I shouldn’t have taken my wife to "Inglourious Basterds," I should have known how upset she would be by it, and today I find that my own response to the movie, which I mostly enjoyed, is overshadowed by her (predictably) negative one. I agree with a lot of her criticisms. Brad Pitt is a bad actor. The fiction of the movie–killing Hitler–is a distinct step down from the reality. "Hitler killed himself. That showed how pathetic he was. Why would anyone want to change that?" The movie tells you nothing at all interesting about the Holocaust or the Germans or the occupation of France and Paris; it is just about violence.Tarantino created an equivalence between the Nazis watching a movie that glorifies violence in the film’s climax with us watching our American movie that glorifies violence. So was that the point, she said, that we all love violence? I said Tarantino doesn’t think that much.
Trying to recover what I liked about the movie: I found it entertaining. I enjoyed the scope and the pace, and there were a few really good scenes and great actors. The bad guy Christoph Waltz was superb. Tarantino knows how to do action and blood. This was Grindhouse in Europe.
The surprise for me involves Jews. The first scene in the film includes the murder of a Jewish family, and yet they are all but faceless; and then I braced myself for the movie to make me sick/angry about the extermination of the Jews, but it didn’t do that. The only Jews after that were Revenge Jews, plotting violence against Nazis. You didn’t see anything of the final solution, the cattle cars, starving Jews or work camps. Nothing at all. Tarantino is cartoons; and his Jewish cartoons were the Basterds themselves: American revenge Jews going to Europe to kill Nazis. One of them, the Bear Jew, played by Eli Roth, who kills with a baseball bat, was particularly grotesque and impossible to connect with, oafish. (And when he declares that he is "going yard," when he smashes a Nazi’s head, I thought, That expression for hitting a home run didn’t exist in 1944. It came into baseball coverage in the last ten years.)
Tarantino’s other Jewish portrait in the film is the artistic survivor Shoshanna, played by Melanie Laurent. She is also a revenge Jew, because her family was murdered and she plots angry revenge even as a sensitive Jew.
But her character is a hip cinephile and the lover of a black man. So really, Shoshanna isn’t about the Holocaust, she is about being a Jew in America. It seems like a lot of Tarantino’s Jew-feeling in the movie is connected to his philosemitism, as a Hollywood player.
The movie was also revealing about Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who will one day have his own wing in the museum of the Israel lobby. Goldberg served in the Israeli army and he too was entertained by the movie— and also put off by the film’s reverence for violence. Goldberg’s piece on Tarantino was rightly titled, "Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger"; Goldberg dug that philosemitism I have just talked about; he revelled in the Eli Roth character, and reports that Eli Roth was Tarantino’s rabbi on the plotting of the movie.
And Tarantino’s murderous Jewish feelings called on Goldberg’s:
"When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview [with 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."
Goldberg’s confusion about the real enemies of the Jews–the Nazis or the Palestinians– is a very old theme on this website. I have often quoted Avraham Burg’s genius statement that the Jews forgave the Nazis too quickly–in part because of German remuneration– and put their rage on to the Arabs. Goldberg is confused in that very way. What the fuck do the Palestinians have to do with this European evil?
The good thing about the movie is that it reconnected me to the potent feeling of Jewish rage at the Nazis. That’s an important feeling. I’m still angry about what they did, no matter how much water goes under the bridge. And I liked a lot of the Basterds in the movie, even if my wife thinks none of them can act. I identified with the nerdy ones.
I thought with sympathy of the neoconservative Douglas Feith. His father Dalck Feith lost 7 brothers and sisters in the Holocaust and his parents too, and so Dalck became a warrior in World War II. Of course he did. I would have done so too. But Douglas Feith experienced Jeffrey Goldberg’s confusion. He put all that unresolved rage on to the Arabs. And then, in a further motion of non-straightforwardness, Feith lied about Jewish power, lied about pushing the Iraq war in his book War and Decision, and put it all on Bush.
I liked the pure undeflected Jewish rage, liked being connected to it. The Jewish avengers are all so angry at the Nazis they are willing to give up their lives to kill them. Two or three of the Jewish characters plan to be suicide bombers.
So in that way, the movie goes to Palestine too, and makes me feel sure that some day, if only the conflict is resolved and our culture ceases to demonize Arabs, we will watch a film about how Deir Yassin fired the Palestinian basterds.
