Grading on the Curve

Time to add my two cents to the rest of the internet... I have seen Inglourious Basterds... Uh oh.... I think I should have forced myself to only look at the negative reviews - I would have come out singing a different song.

It is, taken as dispassionately as I can manage, a gripping, sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, superbly written and made film - that has more or less nothing at stake, probably due to having just about exactly one character in it. Everyone else is a function, a plot point - acted with aplomb (except for a few caricatures that are enacted with the perfect pitch of absurdity - think Eli Roth, Mike Myers, or the people playing the German High Command) - everything is made with great care and energy, but it is all just a machine. The exception? Christoph Waltz, playing a fairly transparent Tarantino stand in (motormouth, omniscient, demiurge, foot fetishist...), overall - I guess maybe not quite a character either - more the Author. Though, one might note, not the only author, or Auteur - heck, it's lousy with auteurs, inventing scenarios, enacting them, stage managing them, editing them - as well as, of course, making actual film... staging bits of actual theater... writing, or carving, things....

All of this, I'd have to say, erases most of the real history involved. I suppose you can argue about what it means to erase the actual history of WWII, especially WWII as a story about Germans and Jews - you could, but I don't think it's worth as much trouble as some of the critics (pro and con) are going to. He isn't denying that history - he isn't telling a story that justifies glossing over what really happened. The holocaust, the final solution, is treated as an inciting incident, a piece of backstory - that may be a loaded thing to do (therein lies Rosenbaum's objections, as I read them) - but it does not deny the holocaust. Maybe it treats the holocaust like any other historical phenomenon - subject, like all history, to absorption into stories, absorption into history - there is some point in resisting this, in treating the holocaust as somehow resistant to history... But it isn't. It is history, in the end, and will move, like everything else has moved, from lived reality to books and stories and signs, which is all there really is of the past.... Tarantino doesn't lie about that past - he just treats it as part of the grand text of history - but I can't say that he says anything terribly important about that past. It's a convention, a plot device - it's not history....

And besides, say the champions, it's more about film (history) than history (history), anyway. Which is fair enough - though even the film references seemed a bit like name dropping - "oh look! Emil Jannings!" - though to be fair, there are some pretty interesting names being dropped (not just Joe May [I think I caught a Joe May reference] - Karl May! Rather prominently, that...) I don't think, that is, one gets anything particularly profound out of the film references - though what you get, you get underlined, starred, bolded, in red. No bit of irony or meaning, no moment of audience manipulation and complicity goes unmarked... He seems very eager to make these points, and make sure no one misses them. You know - Hitler giggles and squeals over Zoller (hero of the film within a film) slaughtering hundreds of Americans - 5 minutes later, the audience in the real theater giggles and squeals in exactly the same way as Hitler and company - etc....

So no - it's not a great film. It's a marvelously well made film - but it doesn't do much with its powerful material, and it doesn't add up to as good a story as Tarantino at his best... But - you know - that's on a curve, set by all those gushing reviews....

...Because under it all run some interesting threads. For example - the role of language, words, accents - even signs, marks - semiotics. "Meta-signs" maybe, "metalanguage" - not what people say, but the language they say it in; not the language but the accents. Not even that - the betrayal of the body (hands; feet)... Or the way people assume other cultural identities - we have Jews hiding as French; Brad Pitt rather implausibly claiming to be Apache (which probably inspires the Karl May reference... Jonathan Rosenbaum brings this up, for instance in the comments at Bright Lights After Dark - Tarantino not only uses the holocaust as a plot device, he brings in references to Native Americans and scalping, but purely as a "movie myth"... But here, I'm not so sure just how dumb Tarantino really is. Yes indeed, he has Brad Pitt claiming to be Apache and using this as an excuse for his scalping routine - but: for heaven's sake - that's a character talking - whether Tarantino should use the myth or not, this is a character in the film invoking the myth... And then there is that Karl May reference - that is, a reference to a German tradition of completely invented American Indian mythology. I don't know - I think maybe all that mythologizing, all the cultural cross-dressing, all the complexities of language and culture and history and mythologies and dehumanizing analogies (Jews and rats, duly evoked) - might just start to rise to the level of content....) We have spies, assuming various identities, out of movies or not - we have clever casting jokes (they have to be jokes), like a German born actor being accused of not speaking proper German... All this gives a bit of a twist to Pitt's determination to make sure no one who serves the Nazis can ever escape that fact...

Finally... as history - I have nothing against alternative history, but there is one thing that is very much a-historical about this film. Though again - it's a strange and maybe haunting kind of ahistoricism. Is it, shall we say, entirely a coincidence that Eli Roth plays someone called the "Bear Jew"? That this Bear Jew and his comrades are murderous, cruel, irregulars operating behind German lines? partisans, basically - not subject to the rules of warfare... and... Because what is missing from this film is most precisely the Bear - and what the Basterds do would probably not seem too out of place behind the lines on the Eastern Front. Where is the Eastern Front? where are the Russians? All this talk about ending the war by killing the German high command is fine and good - but even if that happened - what do you do about Stalin? Even the war movie-in-a-movie, set in Italy, sounds a lot more like something you'd get in Russia somewhere... Eli Roth, at least, has the decency to swipe a few shots from Eisenstein - otherwise, the reds would be completely missing. But - this film, the Basterds especially, plays a lot more like an eastern front movie might - atrocities and horrors on all sides (though played for laughs.) And I suspect some of that is supposed to be there - Tarantino is too attentive to his words not to mean something by calling his most brutal character (played by a Jewish actor with Russian heritage) "The Bear Jew"...