Tarantino, fascism, cinema, and violence

Rescued from Twitter:

Emperor Norton <@ashleynaftule> argues:

Something I really appreciate about Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained is that they are a very rare species of Hollywood cinema that understands that half-measures in the face of fascism don’t work and doesn't try to equivocate about the morality of its political violence

tl;dr Nazis and slave-owners getting absolutely Itchy & Scratchy wrecked is good

Like, Quentin isn’t a Marxist or anything but it’s hilarious when people call him a reactionary. Absolutely no conservative on planet Earth would take this much joy from depicting jackboots and slavemasters getting turned into torrential streams of uncanned Chef Boyardee

I find this fascinating because I simultaneously understand this reading and think it is profoundly wrong.

Both Basterds and Django call shenanigans on cathartic movie violence. They say: “Hey, in the world we portray in movies, slavery and WWII would have been over quickly with victories over evil. So movie logic is bullshit.”

As I have described before at length, I do not see how one can watch the Bear Jew sequence in Basterds and read the movie as just a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. It drags us back and forth over the line of I Want To See It Happen vs Oh Gods No I Don’t. Tarantino marshals every bit of cinematic vocabulary he can — framing, music, editing, et cetera — to give the Nazi a Stoic Heroic Sacrifice at the hands of cruel maniacs. Not just a German soldier, a guy who expresses his antisemitism directly.

It is not Tarantino saying that Nazis are the real heroes here; one cannot read the movie that way. It is Tarantino criticizing movies. Criticizing the kind of violent movies he himself has made.

Understand, I love a cathartic good time watching movie heroes killin’ Nazis. My favorite scene in all of cinema is one of those.

I love Tarkovsky and Kurosawa and Bergman and all that film nerd shit but honestly this is my favorite scene in any film I have ever seen. I have watched it a hundred times and I will watch it a hundred more. There should have been ten movies of this.

I am not above enjoying Inglorious Basterds that way as well. It invites us to! But I think it delivers that in service of trying to get us to examine why and how we like it.

1. The movie gives us a theater full of Nazis gleefully enjoying a movie depicting pointless nihilistic violence. Tarantino is asking, “What the fuck is wrong with me and my audience? Is this what we are?”
   
2. Not for nothing, the logic of cinema reverses at the end of Inglorious Basterds. The Action Heroes’ plan fails. The Nazis are defeated by ordinary people, a Black man and Jewish woman, by them burning their back catalgoue of films.
3. The overpoweredginger <@AdmiralOPG> adds:

   also I think it’s worth noting that the Allies’ plan fails not just because of the violence, but also because of the language

   their inability to communicate like the Germans & Italians directly hampers their effectiveness, but the people from within that environment don’t

   Tarantino says here that expertise in violence is worthless where it really counts; cultural sophistication is far more powerful. Notice how from the very beginning, his films have been Comedies Of Manners Decorated With Violence.

Turning to Django Unchained, of course there is a lot going on in it. Surely one can see in there its own ambivalence about the fantasy of cinema projected onto real historical horrors? Yeah, it feels great to unleash Black Cowboy Murder on slavers, and movie logic lets Django & Broomhilda get away. But in the movie, slavery is not defeated, is it?

Literally as I was walking out of the theater, it was clear to me that it was about not history but movies about slavery, making it impossible to watch Gone With The Wind uncritically. I said at the time:

Django Unchained is, first among many interesting things, Tarantino vs. Selznick. Tarantino wins.

I think that needed doing.

Now Tarantino does have a third, explicitly political film about how we respond to the fascist sensibility.

And boy howdy is The Hateful Eight a lot more complicated than either simply advocating responding with violence, or not. Maybe someday I will find time to write about that, or find someone who has already said it better than I could.