Violence as the Best Revenge: Fantasies of Dead Nazis

...Denby envisions a director’s cut “which no doubt shows Shirley Temple arriving at Treblinka with the Glenn Miller band and performing a special rendition of ‘Baby Take a Bow,’ from the immortal 1934 movie of the same name, before she fetchingly leads the S.S...

...No one that I’m aware of objected when Jacques Barzun, in his 2000 history of Western civilization From Dawn to Decadence, praised Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government and instigator of the deportation of more than 6,000 French-Jewish children to Auschwitz...

...If fictional depictions of Jews taking revenge turn them into Nazis, then it must follow that actual Jews who took revenge during the war, or after they were liberated by the Allies, are also Nazis...

...What Jews have done since the Second World War has no bearing on the action of characters in a film set during the war itself or on the real situations that faced Jews during the war...

...In the showstopper finale, Tarantino delivers a sequence that is so audaciously conceived and executed it makes you laugh with pleasure even as your jaw is dropping...

...even literary fiction like Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray (itself the basis for an underrated movie directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Cate Blanchett...

...None of this registers with Daniel Mendelsohn, who, in Newsweek online writes, “An alternative, and morally superior, form of ‘revenge’ for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future...

...That’s precisely the morality that Tarantino has brought out in critics...

...So what is bothering Denby—that Tarantino is straying from history or that the kind of history he’s brought up complicates things...

...That Inglourious Basterds has detractors who insist that history, art, and morality should always be rational, ennobling, clear-cut, and nice shows only just how audacious a work of popular movie art Quentin Tarantino has made...

...The power of any alternative history relies on our knowledge that things turned out very differently from what we’re seeing...

...It’s hard not to think that Tarantino is being accused of insensitivity to the Holocaust because of the genre he’s working in...

...That’s playing fast and loose...

...Even after the screen has erupted in flames, Shoshanna’s laughing image, now projected on billows of smoke pouring forth from the proscenium, hovers over the doomed audience like an avenging wraith...

...a British film critic (Michael Fassbender) enlisted to go undercover as a Nazi officer...

...Shoshanna, pestered by that young Nazi hero who hangs around her like a puppy, is pressured by Goebbels to host the gala premiere of the film starring this hero in her theater...

...The Basterds are merely the supporting players...

...Ken Follett’s popular thrillers like Hornet’s Flight and the terrific Jackdaws...

...He was shot as a traitor in 1945 but his record more justly classes him as a patriot in a post of double danger...

...These criticisms seem to imply that even acknowledgment of the extermination is inappropriate in a mere adventure film—though eliminating any consciousness of it would be closer to Holocaust denial than anything Jonathan Rosenbaum imagines he sees here...

...It would have to apply to the Jews liberated at Dachau who, after being given bayonets by American soldiers, killed the guards turned over to them...

...Nowhere in the film does Tarantino attempt to depict the extermination camps...

...With the entire Nazi hierarchy gathered in one place at the same time, Shoshanna plans to lock the doors of the auditorium and set fire to the theater’s highly flammable collection of nitrate prints...

...We know that the war went on, thousands upon thousands more died in combat, thousands more Jews were killed...

...Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War adventure, like Bonnie and Clyde, is a distillation of the movies, tall tales, and shared legends that color our view of the past...

...guards to the gas chamber...

...And as Raine, Pitt squints and struts through his scenes (to quote the critic Gene Seymour, who hated the film) as a cross between the Loony Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn and Clark Gable...

...Even what’s shocked most critics—Raine’s carving swastikas into the foreheads of his prisoners— has a moral point...

...And Tarantino is trying to shock us into realizing how clean those fantasies still are...

...the comparatively sober spy novels of Alan Furst...

...But she also defined the unprecedented nature of the Nazis’ crimes, the way those crimes took place outside of any comprehensible context...

...Art should make the Holocaust hard to grasp, should place the Nazis in the realm of the irrational where they belong...

...As a prelude, she’s filmed a scene she inserts into the midst of the propaganda film...

...We know that Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels didn’t burn up in a Paris moviehouse in 1944...

...Eichmann in Jerusalem is remembered for the way Arendt defined the banality of evil...

...Above all, they’re a reminder of the moral squeamishness that, when it comes to culture, passes for refined discernment, and that, when it comes to history, passes for humanitarianism...

...This is what seems to shock them most, the movie’s belief that audiences shouldn’t feel guilt for seeing the worst monsters of a century filled with them get theirs...

...The scene achieves operatic grandeur...

...It’s never a problem when high culture doesn’t hew exactly to the historical line...

...The incident was filmed by the Army photographer Walter Rosenblum and the footage later suppressed...

...But as the scene builds, Tarantino complicates the mounting elation with a sight that momentarily stuns us into silence: a well-heeled Nazi movie audience cheering as they watch American soldiers being gunned down...

...Crispin’s Day speech...

...The title Inglourious Basterds (the misspelling a way to distinguish the picture from its in-nameonly source, the 1978 Italian production Inglorious Bastards) refers to a squad of JewishAmerican soldiers operating in Nazi-occupied France...

...The scalpings and carvings are not the graphic atrocities that many detractors have claimed, but the sort of Guignol that makes you laugh and go “ewww” at the same time (those scalped pates are in a horror-movie shade of candy-apple red...

...The critics who believe that even fantasies of revenge reduce those who indulge in them to barbarians are keeping the lid on very tight, especially when the fantasy doesn’t allow audiences to pretend that there’s a clean way to mete out the kind of justice the Nazis’ crimes deserved...

...it’s the mark of Cain visited upon the entire Third Reich...

...By making the Americans cruel, too,” writes David Denby in the New Yorker, “he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well...

...In Paul Fussell’s writings on the war, in memoirs like Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed and William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness, in Sarah Helm’s truly disturbing A Life in Secrets (a history of the British agents who were sent into occupied France), there is no room for the comforting lie that the war was conducted on a plane equal to its noble objective...

...Mendelsohn reveals the cushy morality beneath his condemnation of the film...

...The Jewish critics who’ve praised the film get a special scolding from Rosenbaum, who never explains how a film that opens with a Jewish family being killed by the Gestapo and features a group whose main purpose is to avenge Jews denies the Holocaust or, as others have claimed, cheapens it...

...And whenever popular fiction deviates from history, there are always people ready to warn that we’re falsifying the past...

...The trickery and deceptions here are a potent metaphor for the way in which movies have forever altered our view of the Second World War...

...In a movie that has been accused of denying history, it’s an implicit belief that not all sins will be expiated, that history will not be denied...

...Charles Taylor is a writer living in Brooklyn...

...But as the critic Kim Morgan has noted, it is, by conventional logic, exactly the sort of movie that shouldn’t be a hit: twoanda-half hours long, most of that dialogue, most of that in a foreign language (therefore subtitled), and with foreign actors on screen much more than the ostensible star, Brad Pitt...

...Only the morally insensate doubt that the Allied forces saved the world...

...These characters use what the movies have taught them to win the war in the same way that the theatrical troupe members in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not To Be used the illusions of their profession...

...Behind the moral disapproval of the film is the confusion of art with civic virtue, the belief that art must be ennobling and worthy, and the woozy fear that indulging our taste for bloodlust makes us depraved...

...His too was a resistance,” Barzun wrote...

...But first it should be said that Tarantino’s critics have one thing absolutely right: the director wants us to relish the revenge taken on the Nazis...

...Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a Tennessee moonshiner and proud descendant of mountain man Jim Bridger (teller of tall tales and husband to successive Native American women), the Basterds set out to inflict as much terror on the Nazis as the Nazis have inflicted on their victims...

...The Basterds sequences are a series of splitsecond sick jokes with baseball bats to the noggin and punctuations of machine-gun fire landing like punch lines...

...For Raine that means scalping the dead (his tribute to his Indian heritage) and sending the survivors back to their Nazi superiors with swastikas carved in their foreheads...

...When, in his 1989 Wartime, Fussell wrote, “It’s thus necessary to observe that it was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic,’’ and ‘’It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning,” he was accused by Simon Schama of saying there was no moral difference between the Allies and the Axis...

...From that description it’s clear that we are in the sadistic landscape of exploitation movies, a place ruled by the mechanics of revenge...

...As for the thing that drives the critics of Inglourious Basterds gaga, Jews taking revenge, well, there’s precedent for that as well...

...Those works are all very different from one another, but it’s possible to enjoy most of them without feeling that your hands have been dirtied (unlike, say, Jean-Pierre Melville’s devastating film of the French Resistance, Army of Shadows...

...Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a German movie star who’s secretly a British agent...

...Just because critics don’t like Tarantino’s moral vision doesn’t mean that there isn’t one here...

...This is criticism seeking certainties, content to be alienated from the moral ambiguities with which art and history confound us...

...NOTEBOOK Violence as the Best Revenge Fantasies of Dead Nazis CHARLES TAYLOR Spoiler alert: This piece gives away key plot details about Inglourious Basterds...

...His afterthefact prescription relieves him of confronting the question of how people respond to violence as it’s happening to them...

...But detailing just what “the greatest generation” had to do to win “the good war” has always roused people indignant at being robbed of their moral virginity...

...Again, not an argument anyone is likely to make about Henry V’s St...

...The Basterds could have been inspired by the Ritchie Boys, U.S...

...Tarantino’s inventions are not as far-fetched as his critics would have us believe...

...When the Jewish family is killed in the opening scene, their murder is suggested by wood chips flying up from the machine-gunned floor...

...That The Reader used the Holocaust as the basis for its Nazi Tea and Sympathy didn’t much affect the enormous praise for book and movie...

...it’s an example of the rapture movies are capable of— even as it shows movies themselves employed as an instrument of death...

...For Mendelsohn’s claim that Tarantino turns the Jews into Nazis to be true, the Jews would have had to proceed with what Hannah Arendt called “an attack on human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning...

...And they are particularly shocked because it’s the lust for vengeance that powers the film’s most delirious and daring passage...

...the films The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape (based on a true story...

...But the picture is much more than a pageant of comic atrocities...

...What’s missing is what you find in the history and memoirs that the Second World War has produced...

...But in a real war, everyone commits atrocities, the Allied forces in the Second World War included...

...And while it might have caused 1940s audiences real confusion if, at the end of Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart had delivered Paul Henreid to the Gestapo so he could escape with Ingrid Bergman, no one objected when the romantic hero of The English Patient betrayed the Resistance to the Nazis in order to save his beloved’s life...

...In action movies and horror movies, the timing of violence is often close to comic timing...

...And from the words we see at the movie’s beginning, “Once Upon a Time . . . “ it’s also clear that we are in another landscape of cruel fictions, the fairy tale...

...Defeating the Nazis by sabotage or spying or some other feat of derring-do is such an appealing, enduring fantasy that it’s become a staple of adventure and espionage books...

...They weave in and out of the five chapters of the film, through the stories of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) a young FrenchJewish girl, the only survivor of a murdered family, who is hiding in plain sight as the proprietor of a Paris cinema...

...Marlene Dietrich, who was decorated for her war service and rode with American troops into Germany, is clearly the inspiration for the secret agent movie star Bridget von Hammersmark...

...There’s an outlandish, fantastical quality to these scenes...

...The air of prestige perfumes a lot, and high culture has its privileges...

...It’s not simply cinephilia that has led Tarantino to create a world where the war is fought by movie stars, film critics, theater owners, even a minister of propaganda who fancies himself the Aryan David O. Selznick (“trying to beat the Jews at their own game,” as Rod Taylor’s Winston Churchill observes of Goebbels in the movie...

...Lurking behind that bit of pulp outrage is the reality of the Nazis who disappeared into South America or into American intelligence programs...

...As we anticipate the coming revenge, Tarantino gives us a taste of what it feels like to be the prey...

...It would have to apply to the elderly descendants of the Jewish partisans depicted in Defiance who, at a Manhattan screening, shouted “Never again...

...The Nazi audience members finds themselves confronted with a close-up of Shoshanna in which she invites them to look into the face of the Jew who is about to kill them...

...And it would have to apply to Arendt justifying the execution of Adolph Eichmann by writing that because Eichmann was unwilling to share the earth with Jews “we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you...

...and a young Nazi soldier (Daniel Brühl), whose exploits single-handedly holding off hundreds of American troops have made him not only a German national hero but the leading man of a colossal Joseph Goebbels film production in which he stars as himself...

...soldiers trained in interrogation and psychological warfare, many of them German and Austrian Jews who had managed to escape to America before the war...

...And this is to say nothing of the moment when Shoshanna kills for the first time and the movie pauses to take into account her confusion about what she’s just done...

...It animates Geoffrey Household’s uncompromising novel Rogue Male...

...The attacks on Inglourious Basterds are a lesson not just in the class-based prejudices about who should be able to use history as the raw material of drama, but in the willed naiveté that still exists about the virtuousness of the Second World War...

...As a rewriting of history, that goes beyond anything Tarantino dares...

...Morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that,” harumphed the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum...

...You won’t find anyone claiming there’s lurking danger in the historical rewriting of Richard III...

...It’s not just refined and noble feelings that art should deal with—and Inglourious Basterds is very much a work of art...

...In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities...

...Under the leadership of Lt...

...The judgment would have to apply to the Ritchie Boys who, in filmmaker Christian Bauer’s documentary about them, acknowledge wanting to take revenge on Nazis...

...His detractors might like to believe that the box-office success of Inglourious Basterds (almost $300,000,000 worldwide at this writing in late fall) is proof of the contemporary audience’s taste for brutality...

...The catharsis of Inglourious Basterds, its wicked thrill, depends exactly on that knowledge...

...And there’s a way in which outlandishness is entirely appropriate to the subject...

...When Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, “For me, IB makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp—as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention,” he’s inadvertently praising the film...