Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Killer Psyche

ad-free right now.

Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

A listener note, this episode contains adult content

and is not suitable for everyone.

Please be advised.

Thank you. suitable for everyone. Please be advised. In Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, a woman called The Bride, walked the earth with a list of names

and a samurai sword.

She did not kill out of necessity or for money, or even for revenge in the ordinary sense

of the word.

She killed because she had decided to.

Each murder was choreographed, stylized, set to music.

The film treated her violence as art.

The audience cheered her on.

That is the trick of cinema to take a woman who hunts and stabs and decapitates,

and to make us forget for two hours that what we are watching is the destruction of human beings.

The bride was a fantasy, a revenge fantasy made beautiful by camera angles and yellow track suits and, well, a killer soundtrack.

And it is one of the oldest tricks in storytelling.

We have always had trouble seeing female violence

as real violence. We give it costumes. We give it justification. We give it style. When a woman

kills on screen, the camera tends to slow down and linger, even admiring the crime. We tell ourselves a story about the woman

who does this kind of thing, and the story almost always involves a long, terrible reason,

...