HISTORY, BASTERDIZED

Considering Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

 

Note: It’s impossible to discuss this film in any meaningful fashion without a detail-saturated recapitulation of its shock ending. The more incredible aspects of the finale are likely common knowledge by now, given that they’re among the most important and intriguing facets of the film. Those who wish to remain innocent of Inglourious Basterds’ climax, however, should turn away from this essay altogether until they’ve seen the film.

Restraint, which has been largely absent from the Tarantino canon for the past decade, is graciously – though only partially – restored in the World War II adventure yarn, Inglourious Basterds, making this his most rewarding picture since 1997’s Jackie Brown. Finally, those fearing the prospect of QT having permanently marooned himself in the copious, cartoonish bloodletting of the two Kill Bill pictures or, worst yet, the aimless, jabbering menace of Death Proof can exhale a sigh of relief, even if those same connoisseurs of high-brow vulgarity like Jackie and Pulp Fiction won’t be able to ferret out much resembling “maturity” (the word that continues to dog the video store maestro more than any other) in his latest.

The restraint in question manifests itself as a renewed sense of dramatic balance and carefully construed tension; effortlessly juxtaposed (and commensurately thrilling) virtuoso dialogue sequences and action set pieces abound, servicing the story rather than diverting it. His focus restored, Tarantino proves himself again able to tell an engaging cinematic story, clearly and well, an ability he’d seemingly forsaken as he attempted to isolate his polar strengths (meandering conversation in Proof, comic violence in Bill) rather than organize coherence between them.

Basterds’ story is divided between two plot lines: The first focuses on French cinematheque owner Shosanna’s (Melanie Laurent) attempt to disrupt the premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda effort starring the “German Sergeant York” Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who happens to be courting the comely projectionist; the second arc details a Dirty Dozen-type band of Jewish American soldiers, “The Basterds” led by the “part-injun” gentile Lt. Aldo Raine (Hollywood’s favorite accented uber-ham, Brad Pitt), as they’re dropped behind enemy lines with the sole objective of each man collecting, as Pitt’s iron-jawed hick shouts, “One….Hunnert….Nazi….Scalps.” Graphically depicted, but not often and never garishly so, the scalping amounts to psychological warfare: It's not enough for the Basterds to hunt and kill Nazis, they aim instead to breed vulnerability into the Third Reich via brutal Native American war tactics.

That Shosanna is the sole survivor of her Jewish family’s massacre at the hands of the evil Nazi Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (the brilliant Christoph Waltz, in what may be the best Tarantino-directed performance since Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield) makes both strands revenge stories of a kind, perfectly keeping with QT’s post-Jackie obsession. The split between the plots effectively bisects the holocaust and our postwar outrage into the personal and historical: Shosanna’s tale personifies revenge in the particular, as she’s spurred to retribution as the result of personal tragedy, whereas the Basterds represent the necessity for Jewish revenge in the abstract. No single Basterd is given a personal history or motivation; their need to kill is based more on a post-WWII historical reckoning of Nazi atrocity, and audiences are expected to walk into the theater armed with a preconceived understanding of and appreciation for the mission’s urgency and righteousness.

Two-pronged Jewish vengeance against Nazi atrocity provides Tarantino with a doubly fortified podium for commemorating an alternate history in which the consummate bad guy gets a more thorough comeuppance administered by his victims directly. The picture culminates in the Fuhrer himself attending Goebbels’s premiere at Shosanna’s theater, and dying simultaneously at the hands of Shosanna (who locks her theater doors when the Nazi aristocracy has been seated and sets a pile of explosive silver nitrate film aflame), and the Basterds (who bombard his private booth with machine guns), presumably ending the war in the European theater months before the Battle of the Bulge. In the movies, in Tarantino’s movies, Hitler is deprived the privilege of poisoning himself in a dank bunker, thus affording justice (depicted as recoiled holocaust in the literal sense) a second chance at the ultimate prize in Inglourious Basterds.

Is this historical do-over problematic? Most definitely, primarily because Tarantino skirts all discussion of morality, historiography, justice and ethics, situating his film on the ostensible stability of Western culture’s staunchest Manichean division between good and evil. In an embarrassing comparison, the recent Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie (about a real-life plot by SS officers to assassinate Hitler) can certainly claim a more nuanced approach to Nazis culture, though it was hardly Tarantino’s approach to do so (1). This dichotomized morality has bred nothing but a pious laziness in film artists such as Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benini. Does Tarantino, like these saints of recent Serious Historical Cinema, here exploit Jewish suffering to legitimize his pre-fabricated compulsions? Yes, without a doubt, but it’s arguable, and surprising, that he does so to a much lesser extent than his contemporaries. In this sense he is (somewhat disingenuously) casting himself as Tarantino the Innocent, incapable of offense and operating under the belief that he’s providing the world a shattering catharsis it had never considered or was too embarrassed to propose or pursue with such grand scale (2). This is in tremendous contrast to the pale, grandiose suffering offered by Spielberg and co., who obnoxiously mine survivor’s guilt in the service of schmaltz. Tarantino’s taking up of arms against the 20th century’s bogeyman is, while often loathsome and never completely unimpeachable, certainly preferable to the feebleness (mistakenly defined as “stark realism”) of the aforementioned. But that's faint praise, indeed.

While Pitt’s redneck gunner and Laurent’s scarred vixen hack admirably at the Nazi regime, the cinema itself emerges as the 20th century’s true avenging angel. The institution of cinema is given the most complex treatment in the film: it is variably seen as propagandistic muscle (3); the key to an intellectual resistance (Clouzot's occupation-era, anti-fascist masterpiece Le Corbeau is showing at Shosanna’s cinema), a tactical maneuver (a double agent’s intelligence qualifications arise out of a knowledge of prewar German cinema), recorder of history, entertainment alternative to the killing (Lt. Raine claims that their ultra-violence is “the closest thing to movies” his men see), and finally rectifier of the historical record. Cinema prevails, Tarantino claims, by embodying our hopes and fears, offering a chance at both fact and fiction, each a branch of Great Truth in essence. It’s not insignificant that the Basterd played by filmmaker Eli Roth is the supplier of the Hitler killshot. The potency of the director is remarked upon several times, and Roth (in a hollering, grating performance) is, in his last scene, the most literal manifestation of that, next to Shoshanna’s auteurist interruption of Goebbels’s screening (shortly before blowing the place up, she projects a short film in which she addresses the audience, informing them of their forthcoming demise.)

Her brief, climactic moment as auteur occurs a few hours after Shosanna states, in a semi-cordial argument with a German private/film buff: “This is France, we respect our directors,” and fittingly the film contains more conversational references to the cinema and filmmakers (King Kong, G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, David O. Selznick, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Max Linder, and Weimar cinema among others, are all given significant mention) than any other in recent memory (4). Inglourious Basterds not only boasts the most film-centric storyline of recent memory, it also marks the most overt fawning directed at the movies in Tarantino’s oeuvre. Past references in his films have been obscure and tucked away into the corners of the frame, never confronting their target audience with any sense of history or theory. While there are certainly instances of the same in this picture, it’s refreshing to see the consummate cineaste profess his love of the cinema as strongly as he does his fondness for women’s feet. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino could potentially spark more of an interest in film history with this film than all of the previous century’s countless television documentaries extolling the virtues of classic cinema combined. Such is Tarantino’s popularity worldwide, and such is his feverish devotion to his craft, now finally at the forefront of his work.

From a technical standpoint, the most attentive of cinema’s students simply knows where to put the camera and what to do with it, just as he always has. His tracks, pans and beats are, as ever, completely without flaw. The entirety of the film is pure cinema, with nary an errant angle or cut, as if it were assembled effortlessly. If there is a director for whom a concept of “cinema” is itself a style of direction, an attainable ideal or hygienic distillation of the medium’s past masters and hacks, it is Tarantino, whose images often lack idiosyncrasy and sweat despite perfect, efficacious execution. Similarly, DP Robert Richardson’s colors and textures are characteristically brilliant; this ongoing collaboration (their third film together) is proving more even-handed and fruitful than the teaming between Richardson and Scorsese, which is tilted decidedly toward the genius of the former. It’s relieving to see an action film made with tripods and dollies, concentrating and focusing kinetic activity rather than spilling it across an unstable image as in the Jason Bourne pictures and that series’ disciples. The soundtrack is often annoyingly filled with Morricone trots and inexplicably anachronistic pop tunes, but it’s largely effective in mounting tension, and it’s not hard to say that music in general has a more relaxed presence than in either Kill Bill film. As a technician, there is no uncertainty to Tarantino’s master status. If only his thematic preoccupations could claim the advancement of his visual and narrative prowess.

As the film closes on Lt. Raine committing one last act of mayhem (carving, as he's been in the habit of doing with prisoners, a swastika into the forehead of Waltz' Nazi so he'll never assimilate to a postwar society) Pitt utters the film's final line, “this might just be my masterpiece” before the camera cuts to black with Tarantino’s writing and directing credit. It’s easy to interpret this as Tarantino’s message to his audience (the self-mythologizing actually begins at the outset, with the succession of quite identifiable fonts that had introduced his previous films used to present the cast and crew of his latest), but, unfortunately, it looks like his masterpieces – those first few works of unnerving intensity, bereft of too much generic specificity and posturing – are behind him.


Inglourious Basterds / USA / 2009 / Color / 153 min. / Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino / Starring: Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger, Daniel Bruhl and Jacky Ido.


Notes:

1 - If there ever was an actor who could benefit from a creative revivification at the hands of Tarantino, it would be Cruise, who sports more charisma and bravura than the previously Tarantino-resurrected John Travolta, Robert Forster or Pam Grier, and seems headed for a similar rock bottom in popularity that all three experienced before starring in QT pictures.

2 - I’m aware that “what-if” scenarios, commonly labeled “Uchronia” (though Wikipedia disputes this usage, preferring “alternate history”) involving the expedited demise (or victory) of the Third Reich have played out in popular culture since war’s end, but they’ve certainly never been so operatic in scope or widely seen and/or discussed, making this the most visible variation on the concept, and should thus be held to a higher standard. Also, the fact that most of such fiction is literary is worth considering, as the potency of the cinematic vis-a-vis our conception of history is far greater than literary fiction's influence, but that's a topic for another day. An interesting bibliography of uchronic fiction (most of it unrelated to Nazism) can be found at www.uchronia.net.

3 - The propaganda film-within-the-film was directed by Eli Roth, who claims Battleship Potemkin as its partial inspiration, apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s work, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with how this may register with audiences knowledgeable of political and film history. An interview with Roth concerning the sequence can be accessed at http://www.avclub.com/articles/eli-roth,31811/

4 - The website Scarecrow Video has attempted an itemized account of Tarantino’s references in the film. This has become a natural occurrence when a new Tarantino film is released, and such lists inevitably expand as audiences digest the film over time. The list (the best one I came across during a brief search) can be found at http://www.scarecrow.com/2009/08/27/before-they-were-basterds/

BACK FROM THE FUTURE

J. J. Abrams' Star Trek

How’s this for time travel: As it reboots itself for a 21st century crowd nursed on the hollow pandering of multiple Star Wars and Matrix films, the once forward-thinking Star Trek series has backtracked at warp-speed from a thoughtful, if idealized, utopian future to the mindless, specious present of the tent-pole summer release calendar. One would think that in the era of audacious hope Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a united humanity traversing the cosmos could once again prove a viable pop-culture vehicle, but in the hands of television wunderkind J. J. Abrams (Felicity, Lost), Star Trek has instead devolved into yet another juvenile and ultimately banal exercise in blowing shit up. Abrams and co. have retooled and reinvented the Enterprise and her crew, emerging with a souped-up muscle car zipping about the galaxy in search of cheap thrills and even cheaper platitudes.

George Lucas envisioned Star Wars as the quintessential panhuman cultural document filtered through a kinetic “pure cinema”; a semiotic code bereft of specificity, relying exclusively on speed and volume, epitomized in the only scrap of directorial guidance the visionary offered his performers: “Faster, with More Intensity!” We can now imagine Abrams echoing this command to his writers, editors and thespians. One winces to think that it may also be the rallying cry of today’s audiences. After famously mining Joseph Campbell’s pioneering work on centuries of human mythology, Lucas reconstructed a phantom past that was gleefully decentralized: his landscape was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, belonging to no one and everyone, as technologically advanced as it was morally simplistic. Unsurprisingly, this construct was adopted by the aimless post-boomer generation as its own center of cultural gravity. Gazing backward with a bushy-tailed sweetness and casting his net widely, Lucas sidestepped an engagement with his calamitous present while unveiling the future: the massive, meaningless film spectacle populated almost entirely by machines, with a plot cobbled from military tactics and good ole’ fashioned derring-do. Almost immediately, Star Wars became mile marker zero.

Ten years earlier, Star Trek had captured the collective imagination of a much smaller group of earnest science fiction obsessives during it’s abbreviated three year run in prime time. Riding the emotional high of the Apollo program, the series reveled in allegorical allusions to the social ills and moral quandaries of the Cold War era. With an array of alien life forms rendering human discrepancies meaningless (and the concomitant belief that the future would see a human nature expanded and evolved beyond petty grievances), the crew of the Enterprise set about on a series of ventures whose closest television equivalent may have been The Twilight Zone. Along with the six feature Trek films that followed in the wake of Star Wars, the original series was comprised, unabashedly, of Shakespeare- and Milton-quoting chamber dramas set in outer space.

Almost a half century and several worthy spinoffs later, the series has finally succumbed to those middling standards set forth in 1977 by Star Wars and happily maintained each subsequent year by new installments of James Bond, The Terminator and a slew of superhero comic book adaptations. Rather than plumb the depths of racial antagonism, political legitimacy and the moral boundaries of science, Abrams’ newfangled Trek is yet another mouth-breathing, juvenile fantasy awaiting a full line of increasingly bloated sequels and candy-colored merchandise.

To provide himself with enough wiggle room to reinvigorate the series, Abrams and his screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman fashion a parallel universe storyline in which a Romulan ship (resembling a bunch of mechanical bananas) breeches an artificially created wormhole in order to travel back in time and destroy the federation-aligned planets one by one. The ship’s pilot, Nero (Eric Bana) is seeking revenge for the destruction of Romulus, which Starfleet (the peace-keeping arm of the United Federation of Planets) will fail to prevent 250 years in the future. Nero’s first target is the ship USS Kelvin, the command of which falls to a young George Kirk after his Captain is taken prisoner by the Romulans. Kirk the Elder subsequently sacrifices his life in order to ensure the safe evacuation of his crew, including his unborn son, James T. We then flash forward 12 years to the rambunctious, fatherless Kirk’s pre-adolescent escapades, before flashing forward again to his teenage years and his joining Starfleet, and flashing forward yet again to his third year in Starfleet, as he has matured to a meritorious, if no less unruly, student of intergalactic diplomacy. Devotees of Abrams’ Lost series should have no problem being constantly shot ahead in these narratively convenient chunks of time, but newcomers might feel as though trapped in a stuttering elevator. Eventually, Nero resurfaces through his wormhole to battle a second Kirk, and the film makes a beeline for it’s predictable outcome, scarcely worth spoiling. It will suffice to say that by the end we’ve all learned that revenge poisons the soul and a bit of unvarnished gumption gets the job done over rationality and compromise every time.

What’s interesting about the story’s trajectory is the translation of Kirk – the fulcrum of Roddenberry’s original universe and the standard by which all subsequent starship captains are judged – into the idiom of Star Wars: Shatner’s Kirk was red-blooded and cocksure, but also introspective and pensive, as apt at quoting classical literature as he was in a scuffle. This new Kirk (played by the relatively unknown Chris Pine) is an amalgamation of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, equal parts rapscallion and starry-eyed farm boy, prime for reckless adventure but simple at his core. Even as the United States elects its first avowedly intellectual president in decades, we still demand of our heroes a temperament closer to the recently departed George W. Bush, a pistol-packing, uncompromising anti-hero with complete disregard for both consensus and the law alike. Kirk is balanced by Zachary Quinto’s Spock (the third point of the triangle, Bones McCoy, is far less involved in this incarnation, and it doesn’t help that Karl Urban’s performance is an occasionally embarrassing imitation of DeForest Kelley) is a touch more Obama-like, but here rendered largely impotent with humility, shame and inadequacy, much as the political right wishes Obama would be. It is doubtful this portrait of our current political discourse is intentional, as the film was set in production before the current international climate solidified into this dynamic, yet even without intent it is nearly impossible to shake the parallels between this dynamic and the world that we’ve recently built for ourselves. It’s worth considering the implications of the disparity. As we experiment with a cool customer at our highest office, why is it that our most lucrative chunk of culture (already the highest grossing Trek of all time) during his first year in office showcases as its exemplar of heroic maleness a man remarkably similar to his loathed predecessor (let alone Kirk’s similarity to Obama’s foe in last year’s election)? Twenty years ago a Star Trek film may have questioned the viability of such a leader, but this film is far too busy looking for things to eviscerate.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has described our contemporary cinema as one of concentrated efficacy, and it is in this instance that this new Star Trek logs its most glaring acquiescence to Lucas’ hegemony. The perfunctory manner in which entire planets are destroyed, or evil is vanquished, or a young hotshot assumes command of a starship, removes all sources of tension, leaving the viewer (or at least those with any resistance left to the perennial blockbuster onslaught) feeling throttled rather than engrossed. This efficacy largely began in the 1970s with Star Wars and Jaws, and more thrills at ever-increasing rates have been offered up summer after summer on thousands of theaters simultaneously ever since. For the past quarter century, the Star Trek films also utilized bigger budgets and prime Cineplex release dates in the search of boffo box office, but The Series as a whole always felt out of step with the narrative trends of the day, admirably preserving its tendencies of earnest pontification. As Hollywood guns blazed, average shot lengths plummeted, and “Summer Movies” became a genre, the Stark Trek franchise stubbornly maintained a slow, inquisitive burn as it probed more than popped. At the center of these films were deep, timeless questions. Sadly, this new film has only answers in the form of payoffs to which the setups hardly have time to register. That’s progress for you.

Depending on whose account you trust, Gene Roddenberry either thought the idea of a Star Trek: The Young Years a worthy extension of his vision or a laughable indulgence. But even if we accept an attempt at an origins story (practically a compulsory move for any franchise these days) what has resulted is at odds with the tone that Roddenberry cemented firmly for his brainchild. One thing that Wars and Trek have always had in common was their existence as the work of a sole mastermind; Lucas and Roddenberry each maintained an equal mastery over their creations, employing talented, if pliable, stewards to tend their gardens. It’s clear that this Enterprise has room on the bridge for only one captain, so Abrams’ blockbuster ambitions (informed by his fervent adherence to the gospel of Lucas) have elbowed Roddenberry out of the chair. Abrams as an auteur is less the yeoman that Lucas found in Irvin Kirshner and Richard Marquand, so this Star Trek is his baby entirely. (2)

But is it necessary to discuss this film entirely within the context of another, altogether separate series? Has this become something of a false dichotomy? It’s now fair to conflate the destinies of Star Wars and Star Trek, as the latter has prostrated itself to the mandates of the former. Abrams has said in a recent interview that he has always preferred Lucas’ series, and sought to implement its lessons of aesthetic and narrative vigor in Roddenberry’s lumbering universe (3). However, if one evaluated each on its own terms as revenue-generating Hollywood product (the barometer most suited to the task, considering how thoroughly all ideological divergences have been purged) it could easily be said that Abrams’ film is vastly superior in both sentimental and aesthetic acumen. That Star Trek is so utterly superior to the past three Star Wars films is faint, if significant, praise. Abrams has a natural photographic eye whereas Lucas compositions have always been leaden, the most obvious evidence of which is the universal preference among fans for The Empire Strikes Back, which was not directed by General Lucas himself. The protégé also commands the ability to elicit identifiably human emotions from his actors, which his predecessor famously lacked. Abrams’ affinity for his human characters provides the film with a merciful absence of humanoid robots. Instead, Abrams has the decency to populate his films with biological creatures, and this touch of warmth keeps the film from feeling like an auto show or toy convention, giving it a leg up on most recent science fiction.

What’s most dispiriting about this film is that for a younger generation unfamiliar with the franchise’s venerable history, this new entry (and its future sequels) exists cozily alongside every bombastic franchise that soaks up summer dollars before returning to the trough at Christmastime with Unrated and Collector’s Edition DVDs. Rather than spark a renewed interest in the series’ previous installments and their progressive optimism, Star Trek is more likely to inspire anticipation for its own sequels – along with graphic novels and video games. Sequels which will continue to pay lip service to the window dressing of Star Trek lore while pulling further away from the original premise of Roddenberry's endeavor. Abrams’ film has eradicated, along with the hapless planet Vulcan, its own past, consequently destroying a better future. Through a wormhole, indeed.

Yet again, we’ve imagined a future nestled within an imaginary past. This film envisions a destiny rooted in the mythologies of violence and misanthropy that have plagued our popular culture for most of the postwar era. Roddenberry’s vision of a better way of conducting our affairs no longer has a place at the table (or, to be accurate, market). J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek has dreamed for us a colossally stupid and banal future, which should position it well within a culture hungry for squeeze and release arcs tucked within insipid master narratives. A pity the collective imagination has developed such a ravenous appetite accompanied by such a limited capacity.


Star Trek / USA / 2009 / Color / 127 min. / Directed by J.J. Abrams / Written by Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry / Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy, Karl Urban, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana and John Cho / Presented by Paramount Pictures


NOTES:
1 - According to the Wikipedia entry on the new film, Roddenberry said on record in 1968 that he desired to craft a prequel to original series. The biography Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man behind Stark Trek by Joel Engel claims that when the idea was proposed for Star Trek VI, Roddenberry quickly derided the premise, comparing it to the Police Academy series.

2 - For a humorous and detailed account of Lucas’ obsession with brand maintenance, see “The Empire Wins,” collected in John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing – the Marketing of Culture.

3 - Paradoxically, Abrams expresses admiration for the “optimism” of Star Trek as “positing a future that is incredibly inspiring,” while claiming that his film is necessarily in “the shadow of George Lucas,” and thus must be made to beat Lucas at his own game, rather than opt for any sort of alternative. The interview can be accessed at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/01/star-trek-dir-1.html


Either due to the unavailability of footnotes and superscript on Blogspot or my inability to figure out how to use them, I’ve resorted to a simplified, MLA-inspired method of annotating this and future essays. While aesthetically unappealing, these notes still serve the same purpose as traditional footnotes. With any luck, Blogspot will soon allow for footnotes, or I will figure out how to use them. Suggestions are welcome.