There is nothing new under the sun, especially in Hollywood. Numerous screenwriting how-to bibles claim there are only six plots, and a mere three acts to plot them in. Equally limited in number are the character types available to populate a story with: the naïve hero, the wise mentor, the fair princess, the formidable villain, the shape-shifting trickster, and a few others. While the merits of this more allegorical approach to the act of creation are debatable, they can in fact assist in reviewing and re-viewing films by simplifying an approach to a complex artistic medium.

This allegorical approach is partly rooted in early modern storytelling. In the English morality plays one of the stock characters was named Vice. It was an aptronym: a name that represented what the character did, in an allegorical

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mode later perfected by John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress. The Vice character is one of the main players in the psychomachia of a typical morality play: the battle for the hero's soul waged by good and evil forces, the little devil on the hero's shoulder, whispering in his ear.

The Vice character proved not only popular on the stage, but malleable on the page; he evolved in two directions: sinister and comic. Shakespeare transformed Vice into Iago on the one hand and Falstaff on the other. For Shakespeare's contemporary Marlowe, and later for Goethe, Mephistopheles plays the Vice role in the Faust legend, more sinister in Marlowe, more comic in Goethe. The Faust tale, by the way, is one of those six basic plots, and the only one to be contributed by Christianity. In 20th century literature and film, the Vice character is the protagonist, the anti-hero, from Leopold Bloom, Gregor Samsa and Meursault, to Michael Corleone, Travis Bickle and Vincent Vega.

While two of the directors whose characters were just referenced, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, often vie for the title of most violent film director, they both have also made much more MPAA-friendly movies (e.g. Finian's Rainbow, Tucker and Peggy Sue Got Married for the former, and Quiz Show, The Age of Innocence and New York, New York for the latter).

Tarantino is the only director in this not-so-holy trinity who has consistently made movies that are both popular and critically acclaimed, that are all violent, sometimes brutal, and that all feature a postmodern version of the Vice character as protagonist.

Comparing literary precursors to movie anti-heroes would be something Tarantino himself might do. He often defends his choice of lurid subject matter, low-life protagonists, hyperviolence, and narrative cut-and-paste by referencing the techniques he learned from the pulp fiction of such authors as Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford and Elmore Leonard. As Tarantino himself claims, "In movies, everyone has to be so fucking likeable, the audience has got to be behind him; the audience has got to root for him. You can write a novel about a perfect bastard, right? It doesn't mean you don't want to turn the page. You're just reading a story about a bastard and that's okay, that's interesting."

With his wise-guy killers dealing with loyalty and betrayal, his dismembered plots, his pop culture seasoning, and his alternation of hilarious profanity with hideous brutality, Tarantino presents a perfect subject for the study of vice. Yet, as he is castigated by the religious and political right, he actually makes violence more real to us than, say, Schwarzenegger movies (or legislations) do. His movies, he says, "almost follow the old Hays code. Violence was never a major issue in the old days of Hollywood. You could have as much violence as you wanted as long as the bad guy dies in the end, or denounces his sins."

Tarantino is something of a Vice character in real life: from his stints in jail for small-time crimes, to his tabloid romances with female stars and groupies, to his gossip column fisticuffs with male producers and cabbies, to the accusations of plagiarizing obscure films and betraying old friends. But above and beyond his off-screen escapades, he also deserves our attention for his depiction of vice (and Vice).

Sin City, structured like Pulp Fiction is an adaptation of three tales by legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller, directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez, with a sequence directed by Tarantino (he traded the gig for having Rodriguez score Kill Bill, each agreed to be paid one dollar for their work). The production notes for the film say Sin City is a place where "some are seeking revenge, others lust after redemption and then there are those hoping for a little of both." Tarantino's characters fit the same mold. His Vice characters follow one of three trajectories:

First, in Natural Born Killers (directed by another vice-regent of film, Oliver Stone) and Reservoir Dogs, the Vice character(s) lean toward the very dark side: there is only the slightest glimmer of redemption, overshadowed by motiveless malignance in the characters' glee as they perform torture, robbery and murder, often while eating fast food. It should be noted: these are two of his earliest efforts, and were written while he was desperately frustrated trying to break into Hollywood. Yet Tarantino's segment from Four Rooms, "The Man From Hollywood" also fits this mode, although written later, after becoming a household name.

In other Tarantino movies, the heroes are trying to escape their "minimum wage" existence with one perfect crime: Butch the boxer in Pulp Fiction, Clarence and Alabama the lovers in True Romance, and Jackie Brown the stewardess in the eponymous movie. In fact, escape could be said to a major theme of all of his movies and scripts. "I've often wondered," Tarantino writes in his liner notes to Johnny Cash's album Murder, "if gangsta rappers know how little separates their tales of ghetto thug life from Johnny Cash's tales of backwoods thug life. Cash sings tales of men trying to escape-escape the law, escape the poverty they were born into, escape prison, escape madness. But the one thing Cash never lets them escape is regret." Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

The third trajectory, and the most interesting for our discussion, is the trajectory of characters also trying to escape, not from poverty, but rather from filthy-rich criminality: the Gecko brothers in From Dusk Till Dawn (one of whom is played by Tarantino) want to plan one last bank robbery and then hightail it to a mythical place called El Rey where you can live like a king with other criminals, but, once you run out of your ill-gotten gains, you're dead meat - literally: they eat you for dinner. Jules, in Pulp Fiction, who conflates Ezekiel 25:17 with Psalm 23 to strike fear into his victims before killing them, has a near brush with death, concludes it was a miracle, and, while holding a man at gunpoint, exegetes the new, combined text he has created about "the path of the righteous man." It has become a script(ure) for his life. He decides to leave his life of crime, thus saving a diner full of people, and leaves to "walk the earth," like Caine in Kung Fu, waiting for God to show him a new path, even if it takes "forever." As Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Jules, said, "The voice of redemption flows throughout the whole film. I mean, Mia gets it when she comes back to life after OD'ing, Butch gets it, Marsellus gets it, and I'm the person who actually voices it." In Tarantino's words, it is "ultimately a film about forgiveness and mercy, albeit in a hard and brutal world."

Where Pulp Fiction ends, Kill Bill begins: with a character striving for redemption from his/her self-made prison of sins, crimes and misdemeanors. Indeed, Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill is shot in the head in retaliation for escaping not only her life of crime, but the love of her life: Bill.

The Vice character of old, Marjorie Garber explains in her magnum opus Shakespeare After All, "carried a broad flat dagger of lath that made a loud slapping sound, and he was generally a figure of ribald improvisation as well as an inciter to rebellion, disobedience, and sin. We could say very generally that the Machiavel was to the incipient genre of revenge tragedy what the Vice was to older and increasingly comic morality plays."

We could also say very generally that Tarantino's anti-hero is to the incipient genre of revenge films what the Machiavel was to older stories. Kill Bill's exterminating angel Beatrix also carries a sword, although not a cheap wooden lath, but rather a priceless samurai sword: one, it is said, that would "cut God." With it she carries out a female familial revenge rampage unequalled since the blaxploitation masterpiece Coffy (one of Tarantino's favorite movies, by the way, starring Pam Grier, who he chose to play Jackie Brown). Even more apropos of Garber's quote above, when Beatrix leaves her life as the world's deadliest assassin, she renames herself Arlene Machiavelli.

Kill Bill, which took a year and a half to write, another year to make, and cost $55 million, is a "duck press," as Tarantino puts it, of all the genre action movies he grew up loving (Hong Kong grindhouse, Japanese samurai & yakuza, spaghetti Westerns, Italian giallos, French policiers - there is even an anime sequence). It is also a mix of film styles (black and white, 1:33 to 1 aspect ratio, split screen - there is even a 2-minute scene shot in utter darkness). It is a brutal, visceral, action-movie-to-end-all-action-movies, yet with a decidedly feminine twist (Uma Thurman, the movie's star, who Tarantino calls "my muse," helped develop the main character of assassin Beatrix Kiddo, and Thurman even shares story credit with Tarantino). Renowned for being a career-resurrection artist, Tarantino has revived his own career six years after his last film (the uncharacteristically peaceful and contemplative Jackie Brown) and nearly a decade after Pulp Fiction, with this one-two cinematic knockout punch.

Kill Bill was originally slated to be one movie, but was split into two by Miramax (perhaps in imitation of the Lord of the Rings success of releasing on the installment plan), and may prove Tarantino's crowning achievement when it is reassembled as a single work. And I say this as a person who was in the middle of film school when a "little indie" movie came out that shook the film world: Pulp Fiction. I saw the film with another student with whom I was editing someone else's film. Our little project had been set up as a postmodern, non-linear film, but it was falling apart at the seams and we were desperately trying to save it. Seeing Tarantino pull the same thing off with such brilliance made me as jealous as Salieri in Amadeus. Pulp Fiction was not only a great movie, it made Tarantino wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but, perhaps more to his purpose as a film geek with an agenda, made him more famous than the previous two generations' household-name directors, Hitchcock and Spielberg, combined. People had to listen to him, and he rarely stopped talking. Innumerable appearances on the talk shows confirmed my feelings toward this little man farting at parties, this boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy, this upstart crow.

Kill Bill takes place in what Tarantino calls his movie-movie universe as do two other films he wrote, but that were shot by other directors, Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn. His other movies take place in a movie universe, but the movie-movie universe is one step even further removed from reality. When his characters in his regular movie-universe movies watch a movie, these are the movies they watch: the movie-movies.

We may fear to admit the power movies have over our lives. Tarantino is an extreme example. His education was ultimately at VCR Night School (which became Laserdisc College, and is now DVD University). Pop culture references abound in his films, and he is at the cusp of a generation that will grow up with movies as readily available as only books used to be. My five-year-old son asked if he could watch a movie the other morning (a request that would have been ridiculous when I was five and all we had were three networks on an old RCA TV with rabbit ear antennas!). Well, I had to say no: he was leaving for school in a few minutes. Instead of grunting in anger as he usually does, he stared at the ceiling, deep in thought, with a smile on his face. Then he said, "I'm watching all my favorite movies in my head; all mixed up together!" It's exactly this playfulness with story that is engaging and even endearing about watching a Tarantino movie, especially one like Kill Bill, where you get the sense that Tarantino is watching all his favorite movies all mixed up together. And it works. He takes the old plots and stories that have become tired and reinvents them with a depth of subtle characterization and sublimity of dialogue that reminds people … well, of Shakespeare.

Bruce Willis took a major pay cut to play Butch in Pulp Fiction, because the script was "like Shakespeare." Tarantino said that the role of Jules in the same film, written especially for Samuel L. Jackson, would be where Jackson could express "this Richard III side of himself that he has." An improv troupe in New Zealand performs "Pulp William," a scenario where William Shakespeare returns from the dead as a zombie and meets Tarantino in a bar. They find that they have a lot in common. Critics have compared Tarantino's use of the "n" word and exploitation of black culture to the equally-disturbing-to-political-correctness portrayals of Shylock and Othello; they have heard echoes of the Bard in Tarantino's theatricality and emphasis on characters that are playing roles within their own stories. Alexander Walker compared the end of Reservoir Dogs, where everybody dies, to that of a "Jacobean revenge drama." Adrian Noble thanked Tarantino "for the revival of Shakespearean cinema."

David Carradine, who plays Bill in Kill Bill, and who is Tarantino's latest career resurrection, in an interview for The Making of Kill Bill Vol. 2, says "I've done eleven Shakespearean plays and that guy can write pretty good too, but Quentin is at the top of the heap for me." Tarantino has even compared Kill Bill to Hamlet, most obviously because of the revenge theme, but perhaps in more ways than just this one. It may be troublesome to hear a junior high school dropout referencing Shakespeare, but Tarantino's self-education may mean that he's "read" Hamlet (via Olivier, Gibson, Branagh, Hawke, et al.) more times than many English majors. And the comparison between Beatrix and Hamlet may be apt in another way: Hamlet has been played not infrequently by females, most famously by Sandra Bernhardt. With Kill Bill's Beatrix, Tarantino has taken this to its logical extreme. In addition to Tarantino's Hamlet reference, Tarantino also references Shakespeare in Volume 1 of Kill Bill, with regard to O-Ren Ishii's godfather-like dominance of Japan's mafia.

Lastly, as a struggling young actor, Tarantino chose to put films on his resume that he had never acted in, but he chose obscure films by great directors, figuring casting agents would never have the time to confirm his claim while being impressed by the famous director. One of Tarantino's favorite directors is Jean Luc Godard (Tarantino's production company, A Band Apart, is named after Godard's film Bande À Part). He credited himself for playing a part that he never played in the film Godard made in 1987. That film was King Lear.

Is it legitimate to compare Tarantino to Shakespeare? The reverse has been done, by the Reduced Shakespeare Company for one, in their stage act and filmed version of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)," they summarize Titus Andronicus, a play about dismemberment and cannibalism in five bloody minutes. After, one of the players asks pardon if anyone in their audience was offended. As he puts it apologetically: "Shakespeare as a young writer seems to have gone through a brief Quentin Tarantino phase!"

One key to reading Tarantino is to note how he mixes Brechtian distancing with a postmodern sense of life as an ironic, self-reflexive game. For example, Beatrix's name was not revealed in the soundtrack of the first film, but instead was electronically "bleeped" out, as though it were an obscenity. She was merely called "The Bride" or by her code name "Black Mamba." Her Christian name is only revealed when we learn she is pregnant, and she decides to leave her life of crime, and change her name. Beatrix's name suggests the Beatrice of Dante's vision of love, combined with "dominatrix," dressed in leather, dealing out pain in the name of another kind of love. Her character's last name is "Kiddo," a term of endearment and a joke at the same time.

The title character Bill, who is heard but not seen until Volume 2, is also a Vice character, but far more on the Iago side of the spectrum. Bill is played by American martial arts movie legend, David Carradine (he played Caine in "Kung Fu" - Jules from Pulp Fiction's imaginative spiritual example). The word itself, "bill," in addition to being a simple poetic rhyme for a catchy title, refers to many other things that Beatrix wants to kill. A dictionary will tell you that the word can relate to the economics of debt: Bill and the other assassins owe Beatrix their very lives. In theatrical terms, a "bill" is also the list of scenes in a play. And, as usual, Tarantino not only stops the flow of the movie to give us a "bill" of chapters, but jumbles them up in time for optimal dramatic effect. Top "billing" refers to the primary actor in a drama. Beatrix also wants to "kill" Bill's position as leader of the team of assassins, as well as his position as father of their child. She wants top billing; and she steals the show. A "bill" can become a law, but the character Bill is a law unto himself. This is a bill that must be vetoed. And, finally, just to tie it in to the morality plays, a "bill" in Old English was a combat weapon, much like a spear that was converted from a pruning hook as agrarian England turned imperial in Elizabethan times. Perhaps "Bill" is even a reference to Shakespeare himself. Did Tarantino intend this multiple entendre in his title? Probably not, but let's not forget how his masterwork Pulp Fiction began: with a dictionary entry.

What's in a name? As Butch puts it in Pulp Fiction after learning what his cab driver's name means in Spanish, "I'm an American; our names don't mean shit," or as Shakespeare put it "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Yet Shakespeare seems to have chosen his names with great care, and even punned on his own name (both first and last), especially in his sonnets. "Quentin Tarantino" is also a name that had some thought put into it. Tarantino chose the last name of his biological father rather than his adoptive father. His mother named him Quentin partially after Quint Asper, the Gunsmoke character played by Burt Reynolds, but also partially after the two Quentins from William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury (a title cribbed from -- that's right -- Shakespeare, but one that also ironically summarizes the director's work as well). In Faulkner's novel, one Quentin is a male, one Quentin is a female. This androgyny of naming might show itself most in Kill Bill, where the female kicks ass and kills scores of foes as the male cuts the crust off his daughter's sandwich.

So how does our faith fit into all this? Where is the morality of this pomo morality play? What does the Vice character give us in this revenge tale? Is God even involved in this film? In volume 1 of Kill Bill, when Beatrix wakes from the coma that Bill induced by shooting her in the head during her wedding dress-rehearsal; when she realizes all her friends and the man she intended to marry were dead; when she realizes that the peaceful life she had set up for herself had been ripped away from her; when she thinks that her baby by Bill is also dead, she declares with the authority of an Old Testament prophet: "When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge, it seems proof like no other, that, not only God exists -- you're doing his will."

Beatrix is no Mother Theresa, that's for sure. She isn't even a female Hamlet, really: she's more like the yin to Charles Bronson's yang, and with a kung-fu grip no less; a femme fatale who goes first maternal and then postal, enacting all the cursing psalms upon her enemies one-by-one until, in the end, she does kill Bill . But, unlike most action movies, Kill Bill ends not with a bang, but a whisper. Beatrix strikes Bill in the chest with an ancient Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, learned from her cruel master, Pei Mei, played by Chinese martial arts movie legend, Gordon Liu.

How can we condone this as people of faith? What do we have to learn from a director who has said "Movies are my religion and God is my patron"? Then again, do we have a right to cast stones being people of a Book that contains violence which, if depicted in full, would be just as disturbing as any of Tarantino's movies, if not more so? Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is a case in point. The movie cannot be ignored, if only because it represents one of the foremost cultural events to unite Protestants and Catholics in centuries. But Tarantino, as always, has his own take on Gibson's movie:

I loved it. I'll tell you why. I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies - as far as telling a story via pictures. So much so that when I was watching this movie, I turned to a friend and said, "This is such a Herculean leap of Mel Gibson's talent. I think divine intervention might be part of it." I cannot believe that Mel Gibson directed it. Not personally Mel Gibson - I mean, "Braveheart" was great. I mean, I can't believe any actor made that movie. This is like the most visual movie by an actor since Charles Laughton made "The Night of the Hunter". No, this is 15 times more visual than that. It has the power of a silent movie. And I was amazed by the fact that it was able to mix all these different tones. At first, this is going to be the most realistic version of the Jesus story - you have to decipher the Latin and Aramaic. Then it throws that away at a certain point and gives you this grandiose religious image. Goddamn, that's good direction! It is pretty violent, I must say. At a certain point, it was like a Takashi Miike film. It got so fucked up it was funny. At one point, my friend and I, we just started laughing. I was into the seriousness of the story, of course, but in the crucifixion scene, when they turned the cross over, you had to laugh.

Not exactly Billy Graham's perspective, but maybe closer to what many non-Christians were thinking when they saw it.

Speaking of filming the Bible, Tarantino gave the following interview while filming Kill Bill in China (the Chinese journalist's loose grasp of English has been retained):

One last question: if asking you to make a movie based on the Bible, what would the movie be?
(Surprise) Interesting, interesting. I ... eh ... of course it won't be the whole Bible. I will choose a part of it. Maybe ... eh ... let me think ... I will come out an interesting idea. I will choose the part with the forbidden fruit. Let's call it EVE AND THE SNAKE. It's not a bad thing for Eve and Adam to taste the forbidden fruit. On the contrary, it's a good thing. The tree filled with forbidden fruits is the tree of knowledge. If they didn't taste the forbidden fruit, our life today would not be so colorful, so enjoyable. Maybe live like animals, see the rabbits in the yard? (Ha ... Ha ...)
I see.
Just like them. The tree bore the fruits of freedom and the snake gave the fruit to them. He was a messenger of freedom and Adam (translator's note: should be Eve) was a hero.
Who would play Eve?
... I don't have an answer yet. (Ha ... Ha ...) Let Uma try? (Ha ... Ha ...)
Who would play the snake?
Let me give it a shot? (Ha ... Ha ...)

What about Tarantino's faith? Despite his Italian Christian name and the unending comparisons to Scorsese, Tarantino is no Catholic. His mother is, though (Shakespeare's parents were also Catholic, in Protestant England, although his own denominational allegiance is uncertain). Tarantino's mother encouraged him to find a church he liked when he was younger, but, although he bounced from church to church each Sunday, he never found a home. He briefly attended the strict Hawthorne Christian School (he even had to wear a uniform), but it was his most miserable educational experience.

All Tarantino has said about his faith is: "I'm not going to tell you how I believe in God, but I do believe in God." Unlike, say, Scorsese (and myself, by the way) Tarantino was never conflicted between a life making films and a life of professional faith (the priesthood for Scorsese, divinity school for me). Making movies is Tarantino's religion, not his job. Movies are his vocation in the deepest sense of that word; his calling. Tarantino's church is the multiplex; his Notre Dame is the Cinerama Dome.

The closest Tarantino has come to depicting an overtly religious character in one of his films was, ironically, in his zombie/vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez, who also directed Sin City. Harvey Keitel plays Jacob, a preacher who has lost his faith after the senseless death of his wife. Although this part of the story is subsumed in the subtext of the film, Jacob has one moment where he explains to his daughter:

          JACOB
Every person who chooses
the service of God as their life's
work has something in common. I
don't care if you're a preacher, a
priest, a nun, a rabbi or a
Buddhist monk. Many, many times
during your life you'll look at
your reflection in the mirror and
ask yourself, am I a fool? We've
all done it. I'm not going through
a lapse. What I've experienced is
closer to awakening. I'm not
trying to shake your faith. I've
just decided not to devote my life
to God anymore.

Later George Clooney's character, Seth, has an epiphany of his own and challenges Jacob's doubt:

          SETH
I know why you lost your faith.
How could true holiness exist if
your wife can be taken away from
you and your children? Now, I
always said God can kiss my fuckin'
ass. Well, I changed my lifetime
tune about thirty minutes ago
'cause I know, without a doubt,
what's out there trying to get in
here is pure evil straight from
hell. And if there is a hell, and
those monsters are from it, there's
got to be a heaven. Now which are
you, a faithless preacher or a
mean, motherfuckin' servant of God?

Jacob has to laugh at that. So does everybody else. Jacob sticks out his hand and shakes Seth's.

          JACOB
I'm a mean, mmmmmmmmm servant
of God.

Interestingly, in the original script, as Jacob holds off the vampires with a metal pipe and a shotgun held together in the shape of a cross, he quotes the Ezekiel passage that eventually went to Tarantino's other saint, Jules. The use of the Bible passage before killing originally came from a Japanese TV series of the '70s, Shadow Warriors, starring Japanese martial arts movie legend, Sonny Chiba, who plays sword smith Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill .

So we return to the question: how can we as people of faith in a God of love cheer Beatrix on in her murderous quest? Isn't revenge the Lord's? Didn't he sayeth so Himself? Didn't Jesus rescind an eye for an eye? It would all have been so much easier if she had known her daughter was alive as she was taking revenge. Then she would be the shepherd, out to find the lost sheep. But no, she is avenging the death of her fiancée, her friends and, especially, her daughter. The issue is far from black-and-white. As Bill's low-life brother Budd (played with a grim nihilism by Michael Madsen) puts it, "That woman deserves her revenge... and we deserve to die…. Ha! But then again, so does she." And she nearly does. She is shot with rock salt, buried alive, and, as James Christopher put it, "takes more hits than Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ."