A couple of verdicts are in on my critique of Ron Rosenbaum’s anti-Kill Bill/Sin City piece: Jog liked it; J.W. didn’t, mainly because he thinks I basically made up an anti-white bias on Rosenbaum’s part.
For the record, I totally knew I was breakdancing on the fine line between inference and invention with regards to the racial subtext of Rosenbaum’s piece, especially when I wrote the bit about Rodriguez, Avilan, Wo-Ping, Chiba, and Liu. (The gender of Avilan, and of Uma Thurman, was at least as important a factor in my writing that section as the racial angle.)
The real meat of my argument had nothing to do with race–it was more a question of gender and class, specifically that subset of both known as fanboydom. I lumped the racial stuff in there for good measure more because fanboydom is so overwhelmingly white rather than anything specific that Rosenbaum said, as I tried (and seem to have failed) to clarify when I said “to be fair, Rosenbaum doesn’t come right out and play the race card.” (Except for the Orientalism bit, which was just silly, since the Pai Mei character he’s attacking appeared almost exactly as-is in several Asian-made flicks. From this I deduced that it Rosenbaum thought it was okay for them (assuming he knew they existed, which, if he had that Annotated Kill Bill book he kept talking about, he would) but not for Tarantino.) Rosenbaum does come right and say that the maleness of the filmmakers behind KB and SC, and also of their fans, is a drawback, so I think it’s safe to say he’s not above deploying that kind of argumentation.
What I’m trying to say is that the main thing really is the anti-male, anti-fanboy bias, which I hope J.W. addresses at some point because I’m curious to hear his take on it. The white stuff is just the vanilla icing on the cake. Anyway, I recommend you read J.W.’s piece in its entirety, not just to get an opposing take on the issues I brought up but to hear of further problems with Rosenbaum’s attempted take-down (eg. the fact that Sin City really isn’t all that referential, or at least not in the way that Kill Bill is; and that the “this sucks/this rocks” comparison Rosenbaum tries to set up with something he calls the “L.A. Collage School” is slapdash and arbitrary).
(As for the “self-evident brilliance of the Wu Tang Clan” with which J.W. so passionately disagrees, well, it’s self-evident on my blog, at least. 🙂 )
UPDATE: I had a hunch the illustrious Steven Berg would weigh in on the anti-KB side, but I was surprised to see that he, too, thought (as he put it) “the bulk of Sean