Pop Culture Tuesdays III

Part of my love of Pop culture is its ability to take another culture or element from High culture and use this element for its own purposes or adjust it to 'the way it should be'. This element goes through several layers of filtering/translating and by the end of the process the meaning of the element in the new culture may be totally different from its meaning in the original culture.

Yet it is not just elements of a culture that can become filtered, it can be an entire culture.

"Kill Bill" is one of my favorite movies. Partly because it's intensely watchable, but also because it is truly a case study in Pop Culture. I'm still discovering the references found throughout the movie, from the cinematography, to the lines, to the music. And in a step in Pop Culture evolution that really turns me on, Lady Gaga's music video "Telephone" references "Kill Bill" on several occasions, bringing the cycle full circle and putting "Kill Bill" in the same category of the films it referenced. God that's sexy.

Anyway "Kill Bill" also, I believe, is/was critical in subtly bringing Japanese culture into mainstream American culture. The Japanese culture in the film has been filtered and fitted as the purposes of Pop Culture required and the result was not really Japanese culture represented, but Quentin Tarentino's version of Japanese culture. It resembles the original, but it is also something completely unique. It is rooted in Japanese culture, but stylistically very Quentin Tarentino, and this melting pot to create something original-but-not is distinctly Pop Culture.

And for that, "Kill Bill", its interpretation of Japanese culture, and its role in propagating Japanese culture without the public really realizing it (aka propagating Japanese "soft power" for all you PoliSci/Sociology scholars out there), earns a spot in Pop Culture Tuesdays:




And this entrance is probably one of the best in movie history:



Seriously. Pure Sex.