If I’d had to make a list of impossible things that could never happen, Tarantino indulging in full-tilt, "Grand Theft Auto"-levels of misogyny would have been right at the top of the list. Even working within traditionally masculine genres—the war movie, the spaghetti Western, the gangster pic, the kung-fu flick—he has crafted women characters who feel as cunning and nuanced, as fiercely intelligent and unabashedly unlikeable, and truly as iconic, as the male standard-bearers of those movies. Uma Thurman’s inscrutably cool and charismatic Mia Wallace appears on the posters for "Pulp Fiction". Mia’s black bob, air-drawn square (as in “C’mon, daddio, don’t be a square”) and Fox Force Five joke are as integral to the film as Vincent Vega’s black suits and Jules Winfield’s Ezekiel 25:17. And there is a good reason why Tarantino’s adaptation of the pulpy crime novel "Rum Punch" became "Jackie Brown": When all too many filmmakers believe that any actress over forty can only be the mother of the bride or the sad yet knowing older friend, he gave Pam Grier the chance to play earthy and sexy and smart, to be daring and ruthless and, in the end, triumphant. (Ironically, the casting of 53-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh in "The Hateful Eight" was part of what initially excited me about that film).

Tarantino’s loving pastiche approach to cinema functions (at its best) as something more than mere tribute. It invites those of us who may have felt left out by particular genres or tropes to wade back in—the water’s fine, since now, finally, we can see our own reflections on the surface. Powerful, self-contained women who are still raw and flawed and bracingly, achingly human now share the silver and small screens—but I can still remember a time before Katniss Everdeen, Imperator Furiosa, and Jessica Jones (and I hope to live in a time when most of the major female protagonists aren’t white). As a teenager, I was an avid Buffy-watcher, but none of the other women action heroes I could recall truly inhabited their own narratives: Sarah Connor may have been fierce, but she was also a vessel for and player in her son, the great Chosen One’s, story. Ellen Ripley blessed us with “get away from her, you bitch!,” but her story is often about raw-knuckled survival, nothing more, nothing less. So, when I was a 21-year-old, sitting in the theater and looking up at Beatrix Kiddo as she cut through hordes of enemies with her Hanzo sword (while wearing Bruce Lee’s legendary yellow and black-striped track suit) I felt something truly transcendent: "Kill Bill" was one of the first movies I’d seen where a woman underwent the traditional hero’s journey. Beatrix’s journey isn’t entirely about dropping bodies, it is also about contemplating the nature and purpose of her own power; hers is a story equally of redemption and revenge. In obliterating the Deadly Vipers, she goes beyond being Bill’s woman, a woman who would jump motorcycle onto speeding train for him, and becomes her own woman.

One more subtle, though no less potent, aspect of the films is that the relationships between Beatrix and most of the vipers is as fraught and complex as her affair with Bill. Elle Driver may want Beatrix to “suffer to her last breath” but she still respects her as “the greatest warrior I’ve ever known.” The brief interactions between Beatrix and O-Ren tease a once-deeper friendship—they even finish each other’s sentences (and “silly rabbit, tricks are for kids,” feels very lived-in, like one of those random asides that somehow becomes a care-worn private joke). After "Kill Bill," I became a ride-or-die Tarantinoista, defending his work to my fellow feminists who dismissed Mia Wallace as a sad Cool Girl archetype, or claimed that "Death Proof" is just a bonanza of booty shorts and flip-flops. Mia is aware that she is a sad, Cool Girl archetype, and that, instead of becoming a mainstay on the silver screen, she exists as an object of obsession for her husband’s employees. There is genuine pathos in her limitations (Uma Thurman’s rueful line reading of “when you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle” always pierces me.) because there is a real woman, who had real ambitions to act, long before Vincent Vega ever worked up the nerve to ask her why Marcellus threw Tony Rocky Horror out of that window. And yes, "Death Proof" features a plethora of babes with shapely feet, but it also shows a surprising insight about certain terrors of being a woman: Stuntman Mike is every Nice Guy™ who expects to be invited home from the bar because he bought you a drink; Kim, the bad-ass stunt driver, admits to carrying a gun because she fears being raped if she goes into the laundry room at midnight; and Abernathy worries that, as a single mother, she’ll be seen as unhip, and left behind by her friends.