Bloody hypocrisy

A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately stabs him in the stomach and, as his blood gurgles out, she says triumphantly, ‘How does that feel? Do you still want to penetrate me now?’ He falls off the bar stool, dead — and the audience laughs. A voiceover from a third character confirms that the scene is indeed supposed to be funny, and the murder cool, because the young man is hideous and stupid while the girl is utterly vicious.

This scene is but a few minutes in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume I, a two-hour orgy of violence in which evil is exalted as alternately admirable, erotic or funny.