See Quentin Kill

By Armond White, Africana.com. Posted October 15, 2003.

When you think of the resounding flop of Jackie Brown -- the film Quentin Tarantino made after his 1994 Pulp Fiction changed contemporary movie history -- it's no wonder he offs Vivica A. Fox early in his new movie, Kill Bill: Vol. 1. He wasn't about to repeat the mistake of asking mainstream movie audiences to take a black person's emotional life seriously.

Vivica A. Fox's character Vernita Green (a.k.a. Copperhead) may return in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (to be released next Spring) courtesy of the film's fractured time scheme. But for now she is a typical example of Hollywood cannon fodder. It's another bait-and-switch role, used to lure black filmgoers to a movie and then be conveniently dispatched to appease white racist distaste. Vernita is a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS), a group of hit-women working for the film's shadowy title character Bill, a pimp figure. Although Kill Bill shows how one diva, The Bride (Uma Thurman), seeks revenge on Bill by first hunting down and killing her sister divas, this movie is no more an examination of patriarchy than was the Hughes Brothers' noxious American Pimp. Tarantino, always in trivia-mode, simply creates his own Charlie's Angels but ups the pop references and intensifies the violence quotient. Vernita's death is not taken seriously, but then Tarantino takes nothing seriously besides his adolescent fascination with the low end of popular culture.

Tarantino is the first white filmmaker to forge a career based on disreputable, underclass taste -- the movie culture that black urban youth were raised on and affectionately viewed as their own. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill owe their inspiration to '70s blaxploitation movies -- a Hollywood trend that catered to the domestic fragmentation that occurred in America after '60s political dissent, responding specifically to the social conflagrations of riots and rebellions that shifted the tax base and demographic make up of most U.S. cities. (Abandoned urban movie houses were blighted, left to feature the kind of trash-product that had been the traditional fare of drive-ins.) Blaxploitation anticipated a lasting cultural fragmentation. The pop audience that the '60s seemed to unite became newly segregated into distinct racial and generational enclaves. The young folk who grew up on blaxploitation (and who would innovate hip hop culture) withdrew into disaffected sub-cults -- claiming grade Z action movies, even the cheaply made and hastily dubbed kung-fu imports, as aesthetic ideals divorced of any social or ideological thinking.

Young, white Tarantino witnessed and participated in these changes. As a new era's hipster, Tarantino embarked upon a different kind of white flight. He gravitated toward sleazy black pop but without acquiring any political identification. He could reject the traditional, bourgeois film content and claim a timely, original approach: His films emphasized the pleasure of pop without moral conscience, yet were rife with racially tinged violence. Blaxploitation was thereby reborn as something postmodern -- a white-identified entertainment form that took lack of social progress for granted and celebrated the post-80s tenets of greed and narcissism.

This was coincidental with hip hop's dubious achievement of "nigga," unearthing former opprobrium and transforming it into publicly accepted address. Tarantino, in his own way, affected a similar transformation, appealing to the public's unaddressed racial anxiety and seeming to relieve it through ruthless evocations of racism and hostility. That was the novelty of his early '90s screenplays that incorporated vicious, racist utterances into slangy, kitsch-obsessed dialogue (in Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction the various "nigger" references were clearly hostile, not salutary). Tarantino's irresponsible comic lingo matched the blithe way he dramatized brutality devoid of purpose.

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