Karen Wilson over at Cinecultist has posted a dissenting opinion of Kill Bill, and not because of the movie's violence. Here's a snippet:

In QT's world we can never be as cool as him, as quick as him, or as in the know as him to "get" all he throws at us. Sure, the thing looks slick and there's moments that are truly lovely in their brutality but if [Cinecultist] wanted to be talked down to, we wouldn't ask for it from a pop flick, a self-avowed paean to grind house movies.

David Denby mentioned something similar in his New Yorker review:

It will doubtless cause enormous excitement among the kind of pop archivists for whom the merest reference to a Run Run Shaw kung-fu picture from 1977 is deliciously naughty — a frisson de schlock that, for them, replaces any other vital response to a movie.

I can understand both of these points of view. On the other hand, I liked the movie, and I'd never heard of Run Run Shaw before. So I wonder what about the movie appeals to me? Do you think it's a desire to be a part of Tarantino's exclusive club? That I felt like watching the movie was giving me an education in obscure cinema? If I'd run home from the theater to look up Shaw-Scope then I could pretend I knew all along what Tarantino was referring to.

Except I didn't do that, and I don't have much of an interest in old kung-fu movies.

In 1964 Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay for Partisan Review in which she tried to define this thing we call "camp." I'd heard about the essay but read it for the first time last night. Despite being 40 years old, it's still surprisingly accurate and relevant.

Kill Bill isn't itself camp, but it celebrates it. Watching the movie is like sitting around with friends in the living room watching old, nutty TV shows, like someone has taken the funniest, campiest moments from those shows and spliced them together. As Karen at Cinecultist says, "Tarantino's originality lies in his ordering of reference." How should we respond to celebrations of camp? The movie's attitude is an example of what Sontag was trying to define. She says:

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.

The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness — irony, satire — seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment....

Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans' ? Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, Val?ry's Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to "good taste."

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp — Dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

I believe my enjoyment of the movie comes simply from its aesthetics, the way it surprises me in ways that action movies usually don't. I'm pretty indifferent to the allusions. I'm aware of them, but I don't get most of them, and I don't necessarily feel condescended to. Somehow the glow that those allusions give off, the spirit of camp, rather than making me feel like an outsider is inclusively giddy.

My reservations about the movie, then, are that I feel like Tarantino's ultimate goal is to enshrine his favorite moments from B-movies and perhaps appear cool as a result, which seems like a waste of talent. As Jonathan Rosenbaum said in his capsule of Pulp Fiction, which is surprisingly applicable to Kill Bill, Tarantino's goal seems to be "to evict real life and real people from the art film and replace them with generic teases and assorted homages, infused with hype and attitude, building a veritable monument to the viewer's supposed connoisseurship."

In some sense, rather than being exclusionary, Tarantino's movies are packaging camp and taking it to the masses, with him as our all-knowing leader, of course, waving the flag up front but not laughing at us.

Finally, as a counterexample, take a look at Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog. It's a movie about gangsters, modern day samurai, and it makes references to other movies, to literature, and to our use of cultural touchstones for communication — look at how Pearline and Ghost Dog sit on a park bench and talk about novels both trashy and classic — but the movie also gives viewers lots to think about as it draws its metaphors for multiculturalism, globalization, and feminism, and I don't mean the kind of faux-feminism of girl fights. You don't have to get Jarmusch's references to Jean-Pierre Melville or Akira Kurosawa to take something away from the theater.

I don't mean that Kill Bill needs to be Ghost Dog, because I get a different kind of charge there. I'd just like to see Tarantino one day train that sense of visual and musical collage and that ear for cultural communication on a more deserving subject.