Posts Tagged ‘Inglourious Basterds’
Afterthoughts on Tarantino
Jonathan Rosenbaum has written more on what troubles him about Inglourious Basterds. He makes, much more articulately, the point I wished to make about how it fails to convey any meaning: how its talk is idle. My response, one that JR claims to be waiting for (though it is not possible to reply directly as his blog is closed for comment), is that there will be no such reply: no one will be able to perspicaciously point us to anything Tarantino is saying about his subject or his medium (or persuasively argue that Inglourious Basterds is an experience worth having). What we might get, however, is analysis of the film as a phenomenon (a symptom): in the vein of K. Longworth’s post on Tarantino’s little omelette. She felt that I.B. seemed to be more symptomatic of the world of September 2009 than of the 2008 which threw it up. And when I watched the film, Slavoj Zizek’s preoccupation with the obscene fantastical popped into my mind (a similar connection was made by KL). Yet this film is the obscene fantasy of QT, and a select few peers. I am glad not to count myself among them, but also glad not to merely dismiss it as simple self-indulgence. It is, after all, quite obscene.
Inglourious Basterds **
An extremely sensitive debate has unfolded around Inglourious Basterds (and rightly so). One opening salvo came from Daniel Mendelsohn at Newsweek, whose deep concerns with the film have peculiar resonance. Quentin Tarantino’s film is concerned with inversion – principally, the subversion of the violent 1950s and 1960s action films set in the theatres of the Second World War (within the mould of a classic spaghetti western). Put succinctly, Inglourious Basterds is about Jewish revenge. Obsessively drawing upon conventions from War and Western genres, then turning inward on the traditional auteurist subject of the cinema itself, Tarantino ultimately has the raw power of cinema defeat the Nazis (having already tortured, butchered, burnt and explicitly annihilated the Germans, as effigies of nemesis). Mendelsohn contends that this genre-mashing postmodern omelette leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and broke too many eggs in the process. “Using the Holocaust, even tangentially, as a vehicle for a playful, postmodern movie that so feverishly celebrates little more than film itself” is the first sin. I would happily defend a director’s choice to reject historicity, but by toying with several key symbolic aspects of Nazi terror and violence (mass burning, symbols carved into flesh, etc), Tarantino leaves himself open to hard criticism. By turning these acts against the Nazis, and moreover, by having Jews perpetrate the atrocity, his inversion amounts to either an exploitative leveling (that brings the victim into the fold of the condemned) or a vicious misreading of Jewish philosophy (an eye for an eye, ad absurdum).
