Why does The Bride want to kill Bill in Quentin Tarantino’s movie saga?
When it comes to Quentin Tarantino movies, few are as divisive as the two volumes of Kill Bill released in 2003 and 2004. Some view the films as a masterful love letter to Japanese exploitation movies of the 1970s, among the best things Tarantino has ever done. Others find them crass and indulgent male-gaze fantasies, gratuitously depicting violence against women according to the whims of their director.
Either way, the focus of everyone with things to say about the movies seems to centre on their female protagonist. Beatrix Kiddo, who remains nameless for most of the saga and is principally credited as the Bride, embarks on a pursuit of vengeance like no other. Played brilliantly by Uma Thurman, Kiddo shows fearsome resilience and skill to overcome a procession of ruthless assassins with her trademark angular swagger.
In the end, she simply cuts down anyone standing in the way of her reaching one man. The eponymous Bill, who, as the movie saga’s titles suggest, Kiddo is aiming to kill.
But why? What is she avenging? The secret lies in Kiddo’s heroic epithet, The Bride.
Whose bride is Beatrix Kiddo?
In a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose, Uma Thurman explained how she and Tarantino created the character The Bride together while they were working together on his film Pulp Fiction back in 1994. Tarantino was telling her about the genre of revenge films when they began creating a revenge story of their own.
“We went back and forth and the character of The Bride was born,” Thurman said. The very first things to be conceived about Kill Bill were that The Bride was an “assassin, and the wedding chapel massacre, and the drama of all that.”
Thurman was referring to the opening scene of Kill Bill: Volume 1, in which The Bride lies helpless and bleeding after Bill’s gang of assassins has ambushed her wedding rehearsal. We meet The Bride’s husband-to-be, Tommy, briefly in a flashback at the beginning of Kill Bill: Volume 2, before the assassins arrive to kill the entire wedding party.
Who is Beatrix Kiddo avenging?
The pregnant Bride just about gets the words “Bill, it’s your baby” out before Bill shoots her in the head. When she awakes from a coma four years later, she assumes her baby is also dead. Thurman described Kiddo’s primary motivation for killing off the other assassins and, finally, killing Bill as “to rid the world of those child killers”.
Until the final scenes of Kill Bill: Volume 2, the death of her daughter continues to be The Bride’s main cause for vengeance. That is until she meets Bill again and realises that he’s kept their daughter alive.
Yet The Bride still has to fight Bill to the death. She still has to kill Bill. And so, there is a bit more to it than avenging the supposed death of her daughter.
Thurman told Rose, “She was Bill’s woman in a way.” In Bill’s eyes, she was at least as much his “Bride” as Tommy’s. Before they engage in mortal combat, Kiddo opens up about how much she loved Bill.
But she couldn’t allow their daughter to grow up in a world of assassins. And Bill couldn’t let her marry someone else, so he decided she had to die. In the end, Beatrix Kiddo is avenging herself for the violence inflicted on her by the love of her life, as much as she’s avenging her daughter.
As Thurman puts it, “It’s about love crimes, really”.