Basterds

I saw Inglourious Basterds, hesitated, wrote a review, saw it again. Hesitated. This is really and truly a controversial film, but not (only) because it is about Nazis and Jews. It’s controversial because it makes us question things that reveal our inner critic, shows us what kind of watchers we are, what we value in art, what we think an artist’s responsibilities are – or are not.

So many essays and responses have already surfaced online for this film that I find it difficult to add to the mess. I always hate reading about something if I am in the process of thinking about it myself, and the more I read the more my own thought feels recycled and unnecessary. Thus: I’ve tried to abstain as much as possible from reading what others have written about IG. And I will only bring up two points that I feel would be irresponsible, for me, to ignore.

One review that I have read is Daniel Mendelsohn’s brief but welcome rebuttal to critics who assert that IG is more about film than it is about Nazis, and is therefore not historically or morally problematic. Yes, it is a film about film, and like Tarantino’s other movies the main player is his wild and audacious artistic vision. But as Mendelsohn says, it is nevertheless a movie populated with accurate depictions of real people – at no point does Tarantino suggest that the Germans in the theatre might not be real Germans during the war – and that is why Inglourious Basterds is not the same film as Kill Bill, for instance, and why its violence cannot be thought of in the same way.

Mendelsohn points out that the burning of the theatre is an inversion of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, in which Jews were locked into a confined space and killed en masse. Now it is Jews who do the killing, and who do so thoroughly: by Shosanna’s fire, by the Basterds’ machine guns, and by explosives. If this is really and truly a revenge flick, which Tarantino has claimed it is, the absurdly excessive firepower levied against the Nazis would indicate a correspondingly excessive amount of hate, on our part, for those who perpetrated crimes more than sixty years ago.

I am not saying that the Nazis should be forgiven because of how much time has passed. As a culture, we don’t have to let them off the hook for anything, but that doesn’t mean that we have to delight in watching them suffer – which is, after all, the entire point of a revenge flick. We identify (for example) with Shosanna, because she is innocent and is wounded, and thus share her desire for retribution. Certainly the film thinks we should. From the beginning, IG has much in common with Kill Bill, a less problematic (because fictitious) revenge flick. Just as Beatrix Kiddo had her hit list, so too do we see prominent Nazis identified on screen. We don’t even meet some of them, such as Göring and Bormann; they are named solely as targets to be knocked off. Indeed, when we are introduced to the chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, we see a brief clip in which he spouts some horribly racist garbage about American blacks (more on this later); then, FREEZE FRAME! and Goebbels’s name emblazoned across the screen. We are clearly meant to know only enough about him to hate him; the scene’s only purpose is to mark him as one of the revenge movie’s villains, as a target to be later taken down.

This is all according to plan for a revenge flick until we come to the movie premiere, which is the film’s big climax. If we accept that this is a revenge narrative (and Tarantino has given us no reason to believe that we shouldn’t), then, as an audience that has both literally and psychologically bought into the film, we ought to subsequently cheer at the deaths of the hundreds of men and women in that theatre. That is, after all, how narratives in this genre end. This is actually quite sly, because at no point do we want Shoshanna’s plan to fail, or the Basterds’ pathetic Italian cover to be blown. Yet we (I hope) did not actively yearn for the deaths of the 350 or so Nazis in the hall, in the same way that we hoped for Shoshanna to succeed and the Americans to survive. But one must of course follow from the other.

When the fire begins to eat up the screen, and the Basterds open fire on the Nazis down below, the movie changes abruptly. The problem is that IG begins as a revenge narrative, but because these are real humans and not fictitious constructions, Tarantino takes us someplace morally we’d rather not go. We find ourselves, in fact, in the exact same situation as the Nazis in that theatre: we are watching a film that asks us to cheer at human massacre. If we do cheer, then we are no better than the Nazis at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride.” If we don’t, then we break the implicit contract with Tarantino, who sold us a revenge flick. I imagine that he might say: “This is how you wanted it to end, isn’t it? Didn’t you want them to die? I am giving you exactly what you paid for.”

I mentioned earlier that Mendelsohn recognized an inversion in the burning of Nazis by Jews. Here is another inversion, because Tarantino now turns our theatre, the theatre in which we sit, inside-out. As the Parisian theatre burns down, all that is left is the Cineplex or whatever that we are in, and the Nazi audience watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die becomes us, watching a revenge flick in which hundreds die – and the challenge to our own morality seems clear. It’s easy to judge the Nazis for celebrating what looks like a terrible film that delights in the deaths of other human beings, but how far off are we from they? We all knew, going in, that this was a revenge movie in which a band of Jews hunt the Nazis. We knew we would see Nazis die, and fantastically, because this is a Tarantino movie. I think Tarantino might have also worked in a dig against himself, in the scene in which Hitler praises Goebbels for making his best film yet; I can’t help but wonder if Tarantino was making an ironic gesture toward the critical success of his own violent films.

This might all sound like a stretch, but consider that Shosanna delivers her final monologue not in French, nor German, but English, a language foreign to both herself (she, after all, did not speak it at the beginning of the movie) and the German audience. Why, then, would Marcel remind her to deliver the words in English? Inglourious Basterds is, above all else, above even the subject of World War II, a movie about language. Tarantino is an American, and an English speaker. I believe the same thing happens in the movie’s first scene, when LaPadite and Landa switch to English from French; this is ostensibly so that the Jews cannot understand, but it is really so that we, Tarantino’s English audience, can understand. He wanted the directness of language, not subtitles, in that crucial exchange. Perhaps Shosanna speaks in English because her audience has changed. The Germans, after all, are either dead or can’t hear her in their scramble for the door; she is speaking to the only audience left in the theatre, and that is us.

***

If Tarantino is a master of anything, it is timing. He knows his audience cold. Roger Ebert likes to quote from Hitchcock, “A good movie should play the audience like a piano,” and I think that this is exactly what Tarantino does. His real art happens not on screen, in spite of all its visual and referential splendour, but rather in the hall where we sit. The second time I saw IG, it was in a 150-seat theatre in Germany, filled with Germans, and it was astonishing listening to them and then watching their faces as they walked out. It is both impressive and sort of frightening what he can do with us. I think to myself: it cannot, cannot, cannot be an accident that, at the end of the movie, it is directly at us that Brad Pitt gazes when he says, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

Here I am

Here I am, I am not drunk but I’ve been drinking again, and as always I feel compelled to put pen to paper and write. The motivation for this seems perfectly clear – I don’t know if this is an objective standard or if this is just an aesthetic prejudice of the age, but I feel that alcohol impedes the stops and starts of the thinking mind, the mind that paradoxically kills the pure, direct thought. I feel, when I’ve been drinking, not that my thinking is better but rather less muddled, like an overgrown forest after a flash fire. It's not more alive, in fact it is by definition less alive than the thorny, natural mess it once was, but at least you can see light between the trunks, count the trees. A cleared forest can be apprehended in the mind in a way that a fully grown forest with its million species of insects and millions of newly unfurling leaves never can be, shifting and brambled as it is like a brain.

The search as always is for the thought that strikes to the core of somebody, yourself maybe but better someone else. It would be expected here to complain that a cruelty of the universal order is responsible for our cleverest thoughts to appear weak or confusing to others, and those with which we are not satisfied to be perceived as (at best) a fragment of genius. Are we so blind to ourselves? What is responsible for us being our own worst readers? It would make sense, in a world in which we are spared pain, that someday we should gain a hard-won objectivity, an ability to see our words as others see them. But this can never happen. A mother can never be objective about her child – she can be unreasonably proud, or unfairly cruel, but the perspective can never be the same as that of the neighbour across the street. I think that we can either write for ourselves or write for others, and only one party can ever be satisfied with the result. For a writer this is no choice at all, since he must either sacrifice himself or his audience, and is thus doomed to some kind of defeat. It’s a winless enterprise, really, and in spite of the terrible options we have we do it anyway because the alternative is still far, far worse. We are bodies spinning in space, held tenuously together by a faint gravity, and shouting soundlessly at each other because the alternative is to be silent, to not speak and only spin absurdly in our shared proximity.

…

My fingers are numb. I see people standing around me, talking, staring at a screen that flickers, renews itself with numbers that speak delay and anticipation. They are beautiful and glow inside their own private spheres. I think: orbit. They shuffle obliquely around a central grain, the wide vibrato of electrons in a space so vast it may as well be empty.