Awkward: you’re a nerdy junior highschooler who has somehow convinced friends and some of their cooler friends to rent and watch a video at your house — True Romance, you all choose — and although your parents manage to stay out of the TV room for almost the entire time, your mother decides to walk in just as a young but no less tough-goonish James Gandolfini batters Patricia Arquette through glass and just about all over a hotel room. “Well that’s nice…” she scorns. It’s over, the guilt sets in as you witness the most graphic violence done by a man to a woman you’ve ever seen (even counting your health class videos). And your mom does not approve. At least she lets you all finish the film.

I didn’t know who Quentin Tarantino was at the time, and I wouldn’t find out until Pulp Fiction hit my small hometown in Northern New York a couple years later, but I had just prepped myself more than ten years in advance for the even more explicit, and more drawn out, tortures Uma Thurman would endure in the epic length serial film Kill Bill.

What distinguishes Arquette’s character, Alabama Worley, and Thurman’s, The Bride, from most other film heroines is their defiance of traditional female roles in the face of violence. Alabama dares Gandolfini’s character to beat her down, and he even expresses admiration for her grit. In Thurman’s Bride, Tarantino has isolated the anti-feminine spunk of Alabama and added perhaps the most concentrated dose of revenge-motive ever manifested on the screen.

Kill Bill, in both volumes, is essentially a non-linear string of crafted episodes chronicling the repeated crushing of a former female assassin’s body and mind as she seeks vengence on her former boss and lover, Bill (David Carradine). So now Tarantino’s archetype female protagonist not only takes and withstands viscerally expressed pain, but she deals it out, too, in buckets. Furthermore, Tarantino shatters any rigid genre boundaries by making The Bride’s womanhood central to the film’s visual and ideological scheme. The revenge-inducing scene, in which The Bride’s wedding rehearsal is interrupted by a four-person hit squad commanded by Bill, a violent man reacting violently to the loss of his love to another man, ends as he shoots her, pregnant, in the head. It is perhaps the most intense and unsettling shot in the film, and Tarantino places it carefully at the beginning of both volumes as a reminder. The ceremony becomes a massacre, an un-wedding. Visually, Tarantino suggests this early in Volume 2 as we see Thurman pacing away from the pastor and the altar, backwards down the aisle.

The icons at work here begin to relate: bride, wedding, wedding dress, pregnancy, motherhood, rape. But a series of clashes figure into the heroine, as well: kung fu, swordplay, killing, blood (lots), hate, revenge. The Bride represents a revolutionary gender presence in film, not only within the bounds of martial arts/action films, but in film as a whole. The meditative, philosophical Volume 2 teases out the aspects of Thurman that are traditionally feminine; she spends most of the film’s final chapter fulfilling the role of mother. In fact, the intensity of violence committed by Thurman systematically decreases over both volumes as they run in real time (chronologic time in a Tarantino film is a different beast). It is the best meditation on femininity in a puported action film since Aliens.

70s myth David Carradine carries Volume 2 most of its epic distance. His thoughtful monologues are delivered with a realism that only borrows from the conventions of the martial arts genre. He is a patient but sadistic killer, and Carradine mananges to balance both the tender and the sinister of his character. After viewing the entire film, no one but Thurman seems to fit the role of the Bride. She was made for it and it was made for her. She is revenge — torso, limbs and eyes. Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah are also brilliant in their few precious moments.

At just over four hours, the entire expanse of Kill Bill is epic. In its subtle but drawn-out pacing, it recalls most vividly Sergio Leone’s two best westerns: The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Dialogue is often sparse, and delivered at a painstakingly (literally) retarded pace. (Scholars of Kubrick have noted this same technique as one of the late master’s idiosyncracies, that he slows down his scenes to the “speed of life.”) Tarantino draws out the intensity of every showdown by flooding the screen with t-zones: bloody stares of hatred, thick determination, and anguish. Hands and feet also get a lot of screentime.

The action and violence are filmed with a distinct tone. The fighting is definitely not realistic, nor is it cartoonish. It mixes the melodrama and grotesque impact of the best kung-fu movies with stylistic shot compositions and traditional rock-em sock-em staples. Every round of kicks or slashes seems just another vehicle for Tarantino’s visual inventiveness. It’s not that he wants to invent another way for the heroine to dismember five attackers in as many seconds, he wants to invent another way to show us those dismemberments with his camera.

The shot compositions, the score and soundtrack, cameos by genre legends like Carradine and Sony Chiba, and much of the “B”-style dialogue are likewise mere dressing on the surface. They link Kill Bill to its progentiors, the reels and reels of 70s action movies that Tarantino quotes like T.S. Eliot writing “The Wasteland”, but they also defy their genre-ness. Kill Bill is not necessarily an “art” film, but it is an artistic film. It is the expression of a film lover treating the collection of sounds and images in his experience like a great pop-cultural palate. It is entertainment, but it is innovative. It seems to be the only kind of film he can make, and in writing we call that a voice.

In fact, this technique of synthesizing elements of his film-going and cultural past likens Tarantino most to another artistic iconoclast of the film world, David Lynch. Lynch has been mining the images and textures of the American 1950s for years, in masterpieces like Blue Velvet and especially Mulholland Drive. He borrows from the trappings of genre, but only to suit his ends as a filmmaker. Tarantino and Lynch may prove that film is the genre in which it is most difficult to conceal one’s influences. And in Tarantino’s case, he flaunts them.