Kill Bill/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Depending on how literally you take the name of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, it could be possible to survive by sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. This is rendered moot if the one character hit with it was ready to die -- and that person debatably managed six steps anyway.
  • What was with the scene in the classroom after they reveal The Bride's name?
    • ...BigLippedAlligatorMoment?
    • Another point I think was that once the name was revealed for real, that classroom scene was done to be absolutely sure the viewers understood that yes, that was her name. But that's just this troper's take on it.
    • I thought it was to indicate that 'Beatrix Kiddo' isn't the Bride's real name, given that there's also a girl called Mary Whorehouse in there.
  • All this talk about Budd being a douchebag seems true until you remember what he says to The Bride as she's lying in the coffin: "This... is for breaking my brother's heart"; he really does believe that they all deserve to die, but family comes before everything and, as said in the WMG page, he probably did see Elle killing him coming, but couldn't live with the guilt of killing The Bride in such a deceitful way, so allowed it to happen... or maybe this is Fridge Brilliance?
    • If you ask me there's nothing remotely noble in either Budd's or Bill's point of view, because the whole thing is predicated on the idea that a woman leaving a man who doesn't feel like being left, for the excellent reason that she doesn't want her child to grow up in a murderous international gangsters' underworld, is guilty of a capital offense, not just for her but for a chapelful of other people (but if you can get your baby cut out of her alive and raise it yourself, that's okay, because the bitch had no right to take it in the first place). People hardly ever defend O-Ren, Vernita or Elle for their part in the massacre, but for Bill and Budd, because their motives were personal they're automatically worthy of consideration... even though they were the personal motives of an abusively possessive boyfriend. If you want to have a Battle Couple carrying on a career of amoral professional killing and still have the relationship between them be tender and touching, fine. I'll watch that. But you can't successfully blend the two. There is no swallowable code of martial-arts-movie ethics that makes "There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard" an admirable thing to say.
      • No one is asking you to sympathize with anyone in this movie except The Bride. They're all Complete Monster 's anyway, no matter what the Fan Dumb insists. Seriously, being played by David Carradine doesn't make someone who ordered the slaughter of a wedding rehearsal not an irredeemable evil bastard. The Bride isn't much better, being a former assassin, but at least she tried to get out of it, and her quest for vengeance was more or less justified. In the words of the cool-hatted-Linkara "there's a difference between having a sympathetic backstory, and actually being sympathetic."
      • He didn't know it was his until just before he shot her in the head. He didn't even know she was alive until she was engaged to Tommy and assumed Tommy was the father. It's partly personal but there's also a nobody leaves the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and lives to tell the tale mentality to it.
    • Budd's concern about his brother and his recognition that Kiddo deserved better than she got appear to be the extent of Budd's honorability. He shot Kiddo with rock salt and buried her alive. Are you interpreting this differently than I am? BTW, this troper was personally disgusted that he went from being an elite assassin to working as a bouncer in a redneck desert bar. To have the opportunity and training that so few can, and to be so ungrateful for that, marks him as the worst scum out of the whole bunch.
      • "Ungrateful"? He didn't get a scholarship, he was a trained killer. Maybe he had a good long think after
      • Bill cast Budd out of his world for some not-explained-in-story reason. It's alluded to in dialogue but never really explained.
  • Sure, Bill was a killer, but at least he was a generous guy, since he insisted on paying for everything when they all went out after. . . the. . . wedding. . . HEY!
  • The Bride's hair in Volume 2. is a conundrum for me. Up through the big fight with Elle, her hair is quite long. Afterwards,during her visit with Esteban and the final confrontation with Bill, her hair has shortened to a bob. OK, one could argue she got an offscreen haircut. But then when we see her with BB at the motel, her hair is back to being as long as it was at the start of the movie. I find it hard to believe that much time had passed between scenes. Obviously very small, but it just bugs me.
  • Why did Bill send Elle on the mission to the hospital to poison the Bride? Didn't he know ahead of time that he would order her to abort?
    • No, he didn't. He sent her there to do it, then got second thoughts when it was about to happen.
  • More of a meta JBM, but why does everyone refer to Uma Thermon's character as "The Bride?" She has a name, just like everyone else, and its Beatrix Kiddo. I get that she was credited as "The Bride" in vol. 1 but she has a name.
    • Because her name is a bit of a spoiler, since the movie goes out of its way to conceal it until most of the way through the second film.
      • OP here, now its been a while since i saw the movie, but i don't think it was that big of a plot point, yeah they do avoid using her name, but was it a big earth shattering revelation? I think not.
      • It's not a huge one, no, but it's something that the movie deliberately hides for effect (there's a bit on the Fridge Brilliance page, I believe, that says it helps illustrate her relationship with Bill), ergo it's a spoiler. Plus, "The Bride" could be seen as a cooler way to refer to her than just by her name.
      • I can't remember exactly where I read it, but apparently Tarantino said her name was deliberately omitted in Vol.1. so the audience wouldn't sympathize/identify with her just yet (cause Vol.1. was more focused on action and violence; the story didn't really fully materialize until Vol.2).
      • Plus, Beatrix Kiddo sounds...really stupid.
  • What about the whole scene in "House of Blue Leaves" isn't rent in Tokyo outrageous, there is no way that a restaurant can make enough profit to sustain that giant building which undoubtedly has equally giant rent.
    • It's clearly more than a restaurant, given it's got a big dance hall, stage for live events, and private rooms. Plus, O-Ren who, remember, runs the whole Yakuza, probably owns substantial stock in it.
  • A blogger on YouTube suggested to me once that Pai Mei should have been around to punish Gogo for her insolence. WHY DID A FIGHT BETWEEN PAI MEI AND GOGO NOT HAPPEN?!
    • Because they were in two entirely unrelated parts of the film and had absolutely nothing to do with each other, maybe?
    • Because Pai Mei was dead before the events of Kill Bill Vol. 1. Plus, he never met Gogo or O-Ren as far as we know, so he wouldn't have been there anyway.
  • How many people were in the Crazy 88?
    • 87.
    • From That Other Wiki: "There are only 40 actors accredited to the Crazy 88, however a frame-by-frame count performed by Jonathan R. from Bouncing Ferret Films shows 82: 67 killed, 12 maimed, 1 killed by an axe thrown by somebody else, one possibly killed, one spanked." I guess we should assume that there are only forty in-universe and the rest are stunt people or extras.
      • I think you've got it backward there. If we see 82 of them, then there's at least that many in-universe. They probably just reused the actors or filled the ranks with stunt people.
  • How exactly did The Bride get out of the coffin? I mean, no way that tiny hole was big enough to escape through.
    • Of course not. If you actually, you know, watch the scene, you'll see she doesn't make a "tiny hole," the board breaks down the length, which she would have, you know, made bigger as she got out?
  • It really bothers me that Vernita Green's daughter at the beginning of Vol. 1 is supposed to be four years old, and yet she's very articulate, carries around a big backpack, and has her own dog. She doesn't even look 4 years old, or 5 for that matter. It's just a really small detail that bugs me a lot, since Vernita's family life is supposed to be realistic in comparison to the Bride's fight scenes.
    • Not sure what you mean by "realistic" when it comes to family life. There really wasn't a lot of time devoted to Vernita's chapter. I think what is "realistic" about this film are the character reactions and interactions, certainly not the dialogue (it's Tarantino of course!). I mean, I think it makes sense that a "4-year old" would react the way Nikki did, quietly confused about what she saw.
    • For that matter, the Bride is 9 months pregnant or damn near when she gets shot. Vernita *may* have been pregnant during the beatdown, but its not likely considering she's, you know, delivering beatdowns willy-nilly. Assuming she's not pregnant at the time, Vernita would have had to quit the DIVAS the next DAY, meet a dude, get married/pregnant in order to have a kid in the same year as the Bride.
      • She could have just had Nikki before the attack on the Bridge-- I mean, the kid is probably Bill's, anyway.
    • I'm thinking that The Bride had to be between 5 and 9 months, far enough to be showing but not so far that she couldn't participate in a wedding. Also, Vernita had to be pregnant at the time, The girls are too close in age. My guess is that she was about 2-3 months. If Vernita was 3 months and The Bride was about 7 months (and more than likely gave birth prematurely due to the beating) that would put the age difference between B.B and Nikki at about 6 months.
  • How did Vernita miss shooting the Bride? Apparently firearms aren't one of her specialties.
  • So, the end credits say the movie is "Based on the character the Bride created by Q&U" (Quentin and Uma, according to Wikipedia.) But near as I can tell, these films are the first time the Bride has actually been used--it's not like Tarantino wrote a book or a comic with the Bride in it before Kill Bill got made. So why's it there?
    • This was covered in an interview or commentary somewhere. Uma and Quentin invented the character on the set of Pulp Fiction and worked on it for years before he wrote the script for Kill Bill.
  • The Bride asks Hattori Hanzo to make a sword for her. He initially refuses until she tells him that she's going to use it to Kill Bill. What prompted Hanzo to change his mind and actually make the sword was The Bride saying that he had an "obligation", because Bill was (I think) one of Hanzo's students at some point. But why? Why would Hanzo have an obligation to help Bill's murderer? Do teachers in this world have some sort of ongoing obligation to make sure their students don't go evil? Is this a martial arts thing or a case of Values Dissonance?
    • Hattori Hanzo stopped making things that kill people, which on the surface means swords, but in a sense, he also "created" Bill by teaching him. He can put his remaining swords on a rack where nobody will ever wield them again, but Bill is probably most murderous of his former students. By helping The Bride to eliminate Bill, he is un-making one of the "things that kill people" that he'd made. He kept only the swords that have sentimental or aesthetic value, presumably the rest, the ones that had no value other than their utility in killing people, were destroyed.
    • It seems to be a far from unusual plot element in Asian works, at least Chinese and Japanese ones. A teacher bears some responsibility on what their student does with their teaching (it could be considered as a trope, in fact). If said student goes evil, it's a duty for the teacher to stop the student if possible. At the very least, the sin of the student bears on the teacher's shoulders. We can see an example of this in Samurai Champloo, in the Lethal Lunacy episode. That is, if said student doesn't have a family able to handle the issue, because the family's duty precedes the teacher's (we see it for example in Tekken: when Asuka finds out that Jin is her cousin, she makes it a personal duty to fight him and his evil plans). This isn't even a specifically Asian trope, but it turns up more frequently in Asian works than European ones. (Disclaimer: This Troper is neither Asian nor an erudite in comparative philosophy. Anyone who knows better feel free to butcher this puny post.)
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