Inglourious Basterds.
Aug. 24th, 2009 20:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI went with my friend M (I have a lot of friends M) to see Quentin Tarantino's new movie "Inglourious Basterds" yesterday. Actually first we went to a brewpub in University City that was pretty damn good--a great selection of draught beers and good food, too, at reasonable prices. We saw the movie at The Bridge cinema, which is now the only theater I've encountered in this country with assigned seating. Funnily enough, unlike Japan, The Bridge has ushers to show you to your seat.
In poking around the Internet reading reviews and reactions, I've come across the phrase "counterfactual revenge fantasy," which seems to me to be a pretty pithy summation of the movie. Essentially, the movie posits a squadron of Jewish-American guerilla fighters, the eponymous Bastards of the title, who parachute into France under the leadership of their Gentile lieutenant Aldo Raine, whose assertions of "Indian blood" are behind his demand that each of his seven (later eight) subordinates bring him 100 Nazi scalps, as well as his nickname "Aldo the Apache." Clearly Tarantino isn't shy about playing to stereotypes--probably the biggest stereotyped character is actually Colonel Hans Landa, the Nazi officer known as "the Jewhunter" who is posted to France in 1941 and whom we meet in the act of exposing, and then massacring, a family of French Jewish dairy farmers, of whom only the daughter Shosanna escapes. Later, in occupied Paris in 1944, fate hands Shosanna the means to exact a mighty revenge indeed in the form of a chance encounter with a Nazi sniper turned movie star and the fact that she now owns and operates a cinema with her black projectionist lover, Marcel. Meanwhile, a British film critic and a German actress turned British spy are linking up with the Bastards to dynamite the hell out of said theater, since the premiere of Goebbel's new film "Nation's Pride," starring said sniper, will take place there, with all of the Nazi high command--including the Fuhrer--in attendance.
I actually think this is a better movie than "Kill Bill." It's (and this sounds odd) way more realist, or at least realistic, than "Kill Bill," particularly in its use and depictions of violence. Tarantino isn't afraid of violence, and oddly enough I like very much that he also isn't afraid to show his female characters both doing violence and having violence done to them, not in a victimizing or feminizing fashion but simply because they are violent people and people who live violently tend to die by violence. Tarantino is also both a masterful framer of shots and a director of actors (M and I agreed that there's more than a passing similarity to the works of Brian de Palma in Tarantino), and this film has the screwball elements toned way down, though never quite done away with--and indeed I think a lot of the film's problems result from Tarantino's inability to juggle all his tonal elements perfectly, to strike the right balance between sobriety and camp.
"Inglourious Basterds" is also, on one level, a dazzlingly romantic love letter to cinema itself--the movie critic lieutenant impersonating an SS Captain, the actress turned spy, the sniper turned actor, the Jewish refugee turned cinema owner and avenging Resistance fighter (the constant references to actual films and movie stars, and the constant in-movie movie references). Tarantino at one point includes a clip from Hitchcock's film that adapted Conrad's The Secret Agent (both movies, in the end, turn on the high flammability of nitrate film reels), and it's both an utterly perfect quotation and a brilliant, apt homage. In the final sequences, the glittering Nazis in the theater take pleasure in the scenes of people dying by violence, just as the audience in the theater is taking pleasure in the scenes of people dying by violence, which is a brilliant turning of the tables on we, the viewers, though Tarantino isn't quite slick enough to really seize that uncomfortable moment of reflected voyeurism--both audiences, the one on the screen and the one watching that one, are able to enjoy the violence because of their moral certainty that they're watching the bad guys get what they deserve. (And then we get to watch the bad guys burn to death in that same movie theater, thanks to the flammability of film, which is even more unsettling.) To my mind, this single-minded insistence on Tarantino's part that Nazis are bad is connected directly with Raine's habit of carving a swastika into the foreheads of the few Nazis the Basterds let go rather than slaughter; Raine avowedly hates the idea of people not being able to tell that former Nazis were formerly Nazis. Is it wrong to say that the scars are reminiscent of yellow stars?
Tarantino mostly evades the issues raised by the fact that his characters are not entirely stereotypical; is it okay to feel just a twinge of sympathy with the Germans who get shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the Nazi who is beaten to death with a baseball bat by the Basterds, or with the sniper-actor's discomfort at watching people cheer the recreation of his slaughtering people on celluloid? Or, for that matter, with the French dairy farmer whom Landa forces to reveal the Jewish family he's been sheltering, or with the collaborating French people who get shot for just trying to live their lives and being in the wrong place at the wrong time? I don't actually think Hollywood in general has a particularly good track record on these questions; either the Nazis are cartoon villains with delusions of eternal imperium, as in the Indiana Jones movies, or they're all victims of their own fascist government as in "The Reader," or we should sympathize with them even though they were raving fascist abominations because they tried to kill Hitler (completely ineptly and years too late) as in "Valkyrie." To some extent the question is unanswerable--but that's part of what makes it worth asking.
I've read people's comments saying that they think this movie comes dangerously close to promoting the kind of insidious anti-Semitism that posits that if the Jewish victims of the Holocaust had just been more...something, more American, more defiant, they would have been able to stand up against the Nazis instead of just being trundled on troop trains to their deaths. I think that concern is far more relevant to a movie like "Defiance" than it is to "Inglourious Basterds", which is pretty clearly disengaged with the realities of history from first to last. If anything, I think Tarantino's movie (since it doesn't really focus on the Holocaust; almost every scene takes place in occupied France, and we never see the Americans on their home ground), by valorizing the bastards of the title and their violent ways (and does that title refer to Raine's guerillas or to the Nazis themselves, or to the people driven to fight the Nazis generally?) un-victimizes the historical victims. In a way, Landa is the motivating spirit of the film (he tells Raine at the end that he's just doing a job that he's good at); Raine eventually comments that his work with Landa may be his masterpiece. In any case, it's a thought-provoking film, though I'm sure some people will be hugely insulted by all or parts of it; I certainly don't agree with David Denby that it's a shallow nihilist fantasy, because I think that just its subject matter elevates it into something mroe than nihilism and prevents it from being shallow a priori. Certainly a film about the realities of occupied France like "Army of Shadows" is leagues beyond "Inglourious Bastards," but I also think Tarantino's moral sensibilities (unlike, say, those of "Valkyrie" or "The Reader", both of which are loathsome in different ways) are in the right place.
In poking around the Internet reading reviews and reactions, I've come across the phrase "counterfactual revenge fantasy," which seems to me to be a pretty pithy summation of the movie. Essentially, the movie posits a squadron of Jewish-American guerilla fighters, the eponymous Bastards of the title, who parachute into France under the leadership of their Gentile lieutenant Aldo Raine, whose assertions of "Indian blood" are behind his demand that each of his seven (later eight) subordinates bring him 100 Nazi scalps, as well as his nickname "Aldo the Apache." Clearly Tarantino isn't shy about playing to stereotypes--probably the biggest stereotyped character is actually Colonel Hans Landa, the Nazi officer known as "the Jewhunter" who is posted to France in 1941 and whom we meet in the act of exposing, and then massacring, a family of French Jewish dairy farmers, of whom only the daughter Shosanna escapes. Later, in occupied Paris in 1944, fate hands Shosanna the means to exact a mighty revenge indeed in the form of a chance encounter with a Nazi sniper turned movie star and the fact that she now owns and operates a cinema with her black projectionist lover, Marcel. Meanwhile, a British film critic and a German actress turned British spy are linking up with the Bastards to dynamite the hell out of said theater, since the premiere of Goebbel's new film "Nation's Pride," starring said sniper, will take place there, with all of the Nazi high command--including the Fuhrer--in attendance.
I actually think this is a better movie than "Kill Bill." It's (and this sounds odd) way more realist, or at least realistic, than "Kill Bill," particularly in its use and depictions of violence. Tarantino isn't afraid of violence, and oddly enough I like very much that he also isn't afraid to show his female characters both doing violence and having violence done to them, not in a victimizing or feminizing fashion but simply because they are violent people and people who live violently tend to die by violence. Tarantino is also both a masterful framer of shots and a director of actors (M and I agreed that there's more than a passing similarity to the works of Brian de Palma in Tarantino), and this film has the screwball elements toned way down, though never quite done away with--and indeed I think a lot of the film's problems result from Tarantino's inability to juggle all his tonal elements perfectly, to strike the right balance between sobriety and camp.
"Inglourious Basterds" is also, on one level, a dazzlingly romantic love letter to cinema itself--the movie critic lieutenant impersonating an SS Captain, the actress turned spy, the sniper turned actor, the Jewish refugee turned cinema owner and avenging Resistance fighter (the constant references to actual films and movie stars, and the constant in-movie movie references). Tarantino at one point includes a clip from Hitchcock's film that adapted Conrad's The Secret Agent (both movies, in the end, turn on the high flammability of nitrate film reels), and it's both an utterly perfect quotation and a brilliant, apt homage. In the final sequences, the glittering Nazis in the theater take pleasure in the scenes of people dying by violence, just as the audience in the theater is taking pleasure in the scenes of people dying by violence, which is a brilliant turning of the tables on we, the viewers, though Tarantino isn't quite slick enough to really seize that uncomfortable moment of reflected voyeurism--both audiences, the one on the screen and the one watching that one, are able to enjoy the violence because of their moral certainty that they're watching the bad guys get what they deserve. (And then we get to watch the bad guys burn to death in that same movie theater, thanks to the flammability of film, which is even more unsettling.) To my mind, this single-minded insistence on Tarantino's part that Nazis are bad is connected directly with Raine's habit of carving a swastika into the foreheads of the few Nazis the Basterds let go rather than slaughter; Raine avowedly hates the idea of people not being able to tell that former Nazis were formerly Nazis. Is it wrong to say that the scars are reminiscent of yellow stars?
Tarantino mostly evades the issues raised by the fact that his characters are not entirely stereotypical; is it okay to feel just a twinge of sympathy with the Germans who get shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the Nazi who is beaten to death with a baseball bat by the Basterds, or with the sniper-actor's discomfort at watching people cheer the recreation of his slaughtering people on celluloid? Or, for that matter, with the French dairy farmer whom Landa forces to reveal the Jewish family he's been sheltering, or with the collaborating French people who get shot for just trying to live their lives and being in the wrong place at the wrong time? I don't actually think Hollywood in general has a particularly good track record on these questions; either the Nazis are cartoon villains with delusions of eternal imperium, as in the Indiana Jones movies, or they're all victims of their own fascist government as in "The Reader," or we should sympathize with them even though they were raving fascist abominations because they tried to kill Hitler (completely ineptly and years too late) as in "Valkyrie." To some extent the question is unanswerable--but that's part of what makes it worth asking.
I've read people's comments saying that they think this movie comes dangerously close to promoting the kind of insidious anti-Semitism that posits that if the Jewish victims of the Holocaust had just been more...something, more American, more defiant, they would have been able to stand up against the Nazis instead of just being trundled on troop trains to their deaths. I think that concern is far more relevant to a movie like "Defiance" than it is to "Inglourious Basterds", which is pretty clearly disengaged with the realities of history from first to last. If anything, I think Tarantino's movie (since it doesn't really focus on the Holocaust; almost every scene takes place in occupied France, and we never see the Americans on their home ground), by valorizing the bastards of the title and their violent ways (and does that title refer to Raine's guerillas or to the Nazis themselves, or to the people driven to fight the Nazis generally?) un-victimizes the historical victims. In a way, Landa is the motivating spirit of the film (he tells Raine at the end that he's just doing a job that he's good at); Raine eventually comments that his work with Landa may be his masterpiece. In any case, it's a thought-provoking film, though I'm sure some people will be hugely insulted by all or parts of it; I certainly don't agree with David Denby that it's a shallow nihilist fantasy, because I think that just its subject matter elevates it into something mroe than nihilism and prevents it from being shallow a priori. Certainly a film about the realities of occupied France like "Army of Shadows" is leagues beyond "Inglourious Bastards," but I also think Tarantino's moral sensibilities (unlike, say, those of "Valkyrie" or "The Reader", both of which are loathsome in different ways) are in the right place.