Kill Bill v. The Passion of the Christ

What's to compare? The use of violence of course.

The violence in 'Kill Bill' is there to desensitize. We see dozens of people lose limbs and heads and get sliced through. We see legs blown off and eyes plucked out and bullets go through heads. We aren't supposed to feel what these people are feeling. It's just supposed to gross us out and make us amazed at the fighting prowess of the main characters.

The violence in 'The Passion of the Christ' has a completely different purpose. Every strike of the whip, every punch to the face, every nail hammered in is supposed to make us wince. The purpose of the movie is the opposite of 'Kill Bill'. We've been told the story of Christ so many times that we forget. 'The Passion' was deliberately vivid so that we could remember the pain, and feel along with the victim.

In 'Kill Bill' dozens die in gruesome fashion. 'The Passion' focuses on the death of one man. Yet 'The Passion' is considered by many to be the most violent film ever made. Never before though have audiences been made to feel for someone suffering through this amount of torture.

We've all seen action/adventure films where people get shot by the hundreds. Just that quick explosion or person falling over. It's play time. People whose lives we never touch. They're cardboard cutouts. We don't think about their lives: their love interests, the places they take vacations. What these films share with 'Kill Bill' is the detachment.

What Kill Bill director Tarantino wants us to do is accept the graphic nature of the violence but still have that detachment. These are not real people dying. They are stick figures. Instead of sanitary bullet to the chest, he gives us a gory cranium removal, but he doesn't want us to feel for the people who are dying. If anything, he wants us to see each death as a victory for the hero.

And Tarantino's hero is not a hero at all. At one point Bill is talking with his brother and his brother says, "You deserve to die. And so does she." (refering to the Bride - the main star). Everyone in this film is corrupt and evil. The Bride is a paid assassin, a natural born killer. The only individual outside of herself that she cares for is her daughter. Her motive is revenge, plain and simple.

What 'Kill Bill' shares with 'The Passion' is the graphic nature of the violence But 'The Passion' message is the complete opposite. Here we have a god (allegedly) commiting an act of sacrifice. The people who are whipping him, the people who are condemning him, are the same people who he is doing this for.

Of course anyone reading this may think of 'The Passion' in its broader context. The religion that sprang out of this sacrifice has more than a few black marks in it's history. 'Kill Bill' doesn't exist in a void either. The desensitizing we see on the screen may contribute towards our nations willingness to go to war. We detach ourselves from the deaths and lower the threshold below which we will commit acts like these.

Ok. bit of an abrupt ending, but I'll work on it some more later.