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lessons and is learning to talk again. The first ending lacks internal logic: assuming
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a piano could be pushed off a small boat without overturning it, why should Ada
discard something which is so important to her? No musician would discard a piano
so casually. For bell hooks, the piano is soiled with tainted memories, in which case
why not leave it behind?28 Barbara Quart is more speculative: This comes not out of
any confusion on Campion s part, but rather from her openness to irrational forces
resistant to neat understanding and verbalization. Perhaps the instrument is related to
death because it has filled all Ada s needs and replaced other human attachments. 29
This leaves unanswered questions. Why is a rope fastened to the piano and how does
it become caught around Ada s shoe? Why should she try to commit suicide with the
prospect of happiness ahead of her? Campion s happy ending might be Ada s hal-
lucination as she drowns. Alternatively, it might be a sop to Hollywood values, but it
is weak, given all that has happened, and renders the underwater sequence superflu-
ous. Its optimism should not be taken at face value, according to Carmel Bird, for
whom Ada s veil portends no happy ending.30 Campion reprises the image of Ada
being pinned underwater, suggesting to Alan A. Stone the tragedy which lies ahead:
Caught, finally, in the ordinariness of a life without art, she dreams of the imprison-
ing silence of death. 31 This invests the film with a subtlety which is hard to justify,
given the contradictory nature of the final scenes. The heroine s suicide in Tolstoy s
Anna Karenina shows how it should be done.
The combination of high production values, moody photography, sophisticated
dramatic devices and high seriousness signifies that Campion intended The Piano to
be treated as art. It aspires to resonate beyond the confines of the story, touching on
what Quart terms the mythic, with its themes of love, conquest and revenge.32 Yet
despite echoes of Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast, The Piano never rises above
the level of high-class melodrama. Bird is perceptive on this point:
The film does not have the quality of a fairy tale in which strange things can be accepted
without motive, rhyme or reason. In dream we accept, but the fact of silence does not
have the nature of a dream. It is such an odd and dramatic piece of behaviour, and I think
a storyteller can t be allowed to shrug it off.33
With such devices as Ada s muteness, Nyman s out-of-period music and the seahorse
drawn in the sand, The Piano glories in artifice (or artiness), while aspiring to real-
ism in its settings and ethnographic detail. Campion s visual flair is not married to
convincing characters or a strong dramatic sense, the consequence being that despite
the visual pleasures, the narrative loses direction.
This work fits Dwight Macdonald s definition of middlebrow culture, which so
irks Umberto Eco: it borrows avant-garde procedures after they are worn out and
bends them to create a message understood by all; it constructs the message as a
source of effects which can be sold as art and satisfies consumers by convincing
them that they have experienced culture.34 Eco decries this distaste for populariza-
tion, but, when confronted by The Piano, I can appreciate Macdonald s point.
16
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (US, 2003):
Violence as Art
Production companies: A Band Apart / Miramax Films
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Director/Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino
Photography: Robert Richardson
Production design: Yohei Taneda, David Wasco
Art Director: David Bradford
Editor: Sally Menke
Cast: Uma Thurman (the Bride), Lucy Liu (O-Ren Ishii), Vivica A. Fox (Vernita
Green), Daryl Hannah (Elle Driver)
Synopsis
In a preface, Bill shoots the injured and pregnant Bride. Only his hands are seen. The
Bride is next encountered visiting Vernita in American suburbia. The two women
fight with anything which comes to hand, the Bride eventually killing her adversary
with a knife. She crosses Vernita s name off the list of Deadly Viper Assassination
Squad members who are to be killed in reprisal for what happened to her. In another
flashback, the injured Bride is seen lying in an El Paso chapel, being examined by a
policeman who treats her as though she is already dead.
A stylish woman walks into a hospital. This is Elle Driver. She changes into a
nurse s uniform and finds the Bride unconscious and alone. As Elle is about to ad-
minister a lethal injection, Bill telephones to order that the mission be aborted. Hon-
our demands that the Bride should not be killed in her sleep.
Four years later, the Bride awakens after a mosquito bite. She goes in search
of O-Ren Ishii, the next name on the list. An animé sequence reveals O-Ren s life
story. As a child, she witnessed the murder of her parents. Her revenge was to kill
the paedophile boss of the gang who murdered them. By the age of twenty, she was
a top assassin.
O-Ren has taken control of Japanese criminal gangs, decapitating the only gang-
land boss who opposes her. The Bride commissions a sword from a retired crafts-
man in Okinawa and stages a showdown at a busy club. She disposes of O-Ren s
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144 " Movie Greats
bodyguards. O-Ren escapes, but the Bride intercepts her in the garden and kills her.
The Bride leaves Japan in her quest for Bill, unaware that her daughter is alive.
Cultural Context
Quentin Tarantino came to public attention in the early 1990s with Reservoir Dogs
(US, 1992) and Pulp Fiction (US, 1994). Jackie Brown (US, 1997) had less com-
mercial success. A six-year gap followed before Kill Bill was ready. Uniquely for a
high-profile film, its length meant that it was released in two parts. Pulp crime fiction
stories from Black Mark magazine provided the inspiration, and there were liberal
borrowings from other films.1
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