Arts & Culture
The details may be different, but the basic scenario is always the same: It’s Europe, sometime during World War II. A group of Nazi soldiers is harassing innocent people, barking orders at men, women, and children in some old city square. And then right as Herr Oberst is about to order his goons to perpetrate some horrible act of inhumanity, from out of nowhere we come swinging in to save the day. We have left our kippot at home. We are armed to the teeth. And we Jewish avengers – primed to play heroes of a world we weren’t around to experience but know from a thousand history book and a million Hebrew school lectures – are about to give those Nazi bastards a taste of their own brutal medicine. It’s a revenge fantasy and a salvation fantasy all in one, our post-Holocaust birthright as American Jewish men: the ability to lie in bed and drift off to sleep with the image of defeated Nazis dancing in our heads.
This is why we were so excited to see Inglourious Basterds. From the time we took in the first trailer – the one that premiered about six months ago, with Brad Pitt recruiting Jewish soldiers for his special team of Naaazi-killing, Naaazi-scalping modern-day Macabees — we thought, Finally, someone has made the movie we’ve been playing in our heads since we were little, a movie about righteous Jews purifying the earth of Nazi brutality with brutality of their own, saving innocents and redeeming our people from that feeling that we were bullied badly 60 years ago and did little to stop it.
So yesterday, your Unfit co-editors, Mike and Josh, went to see how Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge fantasy stood up to the one we’ve been concocting, editing, morphing, and perfecting in our heads for … our entire lives. Our hopes were high, even as our expectations were a bit muted. Our main concern? Could the man behind Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and other bits of enjoyable-but-frivolous cinephile fluff do justice to the greatest calamity of the 20th (and possibly any other) century? Which is also to ask: Could this American master of film stack up to the elaborate yet emotional fantasizing of two Jewish freelance writers with no filmmaking experience but tons of free time, imagination, and inherited historical bitterness?
The short answer is No. The long one we’ll call: The Five Crimes of Quentin Tarantino (As Perpetrated Upon and in the Name of the Jewish People):
1. False Advertising – The premise for Inglourious Basterds aligned perfectly with our best fantasies: An elite group of highly trained, highly motivated Jewish soldiers are dropped behind enemy lines to bust German skulls. Simple and beautiful. Problem is, that really isn’t what Inglourious Basterds is about. Aside from one early scene where we watch a man nicknamed the Bear Jew beat one officer to death with a baseball bat while surrounded by the dead, scalped bodies of an entire Nazi platoon, most of what we know about the Basterds’ operations comes from descriptions and narration – exposition sans action. The rest of the movie follows the adventures of a sadistic German officer and a young Jewish woman who escaped from his clutches and is now devising a plan to massacre the Nazi high command in a Paris movie theatre. Though this is all, admittedly, entertaining, we were promised a whole lot more viscerally redemptive entertainment.
2. Salvation From Without – The leader of the Basterds, played by Brad Pitt, isn’t a Jew but a southern bootlegger from the mountains of Tennessee. Now, we like Brad Pitt as much as the next guy, and he’s as good at sticking out his chin and garbling his way through a Great Smokey accent as any minor actor in a Coen Brothers movie could ever hope to be. But what self-respecting Jew ever had a dream about killing Nazis that involved taking orders from a Gentile? The whole point of the Jewish revenge fantasy is that we get to do the whole thing on our own, eradicating the Nazi hordes in the name of all our brothers and sisters who couldn’t do it for themselves. This odd bit of character development on Tarantino’s part sucked the motivating juice right out of his story: If you want your cinematic Nazi-killing done right — with the perfect blend of historical catharsis and unhinged malice — you’ve got to send a group of Jews to do it. (Or maybe Frenchmen. Or perhaps Poles. Could also be Russians, we suppose. Oh, or Gypsies. Maybe the English. Anyway, not a broad-shouldered blond guy from bluegrass country.)
3. Salvation vs. Vengeance – In any anti-Nazi Jewish revenge fantasy worth the name, the heroes shouldn’t simply treat their prey with the relative abandon of, well, Nazis; they have to be violent with a better eye trained toward the virtue of saving innocent people. Return to our example from the beginning of this story and you’ll see that when we allow ourselves to dream, the fantasy’s main feature is our swooping in at the last moment to provide relief for the suffering and defend the helpless. Just running around and killing Nazis willy-nilly (say, when they first wake up in the morning or when they’re writing letters to their mothers) pushes one’s actions into the realm of the callous, the brutal, and the morally suspect, divorced from any sense of heroism or salvation … not to mention eliciting audience sympathy for the wrong side. After all, the worst thing you could do when fighting Nazis is become a Nazi yourself. Which is what you do when, like the Basterds, you ambush a group of soldiers randomly in the woods, pound their heads in with bats, and take their scalps … hooting and hollering as you go. If your fantasy doesn’t involve saving the persecuted, if it lacks humanity as a motivator, if it celebrates violence for violence’s sake, you run the risk of becoming no better than the monsters you’re out to destroy.
4. Tarantino Being Tarantino Pt. 1 – For all of Quentin Tarantino’s well-advertised love of old westerns and kung-fu movies, he actually has little or no interest in the strong, silent man-of-few-words type. Think about Christopher Walken in True Romance or Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction or Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers; those characters never stop talking, right up until the moment (and even after the moment) they’ve killed the folks whose ears they were talking off. In fact, if Tarantino has a trademark as a filmmaker, it’s his unabashed and unapologetic love of words. And because he loves words and the people who love words, he gives his favorite characters the most words to speak.
Inglourious Basterds is no exception. Its greatest creation is the “Jew Hunter,” Hans Landa, a man so loquacious he’s able to ramble in no fewer than four languages. Or take Pitt’s Aldo Raine, who revels in the sound of his own exaggerated southern drawl. Or the Basterds’ comrade from the OSS, a Brit who, in his speech, signifies all the best of old-Europe British formality, absurdly out of place in the brutal world of 1940s Nazi-occupied France.
So what does it say that Tarantino gives the Jewish characters in the movie almost nothing to say at all? In scene after scene, in forests and darkened garrets, Raine yaks it up with Englishmen and German actresses-cum-double-agents while the Jewish members of the Basterds sit quietly behind him, portraits of tough guy stolidity in sleeveless undershirts. How can you be Quentin Tarantino – Hollywood’s greatest lover of words – making a movie about vengeful Jews – perhaps the talkiest people in the history of civilization – and not give them anything to say? In a proper Jewish revenge fantasy, the Jews don’t just kill the Nazis and save the day, they also deliver lectures, mock and chastise their prey — deafen them at great lengths, assault them with wit as well as weapons. We Jews weren’t born to play the heavies standing threateningly behind the brains of the operation; we were born to use words. And Tarantino was born to tell stories about people who were born to use words. So what gives?
5. Tarantino Being Tarantino Pt. 2 – Inglourious Basterds has been a long time coming. Which is to say, cinematic Jewish revenge against the Nazis has been a long time coming.
The Nuremberg Trials, Simon Weisenthal’s Nazi-hunters, the State of Israel: For some, those things were adequate to quell their desire for vengeance. But many Jews of a slightly more creative, slightly more passive bent, have waited for the movies (that most American, that most “new world” of all the arts) to give us the catharsis we’ve been looking for. And now, after all this time, we finally get a movie about Jews exacting revenge on the Nazis and – serves us right – we get a film fetishist to make it.
Quentin Tarantino may be an expert craftsman capable of creating sublime cinematic moments, but he is incapable of telling a story that isn’t shot through the lens of his rampant cinephilia. There’s no moment in Inglourious Basterds that doesn’t relate somehow to his encyclopedic knowledge of film. From the Ennio Morricone soundtrack to the blaxploitation references to the inclusion of Emil Jannings, Basterds is, like all Tarantino flicks, a movie about the movies, or rather about the way we see the world through movies. So what should have been two hours of high emotional release becomes an exercise in film fandom and technical wizardry. Basterds, in other words, was made with movie nerds, not vengeance-inclined Jews, in mind.
Indeed, every time Tarantino makes a winking reference to a favorite Spaghetti Western or some long-dead German director, he sucks just a little bit more psychological honesty out of his story, which should be full of pathos and raw emotion. Instead, his movie is full of moments that refer to other moments in other movies that were full of pathos and raw emotion. By constantly jumping into his viewers’ faces to announce his presence as a filmmaker, Tarantino takes away from their ability to empathize with his characters and feel along with them the ups and downs of a life spent mourning losses and trying to get someone to pay for them. This has always been the knock on Tarantino; that his love of craft has kept him from becoming an artist, that even his best work is two steps removed from actual human emotion. But with Inglourious Basterds it also keeps him from creating a world connected to the reality he’s paraphrasing, a world full of brutality and pain and misery but one also capable of providing its characters and its viewers a shot at catharsis, maybe even a little redemption. And that is all we, two nonviolent American Jews given to moments of inherited malice, are dreaming of every time we drift away into the 1944 Paris that lives on in our fevered minds.
Comments
Add a Comment