Kill Bill: A Necessary Warrior

Warriors in both the Greek classical tradition and Quentin Terentino’s movie, Kill Bill, represent the glorification of mimetic violence, vendetta and the conversion and mutilation of the enemy warrior into a state of bloody, pre-existence. However, whereas in classical myth male warriors were culturally expected to perpetuate violence and construct their heroic identity in opposition to their mother, the warrior-bride in kill bill constructs her heroic identity in accordance with her maternal role, justifying her revenge based off of the killing of her unborn child as she occupies both the biological persona of the mother and the cultural persona of the warrior all at once. In this way the monstrous, mother-warrior becomes a living, biological …show more content…
In the first scene, just before the beaten, bloodied bride is shot in the head by her ex-lover and boss, Bill, the audience finds out that she is pregnant with Bill’s baby. Waking up from a comatose state four years later, the bride grieves over the loss of her unborn child and plans to assassinate and punish her former warrior friends for betraying her. According to Nancy Hartsock, “Women experience others and themselves along a continuum” whereby the child within the womb can be defined “neither as me or as not-me” (293). Thus, when the bride loses her child as well the “continuum” of their relationship, she loses a part of her biological, identity that was unclassifiable to begin with, resulting in her empty womb becoming a physical manifestation of the child’s pre-existence, as she in turn, becomes an unclassifiable monstrosity