Last week I had a piece at Salon where I talked about fascism and the aestheticization of politics in Dead Poets Society. I’d originally intended to talk about Inglorious Basterds as well…but I ran out of space. So I thought I’d try to do it here.
Just to recap: the aestheticization of the political is a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin to describe one of the characteristics of fascism. Quoting trusty Wikipedia, “In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.” So fascism treats political issues as the occasion for pageantry ; differences in power or goals are all subsumed into symbolic unities — like the Nazi arm band or the mass meeting — or symbolic marginalization — like the scapegoating of Jews and blacks.
Inglorious Basterds is, like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, so kinetic and pulpy that you don’t necessarily think of it as particularly thoughtful, about fascism or anything else. In fact, though, Tarantino seems almost to have made the movie specifically to illustrate Benjamin’s argument. The Nazi’s in Basterds are obsessed with image and aestheticization. The first scenes of Martin Wutke’s ridiciulously mugging Hitler, for example, are set against a backdrop of an artist working on a large, hyperbolically noble wall painting of the dictator. More, the Nazis in the film are presented as being obsessed with Nazis in film. The plot centers on a screening of a re-enactment of a German war triumph in which the hero, Private Zoller, plays himself. At the direction of propaganda minister Goebbels, Zoller the hero becomes Zoller the icon — a politicized propaganda image of himself. That image is so important that Hitler himself comes to the screening, giggling happily (like Tarantino himself?) as screen Zoller shoots dozens of men. Hitler compliments Goebbels enthusiastically on the screen carnage, at which Goebbels almost breaks down in tears — a propagandist who believes in his own imagined Fuhrer.
You could say that the aestheticization of politics dooms the Nazi’s in the film; they’re so obsessed with the propaganda image they’re creating that all of the Nazi brass decide to attend the opening of Zoller’s film, exposing themselves to not one, but several murderous plots. The image of Nazi victory turns into the reality of Nazi defeat — Zoller himself is shot by a French Jewish plotter even as his film self (played by his real self) kills enemy soldier after enemy soldier onscreen. And we get to see Hitler riddled with bullets by Jewish-American soldiers, doomed by his love of (his own) image.
Of course, Hitler wasn’t really killed by a Jewish-American soldier in a movie theater. That’s just a filmed fantasy of victory — a Western mirror image of the Zoller film. Hitler sits himself down to see an iconic, aestheticized encapsulation of his political prejudices, and we do exactly the same thing. Tarantino positions us, watching the Nazis die, in the same place as the Nazis watching their enemies die.
If the Nazis aestheticize the political, in other words, then so does Tarantino, and so, in the same way, do we watching Tarantino’s film. Inglorious Basterds is one suspense tour de force after another, with larger than life characters pirouetting virtuosically through breathtaking set pieces, punctuated with knowing flash-backs, ironic voice overs, and compulsive references to films, films, films, from spaghetti westerns to Triumph of the Will. The violence, the plotting, the revenge narrative and the sheer spectacle are so overwhelming and delightful that the occasional nos to political content is actually jarring. When Jew-Hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) makes an offhand remark about how he can “think like a Jew,” and compares Jews to rats, it seems gauche, unnecessary. He’s just supposed to order that family shot in a blaze of choreographed violence; linking the bloodbath to some sort of ideological meaning seems wrong.
The implication here is that, in important ways, Western democracy isn’t all that much different than fascism. The politics of both are couched in aestheticized symbols and mass ideology as spectacle. Brad Pitt’s murderous American guerilla Aldo Raine operates on much the same principles as his Nazi enemies; just as they see the Jews as a species, so he sees them as subhuman, marked. As he says, the idea that a Nazi soldier might go home, take off his uniform, and return to civilian life is wrong and inconceivable. A Nazi is always a Nazi, and so Aldo carves a swastika onto the foreheads of his prisoners, to make sure that the categorical difference he sees, the clear division of the races, will remain symbolically visible — political demarkations given aesthetic form. (It’s worth noting too that Aldo is nicknamed the “Apache” for his habit of taking scalps. Tarantino may well be aware aware that the American Indian genocide was a direct source of inspiration for Hitler’s Holocaust.)
The last image of the film is Aldo and an associate looking out of the screen, supposedly at the swastika Aldo has just carved in Landa’s head. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” Aldo says. It’s a self-reference; Aldo is a stand-in for Tarantino, who completes his film about Nazis at the same time as Aldo completes his Nazi symbol. But Aldo’s self-satisfied smirk is also (self-)deceptive. The Nazi here is not going to remain a Nazi; as soon as the film ends, in fact, Landa will go back to being Christoph Waltz, who (thankfully) has no swastika carved into his skull. Aldo’s dream of Nazis who are forever Nazi, like Tarantino’s dream of Hitler killed in a movie theater — they’re both just aesthetic fictions. Politics as symbol ultimately fails.
It’s true that part of the giddy rush of Inglorious Basterds is the sense that art can be politics; that we can make Jews take their revenge on Hitler just by representing it as truth. But part of the film’s power is also, contradictorily, the refusal of aestheticization; the insistent artificiality and theatricality remind you that the politics here are aesthetics, and so never allow the first to be subsumed by the second. Aldo can’t really reach out of the film and draw the swastika on our head. The symbol he wants to be totalizing isn’t — which means, maybe, that these bloody fantasies don’t have to control us forever. The real hope of Basterds isn’t that the Nazis will get theirs, but that, maybe, we can take off that uniform, and leave the theater.
Have you read this?
http://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/tarantino-nazis-and-movies-that-can-kill-you-part-1/
The author’s analysis follows , but he ultimately comes to a somewhat different, and bleaker, conclusion.
Meant to say, “The author’s analysis follows much the same lines as yours, but he ultimately comes to a somewhat different, and bleaker, conclusion.”
Yeah; conclusion is here:
http://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/tarantino-nazis-and-movies-that-can-kill-you-part-2/
I don’t exactly buy that Tarantino hates his audience — and I certainly don’t buy the argument that Tarantino thinks he’s not in the audience. He’s a fanboy; he loves watching films. The idea that Hitler laughing at violence is supposed to be the movie audience and somehow not Tarantino himself seems like a pretty big leap.
IB is really a joyful film; it just seems filled with love to me, for cinema, for spectacle, for its own characters and its own virtuosity. Seeing it as infused with some sort of violent loathing of the audience…I really don’t get that from it.
There’s been talk of the way the film can be read as implicating the audience, but Roger Ebert argues that the way it’s filmed goes against that reading:
“If he wanted to undercut Shoshanna’s revenge by inflicting sharp pangs of ambivalence on his audience, he would have made sure he shot his film that way, and you would feel it beyond any doubt. But he doesn’t. There’s some room for ambiguity, but not a whole helluva lot. For most of the sequence, as the place goes up in flames and the giant face of Shoshanna glories in her revenge (first on the screen, then as an image projected in smoke), Tarantino shoots the Nazi audience as if they were lemmings — bearing down on them from above, or looking up at the Basterds firing their machine guns at them. Most significantly of all, we rarely even see their faces. They are shot from behind or above as they attempt to flee through the blocked exits. Tarantino does not choose to shoot them coming toward the camera, or to single out individuals in the crowd (see Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence, quoted in “Nation’s Pride”). When the cinema explodes, we’re treated to a spectacular shot of a body flying through the round window above the marquee. The effect of the entire sequence is more cathartic (and kinetically thrilling) than anything else, no matter what undertones you may also read into it.”
http://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/inglourious-basterds-real-or-fictitious-it-doesnt-matter
The last image of the film puts you in the position of the Nazi, though.
I would say that the final bloodbath is more cathartic than anything else…but that catharsis is pretty directly linked to the catharsis Hitler experiences when watching the bloodbath on his screen. And you do sympathize with Landa, I think; he’s repulsive, but extremely charismatic as well. And the Nazi who gets beaten to death with a bat; he’s pretty clearly supposed to be admirable. And then there’s the new father who gets shot to death in the basement just for being in the wrong place, and who the script tells you repeatedly to sympathize with (as in, various characters say, this is a moral problem that you have to shoot this new father.)
“The last image of the film puts you in the position of the Nazi, though.”
Maybe, it’s a little ambiguous I’d argue, because we could be looking from the point of view of the “art” they carved on his head. The dialogue sort of reads that way.
It’s rarely clear absent camera movement whether you have a point of view shot or a camera that happens to be very close to the eyes of the reversed person in a scene.
I do think you’re right that the final scene comes off as not very cathartic.
It seems kind of ambivalent.
Actually, I was pretty ambivalent about the theater scene too. They position Roth and the other sniper up above the audience, shooting down; we’ve just seen on the film within a film the Nazi sniper shooting people from above. The parallel is hard to miss, and pretty uncomfortable.
A frequent comment about Tarantino is his characters sometimes seem sort of aware they are in a film, so you could say they are “looking” at the camera, and the Nazi, and the carving, and the film, and the audience, all of whom are conflated.
Yeah, I’ve seen that commentary about the theater thing, your’re not the only one who had that reaction to that scene, I think that’s what Ebert was responding to, he didn’t buy it.
I felt an uncomfortable ambivalence when watching these scenes. I think Brühl’s performance contributes to this too– Zoller could have been much, much worse. As I remember it, he came off as a bit thoughtless, but still somewhat touching.
A bit thoughtless is an understatement, but yeah, I’ll stick by touching. My guess is Tarantino threw in a good measure of Arendt with his Benjamin, but to make the film more problematic, than less.
Bruhl’s performance, like many in IB, is really brilliant. He does come across as thoughtless for the most part…but you get glimpses of something uglier. When Shoshanna rejects him at the end and he refuses to leave and he starts boasting about how many people he killed for example. He’s a nice guy, but nice guys aren’t necessarily all that nice.
Noah, that puts it exactly. He pulls the nice guy part off so well, it’s brilliant.