill (David Carradine) and the DiVAS, but she acquired it in a way that it alienated her from her own essence and nature. She took up a Hattori Honzo sword, a masculine symbol of power, indicating that the way a woman gains power is to become like a man, but in being so empowered, in becoming like a man, she is alienated from her true nature as a woman. Thus all the women in Volume 1 are powerful, but, having gained power in the same way, they’re also all psychotic, having apparently been psychically deformed by that empowerment.

In my earlier piece on Volume 1, I argued that the film was a kind of therapy session for Tarantino, that he was recreating his past in order to grasp it more realistically, with the father absent and the women powerful, and that he would ultimately perform the Oedipal act by having the Bride do in the father for him.

In Kill Bill: Volume 2, Tarantino fulfills this promise by having the Bride kill Bill, the father. But before she can complete the act, two things have to happen. First, the Bride has to reject the masculine notion of power and become empowered as a woman, thus reconnecting herself with her true nature. Second, Bill, the father, godlike in Volume 1, must be humanized, must