antipopper

Sorry to everyone who’s been trying to get hold of me — I’ve been hiding.

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Two more things to increase my attention deficit: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Marx’s Grundrisse.

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Amazingly, the friction of Tarantino’s Total Fetishism can generate real wonder. I think Kill Bill really is more than the sum of a bunch of Kato masks, hordes of Asian goons, Japanese schoolgirl fantasies, yellow jumpsuits and samurai swords (which are all still great fun). This has probably been true of all of Tarantino’s films, but even more so in this case — despite the heightened focus of the fetishism in this film. It’s notable that he’s shifted away from wordplay, and towards a succession of images that unfold in a mythic fashion.

The question of Cool as Objectification remains, and through the prominence of a fetishised Asia, this process is ever so heightened. But Coolness has never been otherwise, whatever the focus, and perhaps like gender does more prominently in critical film readings, the race angle casts a light on commodity fetishism in general. Recently in a televised interview I heard Tarantino suggestively compare his work as a director to that of a chef — “stirring a big pot, putting all this stuff in”. All the exotic ingredients! But the auteur mythology can never fulfil itself — film is always a necessarily collaborative medium, and a whole host of interesting issues remain about Kill Bill‘s status as a Chinese coproduction. How much is Kill Bill one of the very films it’s appropriating?

In the meantime — captivated by the colour of the film — I’m looking for some bright yellow nail polish to match Uma’s Bruce Lee jumpsuit.

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“Cool” is the ability to manipulate arbitrary aesthetic nodes with a certain amount of aloofness, almost “indifference”, into a temporary constellation. Interesting.