NB: Includes mild spoilers to Inglourious Basterds, Violence and Language.
Here’s the big joke: eight vengeful Jewish American soldiers roam the fields of France between 1941-44 killing German soldiers, and under the direction of their hillbilly Lieutenant (Brad Pitt), scalps them. Literally. In close-up technicolor. If they are allowed to live, for propaganda purposes, a large swastika is carved into their foreheads, with an enormous Bowie knife. We get to see that too.
The Melbourne critic Karl Quinn makes a direct address: ‘Was it really necessary to show men being scalped in such close-up detail?’
Quinn’s answer: ‘Yes, it was necessary. On the terms that Tarantino set for himself, at any rate … It serves a dual purpose, moral and aesthetic. It makes us squirm (a familiar pleasure-pain of a certain type of cinema), but in refusing the quick cutaway that usually diffuses the unpleasantness, it actually makes us feel the violence. Arguably, Inglourious Basterds isn’t just a reimagining of the war movie, it’s a reimagining of how we tell stories of war and brutality and sadism, so that we feel something of their horror. It is, if you will, a necessary evil.’
Quinn’s reading is contestable, but unusually subtle. Compare:
Paul Byrnes, Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Naughty, apocalyptic fun … There are many scenes that do shock — the scalping is particularly gruesome, as is one scene where one of the basterds … takes a baseball bat to a Nazi officer.’
David Stratton, At the Movies: ‘The whole thing is handled with an almost child-like glee … it’s violent, of course, but hey, World War II was a violent business and war movies were never like this before!’
Leigh Paatsch, News.com.au: ‘Irreverent, irrational and irresistibly entertaining … Tarantino’s trademarked, highly stylised use of blood, guts and violence still bursts to the fore on occasion.’
Louise Keller, Urban Cinephile: ‘Drama, horror-fest, romance, spy thriller and comedy with tinges of slapstick are lovingly and theatrically style-slapped into shape by the fearless Tarantino, whose child-like enthusiasm infused with graphic violence, is easily imagined.’
Jim Schembri, The Age: ‘Of course, you shouldn’t make fun of the Holocaust. But there’s nothing in the movie rule book that says you can’t have fun with the Holocaust … what really makes Inglourious Basterds stick out … is its sheer playfulness … a comic burst of violence (Aldo loves etching swastikas into the foreheads of his Nazi captives)…’
Everyone remarks on the amount of violence on display, but then it serves ‘a dual purpose, moral and aesthetic’, does it not?
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Comic violence
I think it was the novelist Don DeLillo who coined the phrase, in a remark something like this: It took America to create comic violence.
Basterds has a full super-sized serving of the ol’ ultraviolence, but it’s all okay, because of its: ‘almost child-like glee’; ‘child-like enthusiasm infused with graphic violence’; ’sheer playfulness’ – because it is ‘naughty’; ‘irreverent, irresistibly entertaining’.
None of this would be of moment except that the film is riding at the top of the Aussie box office, and at the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it has scored a rarified 88% “Fresh” score. (See below for some contrary, negative reviews.)
And who would be so churlish as not to applaud a mission leader who vows to ‘dee-stroy those gnatzis’ and proceeds to do so with those all-American symbols: baseball bat and Bowie knife? (He equates Germans to Nazis: ‘The Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty they endured at our hands.’)
So in that frame of mind let us see how the American Empire is faring in the corners of one of their more recent, factual wars. This is from Salon’s indispensable Glen Greenwald who has recently posted the bluntly titled ‘What every American should be made to learn about the IG [Inspector General's] Torture Report’. Which is, according to US Attorney General Eric Holder, “a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.” Greenwald’s post includes these funkily redacted items from the report:
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Threats of execution:
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Threats to kill detainee and his children:
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Threats to rape detainee’s female relatives in front of him:
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Rather less violent than Tarantino…
But hey wait, Tarantino’s film is just fun, right?! It’s just a jolly jape. It begins with the words ‘Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France…’ Code: a fairy story, right? And after all, as Karl Quinn noted, the filmmaker is only working ‘on the terms that Tarantino set for himself, at any rate.’
It should be recognised the whole film is a revenge-fantasy, and therefore nothing can be taken seriously. But that’s not quite true, because Tarantino manipulates you, requires you to take one thing seriously – that the German/Nazi, each and everyone, is a vicious, merciless, evil monster. This is the prerequisite for enjoying all the fun times ahead.
*MILD SPOILER ALERT* He does this in the very first scene where a German officer, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, psychologically tortures, with prolonged sadistic pleasure – which is, of course, a sadistic pleasure provided by the film director – an otherwise virtuous French farmer to give up the Jewish family* he is hiding, implying he will let the farmer’s own family live. On the betrayal the officer has his men kill the family in long, protracted rakes of their guns across the floorboards.
And at every step of the way right to the end the German/Nazi is shown that he cannot be trusted (only one German woman is featured and she is a double spy, on the side of the angels); that he will be ruthless and murderous, and if given even the tiniest opening – as in a particularly mean moment adjunct to the climax – he will kill you. So, Tarantino forces your assent that these vermin – German/Nazis – deserve the cruel worst. And then Tarantino applies, in ironic film-buff, film-theorist, postmodern fashion: comic violence. Which provide catharsis and laughter.
Karl Quinn’s final words on the matter:
‘Then again, it could just be a vile piece of exploitation cinema. It’s a bloody good one though.’
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I must have known what was in store; I’m sure I did. Apart from a long, draggy talky scene, it wasn’t boring; Tarantino gives good fireworks. But I have to say I’ve lost my tolerance for American gore. With comic violence. It’s all of a piece, what’s on the screen eventually spills over on the streets. Life imitates art. Rah rah rah and so on. But it’s not the intellectualising – it’s the brutalising. When I stop feeling brutalised by multiple scenes of brutal violence, comic or not, is when I’ll need to have a long sabbatical in a quiet country town in the South Island of New Zealand, like Gore or Clinton.
Tarantino in the Guardian: ‘Well, if people are offended by it, I don’t care,’ he snaps. ‘I’m going to do what I do.’
Quite. Yup. It’s only a movie, only Hollywood. Not like, say, Reality TV. Or actual war. The Americans, after all, are famously able to separate fact from fantasy.
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*Jewish farmers (!) in the French countryside in 1941 (!) called Dreyfus (!) Now that’s fast and loose.
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Some negative reviews:
Crikey’s Luke Buckmaster: ‘Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is leader of the Basterds, who improbably survive for years in France, enjoying – and I do mean enjoying – a rampant killing season with the ultimate intention of finding Hitler and sending him to hell. The premise sounds action-packed but it’s mostly hot air and yackety-yak.’
The New Yorker’s grouchy David Denby, with a really serious, malicious *SPOILER* which I will resist repeating: ‘Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager … Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys … spolier removed …), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated.’
Lee Siegel at the Daily Beast turns the tables with a wild and wicked rant, in Tarantino mode, right at the end of his calibrated piece. No Spolier but lots of Language, Violence:
‘So let me try for a new type of criticism that might match idioms with Tarantino’s films and rise to meet them on their own terms. I would like to challenge him to a fight that will decide the validity of hollow, movie-think violence. More particularly, I would like to knock his fucking teeth out of his mouth, break the bridge of his nose and push it up into his head. To hell with seven types of ambiguity, the objective correlative, and the anxiety of influence. Let the blood flow out of his ears, and then let him watch as I shatter his kneecaps, pulverize his ribs, and—yes, indeed—rip the scalp off his fucking vacant head.
‘I’ll meet this glorified videogame programmer anywhere in Manhattan he wants. (As long as I’m home to pick my son up at nursery school at 5.) And don’t let him tell me that my invitation is out of context, full of movie-talk, and juvenile. I’m not buying that. Not anymore.’
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Previous posts:
Obama’s holiday reading list (and, Books I’ve Bought But Haven’t Read, Vol. 1)
The Joy of Irrelevance
8 Comments
“*Jewish farmers (!) in the French countryside in 1941 (!) called Dreyfus (!) Now that’s fast and loose.”
Uh… there are Jewish farmers. Just this very weekend, the film “Taking Woodstock” features Max Yasgur, a (real life) Jewish farmer on whose farm the Woodstock festival was held.
But I guess someone has to keep the stereotypes alive.
Daver,
Yes, it sounds rather like I’m perpetuating some kind of stereotype, and I’m sorry if it looked that way …
But of course there are Jewish farmers – you don’t need to point as far as Woodstock, NY. Farmers were how the state of Israel got going, that’s what the kibbutzim were about.
As for the Jewish farmers in the film called Dreyfus (a transparent allusion to the anti-semitic Dreyfus Affair), we know that most of the Jews in France up to the Revolution in 1789 were forced to live in ghettoes, and even after emancipation were curbed under invidious restrictions. It seems unlikely there were many Jewish farmers in the French countryside in 1940, and I have not been able to find any references.
But I wonder if you should take rather more issue with Tarantino, rather than with my passing footnote – Tarantino’s revenge fantasy twist of the WWII stereotype of the Jewish figure – the harried, fugitive refugee transformed into an efficient emotion-free bloodthirsty Nazi killing force. Not to mention his continuation of that other stereotype – that of the evil Nazi = all Germans are evil.
Tarantino is talented but what he does is make perverted movies. Without exception they portray sadists as attractive.
He mixes up the scenes with quirky dialogue and this never fails to be popular. Unlike the Cohens who pose questions and convey the bleak wasteland of violent behavior, Tarantino makes it into a theme park where sadism is funny.
I’m not good with violent gorey things. I probably won’t see this film for that reason. I do remember when I went to see “Pulp Fiction” that I was astonished to find myself laughing at (say) the bit where a young man shoots himself in the head in the back of a car. Partly it was shock, partly it was that the set up made it funny. But I was kind of ashamed that I’d laughed, all the same. It doesn’t sound like Tarantino intended anything particularly deep and meaningful with “Basterds”, because brutally killing brutal killers isn’t really a terribly interesting message. Tarantino holds life cheap. It might be entertaining, but maybe not admirable?
Tarantino’s point (and I do believe he has one, beyond the grim glamour of it all) is the ubiquity and infectiousness of violence; it’s hardly something confined to his Nazis, is it? David Denby in his New Yorker review gets this to an extent – but it’s not just a wartime thing. Given the situation, the potential is there for all of us to be ‘basterds’ – however inglorious. Nothing proves this point more than the quoted reaction of Lee Siegel to the film – except that this brand of violence is confined to the safety of words and fantasy, unlike the duelling challenges of old.
What I find more disturbing in American cinema generally (by definition, almost, I’d say) is the ubiquity of sentimentality, and this even infects Tarantino. [Spoiler coming.] How truly chilling it would have been – if not chillingly truer to realpolitik – to have allowed the deal between Raine and Landa to go through, and show Landa realising his fantasy of becoming a farmer in Nantucket. (Neat counterpoint to the opening bucolics too.) This might have been possible in a Michael Haneke movie, but it’s all but unimaginable in an American one.
As for Americans and ‘comic violence’, maybe we’d have to go back at least as far as The Three Stooges (subject of an earlier Mulcher blog). You could bet Tarantino was an aficionado of theirs when a kid.
Quentin – that basterd of American film.
Perhaps the first part of I Britain’s comment applies to stephen henry’s and acannon’s remarks. That QT’s hyperviolence is really, as Karl Quinn says, a critique of the violence in American movies.
As to whether or not, apropos Britain above, we become Basterds in a given situation – that remains moot, not to mention tricksy, given that Tarantino’s rendition of basterdry is heroic. In the ideal Tarantino supporter’s world, the Basterds both do justice on an evil inside the world of the film, as well as filmically render ironic criticism of the film world in which it lives.
I don’t believe this at all, of course. If QT is making a point – “the ubiquity and infectiousness of violence” – it is a point he has already made in all his previous movies (save Jackie Brown), and one stops believing there is any wolf in his warning, only that he likes crying, “Wolf!”
And to use a WAR movie context to decry film violence is at the very least perverse, if not self-negating. Tanrantino’s “critique” of film violence was done well enough in the slicing away of a live ear in Reservoir Dogs – a far more powerful and directed effect than engendered by several scenes of scalping corpses. As the violence there is directed towards dead people, one can only assume that the pain is inflcited on live people – the audience. Ha ha, shocking, eh, infectious, eh, crtitcismical, eh?
I think DeLillo’s formulation of “comic violence” is very useful. He may mean something not so far from the violence of the slip on a banana peel – where the laugh is in part relief that it wasn’t you. He means the kind of twisted shock that acannon felt –
“… a young man shoots himself in the head in the back of a car. Partly it was shock, partly it was that the set up made it funny. But I was kind of ashamed that I’d laughed, all the same.”
The physical comedy of an unexpected horror, followed by guilt and shame: classic comic violence. With the 3 Stooges the violence is always expected, so the violence of that comedy is attenuated. The clownish violence is funny then because it’s the broadest metaphorical reminder of how stupidly we behave in our daily lives.
Tarantino’s predictable violence doesn’t retain or attain the innocence of the Stooges. The clowns have departed and only The Joker remains. I mean the sadistic Joker of Batman. The one who laughs at causing grief and finding the basterd limits in the rest of humanity.
—- Well, that was Heavy. Someone pass me the Cinzano…
I disagree with your assessment.
Specifically, you said:
“Tarantino manipulates you, requires you to take one thing seriously – that the German/Nazi, each and everyone, is a vicious, merciless, evil monster. This is the prerequisite for enjoying all the fun times ahead.”
Presumably you failed to notice the angst of Fredrick Zoller as he watched his exploits played back in the cinema? I’m not saying QT didn’t bestow upon Nazis and Germans a highly stylised evil persona (it’s a highly stylised movie), but if you miss the subtleties of brilliant movies like this, you miss everything.
Furthermore:
“He does this in the very first scene where a German officer, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, psychologically tortures, with prolonged sadistic pleasure – which is, of course, a sadistic pleasure provided by the film director – an otherwise virtuous French farmer to give up the Jewish family he is hiding.”
I’m really not sure why you would think that QT provided this scene for “sadistic pleasure” – his or ours – unless there’s something wrong with you. It’s brilliantly crafted to leave the viewer feeling shredded by the humour of the SS guy and the horror of his actions. Let’s not pretend that scenes like this didn’t happen, either.
As for your critique of Tarantino’s response to his critics: do you expect him to care? He’s an artist, and this is his masterpiece, 10 years in the making. Artists aren’t supposed to care if people like or are offended by their work.
Finally, your insinuation that movies like this are responsible for creating crime and perpetuating evil is as baseless as suggesting that alcohol is responsible for violence. Sure, in the wrong hands, both violent movies and alcohol will play a part in amplifying pre-existing evil, but it’s not like an otherwise non-violent person will watch a QT film and suddenly feel the urge to go and scalp someone.
Dear linarms,
Thanks for the commnets.
You are welcome to disagree! So does a good friend of mine. So do most critics it seems.
Angst? Or regret even? Maybe. Let’s say that’s the case. But no one would have missed all the other Nazis, the Fuhrer on down, gloating in glee at Zoller’s heroic actions on screen.
Point 2: I think it is sadistic pleasure - it is part of the “pleasure-pain” that Karl Quinn mentions. Horror movies do this very well. In this case it is entirely in QT’s to drag out the tension as far as he can – and he succeeded. Whether one feels this was warranted by the rest of the movie would be another ong discussion.
Should QT care about criticism? – well, I imagine he does not, or he does but he could care less, in a pissed off way, as the Guardian quote near the end of the post suggests. (Possibly he hates David Denby now, and very likely Lee Siegel.) A critical reading of a piece of work is a tribute of engaged interest with the artist’s work – a mark of taking it seriously – whether it is an agreeable assessment or not. (As yours is not of this post, say.) Tarantino has made at least three very good movies, one of them, arguably great – he can rest on his laurels should he wish to – he has already entered cinematic history as a prince.
As to your last point, I put it somewhat more ambivalently: “… Rah rah rah and so on.”
And where my personal, clearly subjective reaction rests is: ‘But it’s not the intellectualising – it’s the brutalising.’ Movies with violence will ever be (and QT has said elsewhere that he regards the depiction of violence an aesthetic matter, the same, he said, as the depiction of dancing in films). It’s rather less vicious than video games with violence I imagine.