i barely even like movies, and i know i don’t speak the same language (images) as film folk, and i can’t read a director’s mind like i can read the mind of any writer, but when i hear the reactions to inglorious basterds, i get the sense that i didn’t see the same movie everyone else is talking about.
[i'm going to break with tradition here and do one of these "more" things, because this post is going to be all spoiler, and while i don't believe in the concept "spoiler" for fiction, because fiction is made of word, i know picture people get real worked up about it.]
so, yes, now i will write about inglorious basterds in front of people who have either seen the movie or won’t mind my telling them what happens in it. but first i will tell you how other people who have seen it are reacting as i understand it.
if you discount basic qualitative judgments — good/bad, like/dislike — there seem to be three reactions to the movie.
the first is fucking absurd: this is historically inaccurate. for the sake of idiots everywhere, i thank those who have bothered to point out that the leaders of the nazi party did not die all together in a paris movie theater at the hands of a jewish woman and some renegade jewish-american soldiers in 1944.
the second is a little trickier, and one that quentin tarantino has certainly left himself wide open to: that inglorious basterds is a mere homage to/pastiche of films that tarantino likes or has been influenced by, ie, that the film is all style no substance.
the third is frequently tied to the second: the movie is too damn violent (you know, like the kind of movie tarantino likes or has been influenced by).
let’s just discount the first point,okay? tarantino is not your history teacher. it is fine to revise history when you feel like it, even finer when you have a reason to.
the second is a kneejerk reaction, given tarantino’s oeuvre, and like i said, he’s brought it on himself to some degree, so you need to attack the reaction from two angles:
- it is also fine, in film or any art, to be all style and no substance if you want. i, personally, was not a huge fan of kill bill and totally disliked deathproof, but there’s something to be said for fragonard and watteau (and of course “all style no substance” is an empty formulation — any work that you try to describe that way says something about the culture, and your reaction says something about you, as mine says something about me). i admit, art for art’s sake is not my thing these days (though it was, once and for a long time), but it can still be done well, and when it is, it’s better than most art for something else’s sake.
- inglorious basterds is not “mere” pastiche or homage, and i would argue that it isn’t even primarily pastiche or homage. tarantino’s obsession with film has finally tapped into something very, very big through the mediation of his other obsession, the one i mentioned before — violence.
i don’t know if you like violence in art (i do!), but that’s not the point. the point is that he’s doing something here. i want to talk about it with reference to the two violent scenes that seem to be referred to most frequently, the infamous bat scene and the climactic scene in the theater.
the bat scene was disturbing for me, which didn’t keep it from being funny. as aldo raines interrogates a nazi officer in a secluded ravine, we hear an ominous sound coming from a nearby tunnel with references to a man known as the “bear jew.” the nazi officer refuses to divulge information, and the thing is, he is in the right from his perspective, and this creates a moral uncertainty. raines, who has no interest in moral uncertainty, calls in the bear jew. the bear jew is kind of ripped, but not really all that big, and he’s a spazz with a south boston accent who goes nuts on the nazi officers head with a louisville slugger. for me there’s a pleasing dissonance in all of the above (in fact, i really wish tarantino hadn’t had the officer refer to the basterds as “jew pigs” — i think that’s what it was — because it would have made the dissonance even greater).
do you notice i’m talking about this like it’s fiction rather than film (for ex, not pointing out that raines is played by brad pitt and the bear jew by eli roth)?
anyway, i haven’t heard anyone point out the key to this scene, which is when raines, when calling forth the bear jew, points out that the basterds enjoy watching him bash nazis with a bat because it’s as close as they can get to hollywood.
the theater scene is much more explicitly tied to movies, seeing as how it’s in a theater. the premise is that goebbels is premiering his new propaganda masterpiece — nation’s pride — in a paris theater, and all the nazi brass (including hitler) are there. like i said, historically inaccurate.
also there are the inglorious basterds and, unbeknownst to them, shoshanna, the theater owner, a french jew who has escaped the nazi “jew hunter,” who is also there. without getting into it too much, in the end shoshanna manages to burn the theater down while the remaining basterds shoot hitler in the face with a tommy gun in what is a visually stunning scene, while on screen, shoshanna repeats something to the effect of “this is the face of jewish revenge.”
what i don’t see anyone pointing out is that this last scene is organized around the premier, which seems to be the story of a nazi sniper who manages to kill more than three hundred ally soldiers, and the film is just the sniper killing soldiers, and in inglorious basterds, we get frequent close-up cuts to hitler’s grotesque face as he laughs even more grotesquely and tells goebbels that it’s his best work yet (and goebbel’s face suggests an almost sexual satisfaction in the compliment).
so my point.
more human than human
my point is a point i’ve made on here before, but not as directly. it has to do with the word “inhuman.” we want to believe that what the nazis did was inhuman, and tarantino seems to play this up by making hitler a pure raving caricature throughout the film. and yet, what humans do is human and there is no point denying it. hitler, in inglorious basterds, giggles at images of slaughter, and i giggled at images of hitler’s slaughter.
here’s the thing, though:
it isn’t an indictment. tarantino isn’t merely saying (and like i said, i can’t read a director’s mind like i can a writer’s, so when i say “saying” i mean what ends up said) hitler likes violence and so do you, though he may be saying that as well. he’s tapping in to something much more primal, which is a very human tendency to delight in revenge, retribution, what have you. inglorious basterds is, i think, the closest i’ve seen to a fulfillment of artaud’s concept of the theater as plague:
“…like the plague, the theater has been created to drain abscesses collectively.”
(and it’s worth pointing out, i think, that artaud’s great spectacle — never staged — was meant to represent an american genocide.)
also, this movie is especially timely because it is the perfect antidote to the feel-good (and fucking heinous) holocaust genre that has sprung up in the last decade or so (life is beautiful, everything is illuminated, etc.). likewise the “there must have been a reason that is a reason other than humans can be shitbags, like, for example, they are just artists who were never nurtured properly and express themselves in a healthy way” genre (max).
finally, on a stylistic level, why is nobody pointing out what a great job tarantino does of mashing together the american-style WWII epic with French New Wave?
What I find equally worth noting is that Tarantino, more than anyone else I can think of outside of the abstract concept of “writing poetry” has spawned more bad art than anyone else by managing to make a world out of influences that seems so easy and tangible that any 20 year-old with a DV camera, a ziploc bag, and an ethnic friend thinks he can replicate it.
no doubt. and like i said, tarantino gets no passes from me. just keep in mind the (very well put) qualifiers you used:
“a DV camera, a ziploc bag, and an ethnic friend”
i think plenty of other folks have spawned as much bad art, since, for writers (i know you know this), your qualifiers could be (and always have been) boiled down to:
“a pen and a piece of paper”
we’re getting to the point where every “art form” will be accessible to everyone. well and good. i hope to see new things come from all these possibilities. but i tend to think it’s a plus that tarantino absorbed enough of his medium to be able to build on it like i see him doing in …basterds, even if he sometimes uses his powers for evil (mediocrity or the suborning thereof).
of course, i’m also open to the possibility that i’m reading this movie wrong, since i know you could totally school me on film.
I will say first, that I agree with how you read the film. (I will go on to say that I watch films the way I read books, so you’re not alone in that. Unfortunately, my “read the whole book in one sitting” process, perfected in childhood, is more difficult these days.)
What I was saying, or trying to say, is that that thing that I admire and find most frustrating in Tarantino’s work is that which I admire (and find most frustrating) in a lot of fairly contemporary art: the way with which influence is addressed. The cleverest (at their best, for the time being) can form a world out of ideas they’ve borrowed and somehow come up with something that’s wildly itself, despite the homage(s). It’s not as though this is new. (See Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, for instance, complete with Samuel Fuller. Or Baby Nostradamus Shandy for that matter.) Nor are the the differences between “homage” and “in the style of” and “lazy mimeograph,” but QT’s facility (and often brilliance) with homage has led to a kind of laziness that I’ve come to dread so much that I had, until watching the movie in question, forgotten I could even LIKE a Tarantino film. Which is funny, since I’ve enjoyed all of them. Immensely.
At this point in time and technology with all that is available to pretty much anyone, it’s impossible to deny influence, but what one does and is capable of doing with them are strange beasts that far fewer can master.
full agreement with both of your comments. i guess what i was trying to spin off from in my response to the first one was the way i’ve been trying to negotiate the same problem you’re describing, but i think your baby nostradamus shandy formulation illustrates it better than i was able to, at least for folks who’ve read both of the books you’re referencing. it’s one of the reasons i wanted to teach tristram shandy (and gargantua and pantagruel and don quixote and candide, etc) alongside, for ex, jane austen — to show that books like plascencia’s aren’t sui generis or an aberration but part of a tradition. to bring it back to film, i want to fault tarantino for shit he didn’t even make but influenced, like 2 days in the valley (and i do, to some extent) or, i don’t know, boondock saints?, but the best i can do is to point out where artists fit relationally as i see it in hopes folks will see how to build on a foundation they’ve already got. tarantino makes it tough, i think because he’s internalized the history but is still stuck in a kind of low-grade irony (as opposed to, you know, the premium irony?) which he sometimes transcends as if by accident.