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Inglourious Basterds
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Traps / Frisson
This is the text of a
talk (its various drafts written on the same day, titled “Traps” and “Frisson”,
have been combined and interwoven here) given as part of a panel on Inglourious Basterds organised by the Jewish Studies department of Monash University on 24 September 2009. The evening event,
much to my surprise, packed out a large hall and – even more surprisingly – most
in the crowd seemed wildly enthusiastic about the film! I have since reworked
parts of this speech into various essays, including “Shivers, Surprise and
Discomfort” in my collection Mysteries of Cinema (2018); as well as, on this site, my remarks comparing Inglourious Basterds with Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. [8/8/19]
I
once wrote an article called “The Offended Critic” [now collected in Mysteries of Cinema]. It was about what
happens when critics – film critics, in this case – take up a position of
offense, of outrage, when they take (as we say) the High Moral Ground on a
movie. In short, I believe that the position or posture of the Offended Critic – and when I say it’s a posture, I don’t mean it’s
insincere, it may be entirely sincere – can be a trap. But there’s also a trap on
the other, extreme end of the viewer-response spectrum: when it is proclaimed
that there is nothing at all ever to be offended about – or even critical or
plain thoughtful about – when everything in culture is taken, and justified, as
just some kind of spectacle, ritual or knowing, ironic game.
These
two extreme positions I have just sketched – let’s call them the Offense
position and the Anything Goes position – hover around and haunt all commentary
on culture, whether high or low culture. But they really come out to play when
we have a media event – and Inglourious Basterds,
whatever you may think of it, is definitely a media event in many parts of the world – and here tonight, in this very room, we are
making our own modest little contribution to that carnival of endless talk
about Tarantino. ( I have to tell you, since I have already been asked to write
four articles on Inglourious Basterds, from magazines all around the world, in the past 2 or 3 weeks, I am
really starting to wonder if there is something else, maybe, some other film or
filmmaker, we should all rather be talking about).
In the midst of a media event like this, the traps of
critical extremes become even more exacerbated, more exaggerated, and we become
more prone to falling into them. Such an event around Inglourious Basterds pushes us into taking up
ever-more extreme polemical positions pro or con, for or against it, love it or
hate it. Now, I don’t exactly hate this movie – I’m not sure it’s worthy of my hate, exactly – but I sure don’t love
it either, and my tendency (as you’ll soon discover) is to be critical of it.
Let’s
at least be aware of the two extreme poles in relation to this film, which have
already chewed up literally millions of words on the Internet – such is the
fire of this media event. First, there is the position of extreme offense: Inglourious Basterds is a
bad thing, a negative influence, a mistake, a kind of cultural sin or crime –
and, at the very least, an impertinence, perhaps a misjudged provocation that
misfires. Then, second, the opposite
extreme position: Inglourious Basterds is just
a whole lot of crazy fun, “just a movie” as so many of its supporters say; or a
movie about movies (it’s hard to argue with that one); or a fantastic,
invigorating subversion of politically correct dogma about how to show a whole
range of hot-button, historical issues.
In short, any public discussion of this film is a
bloody minefield. We are desperately trying not to spring all of these
booby-traps lying in wait for us on the ground – but if we’re too careful going
about it, we won’t say anything at all. Let me take this risk tonight.
Before
we get into all that, I would like to play a clip which sums up these two
extreme positions I have just talked about. It’s a popular YouTube video, some
of you might know it already, titled: “Quentin Tarantino Destroys a Movie
Reviewer During Interview”. It took place in 2003 at
the time of Kill Bill (Volume One), and it features QT (as his fans and
foes alike call him these days) and a female film reviewer named Jan (but not
our Jan Epstein here on tonight’s panel). Let’s watch it …
Now,
you have to give it to QT: he manages to hang himself in just about every
interview he gives, even as he stands up so stridently for himself and his
whole cinema ethos. In this clip, he manages to contradict himself about half a
dozen times in hardly a few minutes. Try to hold all this together in your head
in the way that Tarantino does. First, films with “gruesome, graphic violence”
(as TV Jan puts it) are, to him, “so much fun” – meaning, not serious, not
real.
Next,
he tells us that he makes “movies about other movies”, about the exciting,
violent action movies of every kind he saw as a child – and he means by this
that he makes entirely artificial films, “live action cartoons” – again,
nothing serious, just spectacle, thrills, kinetics, pure cinema (another favourite term for
QT fans).
Then
he goes surprisingly highbrow, he gets a bit classical, a bit lit-crit on our asses: “Revenge is one of the classic staples
of drama”, he earnestly intones, no doubt silently invoking Shakespeare and the
Greeks. So: screen violence is now (in another classic move) catharsis or
ritual, and therefore socially useful and necessary.
Then
something ethical creeps into his spiel: his heroes and heroines “live and die
by a code of honour” – that sounds good and
promising. And finally, the big revelation: “Revenge is messy, it never works
out the way you want it to”. Well, surely, it must work out the way he (Tarantino) wants it to – after all,
he made the movie! Well, we get what he means, more or less. More importantly,
his grand statement here almost sounds like – and it only makes sense as – a
kind of real-world, real-life advice. He’s not, after all, just
making-a-cartoon-movie-about-other-cartoon-movies; now he’s seriously
suggesting to us, very confidentially, that if you’re planning to take revenge
on those Nazis, then know, going in, that it’s messy, revenge is messy, and it
won’t work out the way you want it to, because innocent people are going to be
hurt!
So
Tarantino has moved, in the space of about thirty seconds, from being a
devil-may-care prankster to an adolescent moralist. And this is where I begin
my critique of Inglourious Basterds.
Watching this film in close proximity to Lars von
Trier’s Antichrist (2009), I had a
certain revelation that sadism in cinema, the sadism of physical violence, is
back – back with (as they say) a vengeance. In Tarantino’s film, the band of “Nazi
killers” during World War II, led by Brad Pitt, gleefully scalp their victims –
and, to eternally “brand” any survivors as the craven scum that they are, they
carve Nazi insignia into their foreheads. “It’s my masterpiece”, intones Brad
admiringly as he finishes his final touch of gruesome, bloody work on the head
of the evil Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz) in the last frames of the fiction – no doubt speaking boastfully for the
director himself as he sizes up his latest creation, without a moment’s wait
wasted on historical hindsight. Who needs the
judgement of history, when QT can award himself his own immediate five-star
rating?
But the historians, among many others, are judging. On all matters of
history, Tarantino has come under rapid fire for his latest opus. Let us be
fair: Inglourious Basterds does
mark a significant change in his career, from making only what he has referred
to as “movie movies” – i.e., films that only refer to other films, in an
ecstatic state of cinemania – to making something that tackles, in a frankly outrageous fashion, questions
of history and politics. This broadening of vision coincides with an expansion
of Tarantino’s usually all-American cultural references (until now, even his genuflections to the French Nouvelle Vague seemed
mainly mediated through other American films that had already gone down on one
knee) –
and that’s intriguing. Suddenly, there is an
explosion of multiple languages (French, Italian, German) and locations; nods
and winks and stylistic allusions abound not only to the tough American
mavericks like Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich, but also to Henri-Georges Clouzot, Leni Riefenstahl, and
Soviet cinema of the ‘20s (that last reference is especially strong in the
oddly anachronistic Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film, directed not by
Tarantino but his protégé Eli Roth of torture-porn-media-panic fame … but
that’s another story).
Still
– even within a film that Tarantino offers to us openly, brazenly, as a
wish-fulfillment fantasy, Jews at last getting to wreak their murderous revenge
not only on innumerable Nazi officers but also der Führer himself – even then,
the work on history is strange and perplexing. Within only a matter of weeks of its global theatrical release,
commentators, professional and amateur alike – especially on the Internet – had
vigorously debated seemingly every detail of the film, from its deliberately
misspelt title to its grand, apocalyptic climax in a burning movie theatre.
(Personally, I find it a pity that not even a small fraction of these pundits
seem to be aware that the exiled American filmmaker Abel Ferrara, too, ended a
not terribly old film, the remarkable but little-seen Mary [2005], with a highly
politicised mêlée in a movie theatre, a bit like in Inglourious Basterds, and Matthew Modine’s ecstatic exclamation in the middle of all this
chaos as he locks himself into the booth and switches on the movie projector,
is: “The film is the bomb!” – and that is a big scene I value about a hundred
times more than the corresponding scene in Tarantino.)
QT himself has not been slow to add gasoline to the
fire of all these arguments – he likes his art to be incendiary in every way,
literally and figuratively. His comments in interviews tend to encourage confusions
rather than resolve them. For example, on his opportunistic use of the Native
American “Apache” mythology of scalping – well, Tarantino has some indigenous
American blood in him, in his family, he does in fact know that scalping was
not an indigenous practice, but one introduced by their European colonisers, and he likes to boast that, as a child, when he
watched Westerns with his Mum, they sided with the Indians against the white
cowboys – but, when asked about the scalping in Inglourious Basterds, this is what Tarantino said (I actually had to sub-edit his stream-of-consciousness or ‘motor mouth’
a little here, from its radio interview transcript, to get it to make even
free-associative sense):
The idea of using the Apache resistance … it
works effective(ly) to actually get German soldiers
to think of Jews that way … And they’re not just any Jews, they’re the American
Jews. They’re Jews with entitlement. They have the strongest nation in the
world behind them. So we [Americans] are going to inflict pain where our
European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could
actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that’s … a gigantic psychological
thing. The other thing is even the Jews … metaphorically aligning themselves
with Indians … you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.
Now:
genocide aligning itself with another genocide? Let’s first get clear that QT meant
that as a good thing. It is an
extreme – perhaps monstrous – transformation of the principle of “an eye for an
eye”, transposed to the world-historical stage of the 20th Century. Yet can we effectively criticise Tarantino for not being an intellectual, a political historian, a moral
philosopher? Those who champion Inglourious Basterds stand up for the filmmaker’s right to be
provocative, to shake up safe, neat conventions of historical representation,
to indulge in and satisfy our deepest, least realistic fantasy of racial
retribution. And, above all, his right to have
fun – gruesome, black-comic fun; fun with his subject, fun with himself as
celebrity auteur, fun with us as the audience whom he effectively leads down a
path and then startles, over and over. And those who deny that fun are (you’re
hearing this a lot at the moment) killjoys,
party-poopers, the politically correct police of respectable culture.
An
abyss quickly opens up between those on one side for whom Inglourious Basterds is “morally akin to Holocaust
denial” because “anything that makes Nazism unreal is wrong”, and those on the other
side, all those tactical amoralists who find the film a daring, invigorating and complex gesture in the context of
current, mainstream cinema. Zach Campbell puts the post-Tarantino dilemma of
critical culture well: “While every good film critic is probably a bit of a
moralist, not every good film critic is a good moralist.” And I would add: not every good filmmaker, either – with Tarantino
sometimes indeed being, in his career, a very good filmmaker (my favourite remains Jackie Brown [1997]).
It
is a delicate matter trying to pry open Tarantino’s political unconscious – to
grasp (without altogether killing the joy that so many spectators derive from
his films) the personal and social complex of which Inglourious Basterds may be the symptom – and if
this film is nothing else, it sure as hell has got to be a symptom of
something. For Tarantino today, revenge has become his dominant – perhaps his sole – subject. Kill Bill, Death Proof (2007)
and now Inglourious Basterds play
out the theorem Tarantino has so often sworn by: announce a character’s revenge
plan, give a persuasive reason for it (usually in an elaborate flashback),
painstakingly trace each step of the plan, and – this above all – give the audience
the orgasmic pleasure of finally seeing that revenge fully, elaborately
achieved. Shohei Imamura’s immortal title Vengeance is Mine (1979) could be the
label for Tarantino’s entire oeuvre.
Tarantino
has never had any qualms about presenting and sensationalising vengeful, sadistic violence. In fact, the horrifying events of 11 September 2001
in USA appear to have had a delirious, perhaps partly unconscious effect on his
creative psyche: since that time, his films have become ecstatic fables of
unfettered violence, albeit justified by some handy moral alibi (such the
divinity of motherhood in Kill Bill).
The right to strike back – so much a
part of American ideology and the American psyche – overcomes every material
barrier in his recent films: geography, language, culture, money. As QT says,
over and over, what he is really after is a really
big effect, what he called a “gigantic psychological thing” – and for some
viewers and reviewers, he obviously succeeds in this.
Tarantino
is comfortable with the simplified polarities of melodrama: by boiling World
War II down to the struggle between one bad (male) Nazi and one wronged
(female) Jew, he manages, miraculously, to obliterate from view the entire French
Resistance! And the (maybe unwittingly?) disturbing sequence in which several
remaining “basterds”, soon for sacrificial
immolation, indiscriminately and without a moment’s hesitation slaughter every
German in the movie house, is enough to inform us, once and for all, that
Tarantino is no Samuel Fuller when it comes to the complex ironies and reversibilities of wartime ethics. The ambiguous liberation
of the concentration camp in Fuller’s masterpiece The Big Red One (1980), with its
vision of an American soldier, the “liberator”, firing obsessively into the live
body of a German who is hiding in the ovens – this incredible scene is not one
that Tarantino could ever conceive, or shoot. There is neither room nor time
for ambiguity in Tarantino: sadistic revenge demands a straight-down-the-line
thrill.
Now,
there is another kind of trap, a more minor one, that comes with disliking,
being offended by, even hating a film. If it’s the politics or the ethics or
something large and unmanageable about the film you don’t like, it’s easy to
immediately translate that into the less heated realm of purely aesthetic disapproval – to just say, as
so many non-fans have said, “Well, it’s just not a good film”, or a “well-made”
film, not well structured or written or edited or acted or directed. And I have
to be frank here – and go ahead and spring this selfsame trap – by testifying
that the film really did not excite me as a piece of cinema. If it had excited me, on any level, I would
have then had the impetus to go back to the film, to try to re-enter its other
levels somehow, and maybe make more positive, constructive sense of it.
Inglourious Basterds, in my opinion, does
not display its director at the top of his form. This strenuous entertainment,
so eager to please and to succeed, exposes the weakness of Tarantino’s narrative
constructions once the usual shuffled time-schemes and other familiar tricks
(which here have only a clumsy, cameo role) are absent – I’m talking about
tricks like the writing on the screen, brief burst of narration, selective
flashbacks, which the film can’t make work either as a chaotic, all-in,
freewheeling structure, or as a tightly controlled, more classical one.
Tarantino gives the same, repetitive weight and shape to every tableau-like
scene: always the same (sadistic) slow
burn of suspense, the same extended dialogue, the same Mexican stand-off of
weapons, the same chaotic burst of cataclysmic death. Tarantino’s cinema been
going backwards ever since Jackie Brown – his only film with a strong political-racial subtext, not to mention an adult
love story, an adult relationship, at its centre –
and compare that to the paper-thin rapport between Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) and the Afro-French projectionist
Marcel (Jacky Ido) in Inglourious Basterds.
Earlier,
I called Tarantino an adolescent moralist, and I would like to make clear, in
closing, exactly what I mean by that. Adolescent moralists are a type; you meet
them, hear them and see them all the time – they make for good, juicy media
events. Adolescent moralising is all about pulling
off a sudden, surprising twist of standard moral values and standard moral
statements – in order to create a collective shock, a public frisson. The twist in Inglourious Basterds is
Tarantino saying: in my film, in my fantasy, the victims of genocidal violence
also get to be the perpetrators of genocidal violence – and isn’t that great
and fantastic and shocking and disturbing and complex and messy all at the same
time? Well, that’s maybe a bit too much for one film to be all at the same time.
OK,
it has caused a frisson – that’s why
we all showed up here tonight. But if we heap praise on this movie, we may as
well go back to handing out official literary awards to Helen Demidenko-Darville-Dale’s
infamous Australian novel The Hand That
Signed the Paper (1994), since that book rested on exactly the same naughty,
windily “provocative”, adolescent thought about the big issues of history: a
reversal of the moral positions of victim and perpetrator. In her case (and her
later journalism bears this out), the grand gesture was reminiscent of the
daringly stylish French literary right-wingers of the 1950s known as the Hussards (one of many influences on the Nouvelle Vague).
I’m not daring to taint Tarantino with that particular cross-historical and
cross-cultural association; all the same, adolescent moralizing has to be
scrutinized carefully in its resonances and effects.
The
general title of this seminar asked: “Can Hollywood Rewrite History?” The
answer is yes; it always has and always will, because fiction has that license.
But I think the question should be: how does it rewrite history, and why?
Especially when it comes to that why,
Tarantino really doesn’t show any sign – in this film at any rate – that he has
a darn clue.
MORE Tarantino: Kill Bill Vol. 2, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood, Four Rooms © Adrian Martin 23 September 2009 |
