[COLUMN] Kill Bill and the Fate of the 1990s Indie Revolution | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This weekend sees the release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, an omnibus movie combining Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 into a single feature, with a little Fortnite thrown in for flavor. It seems like as good an opportunity as any to take a look back at the weird moment in Hollywood history that produced the two Kill Bill films, which signaled a shift in the direction of Tarantino’s career.

Tarantino established himself as one of “the rebels on the backlot” or “the Sundance Kids”, one of the wave of confrontational independent-minded young filmmakers of the 1990s with gritty indies like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, following them with Jackie Brown. These were heightened and pulpy genre features, with a very distinct style and tone. However, they were also set in a recognizable contemporary Los Angeles, populated by at least some recognizable people.

Kill Bill represents something of a pivot point in Tarantino’s filmography. It found the director pushing away from the real world and into more overtly constructed universes with exaggerated genre exercises like Death Proof, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. Even when Tarantino returned to Los Angeles in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, it was a reconstructed dream of the city’s past, an alternate universe fairy tale more memory than history.

This is not to dismiss Tarantino’s subsequent work. His later films are just as interesting and confrontational in their own way, saying just as much about the wider culture. Still, Kill Bill seems to slice through Tarantino’s filmography like a sword crafted by Hattori Hanzō (Sonny Chiba). Something happened in the gap between the release of Jackie Brown in 1997 and that of Kill Bill in 2003, which is the longest gap between films in Tarantino’s career – at least until today.

Tarantino has claimed that one of the reasons that he took so long to make Kill Bill was because he was waiting for his star, Uma Thurman, to be ready. “I knew how good she was going to be in this movie, so we waited,” he boasted in the press. That is certainly justifiable, but it is also notable that Tarantino was uncharacteristically quiet in those six years. He didn’t do any of his television directing, like he did with E.R. before and CSI after. He didn’t write any books as he would later.

Setting aside a memorable recurring role on the spy series Alias, Tarantino didn’t seem to be doing much. Tarantino was not the only breakout 1990s indie director to be in a similar position around the same time. Indeed, there is a really interesting recurring pattern among the filmmakers of Tarantino’s generation. Many of them released a movie in 1999, following it quite quickly with another small movie in 2002, before taking an extended break.

After directing Being John Malkovich in 1999 and Adaptation in 2002, Spike Jonze took seven years to return with Where the Wild Things Are. David Fincher jumped from Fight Club in 1999 to Panic Room in 2002 and then took five years to make Zodiac. Paul Thomas Anderson released Magnolia in 1999, followed it with his shortest and smallest film to date, Punch-Drunk Love, in 2002, before taking five years to do things like shadow Robert Altman before returning with There Will Be Blood.

Even the directors who did not technically take a break entered extended fallow periods. Between the release of O Brother Where Art Thou? in 2000 and No Country for Old Men in 2007, the Coen Brothers directed the oft-overlooked black-and-white noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, two back-to-back work for hire gigs with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, along with two short films Tuileries and World Cinema.

In 2001, Steven Soderbergh took up two of the five Best Director nominations at the Academy Awards for directing Traffic and Erin Brockovich in the same year. That same year, he directed the remake of Ocean’s Eleven. However, in the years that followed, Soderbergh churned out a number of largely forgotten films like Full Frontal, Bubble and The Good German, alongside critical flops like Ocean’s Twelve and commercial misfires like his remake of Solaris.

Of course, this is hardly a scientific study. The dates do not always cleanly line up. It’s not as if Hollywood stopped making movies in the early to mid 2000s. Most obviously, Tarantino’s fallow period was coming to an end in 2003, while that was around the point that contemporaries like Anderson, the Coens, Soderbergh, Jonze and Fincher were only really starting to get a bit lost in the creative wilderness. Still, it’s enough of a trend to be noticeable.

It is notable that these directors emerged as part of a wave that seemed to crest in 1999, an annus mirabilis in the annals of cinema, a legendarily high watermark in the medium’s history that produced any number of classics: The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, The Insider and Eyes Wide Shut, without even listing aforementioned films like Fight Club, Magnolia and Being John Malkovich. It was a frankly incredible year for cinema, up there with 1939 or 1974.

While lightning might strike at random, that level of quality does not emerge in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a decade where the industry had cultivated and encouraged indie talent, broadening its horizons and extending a welcoming hand to the veterans of the independent cinema scene of the previous few years. It was a coronation for a generation of filmmakers. It was a great moment. Unfortunately, the thing about moments is that they end. There’s only one direction from a peak.

Discussions of the miracle of 1999 understandably focus on the year itself and the lead-in to it. It is harder to explain why that level of vision, ambition and quality was not maintained. What happened to those filmmakers? Why didn’t those directors continue to make films of similar quality into the new millennium? This is the gap. This is the space between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are, Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, Panic Room and Zodiac.

It is worth nothing that this does not need to be a tragic tale. Many of these directors lost in the wilderness returned with genuine masterpieces that could be counted among their best work. Just as Anderson’s Magnolia, Fincher’s Fight Club and Jonze’s Being John Malkovich contribute to the myth of 1999, it’s Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Fincher’s Zodiac and the Coens’ No Country for Old Men that make a solid case for 2007 as another of those magic movie years. However, some of the magic of that year seems to exist in contrast to the stretch of valley between those two peaks.

Just as the miracle of 1999 had been a result of larger market and systemic forces, the wilderness that followed was also a result of the machinations of bigger players. In short, Hollywood turned its back on the independent framework that had produced directors like Tarantino, Anderson, Soderbergh and the Coens. The landscape rearranged itself, making it infinitely harder to make those sorts of movies within existing frameworks.

The 2000s were an era of consolidation, beginning with AOL purchase of Time Warner in 2000 and continuing through to Comcast’s purchase of Universal and Disney’s purchase of Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Companies were getting bigger, and so needed to be both spending and earning more to justify their existence to parent corporations and shareholders. 1997 had seen a panic over ballooning blockbuster budgets, but the studios had no idea what was coming.

At the same time, the studios became more hostile to their internal independent divisions, the wings of their companies that made mid-budget fare. After years of refusing to kick “in the kind of marketing dollars that could make the good taste pay off as well as it might”, Paramount fired David Dinerstein and Ruth Vitale, the heads of its Paramount Classics division, in October 2005. By February 2008, following the failure of The Golden Compass, New Line Cinema was dead at Warners.

Disney had “all but abandoned” Touchstone Pictures, its label for adult-skewing mid-budget movies, by February 2009. Of course, the studio had already signaled its ambivalence towards movies for adults. In 1999, in the midst of that miracle year, Michael Eisner had blocked the release of Dogma, fearing controversies around the film might hurt park attendance. The previous year, Disney had buried Martin Scorsese’s Kundun to appease China, with Eisner calling the movie “a stupid mistake.”

The studio’s relationship with Miramax had also collapsed during the decade. In 2004, it hobbled the distribution of Fahrenheit 9/11. That same year, Bob Iger was trashing reports that Miramax was profitable in the press, and the companies agreed to part ways in March 2005. While nobody was particularly sad to bid farewell to Harvey Weinstein, this speaks more broadly to the realignment of the Hollywood landscape in the early years of the new millennium.

In this context, it is perhaps no surprise many of these filmmakers had to step away for a few years – whether voluntarily or as a result of the business realigning around them. It can certainly feel like this shift has taken its toll within the work. In the years since Kill Bill, Tarantino has retreated almost completely into what he calls “movie world.” This year, One Battle After Another became “Anderson’s first film to be set in contemporaneity since Punch-Drunk Love”, more than two decades prior.

With the exception of Burn After Reading, the Coens followed No Country For Old Men by retreating into oft-imagined pasts: the 1960s suburbia of A Serious Man and the folk scene of Inside Llewellyn Davis, the westerns of True Grit and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and the Golden Age Hollywood fantasy of Hail, Caesar! When the duo split, Ethan directed the contemporary-set Honey, Don’t!, but Joel disappeared into the abstract pseudo-history of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Then again, this was itself in line with larger trends in the industry, particularly the emergence of fantasy as a dominant cinematic form. The highest grossing films of 2001 were Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The following year, it was The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This was around the time that the superhero genre was beginning to take a central place in culture, typified by the Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man trilogies.

This is not to suggest that the biggest movies of the 1990s like Independence Day or Jurassic Park offered gritty realism, but the worldwide box office top ten for 1999 could include small budget films like The Sixth Sense alongside romantic comedies like Notting Hill or Runaway Bride and awards fare like American Beauty and The Green Mile. It’s next-to-impossible to imagine an end-of-year top ten that is that diverse in terms of scale, tone and genre in this day and age. Perhaps it makes sense this generation of filmmaker drifted into their own sort of fantasy worlds.

The re-release of Kill Bill, now including a completely unreal additional scene constructed in a virtual world, feels like a good opportunity to reflect on that, the strange lingering hangover of 1990s cinema. Perhaps Tarantino disappeared into an imaginary world long before he rendered it in Fortnite.