Once Upon a Time When the World Was Occupied by War
If journalism is the first draft of history, then cinema is its editor, patrolling the border of our minds between what is accurate and what is glorified and romanced. A whole generation of Vietnam films, from The Deer Hunter to Apocalypse Now, artfully defined America’s angst and ambivalence toward the war (our inability to define the current “war on terror” is also one of its greatest tragedies). Not content to merely influence, Quentin Tarantino chose instead to construct out of whole cloth an alternate history, rewriting the ending and bringing World War II to a swift and sudden resolution under the guide of his pen. There is no delusion that Tarantino can bring back the soldiers and civilians who were killed during the war’s final protracted battles, but surely his film Inglourious Basterds is the truthful affirmation of the old axiom that ideas have power. The elaborate revenge fantasy may be crude, it may be cathartic, but it is cathartic in the way that a fantasy is cathartic once it is detached from the consequences of reality.
The film begins with the words, “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France,” but like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, it is not a fairy tale. Perhaps it is a dream brought low by reality. Mirroring the real Oradur-sur-Glane massacre, in which the Nazis burned alive the citizens of a town inside of a church, the character of Shosanna Dreyfus traps the Nazis inside of her theater and burns it to the ground. Tarantino subverts a lot of elements from westerns, where the good guys and bad guys can only be told apart by the way in which they dress and their sentiment toward those people caught in the middle – the bad guys destroy, and the good guys destroy those who destroy. The basterds scalp dead Germans and embroider swastikas on the foreheads of those whom they spare, giving the Nazis a taste of their own proverbial medicine.
Those who stand in favor of the film might say that the violence is being done against an idea. The Nazis in Inglourious Basterds may have personality, but only as caricatures made out of simple clay, not as flesh-and-blood people; Hitler himself looks like a comic book villain in his opulent cape. Except for the character of Hans Landa, who is a career opportunist that exists somewhere on the scale between salesman and assassin, the real role of the Nazis is to cower before and oblige the blood lust of the Jewish threat – a strange and quirky reversal of fortunes. What is in reality repugnant and offensive might become in cinema an indulgence; when the credits roll, the revenge is consummate and complete, and the director has the final say. It’s all a fantasy story where the violence cannot be reciprocated, and so attempting to negotiate a world of moral complexity would only be a hindrance. If Tarantinto is in perfidy of taste, then it is a crime of excess. A common complaint is that the Jews, by emulating Nazi behavior, are just as culpable for their sins. Evil is reduced to a cartoony state, one in which any real understanding is emancipated from beneath the weight of heady moral contemplation.
Either way, there is something deeper than violence embedded here: it is no coincidence – no act of an artless filmmaker – that during the presentation of a Nazi propaganda film, Nation’s Pride, the theater is burned down with combustible celluloid. It’s a metaphor for the power of film to triumph over and destroy Nazi ideas (and even though the basterds have a plan of their own, it is the young Jewish woman with the personal vendetta who gets her revenge). Inglourious Basterds transcends violent revenge fantasy and becomes its own metaphor. It is often through the eyes of a director that we see the capacious scope of war; Tarantino acknowledges film as a propaganda force throughout history and somehow turns this into a post-propaganda film, in which the revisionist history is done with a wink and a nod.
What gives Tarantino license to attempt such a film is his gory and graphical style, which exists somewhere between irreverent and comically morbid, but he is not the first director to attack the Nazis with humor. While the war was still raging in 1940, Charlie Chaplin made Hitler out to be an egocentric buffoon in The Great Dictator, turning the despot’s totalitarian dreams into the fevered cries of a little child, and Mel Brooks’s 1968 film The Producers is about two Jews who foment a get rich quick scheme by producing a play called Springtime for Hitler (described as a gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden), which through no particular skill becomes one of the funniest satires of all time, replete with a hippie Hitler who sings about love power, seethes with resentment for the establishment, and seems assembled out of dichotomic styles – the audience is supposed to laugh with the play and at German author Franz Liebkind, who is bound by a rank hatred for anything that abrogates his fealty toward Hitler. At the other end of the comedic scope is Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which is not a comedy about the Holocaust, but about the tragic lengths that a father will go to in order to fortify his son against the corrupting influences of hate and violence.
Tarantino’s other revenge series, Kill Bill, pads the irreverent and outrageous violent elements with an endless series of esoteric references to genre films made palatable for the mainstream. Never one to succumb to his own routine, his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure films is employed at the service of his scripts, so that they are at once part of the conventions and yet set free from them, transcendent and alive. The title Inglourious Basterds - the misspelling, by the way, might be a wry and Tarantino-style corruption of the original film, in the same vein that the misspelling of The Pursuit of Happyness represents in Will Smith’s movie a different way to a better place in life - is a reverential reference to The Inglorious Bastards, a 1978 “macaroni combat” film (which is an Italian riff on an American genre, like “spaghetti westerns”) about a Dirty Dozen style incursion into German territory in an attempt to steal military hardware. It’s a fun, exploitative action film in which bullets and lead are the main methods of communication. It’s easy to forget just how radical these original incursion films were. Dirty Dozen was also framed within the excitement and intensity of an action movie context and yet employed violence not on the battlefield, but at a party, where officers and wives attend. These films keep alive the old Klingon proverb that is quoted at the beginning of Kill Bill: revenge is a dish best served cold.
Tarantino calls it the power of cinema to fight Nazis, but that ability is not solely couched within the precepts of violence. Other films have fought Nazis by showing Jewish resistance. Roman Polanski’s The Pianist is about the survival of the human spirit, the triumph of art. It is the real life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was saved from the death camps and fled detection throughout Poland. Polanski had lived through the events of the Holocaust and incorporated many of his own experiences into the film. Through Polanski’s lens we watch a stolen childhood enfold before his eyes, as scenes of violence, stored once in memory, are enacted on camera, not so that the Jews could reciprocate their torment, but so that the Jews could outlive it.
Near the end of the film, Szpilman is saved by a German officer who offers him solace instead of certain death. “What’s your work?” the German asks him. “I was a pianist.” And so he plays the piano, even though his fingers are trembling and the audience almost expects the desolation of the war to obscure and oppress his memory. But at the swelling of his art, the war disappears for a moment in that fortified enclosure of space. It is what keeps him alive and gives him hope.
In Germany, Nazism occupied hearts and minds instead of territory, but amongst those who had no interest in ideology was Oskar Schindler, the German portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. He offered Jews a way out of the charnel house by employing them in his factories, where they could systematically sabotage military equipment and vitiate the war effort in their own small acts of non-violent resistance. SS officer Amon Goth turned into a kind of foil for Schindler; his idea of good was to pardon Jews, those who were already numb to death, from his sadism. He was as a man whose narcissism could be appealed to. While Goth wanted only to consume and destroy, Schindler saved 1,200 Jews whose names were inscribed on his list. “This list is an absolute good,” says Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley. “The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.” By the end of the film, Schindler is heart-broken that his own efforts falter with the realization that he could have saved more.
Perhaps there is nothing so simple about the Holocaust that it can truly be called an achievement or a triumph – neither are there victims, but those who live and those who die, and neither is there glory in tragedy – but in reflection the advantage of Schindler’s List is that it takes broad feelings and coalesces them into a sharp, nuanced relief, so that we may empathize and understand. Inglourious Basterds has the opposite effect. It makes our feelings broad, abstract, remedial but untenable, like a loose thought, a revenge story that one would write but not let anyone see. It may not make for an accurate lesson in history, but through a certain kind of lens, perhaps it has something to teach us about the way in which we see the past through the eyes of the present.
>Written by d/visible contributor Jacob Stutsman.
