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The Oedipal Drive of Kill Bill
“…In psychoanalysis schizophrenia and depression are not brain disorders, but narcissistic disorders. Autism and other brain disorders are not brain problems but mothering problems. These illnesses do not require pharmacological or behavioral treatment. They require only “talk therapy.” Similar positions are taken for anorexia nervosa and Tourette’s syndrome. What is the scientific evidence for the psychoanalytic view of these mental illnesses? There is none.”
The Skeptic’s Dictionary, “Freud and Psychoanalysis”
It is perhaps with this mindset that Quentin Tarantino approaches the work of Sigmund Freud. Both men attached extreme significance to dreams and their role in conscious thought: Tarantino, throughout many of his works, created what has been referred to as a “hyper narrative”, fashioning a surreal and inverted existence for his protagonists. In the case of Pulp Fiction, for example, we find ourselves completely lacking a singular protagonist, yet each one of the stories presented display such unlikely events that it is only pure style that keeps us involved. Similarly, in Kill Bill an unlikely and uncanny narrative allows satirical exaggeration to criticize and lay bare the problems of familiar institutions. It is in this approach that Quentin Tarantino, with full aplomb, seems to be attacking Sigmund Freud’s theories on dream analysis and the unconscious mind. For the purposes of this essay, we will examine primarily concern ourselves with Kill Bill Vol. 2 for its establishment of Pai Mei (Chia Hui Liu) as the father figure, Bill (David Carradine) as the son, and The Bride (Uma Thurman) as the reincarnation of the father. Our final purpose is in establishing an anti-Freudian viewpoint and exploring its statements on patriarchal authority.
Our primary preoccupation in this matter is the Oedipus complex, first named in Freud’s 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s theories deal with sexual attraction and rivalry, noting, “Being in love with the one parent and hating the other belong to the indispensable stock of physical impulses being formed at that time which are so important for the later neurosis” (Interpretation of Dreams, pg. 201). The Sophocles play itself deals with ideas of fate, not mental neuroses. It must be noted before embarking on any aesthetic or critical interpretation hinging on Freudian theory that Dr. Freud himself never noted King Oedipus as having these “physical impulses”. Oedipus was a victim of fate and circumstance, started years before when his father, King Laius, chose to listen to the oracle and send his infant son away. Therefore, Oedipus is unaware that the man he kills is his true father, and the woman he marries is his mother(1) He had no complex, and Freud used the story as a handy allegory to explain the neuroses seen in his case studies. It is, in brief, a handy gimmick to understand the common workings of the unconscious mind(2)
For a study on what the Oedipal complex does to a character, you can only use Sophocles as a reference point. We take a cue here from Dr. Freud(3) in examining human nature, not physical representation, through William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The murder of Polonius in Act III show Hamlet’s speed in action. While it has been noted that the murder feels like a rash action, it in fact belies a strong logic: the simple fact that Hamlet feels hunted gives him reason to assume that anyone spying behind the curtains in his mother’s room must be killed to keep King Claudius from discovering what Hamlet knows. Furthermore, Act V shows us the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This is no act of sudden passion, but a calculated move of deception and cunning. Hamlet’s ability to avenge himself against his enemies is well noted, proving he is well up to the task of dispatching with Claudius. The question becomes this: if Hamlet is physically and mentally capable of killing Claudius, why does he not act? The key lies in Hamlet’s subconscious mind: the childhood devotion to his mother manifests itself again after her remarriage.(4)
Freud believes in the view that Hamlet simply can’t bring himself to murder someone he subconsciously respects and admires. Perhaps part of his interpretation lies in personal experience: in his own writings, Freud admits that a large part of his realization of the Oedipal complex comes from his own mixed feelings of love and hate for his father following the latter’s death. In such a case, Hamlet would be partially a projection of Freud’s feelings in that the action, and Hamlet’s depression seen in Act I, come from feelings repressed and/or long dealt with that are suddenly brought forth by tragedy.
By this same token, all the actions in the play could be seen as a manifestation of Hamlet’s subconscious: the ghost would then become a figment of a very troubled imagination. But that is not the purpose of this essay: I’ve simply set out to provide a (very) brief rubrick for the complex which will soon be refuted by Quentin Tarantino, by way of Franz Kafka. Unfortunately, it becomes somewhat muddled by sexuality. Other than two brief references, Kafka ignores the subject of sex entirely in the course of The Judgment.(5) Tarantino, of course, flips the subject on its head by making the Father’s (Pai Mei)living avatar a former lover of Bill. So, before we move into Kill Bill it’s important to set up a slight modifier to the “traditional” Oedipal complex. That is, we must focus entirely on power and the authority of the head of the household.
A powerful example of this can be seen in Homer’s Odyssey. Although the bulk of the story is about Odysseus’ struggles to return home and rid Ithaca of the boorish suitors, there are a few points to be made concerning his son. First of all is the ordering: once our Narrator has spoken of the gods in the story, our first view of the actions lie in Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, and his place at home. From Book One (lines 182-285). We see not a boy desperate for the return of his father, but a man well capable of handling himself against suitors out to murder him. He is the true authority of the household, and even upon Odysseus’ return he retains that title. While Odysseus slays Penelope’s suitors and averts a war, it is Telemachus who reigns control over Ithaca(6) The Odyssey, for our purposes, may be seen as a “natural” and non-sexual form of the Oedipal desire: it becomes a play on the old adage of youth surpassing their forefathers, as well as taking their places. Telemachus even muses, at Athene’s questioning in Book 1, that perhaps his lineage is unimportant in the matters of manhood (249-254). While it is obvious that Telemachus values his father’s presence as an experienced ruler and as his father, Telemachus as a man has moved beyond the need for an authority over his affairs. It’s a matter of parental authority which runs counter to the norm of Greco-Roman “pater familias”, in which the head of the household remains the head of the household until (and sometimes even after!) his death. A man with a wife and children is still subservient to another as long as his father is alive.(7)
It is this non-sexual aspect of Oedipus which we are concerned with: it is the repercussions that matter. It is not so important that a son desire to kill his father and marry his mother, but that the repercussions of this entail a measure of authority. It is this idea that concerns us in Kill Bill.
Homer can be safely said to be looking at a story of human nature rather than the normal mythological function of supplying the way a person ought to behave when he provides us Telemachus(8). Tarantino goes further than this; rather than being an exploration of human nature, Kill Bill is a direct attack on, and refutation of, Freud’s theories of psychology.(9) The set-up of Kill Bill creates an aura of dominance for Bill, both throughout Volume 1 and until his final scene in Volume 2. We never even see Bill until his meeting with Budd (Michael Madsen) in Vol. 2. That we don’t know the foe that The Bride faces gives him an aura of invincibility. All we know of him is one hand in a close-up, fondling a sheathed sword as he orders his assassin Elle (Darryl Hannah) not to kill the comatose Bride. Yet he is a constant presence; the first words heard are Bill’s as he states to The Bride (as a god would state to a mere human), “Do you find me sadistic?...there’s nothing sadistic in my actions…at this moment this is me at my most masochistic.”
We know only this: Bill is a Force. He managed, as The Bride tells us in voiceover, the nearly impossible task of inserting the half-Chinese O-Ren Ishii as the head of the Japanese Yakuza. He is everywhere, and he knows everything. What chance does a “blood-spattered angel” (as the sheriff dubs The Bride) against a god?
Bill seems to have human emotion only nominally; his first lines show what in a man would be the mind of a sociopath, but when combined with Bill’s omniscience becomes something both less and more than human(10). He’s, quite simply, the New Blood. His former teachers (Hattori Hanzo and Pai Mei) have become recluses as the former New Blood (Hanzo) swore to give up all ways of the sword and the Old Blood died mysteriously. He was trained to use martial arts but disavows it for the more technologically advanced sword and gun techniques we see him display throughout the brief glimpses we have of him. Vol. 1 concerns us only in that introduction of Bill and to illustrate the beginning of The Bride’s odyssey to have revenge. By almost all accounts, The Bride is simply another upstart as Bill once was, with no tangible ties to the old ways and an entirely uphill battle. With one exception. In her meeting with Hattori Hanzo she urges him to make her a sword, something the Old Blood would have no use of. Hanzo says only this, “I’ve completed doing what I swore an oath to God 28 years ago to never do again. I have created ‘something that kills people.’” Note the specific phrasing of that. While not explicit, it seems to be saying that a true warrior needs no instrument; that, by creating and using a sword, he sinned in such a way that only a lifetime of repentance in a sushi restaurant can erase it.(11) Besides this, Volume 1 shows us an affirmation of Freud’s Oedipal theories by its assertion that Bill is the ultimate source of power to be found. However, it’s tainted not only by Hanzo’s presence, but also with an aura of arrogance. As Bill states, “I’m the Man”. We believe him, but such hubris in a human being often brings about downfall in drama, and although Bill is presented as a god in Vol. 1, Vol. 2 pulls back the curtain and reveals only a man. A powerful man and a dangerous man, but still only a man.
That Bill tracks The Bride down and shoots her in the first place illustrates this hubris, as he reveals in Vol. 2 by claiming that The Bride leaving him for the sake of her unborn child was “not your decision to make”. He sees her actions only as they can positively effect him, justified only by his thoughts that she’d be better off with him anyway.(12) Bill is, as Kafka’s protagonist Georg in The Judgment, a creature that is very much under the impression that he’s the pinnacle of mankind, consumed by feelings of superiority bordering on euphoric,(13) convinced that he is indeed the center of the world. The world will be made or broken by Bill’s actions; O-Ren ran the Yakuza, Vernita Green was able to melt completely into a suburban life, and Elle’s supreme arrogance(14) is swept aside, allowing her to become the new Beatrix Kiddo after the El Paso massacre. So complete is Bill’s arrogance that Elle is able to murder his brother Budd and explain it away as the Bride’s work without so much as a question. It must have been The Bride’s work because it must have been The Bride’s work.
This interpretation is not one arrived at immediately. However, even though we note Bill’s superiority, his own conquering of The Bride for her sin of running away (not only sweeping her aside but seeking to replace her, as previously noted, with Elle), we are also given the feeling by Tarantino that something is not quite normal with this world. The feeling does not cease when the bloodbath of O-Ren’s death is over and Vol. 2 begins.
Bill’s first entrance is also that of Budd’s(15), and Budd’s world gives us a feeling that can only be described as pity. He works in a strip bar, and it’s not even a good one. He can show up hours late as the bouncer and “there ain’t nobody left to bounce”. He lives in the trashiest trailer imaginable in the middle of the desert. Even his ice cube trays scream poverty, as they look like something scavenged from a 1930’s refrigerator. This is the world of the bulk of Vol. 2: the new world falling apart. This is the world where a “Texas Funeral” isn’t something read about in old pulp novels. This is the dark side of Bill’s New World Order.
Our only respite from this (until the third act in Mexico) is in our flashbacks with Pai Mei. Bill here seems less a god and more an eminent sage. He’s bathed in firelight and shadow, telling The Bride (laying on the ground as an apt pupil) the story of Pai Mei’s power. Our previous impression of Bill as a god is not destroyed, but it is altered.
This impression is, however, destroyed in the next scene at Pai Mei’s temple. The Bride waits at the jeep as a harried Bill stumbles down the steps. He’s been bruised and bloodied in an unseen fight with Pai Mei, leaving us to only wonder what kind of phenomenal power Pai Mei must have. Although Bill is quick to refer to him as “a rotten bastard…and like all rotten bastards, when they get old they get lonely”, Bill manages only enough energy for a parting joke(16) before driving away. And of course, the camera placement shows us just how much of a hurry Bill is in to get away from the only threat to him as the rear wheels of the jeep kick dust into the lens.
Pai Mei is every bit the coiled force here in Vol. 2 that Bill was in Vol. 1, with the addition that we actually see Pai Mei in action. Although The Bride seems to be a virile warrior, Pai Mei manages to dispatch her without any real effort, and he does so unarmed(17). The Bride’s every word grates on him (after only one word, Pai Mei states, “You bray like an ass! You are not to speak unless spoken to!”) and he cracks a faint derisive smile when The Bride affirms that Bill is her “master”.
Her training is entirely unarmed. While Bill taught her well as a swordsman, Pai Mei has no use for such modern thought and quickly spends years forcing her to break boards with her bare hands. Based upon this new information in Vol. 2, we can make several conclusions. First: Pai Mei is the metaphorical “Father”, the fount and power of the Old thought. Second: Bill is the metaphorical “son”, the direct progeny(18) of Pai Mei’s tutelage. His strength and power as an assassin (or, to use our previously established terminology, a god) has come about as a natural progression of youth overtaking their predecessors. By this same logic, The Bride could be at first considered the intellectual progeny of Bill, which explains Pai Mei’s disdain for her.
This thought, however, is compromised by several subsequent instances. The first comes after Budd’s Texas Funeral. It’s not swords or anything else that Bill ever taught her that gets The Bride out of her grave, but her tutelage at the hands of Pai Mei. By using her wits and her bare hands to escape, The Bride reinvigorates the mentality of the Old Blood, forcing us to realize that for all of Bill’s power, he never could have gotten out of there.
The second instance lies in The Bride’s battle with Elle. Using Budd’s sword, The Bride is able to compete with Elle (now in possession of The Bride’s Hanzo sword) and everything seems to be shaping up towards an epic sword battle similar to the battle with O-Ren at the conclusion of Vol. 1.
This epic battle lasts thirteen seconds, at which point The Bride breaks the stalemate by doing precisely what Pai Mei previously did to Elle: snatched out her eye with three fingers. In these Oedipal turns, The Bride’s method of ending Elle is incredibly telling. She could have easily done exactly what she did with O-Ren: stand up, raise her sword, and fight the battle to its end. She would have fought the battle with the same warped sense of honour Bill exhibited when he ordered Elle to let the Bride live in Vol. 1 in the sense that she would have allowed her enemy the honour of battling to the death. The Bride has become an Avatar of the Old Blood, of Pai Mei, in refusing the upstard New Blood this way out.(19)
This alteration of The Bride’s character is confused when she enters Bill’s home and confronts her daughter, now four years old. We can tell on her approach that The Bride thought this would be a simple matter of cutting Bill’s throat and driving off at dawn. She even brings her sword, which is moot since Bill immediately disarms her without The Bride even realizing she’s been disarmed until it’s far too late(20) She has a gun in one hand, a sword in the other, and Bill can disarm her with only a smile.
Although by now we realize that Bill is only a man, and the father of The Bride’s child, he quickly reveals that he’s no ordinary man. The two make small-talk as Bill holds her sword, and she dives for Bill’s sword sitting on the mantle. We never even see him move and without even aiming his weapon Bill is able to fire off three warning shots, forcing the Bride back to the couch before he laughs and exclaims, “HA! I’m just fuckin’ with ya!” In one moment we realize that Bill is more akin to a viper, his very movements that he can do without any discernable effort are beyond anything we’ve seen The Bride face before. This point is hammered home when Bill stands behind the bar, suddenly swinging a gun up and shooting a dart into The Bride’s knee(21). That he can do all this with a laugh and without even seeming to mean it only illustrates how dangerous this truly is. He may be only an upstart pretender to the Throne of Pai Mei, but he did not gain his seat through words alone.
The Bride recognizes this; she leaves her sleeping daughter Bebe a necklace as a token. She believes, as we are meant to as well, that she can’t defeat Bill. He makes it seem as if this is the only conclusion one can come to as he first physically disarms her, and then mentally crushes her as he demands the truth from her in his Twilight Zone version of “Twenty Question”. “You’re not a worker bee, you’re a renegade killer bee. And no matter how much beer you drank barbecue you ate or how fat your ass got, nothing in the world would ever change that.” The Bride’s attempt to escape the life of Bill was doomed before it started, Bill’s path was the only True Path, and The Bride must die for trying to escape the future.
To this point, Freudian interpretation is accurate. The son has become his father. As previously stated, sexuality has ceased to be an issue in favour of patriarchal power. In a metaphorical sense, Pai Mei has died alone in his ancient palace on the hill, and Bill lives in the lap of luxury. The Oedipal interpretation of the dynamic of The Bride and Bill is that progress is inevitable, that Pai Mei’s ways are outmoded, and that following Bill is the only way to survive in the future.
From this point, Tarantino begins to turn a Freudian allegory on the nature of father-son relations into a complete inversion. As a strictly Freudian interpretation, The Bride would be doomed to failure simply by embracing Pai Mei’s thought, and Bill would win because he is the future. She even seems to fear this, but to her credit, The Bride does not shy away from this but instead embraces it. Even after the truth serum has worn off(22), she continues to answer Bill’s questions and state, if even only so Bill could hear it, the truth of why she left.
The odds seem even more impossible at this final sequence when we see The Bride armed with nothing more than the truth, while Bill still carries her sword. Perhaps if The Bride had simply said “I understand, things are different than I thought” Bill would have welcomed her back into his arms. There is certainly a measure of understanding between the two of them here: Bill sees the truth of why she left revolving not in fear but in protecting her daughter, and The Bride now sees Bill as a scared father eager to protect as well, but in an ignorant method (she specifically says “she deserved to be born with a clean slate. But with you, she would’ve been born into a world she shouldn’t have.”) Bill’s method of “protection” is simply to keep everything he loves hoarded close at hand.
He would have taken her back, with this understanding. But by this point The Bride is no student of Bill’s, and despite knowing she is walking into certain death, she says the oft-repeated line, “You and I have unfinished business.”
Bill strikes once more, and his movement is even more impossibly fast than even what we’ve seen before. His face doesn’t even change its contours as he swings his sword, pulling her sword out of its sheathe and flinging it out of arm’s reach before she can even draw it. By playing with modern rules, with Bill’s rules, she’d have lost. Yet, while Bill remains armed, The Bride does to him precisely what Pai Mei did to her: fought unarmed and won. The Five-Point-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique being used here is not nearly so important as the fact that Pai Mei even taught her the technique. Bill was not good enough for this, Pai Mei once decided, the ultimate instrumentation of death. And it’s not an ability the New Blood could ever master: it depends on such faith in old teachings and old style that the New Blood (here again emphasized by a reliance on swords and, to a lesser extent, guns) could never understand. Steel must always prevail over flesh, and it is this new idea that damns Bill. What was once a god to our eyes falls alone, in the background as The Bride looks on, and dies.
Bill could have died by any one of a hundred ways to achieve the same results. The Bride could have fought him with her blade, she could have shot him at a thousand yards, or she could have detonated his house. That Tarantino specifically forces us to see that The Bride is Pai Mei’s student, that Bill is incapable of fighting in such an archaic fashion, turns the entire Oedipal complex on its head. The Bride entered what was, from her perspective, the lair of an ogre, or perhaps the very same type of Cyclops which Odysseus once conquered. Yet by his final shot he was nothing more than an old, defeated man, crushed by the very ideals he abandoned.
I must reiterate the complete refutation of Dr. Freud’s theories. But Tarantino is in no way revolutionary in his treatment of the father and his son. Where Freud sought to show a natural feeling of aggression on the part of a son towards his father (and therefore an inevitability that, as the elder becomes infirmed, his son will take his place) that is in violation of every institution on the Patriarchy in Western thought, Kill Bill seeks to affirm it in just the same way as ancient Roman or Greek law once did.(23) The moral of Kill Bill is clear: there are ramifications for defying your elders. Beware stepping on the toes of your betters. By betraying such ideas and failing to respect the ideals that came before you, you risk its avatar, its “blood-spattered angel” reappearing n your backyard.
There is a certain feeling of fate involved here, similar to the feeling that damned Oedipus to inadvertently kill his father. Like Laius, if Bill had simply ignored his greed and hubris, honouring the man who has allowed him to live through goodwill, Bill could have survived. However, by ignoring his greed (and by that token, ignoring fate) (24)Bill has set an unstoppable chain of events. Eventually the “right man for the job” (or, in this case, the right thought) will take his job back.(25)
It seems as if Freud had a response to this argument already in his own lifetime. In Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious Freud wrote, “Within our own circles we nevertheless made progress in the mastery of hostile emotions. Lichtenberg drastically put it when he says, ‘Where nowadays one says “I beg your pardon”, formerly one had recourse to a cuff on the ear.’ Violent hostility, no longer tolerated by law, has been replaced by verbal invectives, and the better understanding of the concatenation of human emotion robs us…higher personal civilization teaches us later that it is undignified to use abusive language.”(26) The meaning is simple when taken in context with Kill Bill. The statement seems to be that true refutation can only come through using Freudian wit to cut down the oppositional thought(27). The issue then becomes a question of why.
Freud called wit a form of cover-up from the real emotions motivating the individual. In Wit, he calls attention to it on two counts: first as a form of suppression(28), and second only as one found in the most gifted of minds(29). While difficult to judge in the limited time here whether Tarantino’s film represents a gifted mind, it is somewhat more accessible to judge Tarantino’s supposed wit in Kill Bill to be a form of suppression. In this case, it goes beyond a simple “agree/disagree” response, and into a realm of supposition far beyond the meager aspirations of this essay.
Based upon this relationship to his father, and therefore all paternal authority, it becomes likely that Tarantino does assault Freud’s theories through a possible general disagreement with the unconscious, and because of Freud’s specific statements on the “natural” early relationships between father and son. While many children make peace with this antagonism, one could even make the argument that Tarantino never did.(30) Where he saw himself portrayed as having a neurosis, he attacked the Freudian message through wit (assuming, of course, that Tarantino even made these connections intentionally!), a suppression of the guilt that he had in relation to his own elders. To Tarantino’s mind, in this case he would be the undeserving son of a powerful and infallible patriarch, and Bill’s end is the one which he deserves for his crimes.
As The Skeptic’s Dictionary helpfully provides, there is no proof of the Oedipal complex in any scientific terms. Freud provides self-analysis shown to be biased through Carl Schorske’s analysis of politics, and anecdotal case studies in lieu of actual evidence. Freud himself anticipated such criticism, saying, “The hypothesis is admitted as ‘proved’ only if it can be reached by other ways and if it can be shown to be the junction point for other associations. But such proof, in view of the fact that our knowledge of unconscious processes has hardly begun, cannot be had(31). Realizing then that we are on soil still virgin, we shall be content to project from our viewpoint of observation one narrow slender plank into the unexplored region. We shall not build a great structure on such a foundation as this.”(32) Rather than a body of scientific work built upon these ideas, we are given as-yet unsubstantiated theories such as the “collective unconscious.”(33) The lack of validation does not take away from the possible truth of Freud’s assertions, but it does take credence away from the notion of “scientific thought” that Freud claimed within his work. It is with this skepticism that Tarantino has chosen to attack.
Works Cited:
Carroll, Robert Todd. “Psychoanalysis & Sigmund Freud.” The Skeptic’s Dictionary (2003). 16 Oct. 2005 <http://skepdic.com/psychoan.html>.
“Carl Jung.”: The Skeptic’s Dictionary (2003). 18 Nov. 2005 <http://skepdic.com/jung.html.>
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. Ed. Ritchie Robertson. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wit And Its Relation To The Unconscious. Trans. A.A. Brill. New York : Dover Publications, 1993.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York : Viking, 1996.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. Donna Freed. New York : Barnes and Noble Books, 1996.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 . Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Sonny Chiba . Miramax, 2003.
Kill Bill Vol. 2. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradin, Darryl Hannah, Chia Hui Liu. Miramax, 2004.
Schorske, Carl E. “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.” Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Modern Critical Interpretations). Ed. Harold Bloom. New York : Chelsea House, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark . New York : Signet Classic, 1998.
Foot notes:
1The idea of fate in the Sophocles play is an interesting one: had Laius not listened to the oracle and kept his son with him, he would have averted the entire curse. This shows, perhaps, that the oracle knew what the path of Laius would take, that he would listen to the message and seal his own doom. Tarantino exhibits another version of fate, dealing more with an affirmation of patriarchal power than the denial shown in Oedipus Rex.
2Note that it is the unconscious mind that Freud is concerned with. His basic theory is not that every human being carries a lifelong Oedipal urge, but that it is an early impulse which is later dispensed with. As one grows, one makes peace with the desires. He only refers to those few who never dispensed with these urges, or perhaps repressed them. Tarantino’s Bill shows similar impulses in his apparent smugness at being such a power in his own life, especially in his decision to spare his friend’s feelings by not speaking of the engagement. Similar instances are also noted in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, when Gregor Samsa is convinced the entire family will fall apart when he is turned into a giant bug, and in The Stoker, as Karl feels the need to belittle his elder under the assumption that the stoker will be unable to speak to his captain.
3I refer to Freud’s footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams in which a brief example of Hamlet is given to counter any criticisms that might be leveled against him that King Oedipus had no complex. Freud provided only cursory analysis, saying that Hamlet exhibited no outward complex, but his secondary neuroses pointed to a freshly-surfaced Oedipal complex.
.4 Freud plainly expresses this view on page 204 of The Interpretation of Dreams: “What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his father’s ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized.”
5 Page 66 of The Judgment has a simple statement by Georg’s fiancé, when she says “If you have such friends, Georg, you should never have gotten engaged.” This implies a certain pouty, immature sexuality to the fiancé. This isn’t exactly an accurate portrayal of feminine sexuality, but it serves in that it is somewhat clichéd, and therefore easily recognizable. Later, Georg’s father makes a comment of sexual undertone when he derides Georg’s actions by bellowing, “Because she pulled up her skirts like this, the nasty little goose!” (72). While more explicit, the latter example is drowned out by the sudden emphasis on the sheer power and authority of Georg’s father.
6 Any doubt on Odysseus’ behalf are set aside as Telemachus proclaims “Now you’ll see, if you care to watch, father. Now I’m fired up. Disgrace, you say? I won’t disgrace your line!” (Book 24, lines 562-565). The statement shows an affirmation that the son has surpassed the skills of his father: while Odysseus tries to council Telemachus in the ways of rulership and warfare, Telemachus reveals he’s had a lifetime to perfect this craft.
7 An adage exists of a Roman commander whose father is also his superior officer: facing an opposition of barbarians in Northern Europe, the father has decided that the entire division must hold back and wait for reinforcements before a battle may commence. After the father has left, his son decides that, with proper planning, a victory may be gained. He seizes tactical advantage, and miraculously slaughters the enemy army despite a vast numerical disadvantage. He received acclaim for his victory, and was promptly killed by his father for disobeying an order from the head of the household. Telemachus is unique in mythology in that he faces no reproach for his stature, even while his father is shown to be alive. It is for this reason that he is included here in an analysis of Freudian thought.
8 The main story, that of Odysseus, is one of affirming how a man ought to behave. He nearly kills a man for implying that he is a merchant, a detestable trade in ancient Greece. He gives Polyphemus the Cyclops proper comeuppance by blinding him when the creature dared to kill his houseguests: the role of host and houseguest was an important one in Greece; the implied slight in The Iliad was not that Paris stole Helen and looted Menelaus’ home, but that he did so while under Menelaus’ protection as a houseguest. The suitor’s deaths further this idea: they’re portrayed as detestable, in that they dare to take advantage of their station as guests in Penelope’s home. Studies greater than this have paid tribute to the social role of mythology in human interaction. From any form of religious writing and teaching comes the lesson: we may not behave like Christ on a daily basis, but we are aware that in the Western world it is that ideal which is proper. Similarly, myths like that of Odysseus served as reminders how a man ought to behave, and what his priorities should be.
9 You can almost imagine Tarantino channeling our aforementioned Kafka, who once famously shouted “To Hell With Freud!” - From Gerald William’s introduction to the Franz Kafka translation used here; Williams cites the quotation as coming from Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way.
10 He never does tell us how he found The Bride at that chapel in El Paso: all we know is his statement that “I’m the man”, to which the Bride quickly agrees.
11 Note that The Bride had to “drop your (Bill’s) name” in order for Hanzo to make the sword: it’s almost as if Hanzo sees the disrespect in defiling the way of his Elders. A repentant sinner, Hanzo aids The Bride in her own quest.
12 His analogy of The Bride to Superman illustrates this perfectly. The Bride as a “Natural Born Killer”, so much like Bill, makes her something that could never fit into normal society. There’s only one other Natural Born Killer presented to us in the film, and that is Bill. Therefore, Bill’s implication is that The Bride can only survive under Bill’s shadow.
13 Bill is never nearly as expressionistic as Kafka makes Georg, who even goes so far as to call Georg’s smile “vacant” – 67. Bill’s minimalist actions serve to garner the same impression as Kafka seeks for Georg.
14 The more popular term is “bitch”.
15 Bill says, “can’t we just forget the past”. seemingly a plea for Budd to reconcile with him, from a Freudian perspective it takes on a whole new light.
17 “When will I see you again?” asks the Bride. “Now that’s the title of my favourite soul song of the 70’s.”
18 To be entirely accurate, he does touch a sword, but only to take The Bride’s weapon and throw it back onto the stand.
19 In mind only, of course. For the purposes of this essay issues of true parental lineage is unimportant; it is the lineage of the memes which concern us.
20 Matters become even more confusing if you consider that Elle killed Pai Mei: Elle would be the avatar of Bill, having physically crushed the Old Blood, is likewise crushed by The Bride, now an avatar of Pai Mei. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll avoid the arguments that this reasoning brings us to and simply refer to The Bride as a living embodiment of Pai Mei’s world, sweeping aside Bill for the temerity of attempting to ignore his elders.
21 Bill is cunning enough to use The Bride’s reunion with her daughter to take the sword, he holds it as she returns to him later.
22 That he calls his truth serum “The Undisputed Truth”, after the name of a 70’s soul band, illustrates further the humour of Bill.
23 This is quite obvious when we leave the flashback of the standoff between The Bride and the assassin, returning to Bill sitting out on the veranda.
24 And of course, this fashion continued up until the modern era: land holdings have long been passed on among the aristocracy only at the point of death.
25 Fate moves beyond a simple-minded correlation like that of greed: just as power was a by-product of Freud’s sexuality, here too is greed the by-product of a “natural” desire to seize power. It is literally a modern incarnation of fate in the form of genealogy or nature’s pull. But, for our purposes here, I am content to leave the concept of “greed” as Georg’s primary motivation without delving too deeply in the ramifications and sources of that greed.
26 As a sidenote, I direct your attention to Carl Schorske’s essay “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams”. In it, Schorske takes issue with Freud’s de-politicizing of events as he describes them, whether in plays cited or in his own dreams. At one point, Freud references a dream in which he meets a bureaucrat who was often biased against Jews, and Freud took it as an interpretation that his dream was a wish to gain a job title. Schorske re-interprets the dream, offering that Freud’s dream was political, not “wish fulfillment” in nature, and that Freud has a history of ignoring political argument in favour of a sort of self-actualization. Schorske states, “Freud pays no attention to the fact that Oedipus was a king. For Nietzsche and other modern philosophers, so for Freud, the Oedipus quest was a moral and intellectual one: to escape a fate and acquire self-knowledge. Not so for the Greeks. Sophocles’ drama Oedipus Rex is unthinkable except as res publica, with its regal hero motivated by political obligation: to remove the plague from Thebes. Although Oedipus’ guilt is personal, his quest to discover it and his self-punishment are a public matter and are required to restore public order. Freud’s Oedipus is not Rex, but a thinker searching for his identity and its meaning. By resolving politics into personal psychological categories, he restores personal order, but not public order.” It’s interesting to note the sudden desire to take away the political actions of everything, dream and play, as critics have so often accused Freud of doing with Oedipus Rex. Kafka re-introduced the concept of political action with Georg’s actions against his “king”. Just as the Roman son was killed by his father for disobeying a direct order, and thusly Tarantino is re-instituting the pater familias rule of law here. While not the main point of this essay, it is nevertheless interesting to note that Tarantino seeks to confront Freud on all fronts.
28 Freud further notes (ibid) on page 150, “By belittling or humbling our enemy, by scorning and ridiculing him, we indirectly obtain the pleasure of his defeat by the laughter of the third person, the inactive spectator.” In this case, Tarantino realizes the true victory by the knowledge that his work is being enjoyed: whether the reader agrees with Freud outwardly or not is irrelevant, since the enjoyment serves to degrade Freud’s theories.
29 “The idea of the rebellion against authority through wit – by not “seriously” charging against those in charge you escape some measure of blame. It’s passed off as a joke, and you can more safely scorn your enemy by masking it in humour.” – 153
30 “Most people are probably capable of making jests when in a happy mood; aptitude for joking independent of mood is found only in a few persons…these tendencies might explain to us why the subjective conditions of wit are so frequently fulfilled in the case of neurotic persons. Even the most inept person may become witty under the influence of strong tendencies.” - 285
31 Again, we can only make this statement based upon supposition and conclusions made from the film, with no real knowledge of the man who made it.
32 We find ourselves once again in muddy waters similar to our thoughts on Elle and The Bride as avatars.
33 Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, 283.
34 The Skeptic’s Dictionary has its own entry for Carl Jung, saying, What guide could one possibly use to determine the correctness of an interpretation? There is none except intuition and insight, the same guides that led Jung's teacher, Sigmund Freud, in his interpretation of dreams.” Intuition, while valuable, is not a substitute for data which has been consistently re-created.