Monday, September 28, 2009


"Inglourious Basterds": The Poetics of Unexpectedness

"...the film is one of the most morally repulsive movies of the past decade." (Isaac Chotiner, TNR)

Landa, aiming at Shoshana--->

I went to see “Inglourious Basterds” the first week it came out. The theatre was full. I was sitting next to a group of young men who were speaking in Arabic amongst themselves, and who seemed strangely elated, almost giddy with excitement and anticipation. When the movie ended, they were the only people in the audience who applauded enthusiastically. To this day I cannot quite make sense of a group of young Arabs getting so excited about a movie in which a bunch of tough Jews goes about Europe killing Nazis and scalping them. It will probably remain one of those enigmas, having to do with the least fathomable exhibitions of the human mind.


Chapter 1:

The two words of the film’s title “Inglourious Basterds” are misspelled. The correct spelling is: “Inglorious Bastards”.

If this were the title of the film, what would it signify?

Inglorious, according to the dictionary, means ignominious; disgraceful, obscure, deserving of neither glory nor respect.

A bastard started as the designation of an illegitimate child but has evolved in the popular mind to a derogatory term for a person who is mean or disagreeable.

So, when we read an “inglorious bastard”, what we should be conjuring from the noun and its adjective is a negative character, a villain to despise and shun, if possible. However, that is not quite the affect of “Inglorious Bastards”, is it? We seem to accept, apriori, a slightly ironic take on the traditional meaning of “inglorious” and “‘bastard”. What we look forward to is a sort of a lovable rogue, like Blondie from “The good, the Bad and the ugly” or more recently, Llewelyn Moss, from “ No Country for Old Men” .

In other words, audacious, sympathetic characters, pursuing morally-ambivalent goods by being thoroughly and uncompromisingly bloody-minded about it..

But what about the deliberately idiosyncratic misspelling of the titled?

Two possible explanations come to mind:

1. It is meant as an eye dialect, that is the deliberate use of non-standard spelling to draw attention to pronunciation.

2. It indicates a deeper, poetic motivation.

The acclaimed Canadian poet, Anne Carson explains in "Essay on What I Think About Most,"

...what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the willful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of mistakes
out of which may arise
unexpectedness.


Chapter 2:

The first time I learned about Tarantino’s movie was sometime during 2008, when I read it in Noah Pollak’s post in “Contentions”. Here is what he said:

"Inglorious Bastards, in a nutshell, focuses on the escapades of eight Jewish-American soldiers who are parachuted behind enemy lines and ordered by their commanding officer to “git me 100 Nazi scalps”. It is not a Holocaust movie, as such. But it uses the death camps as a touchstone and therein lies the danger.

Of course, this would have to be made by a Gentile. A Jewish filmmaker would have the soldiers scalp some Nazis and then agonize over the moral implications of their actions for six hours, rather than getting on with the important business of scalping more Nazis."

Of course, Jews being Jewish should be superior human beings, clean of any suspicion that they might harbour anger or vengefulness towards anyone, least of all those who succeeded in decimating them.

And almost right on cue, Jeffrey Goldberg’s review of the movie fully lives up to Pollak’s prognostication:

The ending Tarantino wrote includes the mass incineration of Nazis and their wives, with Shoshanna screaming “This is the face of Jewish vengeance!” and the very last scene features one final forehead swastika-carving.

“Why isn’t that all right?” Tarantino asked me, when I noted the cruelty of that final image.

“Well, it’s torture,” I said. “Isn’t torture wrong?”

Ten seconds went by as Tarantino weighed the question.

“He’s a Nazi,” Tarantino said, finally. “They’re giving him a scar. I don’t know if I would even go so far as to call that torture. He’s scarring him. He’s not torturing him. What he’s doing isn’t so ridiculously painful.”

I asked if he’d ever had a swastika carved in his forehead.

“I’m sure it hurts,” he said. But torture, he said, is something different: an attempt to elicit information by inflicting extreme pain. In other words, the pain inflicted by Tarantino’s Jews on the Nazis was inflicted only to terrorize.”

“Given the chance, of course, I would still shoot Mengele in the face. That would be a moral necessity. But I wouldn’t carve a swastika into his forehead. That just doesn’t sound like the Jewish thing to do.”

Goldberg is treating the fantasy as a real life likelihood, (he is not the only one) and then tries to imagine what he would have done in similar circumstances, only to reject the possibility that he could ever be so vicious.

It’s not unlike all these people today who fantasize that had they lived under the Nazi regime they would surely have behaved differently; they would shelter Jews and would not betray them to the Nazis. Never mind the statistics. Tarantino, strangely enough, does try to assess this fantasy, in the first chapter of the movie.


Chapter 3:

Here is what I think:

The film is done in chapters. And the first chapter is the only segment in the movie which fully and accurately mirrors the reality of Jewish precarious existence during the Second World War in Europe. A family of Jews , sheltered by a virtuous French farmer, is found out and killed on the spot. Shoshana, the daughter, manages to escape somehow from the bloodbath and streaks across a green and freshly harvested field towards a wooded area. Landa, the spectacularly-acted Gestapo officer, nicknamed “The Jew Hunter” (a retroactive ironic fast-forward reversal play, I presume on the term “Nazi Hunter”) watches her as she runs, aiming his gun at her back. But he seems to give up on the idea that he can shoot her and lustily yells after her: I’ll see you later, Shoshana…

It is my opinion that the scene in which we watch her run for her life is a very important moment in the movie. She seems to run without arriving, running away without much distancing. There is some infinitesimal shift during those seconds which, even as I’m writing this, I cannot be absolutely sure whether I saw it or just imagined it.What I think is happening is a rupture in reality. At some point during her run, the action shifts from the actual, irreversible past as we know it, into the future fantasy which Tarantino concocted. From that point onwards, everything that unfolds is clearly in the realm of impossibility.

Of course the film is a fantasy about an impossibility: What characterized Jewish existence during the Holocaust years was their utter defenselessness, despite a few scattered and mostly unsuccessful small eruptions of Resistance, as in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or the survival of a few hundreds Jews depicted in "Defiance".


Chapter 4:

I agree with Pollak, that this is a film whose premise could only be invented and made by a Gentile. This in turn, reminded me of a conversation I once read about, between Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, as they were working on the film script for “Eyes Wide Shut”:

S.K.: Another thing: that scene where Bill and the other guy walk away down the street. You say they're talking. What about?

F.R.: What does it matter? It's the end of the scene and they're a long way from the camera, with their backs to it.

S.K.: But what are they talking about?

F.R.: What would you like them to? They're a couple of doctors, right? So what do doctors talk about? Golf; the stock market; the tits on that nurse who's on nights...uh...holidays.

S.K.: Coupla Gentiles, right?

F.R.: That's what you wanted them to be.

S.K.: And we're a coupla Jews. What do we know about what those people talk about when they're by themselves?

Well, maybe Tarantino is giving us some insight into that mystery.


Update: January 18, 2010: The actor who plays Landa, Cristoph Waltz, won a Golden globe for his role in the film.

Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Quentin Tarantino:

Christoph Waltz’s character [of Nazi officer Hans Landa] was amazing. I would have been very interested to see how, if Waltz had come to the museum, he would have been received.

Well, you know, Waltz’s son is a rabbi.

Really?

Yes. And I’m actually kind of glad about that. There are several qualities in Christoph that are very similar to Landa. Not the Nazi part, obviously, but his erudition and his cleverness. Because of that, I can actually make parallels between him and Landa and not get too worried about calling him a Nazi.

A rabbi… where?

In Israel. I had to check on a Yiddish word, and Christoph called his son in Israel, who is actually a Yiddish expert. Christoph is obviously a language expert himself as well.






10 Comments:

At 2:33 PM EDT, Blogger EscapeVelocity said...

I dont get it.

What do Gentiles talk about when Jews arent present?

Sounds paranoid xenphobic to me.

 
At 2:39 PM EDT, Blogger EscapeVelocity said...

For some reason this came to my mind, upon pondering what you are on about here. I dont know why but it did...so Ill relay it here.


A Commenter at Harry's Place talking about a post which included the Youtube Video of "Tommorrow Belongs to Me" song in the Hollywood production of Caberet....said this.

Paraphrased...

"I went to see this movie when in came out (in the 70s?) in the US....it brought tears to my eyes. But the Americans were laughing at "the efeminate blonde fag with the high pitched voice." Americans terrify me."

 
At 2:42 PM EDT, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

Just a technicality: I guess the choice of the deliberate mistake in the movie name by Tarantino was, at least partly, for a reason that there already is a movie "Inglorious Bastards" made sometime in the seventies, not related to this one.

Otherwise, I liked the movie. But my perception frequently was of a puppet show written for children (oh well...) to explain to them some subjects in simple, deliberately coarsened for easier consumption, words. Or a comics.

 
At 2:46 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

"What do Gentiles talk about when Jews arent present?"

You misunderstand completely.

Kubrick seems to suggest that jewish men and gentile men are completely different species and that two Jewish men could not possibly know what two gentile men talk amongst themselves. The premise being that "Jewish" and "Gentile" might actually dictate the content of what MEN talk about. It may not have been obvious but my take on Kubrick's premise is ironic. Men talk more or less as men talk, when females are not around, regardless of race or religious or even sexual persuasion.

Is this better?

 
At 2:49 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

Snoopy: gam ze ra'ayon..

(Translation: this too is a worthy idea...)

 
At 4:10 PM EDT, Blogger EscapeVelocity said...

Well, that makes more sense.


I think you take Tarrantino way to seriously. He doesnt take himself that seriously. He likes movies for movies sake...that is why he recreates the styles and mannerisms and subject matter from genre films often genres noted for never rising above B Grade. Zombie, 70s Blacksploitation, Vampire Killing Romps, Horror Suspense. Tarrantino is satire of camp...but not in a condescending way, but rather a celebration of American Pop Culture, in all its over the top lowest common denominator glory. Brilliant! That is why he is so successful...he is the average joe (maybe a bit smarter) making movies that people want to see for light entertainment.

If people wanted to ponder the Holocaust they would rent Shoah.

He is here to have fun...not to preach.

That is my take on him. And that is why most people like his films. Not because they are intellectual masterpieces, but because they are fun.

Tarrantino comes at movies from the Video Rental Clerk perspective...not from the Post Modern French Intellectual perspective.

 
At 4:20 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

All you are saying is true and correct, but it does not undo my analysis (over over analysis). What I noticed is all there. Tarantino may be the cinematic equivalent of authors like Balzac and Jack London. They got paid for their novels by word count, they wrote to entertain in order to make a living, and they still managed to produce masterpieces.

 
At 4:30 PM EDT, Blogger BuJ said...

Great review.

The movie is mainly about Jews and Nazis. I don't see the connection with the clapping Arabic-speakers you mention in the start.

As for the name, isn't "...Basterds" with an "e" ?

That's according to:

http://www.inglouriousbasterds-movie.com/
(Tarantino's official site)

Not to mention:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/

and

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inglourious_basterds/

but I may be wrong...

 
At 5:01 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

Yes, it is with an "e". That's the spelling I used in the title and the reason for the whole spiel in "Chapter 1".

 
At 5:33 PM EDT, Blogger EscapeVelocity said...

Here is a Nazi movie (made in Germany I think) that combines them with the classic teenage Horror Zombie camp genre.

I cant wait to rent it.

Dead Snow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-KQh87_V2Q

Tarantinos movie is smarter with a much bigger budget...but similarly unpretensious.

 

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