Quick Thoughts on 'Bite of the Tail'

Bite Of The Tail by Song E. Kim

Bite of the Tail by Song E. Kim is a beautiful piece of work that seems to have many interpretations for different people. The short film uses a snake as a symbol for fertility and rebirth. In the film, the woman constantly complains of a stomach problem that no one seems to care about. The viewers see a doctor who is doodling and shaking his leg in boredom to the questions and complaints of the woman’s problem. What I got from the film was that her reluctance to have a child was the entire problem. During her endoscopy, we actually see a snake entering her mouth representing that she would soon be or already is pregnant. Another scene shows that the snake has entered the kitchen but the woman shoos it away with the reluctance to become pregnant. The last scene of the film shows the man hunting down the snake to find two, in fact, biting each other by the tail, this entails that the woman is now pregnant. This circular symbol of the snake biting each other is called Ouroboros. It is the cycle of eternal return; something of this idea of reincarnation. In the film, this kind of means that a soul or life has reincarnated or returned into the woman and she is finally pregnant. I really enjoyed seeing the splashes of the colour red–strawberries, tongue, intestines etc–throughout the mostly black and white animation.