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For Whom the Bells Toll

We’ll stop here, on the reverse image of the woman shooting and the man hitting the ground. As we’ve seen, “Bang Bang” itself has gotten a lot of pop mileage, often moving in startling directions. Covers by Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Audio Bullys, the Raconteurs, Isobel Campbell, and Lady Gaga show how far the song can go. 

But no one gets it as right as Quentin Tarantino did in Kill Bill. His use of Nancy Sinatra’s cover introduced the song to a whole new set of fans and, once again, made it wildly popular. As most know, the film tells the story of a woman known only as The Bride, a member of a martial-arts female assassination squad (the Deadly Vipers), who gets pregnant by the brutal squad leader (Bill) and then tries to leave the squad to marry another man, one who can give her and her unborn child a normal life. She’s doomed. The Deadly Vipers crash the wedding, killing everyone but The Bride, who they beat and leave for Bill. He shoots her. Using “Bang Bang” to open the film, Tarantino gets right to the point of the song, making any coded messages graphically explicit. (If you haven’t seen it, you might want to be warned that the clip includes a close-up image of The Bride being shot):

What does it say about me that I first saw this, my heart soared: it was so right! There is no mistaking it here: this song is about a man shooting a woman down and calling it love. Via his visual narrative, Tarantino also homed in on the only lines in “Bang Bang” that are even somewhat complicated, those two lines about those ringing bells:

Music played and people sang,
Just for me the church bells rang.

Are these wedding bells playing for a couple? Yes. Or are these funeral bells playing for a dead woman? Yes. Your wedding, your funeral. It was all right there on the screen.

Tarantino gets it right, too, when he illustrates the cultural twists by which “Bang Bang” also becomes a clarion call for female power. In Kill Bill “bang bang” is the awful sound of a woman being shot, but it also becomes the sound of return fire – a frenzied stream of female violence in the name not only of justice but of seething, murderous revenge. The Bride herself explains it in the intro to Kill Bill: Volume 2 (this video clip also contains the image of The Bride being shot):

The Bride [to the viewers]: Looked dead, didn’t I? Well I wasn’t. But it wasn’t from lack of trying, I can tell you that. Actually, Bill’s last bullet put me in a coma. A coma I was to lie in for four years. When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a ‘roaring rampage of revenge.’ I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I’ve killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I’m driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill.

And she does. In hand-to-hand combat, using a death punch called the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. (Someone get this girl a green beret.)

Bang, bang, you’re dead. The bells toll for thee, Bill.