This week’s guest column is from Cerise editor and contributor Richie. His musings on film, film school, gaming, and life in the big city can be found at Crimitism.

I hadn’t heard of Lady Bullseye. This is par of the course for me, as somebody only dimly aware of what comics are, and whose sole exposure to Man Bullseye was watching the Daredevil movie on a hotel pay-per-view service. I had, however, heard of Lady Snowblood; the DVD’s been a ubiquitous presence in virtually every “Asian Cinema” aisle – even the ones that bother stocking genres other than martial arts – for the last five or so years, thanks in no small part to it being cited as the inspiration behind Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Since it would be quicker to list the major martial arts films that aren’t referenced, parodied or outright plagiarised in Kill Bill, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just marketing, but there turns out to be a hell of a lot more to Snowblood’s influence than “Yeah, woman with a sword, let’s do that”.

Snowblood’s out for revenge against a gang of criminals who have since gone their separate ways and re-integrated into society. She journeys across Japan, picking them off one by one – preceded by a crash zoom into her eyes as she recognises them, natch – while the audience learns about her history, motivation and training through flashbacks, before it all comes to a messy end in a snow-covered courtyard. But while Tarantino might have pilfered the basic outline, Lady Snowblood is the polar opposite of Kill Bill when it comes to tone.

What’s striking about Snowblood as a character, and what still manages to retain its power three decades after the fact, is that when she says that revenge is all that keeps her going, she bloody well means it. Here it’s not just an industry standard motivation, nor is it there to make her body count seem morally justifiable; she’s an extension of her dead mother’s unfinished business, an avatar willed into being to settle a score, not a femme fatale with a haunted past or an ice queen who secretly craves a good deep-dicking. So, when I read that Lady Bullseye was apparently a crazy sexy Dragon Lady assassin who’d been a Yakuza sex slave before Man Bullseye inspired her to do something about it, I had to re-watch the movie to make sure we were thinking of the same character.

We were, sort of. Y’see, according to the Wikipedia – yeah, yeah, I know – Lady Snowblood’s manga incarnation, which predates the movies and therefore truer to the artist’s original creative vision SO THERE, is “a seductive and beautiful woman” who “often uses her sexual appeal as a weapon”. Tragically, this doesn’t mean her breasts are actually missiles, a la Mazinger Z. The synopsis is even less promising:

In chapter 4, Oyuki [Snowblood] is contracted to find blackmailer Genjirô. It concludes in a cliffhanger with Oyuki about to be raped by Genjirô. Picking up from the previous chapter, Oyuki escapes Genjirô clutches and deals a fatal blow to him. However before he dies she has intercrural sex with him, placing his penis between her thighs.

No, no, you’re right; I haven’t actually read the book in question, and for all I know it just sounds like every piece of misogynist fanservice ever written in the entire history of time. After all, one of the most commendable aspects of the film is that it depicts the abuse of women as abuse, rather than wallowing in misogyny under the guise of condemning it. That a samurai revenge film from thirty years ago manages to be significantly less exploitative than anything around now speaks volumes. It is, ironically, an excellent twenty first century samurai movie, which keeps the best parts of the genre while moving beyond the shitty sexual politics. It just happens to be from 1979.

But whether it’s the movie’s avenging angel or the manga’s sexy avenging angel, the connection between Lady Bullseye’s character outline and the source material seems… tenuous. Neither version of Lady Snowblood was “Tortured. Used. Broken”; she’s been a self-reliant survivor since childhood, refusing to yield regardless of what’s thrown at her. It’s what made the character – on film, at least – so hypnotic in the first place, and replacing her motivation to simply “rape made her go crazy” is equal parts crass and mystifying. Similarly, where previously violence and revenge had been part of her character since – quite literally – her moment of conception, Lady Bullseye apparently needs Man Bullseye to inspire her to fight back. Eh?

Yeah, I know they aren’t supposed to be the same character. Question is, though, where was the inspiration drawn from? Does a crazy sexy ninja broad whose motivations all revolve around men actually need to be inspired in the first place?

Or was the inspiration that of the writer: “Yeah, woman with a sword, let’s do that”.

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