: Having just watched KILL BILL *and* DEATH PROOF within a week of each other . . .
I've been thinking about those films and how I feel about them - and the films they owe much of their "feel" to, the films referenced by them and given so much love by Tarantino in all the special features on the DVDs. And because I like to think about comics, especially superhero comics, I started comparing the two. As you do, when you're obsessive. (Besides which, ROCK SOCKET is as much a love letter to my favorite exploitation-cinema tropes as it is anything else.)
Nobody, least of all me (especially after watching many of them), is going to claim exploitation cinema is somehow, you know, a perfect example of how things ought to be; it's right there in the name that this shit's exploitative of its characters, it's right there that this is stuff done in such a way that would often make anyone with a moral sense blush at the least.
And the sheer number of times female characters (often of color) get raped in these movies? Rigoddamndiculous.
But, you know what?
They get up and they kick the ass of the men who did it to them, in the end. And there's something deeply fucked about the narrative, but there's something deeply fucking satisfying about seeing scumbags and pieces of shit who do the sort of thing many of the men in these movies do to women get what's fucking coming to them and get it good, from the women they did it to, instead of their boyfriends. (I could name a half-dozen examples off the top of my head, right now, but I don't need to - KILL BILL does it for me, and does it better than I ever could.)
And it's really fucking pathetic that, as much as modern superhero comics writers and artists seem to owe to the narrative tropes of exploitation movies, this is the one good lesson exploitation cinema could teach them that they've failed to learn.
A woman deserves the narrative right to take satisfaction. And men have no right to take that from her. The Shaw Brothers and New World Pictures understood this, even in the '60s and '70s; so why is it that thirty, forty years later, comic books - a medium that, in my opinion, owes a great debt to the style and methodology of those moviemaking "juggernauts" - just fucking don't?
(Addendum: when exploitation movies have better moral standards than you do, you're fucking up somewhere.)
I've been thinking about those films and how I feel about them - and the films they owe much of their "feel" to, the films referenced by them and given so much love by Tarantino in all the special features on the DVDs. And because I like to think about comics, especially superhero comics, I started comparing the two. As you do, when you're obsessive. (Besides which, ROCK SOCKET is as much a love letter to my favorite exploitation-cinema tropes as it is anything else.)
Nobody, least of all me (especially after watching many of them), is going to claim exploitation cinema is somehow, you know, a perfect example of how things ought to be; it's right there in the name that this shit's exploitative of its characters, it's right there that this is stuff done in such a way that would often make anyone with a moral sense blush at the least.
And the sheer number of times female characters (often of color) get raped in these movies? Rigoddamndiculous.
But, you know what?
They get up and they kick the ass of the men who did it to them, in the end. And there's something deeply fucked about the narrative, but there's something deeply fucking satisfying about seeing scumbags and pieces of shit who do the sort of thing many of the men in these movies do to women get what's fucking coming to them and get it good, from the women they did it to, instead of their boyfriends. (I could name a half-dozen examples off the top of my head, right now, but I don't need to - KILL BILL does it for me, and does it better than I ever could.)
And it's really fucking pathetic that, as much as modern superhero comics writers and artists seem to owe to the narrative tropes of exploitation movies, this is the one good lesson exploitation cinema could teach them that they've failed to learn.
A woman deserves the narrative right to take satisfaction. And men have no right to take that from her. The Shaw Brothers and New World Pictures understood this, even in the '60s and '70s; so why is it that thirty, forty years later, comic books - a medium that, in my opinion, owes a great debt to the style and methodology of those moviemaking "juggernauts" - just fucking don't?
(Addendum: when exploitation movies have better moral standards than you do, you're fucking up somewhere.)
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