Beatrix Kiddo's Heroic Journey

Kill Bill is a fantastic, two part, martial arts movie written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. This movie has a character named Beatrix Kiddo who clearly follows many stages of the hero journey throughout the movie. One might not even consider her charater to be a hero but she follows the outline that Joseph Campbell created. Even though she has villainous traits, she is someone who I would consider to be more more of a hero. She shows her heroic traits in some of the stages in her journey.

The film, Kill Bill, focuses on the character Beatrix (Black Mamba) who was once apart of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. This group consisted of six members Beatrix, O-Ren, Vernita, Elle, Budd, and lastly Bill, the leader. They were all successful

The stages of separation began this journey. Beatrix's first step, the call to adventure, was the incident at the wedding chapel in Texas when the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad killed her whole wedding party and left her in a comatose state. When she woke up from the coma she realized her child was gone and assumed that her daughter had died. This infuriated Beatrix, and led her to start her journey to fulfill her vengeance. Beatrix was clearly motivated on revenge so there wasn’t a psychological component of the refusal of the call, but she did have a physical factor involved. This factor was that after her com\ma her legs wouldn't physically move. She sat in a stolen vehicle in the hospital parking lot for a few hours training her legs, feet, and toes to move until she was capable of walking again. In this story Beatrix gains supernatural aid from Pai Mei, and Hattori Hanzo. Pai Mei taught her the techniques that she used on this journey to save her own life and defeat her enemies. Hattori Hanzo crafted her a rare, priceless sword used to exact her vengeance. Beatrix crosses the first threshold when she travels to Tokyo to track down O-Ren, her first target, and kills her whole army, including the Crazy 88 and her

Beatrix enters the stage, the belly of the whale, when she finds O-Ren in the garden outside the restaurant and fights and completes her first kill. This can be considered the belly of the whale, because there was no going back for Beatrix after this event. After killing O-Ren she feels as if she must complete her list for the sake of the daughter they took from her. Beatrix comes across a few road of trials. One of the trials was killing the second name on her list, Vernita, while her daughter witnesses it. The second trial was when she was buried alive by Budd, and had to claw and dig herself out of her own grave. The third trial was when Beatrix comes across Elle fighting for her vengeance retrieving her sword. She is successful after plucking out Elle's other eye which leaves her blind. In this story, I believe the stage, meeting with the god or goddess, was early on when she received the one of a kind sword that Hanzo crafted for her. After creating this sword Hanzo stated “If on your journey you encounter god, god will be cut”. The stage of temptation doesn’t appear in this story because of her dedication to fulfill her vengeance in honor of her daughter. Beatrix finally goes to confront Bill which can be considered, the atonement with father stage. When she does this, she finds out that her daughter, Bb, is still alive and confronts Bill about it after putting Bb to bed. This is where