Jeffrey Goldberg on seeing Inglourious Basterds:
When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview [with director Quentin Tarantino], I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank.
This is now an old story. We were exterminated in the Holocaust so we must regain our manhood. We do it in Palestine (Schindler's List ended in Israel). And we do it by taking it out on the Palestinians.
Psychologists call this "reaction formation." How long do American Jews want to be stuck in this bloody loop? How long do Jewish editors? What is this doing to the Jewish future, to imagine justice in these terms?
Movie # 5,574, 890 about the same subject
I dunno, Phil. That seems kind of ironic to me, i.e. I don’t think G-dberg is intending to be sincere. I get the impression he’s making the same point you are…
Sounds right to me.
This is when the ziocane addicts will show there face. Prepare for a lot of chest-beating pundits to spout more anti-Arab hatred on our national airwaves.
It’s like when Italians see Rocky for the first time…
(oops, my anti-italianism is showing)
Tarantino is at best a mediocre director. Based upon what most of the credible movie reviewers have written about this film, it appears to be a real stinker. Nonetheless, I suppose “reaction formation” will ensure that Marty “Macho Man” Perez* really gets off big time viewing this film.
*”Don’t fuck with the Jews” – Marty Perez, “The Spine”, December 2008
SEE – link to thedisbrimstone-dailypitchfork.blogspot.com
RE: I suppose “reaction formation” will ensure that Marty “Macho Man” Perez* really gets off big time viewing this film.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: In a diagnostic setting, the existence of a reaction-formation rather than a ‘simple’ emotion would be suspected where exaggeration, compulsiveness and inflexibility were observed. For example,
“[r]eactive love protests too much; it is overdone, extravagant, showy, and affected. It is counterfeit, and [...] is usually easily detected. Another feature of a reaction formation is its compulsiveness. A person who is defending himself against anxiety cannot deviate from expressing the opposite of what he really feels. His love, for instance, is not flexible. It cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do; rather it must be constantly on display as if any failure to exhibit it would cause the contrary feeling to come to the service.[3]
SOURCE – link to en.wikipedia.org
To be fair, Mr. Goldberg is only experiencing what most Germans felt in the 1930′s after viewing similar suggestive cinematic works. Mr. Goldberg is susceptible to suggestions of violence which triggers a transformational search for meaning within his own self. Mr. Goldberg desires a greater Israel and when he sees a film, probably beautifully directed, that depicts successful revenge against the greatest mass murderers in history, mass murderers who may have killed or otherwise harmed Goldberg’s ancestors, he experiences a great empathy for the fictional heroes and relishes in their brutality, which he would like to emulate in his own life. To become a Jewish Hero, like the men in the film, however, presents a problem. There are no hideous villains to turn into bloody goo. Goldberg is able to find meaning from the film by conflating the conflict in the movie to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. A conflict Mr. Goldberg has strong feelings for and/or emotional ties for and/or that arouses intense nationalism. Like a German in the 1930′s, after Goldberg sees a film that arouses him to violent action, he wants to increase the territory of the state most closely tied to his identity and reason for being with cinematic violence.
What is of course disgusting about Mr. Goldberg’s reaction to the movie, is that the ‘Banks’ of Palestine are populated with civilian families, not a military behemoth that has oppressed Jews. Mr. Goldberg is actually worse than the average 1930′s German because he belongs to an editorial elite, relating him more to the Nazi writers of that era.
Change editorial elite to publishing elite.
It seems to me that the film, for all its pretense, is essentially a 300 for liberals, allowing those who imagine themselves urbane and sophisticated to enjoy the same uncomplicated sense of righteous violence and masculinity liberated from feminist “oppression” that the hoi polloi experience in the typical action movie. The introduction of the Jewish themes (as well as Tarantino’s name) elevates the film from the mildly disreputable category of entertainment, whereas the Nazis, not a real political phenomenon but a token of pure, fantastic evil, merely function as a device that frees the genteel consciousness from the guilt of enjoying the pleasures of fascism. This is yet another reason to remember (as I also explained here) that the fundamental problem with calling people Nazis is not that it “demonizes” them, but that it assumes that Nazis were demonic. The category of the demonic, not the wrong labeling of Zionists or Arabs or anybody else with this category, is the door through which fascism is kosherized. read more
In most of Tarantino’s movies, he tries – and usually with good success – to manipulate the audience into cheering for acts of pure, sadistic cruelty. This is accomplished by designating the victims of said cruelty as scum who deserve no better, according to Hollywood ethics. Examples:
Pulp Fiction: Homosexual rapist and kidnapper – who deserved to be shot in the scrotum and slowly tortured to death afterwards.
Kill Bill: Rapists who violated a comatose woman. They deserved to have their tongue ripped out before being killed and/or having their head smashed in a door.
Death Proof: Psychotic murderer of young women. Deserved to be beaten and kicked to death.
However, this was all very complicated, because these guys had to be established as what they are – vermin who deserve everything – in tedious backstories. It was thus merely logical to switch from rapists/abusers to Nazis*, so that the righteousness of whatever brutalities they have to suffer does not need to be explained.
Newsweek’s Daniel Mendelssohn has written that in “Basterds”, Jews basically become Nazis.** That certainly sounds familiar, even to those of us who try to curb such hyperbole when describing the occupation. When this kind of self-image is so positively received on a basic, emotional level as Goldberg described, I’m worried. And not just for Jews, but for anyone who readily revels in this type of violence pornography.
I was, when reading some of the reactions to “Basterds”, reminded of one scene in the Novel “1984″. The protagonist is at a cinema showing newsreels of incredibly brutal and violent war crimes against civilians – which are met with cheers, laughter and applause from the audience, because the civilians were the enemy’s.
* Which, in doubt, means any WW2-era German and anybody who cooperated with them.
** I would add: And Nazis become what the actual Nazis considered Jews to be – subhumans which can and should be exterminated.