From Achilles to Hector
Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer
If Homer sat down and watched Petersen’s Troy and Tarantino’s Kill Bill, he would have to watch no further than the showdown at the House of Blue Leaves to see his vision of the carnage on the battlefield outside Troy fully realized. Again, don’t get me wrong – I love Troy, but it simply wasn’t violent enough. Yes, Sean Bean, Eric Bana, Peter O’Toole and Orlando Bloom were all perfectly cast. There’s a lot to admire, but consider this passage from the Richmond Lattimore translation of book 16 of Homer’s Iliad:
Idomedeus stabbed Erymas in the mouth with the pitiless
Bronze, so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way through
below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered,
and the teeth were shaken out with the stroke and both eyes filed up
with blood, and gaping he blew a spray of blood through the nostrils
and through his mouth, and death in a dark mist closed in about him (Iliad, Homer and Lattimore, 16, 345 – 351).
Wait, wait! Here’s the same passage, but translated by Stanley Lombardo, whose brash, loony, vulgar and utterly sublime take on Homer reads like Tarantino himself translated it during a monthlong bender:
Idomeneus plugged Erymas’ mouth with the cruel bronze, the spearpoint passing beneath the brainpan, shattering all the bones. His teeth rattled out, his eyes filled with blood, and he spurted blood out through his nostrils and gaping mouth until death’s black nimbus enveloped him (Iliad, Homer and Lombardo, 16, 366 – 372).
(Quick, insane side note praising the Lombardo translation. Here’s another choice comparison of the between these two texts, this passage taken from Odysseus’ verbal attack on the vile Thersites in book 2:
From the Lattimore:
Let me nevermore be called Telemachos’ father
If I do not take you and strip away your personal clothing,
Your mantle and your tunic that covers our nakedness,
And send you thus bare and howling back to the fast ships,
Whipping you out of the assembly place with the strokes of indignity.
From the Lombardo:
And may I never again be called Telemachos’ father
If I don’t lay hold of you, strip your ass naked
And run you out of the assembly and through the ships,
Crying at all the ugly licks I land on you.
“Strip your ass naked”! From the mouth of Odysseus! I love it!)
OK, instead of giving an aortal-squirt-by-aortal-squirt rundown of the violence in the House of Blue Leave sequence, let me slam-dunk this point by focusing on the awesomeness that is Gogo Yubari, her ball-and-chain mace, and the battle she has with the Bride. And make no mistake, Tarantino stages battles in this movie, and he amps up the energy and anticipation before the battles with the same manner of verbal taunting we see on the battlefield outside Troy:
From Kill Bill:
Gogo: “You call that begging? You can beg better than that.”
From The Iliad:
Achilles: “Come nearer, so that sooner you may meet your appointed destruction.”
Before I tie this all into the graphic gore of the above passage (where Idomeneus stabs Erymas in the face), let’s look at Gogo. She’s a petite little Japanese schoolgirl who is not only a world-class warrior, but she also fights with a ball-and-chain mace. You’d think this kind of character would be a covert assassin, or that she would fight with an appropriately petite weapon like knives or sai blades – but Tarantino once again follows in Homer’s proud footsteps by reveling in oxymoron; by giving a little girl a huge, scary weapon … just as Homer did by giving Ajax, “wall of Achaians,” the biggest guy on the block, a shield, a defensive weapon. (Yeah, yeah, maybe Ajax always had a shield in the ancient legends and Homer just codified it in writing. I don’t fucking know. I’m content to give Homer full creative credit for his masterwork. I ain’t puttin’ no ampersand next to that fucking writing credit, let me tell you.)
Furthermore, when Beatrix finally slays Gogo, she stabs Gogo in the side of the head with a nail-studded two-by-four, and blood pours out of Gogo’s dead eyes right before she and her ball and chain collapse to the ground. That's an almost direct echo of the passage quoted above.
Further-furthermore, Tarantino had the balls and the R-rating to go where Wolfgang Petersen just couldn’t in his Troy. Homer describes brains exploding out of eye sockets, like, every other page – we barely even see any blood in Troy, but Tarantino show us pools of it, gouts of it. He shows us an entire room littered with corpses and dying warriors, all of them bathed in blood.
Regardless of the timing of the split between the two movies, Tarantino has the good sense to keep most of the epic, Homeric violence in volume one, when we still don’t really know the Bride – when she’s still an Achilles: cold, distant, mysterious and unstoppable. Suffice it to say, however, that Tarantino wastes no fucking time in turning his heroine into a Hector when we start volume two. He makes the transition in the first major scene, and he doesn’t do it by expanding the Bride’s character or by delving into her background; he does it by introducing us to her fiancée, her Andromache.
When we meet Beatrix’s fiancée, Tommy Plympton (Christopher Allen Nelson), we meet a happy, fun, cool guy. We meet a guy who is polite enough to insist that Beatrix’s “father” (Bill, an unpleasant addition to the wedding party) give her away, but who has a good enough heart to just as politely and energetically drop the subject when Beatrix asks him to.
As inhuman fire sweeps through the deep angles of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber and the blustering wind lashes the flames along, so Achilles swept everywhere with his spear like something more than a mortal.
When we meet Tommy and his hot friends and nice family, the shit stops being funny. Tarantino was right to keep the shitkicking-pink pick-up Pussy Wagon out of volume two, because it has no place.
There much more to praise in volume two, but it is in that brief introduction of Tommy that Tarantino humanizes and Hector-izes the Bride. After we meet Tommy, we’re ready for the Bride’s reaction to seeing her daughter; we’re ready for her to confess (under the influence of a power truth serum) that her attempt at a real life would have failed; we’re ready to see the delightful flashback where she finds out she’s pregnant and seconds later has to convince an assassin to let her live because she wants to have a baby.
From the Lombardo translation of The Iliad:
With these words, resplendent Hector
Reached for his child, who shrank back screaming
Into his nurse’s bosom, terrified of his father’s
Bronze-encased face and the horsehair plume
He saw nodding down from the helmet’s crest.
This forced a laugh from his father and mother,
And Hector removed the helmet from his head
And set it on the ground all shimmering with light.
Then he kissed his dear son and swung him up gently
And said a prayer to Zeus and other immortals (Iliad, Homer and Lombardo, 6, 491 – 500).
Homer had a choice between this great guy, this warrior who could gently hold his child, or a dead-eyed sociopath who only knows how to kill.
Tarantino could have very easily held the same dramatic course he had set in volume one. He could have made the Bride an unstoppable killing machine through the second volume and I would have still enjoyed it … but I wouldn’t have loved it the way I love The Iliad, and I wouldn’t have believed the Bride’s grief at actually killing Bill, because by then we knew the Bride was for real, and we knew she loved Bill for all the reasons she despised him.
Sometimes I wonder how The Iliad would have turned out if the Olympian gods or the fates or Homer had decided to have Hector slay Achilles.
Tarantino shows us.