The
First World War is fairly consistently overshadowed by its more
spectacular and far more deadly sequel, World War Two. Although many
historians and intellectuals might regard both wars as being equally
momentous and consequential, I think that from the perspective of
popular culture in the 21st century, WW2 wins against WW1
in terms of fame and impact by a large margin. I'm not sure what the
exact statistics are, but I am quite certain that the number of
Hollywood movies made about WW2 far exceeds the number made about
WW1. There are some very interesting and notable movies made about
WW1, such as All Quiet on the Western Front.
Whatever artistic merits these films might possess, they lack a
crucial ingredient: the Nazis.
A
fairly reliable and seemingly inexhaustible format for a Hollywood
movie goes something like this: A bunch of bad guys do some horrible
things to a bunch of innocent people. Then some heroes come along and
do battle with the bad guys. The good guys don't really want to use
violence, but the bad guys are so bad they cannot be reasoned with,
so violence is the only option. So there is a huge fight with lots of
explosions and blood and guts, and at the end the good guys win.
Although it's often a close call, and quite a few good guys end up
dead along the way, these are usually only minor characters so it
doesn't matter too much that they die. The really good looking main
characters always prevail and win against the evil foes. The good
looking heroes are usually smarter and better at fighting than the
bad guys. It is almost as if there is some intangible substance that
the good guys have, and the bad guys lack, which makes the victory of
good over evil somehow necessary and inevitable.
The
Nazis fit into this format perfectly. They are clearly and
unambiguously evil, they kill a lot of innocent Jews, they fight a
gigantic battle against the good guy Allies, and in the end they are
defeated. Hitler is obviously incapable of being placated or reasoned
with, violence is the only possible remedy. There is no need for
scriptwriters to come up with fictional villians, the Nazis are the
ultimate archetype. Hence, hundreds and hundreds of movies involving
Nazis.
Inglourious
Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's
2009 remake of World War Two, presents an extreme and distorted
version of the standard Hollywood narrative. Brad Pitt plays the lead
role of Lieutenant Aldo "The Apache" Raine, who leads a
group of American Jews who go around brutally assasinating Nazis in
occupied France. Just like those other red skinned underdogs, Aldo
scalps his victims. Some of the Nazis he lets go, so they can tell
the others about the horrors that have been inflicted on them by this
notorious group of Jews out for vengeance. To make sure that they
never hide their Nazi past once the war is over (Aldo is of course
certain about the inevatibality of Allied victory), he carves a
swastika into their foreheads before releasing them. The climax of
the movie is a kind of sadistic wish fulfillment on an epic scale:
Hitler and all of the top Nazis are murdered gratuitously in a
cinema. The tawdry and private death of the real historical Hitler is
transformed into a fictional spectacle, with nitrate film providing
the highly flammable base for the final explosion.
The
first time I saw this movie I'm not sure I had a strong opinion about
it. Although it was nowhere near as memorable as his earlier films,
and there was something I sensed to be a bit sick and twisted, I
didn't think too hard about what that sick and twisted thing was.
This is Tarantino we are talking about – obviously, he is
determined to shock the sensibilities of ordinary every day movie
goers. In terms of the famous Either/Or choice of Soren Kierkegaard,
Tarantino very clearly chooses the aesthetic over the moral approach.
You can't judge a stylish postmodern aesthetic by the humdrum
standards of conventional morality. Besides, I genuinely did enjoy
movies like Reservior Dogs, Pulp Fiction and
Jackie Brown, so I
felt a sense of loyalty towards his films.
After
watching Inglourious Basterds
for the second time however, I am quite convinced that I really don't
like it, and I think I know the reasons why. This may be a completely
off-the-mark analysis of the movie, and I am probably guilty of
reading too much into what is basically a tongue in cheek romp with
lots of cool violence. Well, I will plead guilty in advance and
explain my views on this movie anyway.
Firstly,
Tarantino is venturing into new territory, so it is worth pondering
the differences between Basterds
and the earlier films. Most of these films were set in a criminal
underworld. Bank robbers, hitmen and femme fatale characters are
worlds away from the righteous Jews in Basterds.
We expect the criminal characters to perform acts of sadistic
violence, but it is shocking to see the muscular 'Bear Jew' smash the
brains out of a Nazi officer with a baseball bat. Also, whereas the
criminal characters are very firmly and definitely fictional, the
World War Two setting provides a much stronger connection to
historical reality. This is still very clearly fiction, but in a
different category.
Secondly,
this film is actually quite a lot more conventional than his earlier
films. Whereas Pulp Fiction
experimented with a non linear narrative format, with major
characters getting killed unexpectedly, Basterds follows
a standard narrative arc and has a predictable ending. Aldo's gang of
killer Jews are not exactly typical Hollywood good guys, but they are
the unambiguous narrative focus, and they triumph over evil in the
end.
Most
significantly, I think that the historical context – fictionalised
as it may be – completely changes the nature of the violence in the
film. There is nothing much new about the violence as such, it is
just what we expect in a Tarantino film – bodies writhe as they are
hit with machine gun bullets, people scream as they are mutilated
with a giant carving knife. But the fact that the body belongs to
Hitler, and that the knife carves a swastika, provide the movie with
that 'sick and twisted something' I mentioned above.
Usually
with these sorts of movies, the heroes are very solid virtuous
characters who take no pleasure in the violence they are forced to
perform out of duty and honour. With Tarantino there is no shame
whatsoever: the unquestionable moral basis of revenge against evil
(killing innocent Jews etc) provides complete and total license.
Milking this for all it's worth, Tarantino invites the viewer to
share in the pleasure of the sadistic violence. It's OK, they are
evil Nazis who deserve to die. And it's just fiction anyway.
The
strange thing is that Inglourious Basterds
almost acts as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the entire moral
basis of traditional Hollywood WW2 films. What is the difference
between the sadistic violence of the Tarantino Jews and the sadistic
violence of the Nazis? Presumably, the Jews have good reasons to be
violent whereas the Nazis are just plain evil. You don't have to be
an expert historian to smell a rat here: the Nazis surely had bad
reasons for killing Jews, but they did without doubt have reasons.
From their point of view, just like Aldo's Jews, revenge was morally
required.
The
most disturbing parallel is the swastika emblem carved into the
foreheads of the Nazis who are released. Again, the ideological
undercurrent is a sort of essentialism: there is some intangible
substance within the soul of these evil Nazis, which separates them
off from the world of regular humans. The swastika functions as a
visible mark which allows us to identify this invisible evil
substance. Now what is the difference between this and the Star of
David armbands the Jews were forced to wear to identify themselves?
The
final chapter of the movie includes numerous close-ups of Hitler's
face as he watches the movie in the cinema. A Nazi sniper is in a
clocktower picking off victim after victim with his rifle, while
Hitler laughs and drools sadistically at the violence on the screen.
Not long afterwards, we are allowed to indulge our own sadistic
voyeur, and watch Hitler's face being ripped apart by bullet after
bullet from the machine gun of one of the vengeful Jews. Is this
supposed to be irony? Co-incidence? Is Tarantino actually providing
us with a grotesque critique of our bloody sensibilities?
ANYWAY,
I am guilty of using this film for my own purposes, and I have pretty
much said all I need to about it now. The question I want to try to
get back to is WW1, and how it gets retrospectively affected by a
sort of populist understanding of WW2. There is a Finnish saying
which calls out people who try to make vague or overly imaginative or
obscure “leaps” from one topic of conversation to another: they
are building 'donkey bridges' between the topics. I would now like to
construct my own donkey bridge, leading from Tarantino's awful movie
to academic history. The person who will help to build the bridge,
and then walk across it, is the German historian Fritz Fischer.
The
point of connection is the fact that Fischer used to be a real Nazi,
who then turned away from Fascism and became famous in the 1960s as
the originator of a 'revisionist' view of the origins of WW1. Up
until this time most German historians either viewed Germany as being
equally guilty for the war, along with the other imperial powers, or
as a relatively innocent party forced into war by the aggressive
geopolitical context of the pre war years. Fischer gained access to
diplomatic documents previously not examined, and told a radically
different story. He claim that German leaders had the war planned
well in advance, and aggressively sought out pretexts for starting
such a conflict: the Sarajevo assassination was a convenient episode
for these warmongers. He also claimed that notions such as lebensraum
were alive and kicking in Kaiser's Germany. “Fascism” was not yet
a common word in European vocabulary, but the Germans could
accurately be described as “proto Nazis”.
There
is a crude and vulgar sort of essentialism going on in the Nazis of
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. A kind of invisible evil
essence pervades the Nazis and curses them forever to Seig Heil and
kill innocent Jews. Fischer and other revisionist historians refer
instead to the notion of Sonderweg or a “special German
path”. This provides an explanation for fascism based upon the
special characteristics of German political and cultural history
prior to WW2. The Nazis were not, according to this view, an
historical accident, but a very logical outcome of this historical
tendency towards authoritarianism and virulent nationalism.
Tarantino's Nazis are caricatures stuck in the recreated hollywood
version of the 1940s, Fischer's Nazis are complex historical ghosts
which can time travel back to the years before WW1.
Given
the sad and intellectually bankrupt status of mainstream comment on
WW1 commemorations, you probably won't see Fischer named very much in
the articles. If you take a look at something like the Guardian
however, versions of the “Fischer thesis” are commonly referred
to. Conservative commentators routinely reference Fischer as if his
“thesis” was the historical equivalent to Pythagoras' Theorem:
certain, proved beyond any reasonable doubt, Germany WAS responsible
for the war. We may not have known it at the time, and those proto
Nazis were not quite as monstrous as the ones that came after, but we
were the Good guys after all.
I'm
going to wind up this post with a couple of links:the Wikipedia entry for Fritz Fischer
And a very good essay about the history and motivations behind the 'Sonderweg' idea here
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