Bill (Kill Bill Vol.2)
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| Till death do they part? |
Kill Bill: most misleading title ever???
Good old Tarantino, God love him, he does like to over complicate things...
Consider the Bride's rampage in chronological order:
- She wakes up in hospital and promptly kills Buck and the trucker.
- Next she flies to Japan, slaughters the Crazy 88, maims the interpreter and kills O Ren.
- Back to the states and onto Venita, killed in the kitchen of her family home.
And pause.
The Bride inadvertantly kills Vernita in front of Vernita's young daughter. This could (possibly) have had lasting impact on the Bride's quest for revenge; it is (theoretically) possible she killed nobody else from this point onwards...
The Bride's first impulse on killing Venita before her daughter was to hide the bloody knife, even though it's painfully clear what has taken place. Is this guilt? Shame?
Back to the kill-list, as it is...
- Budd is killed by Ellie's snake.
- Ellie is left blinded after a battle, but never actually finished-off.
Sure, I'll concede the Bride meant to kill Bud, but rushing into the door as she did suggests clouded judgment at least- this coming directly after what happened at Venita's house. And yes, The Bride blinded Ellie and left her at the mercy of a deadly snake, but that's the Batman defense:
Batman responds to Ra's Al Ghul's last words by explaining that while he will not kill Ra's, he doesn't have to save him from his impending death.
- Then we get to Bill...
We know by this point Pai Mei "teaches no one the five-point-exploding-heart technique", and we don't see it during the Bride's training sequences. Not that this alone constitutes concrete evidence.
Consider the 'gun game' when the Bride first arrives at Bill's home: Innocent fun, or intentional foreshadowing? They 'shoot mommy' and 'mommy plays dead'. Does Bill do exactly this during the final duel?
I suggest to you, merely as a counter-point, the following:
The Bride pretends to use the Exploding-Palm, and Bill pretends to die. By this point, cards on the table, neither wanted to kill the other, but circumstances demanded a conclusion. Bill had spared killing the Bride in hospital and made a fairly decent attempt at raising their daughter, while the Bride concedes it was probably a terrible thing to let her lover think that she was dead. Since the El Passo Massacare Bill had let Vernita leave the Assassin Squad- either because he would have been sympathetic to his lover all along or because that event (and the guilt it caused him) 'mellowed him out' some and bought about his retirement?
At the end of the film, The Bride is seen curled up on a bathroom floor crying "Thank you, thank you." Who is she thanking? God, or Bill? And if Bill, for what reason? Raising her daughter, or 'playing along'?
During the end credits, each of the people on the Bride's kill-list who died have a line struck through their name. Ellie is marked with a question mark because she was technically left alive... Not Bill. Bill's name isn't marked at all.
...Because they never killed Bill in Kill Bill.
Or did they?
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