What Tarantino Is Doing

Around the third grade I took to writing a series of short stories set during my favorite conflict, World War II. They were all written in the first person, and although I knew that the exploits of the protagonist were not exactly my own, this form of narrative had an extra thrill for me. And thrilling these stories were. Their protagonist was a sort of super hero of the conflict, seeing action in all theaters, on land, at sea and in the air.

In one of these stories, the narrator, while flying his fighter plane, encountered a flight of Nazi aircraft. He engaged them and shot down the flight leader, who managed to bail out. As the enemy pilot bailed out, the narrator recognized him as none other than Adolf Hitler!

When I submitted this particular story to my father for his comments, he said he was nigh certain that Hitler was not a pilot, and even if he was, he would not have been flying patrols along the front. At the time I thought this a rather unnecessary fixation with historical detail. Moreover, I found this bit of information about Hitler rather disappointing: we all know he was the leader of the Nazis, a fearsome band of warmongers. So why wasn't he out front personally warmongering, like a modern-day Alexander?

When I recently saw Quintin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, I immediately recognized what he was doing. The film, about which I have written here and here, centers on a group of Jewish-Americans who operate behind enemy lines, scalping Nazis. Their plans to kill all the top Nazi leaders - who are in Paris for a film debut - merge with the efforts of the French Jew who owns the cinema in question.

Not only does the visual style of the film hearken back to an earlier age of pulp comics and movies, but the basic notion of over-the-top pseudo-history is something I think you can find in the childhoods of most little boys. Why do we dream in this kind of way? I have not yet definitively answered this question to my own liking, but I have some theories.

The kind of super pseudo-historical character I created as a child lends a certain clarity to the historical narrative. No single historical individual actually served in all theaters, fighting every enemy, engaging in every form of combat; thus, to tell the story of the war as a whole we are forced to tell the story of vast forces, of military committees and other impersonal bodies which waged this global conflict. By creating a decidedly unhistorical character, my third grade stories were able to capture the entire war in a single person's experience. The other day I was reading an essay from a collection in honor of M. R. D. Foot, which noted that Foot enjoyed writing the history of the resistance during World War II precisely because it placed the focus on individuals rather than the divisions, corps and army groups of the conventional forces. I suspect that Tarantino's unhistorical tale accomplishes something similar: we know that Hitler was the single most important element in the Axis bid for power, so why not put him in the sights? We know that the Jews were some of the most hounded victims of the Nazis - and vigorously hunted them down after the war - so why not makes Jews the Nazi's face-to-face enemy? And why not tell this story with roughly a dozen characters, to keep things neat?

I think a second reason I wrote counterfactual stories as a child was that I wanted to be able to change things. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to have a role in the victories and reverse the defeats. But in writing historical fiction of the usual sort, characters' actions have to fit within the framework of what actually happened. They are prisoners, in a sense, of history; their actions are not allowed to change anything significant. Hitler may not have been a pilot who was shot down, nor was he ever ambushed by Jews in a Paris cinema, but these kinds of stories allow their authors, readers and viewers to partake in new outcomes, not simply reading about the defeat of evil in the past, but defeating it in new ways in the present. For a child in the third grade, the present age has rather few evils; if there are dragons to be slain, Nazis make excellent candidates. But even for adults, the evils of the modern age can be quite complicated. A story like Tarantino's may not provide detailed programs for solving modern ills, but it does provide moral clarity and the possibility that evil can be defeated again and again, in ever new ways. And that's not such a bad lesson, now is it?


On a related note, Sally Menke, Tarantino's editor on every film he has ever made, passed away the same day I happened to watch Inglourious Basterds. May she rest in peace.

Inglourious History - The German Response

I have a confession to make: I have not yet seen Inglourious Basterds. This may not, in and of itself, be a bad thing. Except that I am now writing a follow-up to my last post on the film.

At first I was worried that Tarantino doing a nominally historical film would be a dangerous thing, blurring the line between fact and fiction in a way that a film like Kill Bill - with its Texas sword fights and anime flashback - could not. The completely over-the-top ambush of the Nazi leadership, seen in the trailer below, seemed to lay my fears to rest: at last, we could sit back and enjoy the show, knowing that this had very little to do with any actual history.



But now the New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports that the film has received an overwhelmingly positive response from German critics. One of them wrote:

This isn't camp, it isn't pulp — you miss the point using such categories with Tarantino — but rather a vision never before seen in the nearly exhausted world of cinematic images.... It took 65 years for a film-maker, instead of bringing Germany's evil 20th century history to life once more to have people shudder and bow before it, to simply dream around it. And to mow all the pigs down. Catharsis! Oxygen! Wonderful retro-futuristic insanity of the imagination!

Perhaps. But if the film is "retro-futuristic insanity," can it really exercise the daemons of Germany's Nazi past? Doesn't "Germany's evil 20th century history" need to first be brought to life, if it is be finally slain?

Some might contend that expecting a cathartic release from the nightmare of Germany's Nazi past is asking far too much of this film; instead, we should be expecting nothing more than a sort of World War II Rambo. Fair enough - except that the German critics think they see more, a film in meaningful dialogue with history.

Yes, I realize that any invocation of the Nazis is, necessarily, historical in some way; but it seems to me that the relationship between a film like Tarantino's and the actual events of history is complex, at best. That so many German critics are raving about the film suggests to me either (a) that they all have great insight, successfully navigating this complex relationship or (b) some of them are missing the point. And that's a tragic, even scary, thing, when we're dealing with the legacy of something as appalling as the Third Reich.

Special thanks to Santiago Ramos for bringing this Vulture blog post to my attention.

Inglourious History

Quentin Tarantino is well known for his love of bloodletting: films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Kill Bill (vol. 1 2003, vol. 2 2004) are chocked full of violence. So it should come as little surprise that his latest project, Inglourious Basterds - due for release on 21 August - features "a group of Jewish-American soldiers... [who] ambush and kill Nazi patrols, desecrating their corpses whilst leaving one alive to tell others," according to The Hollywood Reporter. Tarantino is quoted as saying that the film is a "spaghetti-western but with World War II iconography."



Inglourious Basterds alludes to Enzo Castellari's 1978 movie of the same name (but conventional spelling), though Tarantino's work is apparently a new story and not simply a remake. (Castellari's film follows a group of American soldiers who are on their way to prison for various infractions, try to escape to neutral Switzerland, but inadvertently end up on a secret mission to steal Nazi technology with the help of the French Resistance.)

Even prior to the film's release, there is plenty to talk about. There is, of course, the question of Tarantino's use of stylized - dare we say Homeric? - violence. But the question that that first came to my mind upon seeing the trailer was that of history. So far as I know, the United States never organized Jewish units during World War II. This is in contrast to the British, who recruited the Jewish Brigade and the Special Interrogation Group from among Jews, primarily - though not exclusively - from Palestine. Both saw action in North Africa, and the Jewish Brigade (along with Arab elements of the Palestine Regiment) saw service in Italy. Though members of the SIG disguised themselves as German soldiers - an action which put them outside the Geneva Convention - their goals were basic commando objectives, not terror. After the war, some members of the Jewish Brigade formed assassination squads that hunted down German officers, some of whom claimed to belong to the fictitious Tilhas Tigiz Gesheften, to allow themselves to travel more easily around occupied Germany. However, none of this extracurricular was sanctioned by the British, much less the Americans. (Remember, the British Empire itself was the target of militant Zionism.)

I have been reading through OSS files in the National Archives lately. Though this American outfit has a reputation for playing dirty, and engaged in its fair share of black propaganda and covert operations, I have been surprised by the extent to which OSS insisted that its operations be conducted on the up-and-up. Interrogation manuals read about like business interviews, without so much as an elliptical reference to coercive methods. One series of memos I encountered mooted the idea of OSS special forces posing as civilians - as Tarnatino's characters do - but the idea was rejected for two reasons: (1) It would place American soldiers outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention. Our enemies had violated the Convention on plenty of occasions, but did also follow it from time to time - downed airmen in Germany, for example, were well-treated - but American leaders insisted that we play by the rules, in the hopes that prisoners might receive fair treatment. (2) There was a keen sense from American leaders that we would lose the moral high ground and could not pass judgment on our enemies if we violated the laws of war.

I think it safe to say that Tarantino has not taken a historical story and simply changed a few names, nor has he even imagined a plausible historical scenario which might have happened, but did not. He has made up a story which runs contrary to the facts of history on several key points. I am inclined to take offense at this not so much as an American - whose side is made to look bad, even morally equivalent to its Nazi opponent - but even more as a historian. Is the past simply a malleable thing we can reconfigure to fit our narrative needs? How many people will view this film and conclude that the war was more or like this (even while acknowledging that the details are fictional)?

Some might argue that Tarnatino is reaching deeper than simple facts and revealing the fundamental truth that war is hell. This is true to a point, but failing to make any kind of distinctions can be dangerous. Vindictive brutality on both sides was the rule on the Eastern Front; it was the exception in the West. War may be hell, but there is no reason to make it more hellish: that is why a great many nations have not only agreed to laws of war, but even follow them more often than not.

But even aside from these particular questions, is Tarantino's use of history licit? Is history a mere assemblage of names and dates, the re-writing of which only constitutes a kind of white lie? Or does that assemblage contain a kind of deeper truth, which is obscured and violated by changing too many details?

Ultimately the question is that of fiction: What are its bounds? How closely must it conform to "reality"? Fiction reveals certain truths by imagining situations that have not existed, to gain greater perspective on those that have, or will. This is the basic premise behind the fantasy genre. But I worry Tarantino may be blurring the line between history and fiction in a dangerous way that is not faithful to either. But perhaps the jury should remain out until after 21 August.