Tarantino's movies pile up the visual references, high and low, with similar abandon: he's surely the first to use anime -- though not particularly well done anime -- and the French New Wave in the same film. Kill Bill, after all, flows from Francois Truffaut's Bride Wore Black, based on Cornell Woolrich's grim-reaper novel in which a young woman tracks down the men who ruined her life. In the Tarantino version, though, the Bride's enemies are often women. One of them, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), enters whistling a theme from Bernard Herrmann's Twisted Nerve score. She is lifted, complete with her Modesty Blaise trench coat, from a luridly engrossing piece of drive-in fodder from 1974, They Call Her One Eye. Elle sports the same eye patch and costume as that film's young female protagonist, who was mutilated and raped and left to die at a brothel. (The movie gave me nightmares for years after I saw it, because it had the lack of affect and surreal flatness of a bad dream.) They Call Her One Eye emerged from a genre in which guitar-heavy soundtracks, a particular Tarantino enthusiasm, were key: the last R-rated flowering of double-bill, body-count specials. They had less plot than an Old Navy commercial and titles that were about as ambiguous as a death certificate -- I Spit on Your Grave, The Honeymoon Killers.
Tarantino clearly cherishes films in which willowy starlets -- whose acting chops put them a notch below spokesmodels and ring girls on the talent scale -- endured horrible violence before grabbing a gun, knife or the metal fasteners that bound the scripts to inflict several reels of mayhem.
His love of female-trouble action movies may even explain his peculiar obsession with a B-list 1980's TV show that provided the inspiration for Uma Thurman's Mia character in Pulp Fiction. Mia was the star of a failed TV pilot called Fox Force Five; there are enough revenge-plot parallels that Kill Bill could be the feature-film version of Fox Force Five. And Tarantino based Fox Force Five on Codename: Foxfire, the 1985 television show featuring three of the sexiest babes ever to take on the forces of evil: Joanna Cassidy, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Robin Johnson. The women had so much chemistry that it almost didn't matter how astonishingly awful the show was (almost).
Tarantino's endless catalog of references does not serve, as it might, to enlarge his film's meaning. Even the exploitation-movie scores that Tarantino appropriates served, on some freakish level, as social commentary. But he shows no interest in any social context. He also doesn't seem to understand that the blaxploitation films he loots were a delivery system for underground cultural transmissions. The theme from Across 110th Street (1972) roasted the status quo. When Tarantino uses it in a film like Jackie Brown, he's ... well, exploiting black talent in the same way the original's white filmmakers did 30 years ago. Just another example of a white man's profiting more from African-American culture than African-Americans. Still, there's something guileless in his relentless quotations from movies and albums. You can't arrest a man for movie music love.
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