Kino Fist

Rating: Null/10 (3 December 2009)

Most Holocaust movies, no matter how gory, are exercises in wish fulfilment. Today they've morphed into Jewish revenge fantasies ("Munich", "Defiance", "Zohan", "Debt" etc), exploitation flicks dressed up in big budget gloss. Reflecting the now superpower state of Israel, these films typically feature Jewish action heroes dishing out punishment to cowering terrorists/Nazis and then feeling "kind of bad about it".
Quintin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" is divided into 5 chapters. The first is a wordy rip off of Leone's "Once Upon A Time In The West", the audience watching as Shosanna, a pretty Jewish girl, has her family massacred by a Nazi officer known as the "Jew Hunter". Shosanna escapes and we cut to Chapter 2. Here we're introduced to the "Basterds" ("Dirty Dozen", Casterellari's "Bastards" etc), a group of Nazi hunters comprised almost entirely of Jews. Significantly, the Basterds use Apache hit-and-run tactics and delight in scalping their enemies; the film is a "victim's fantasy" on a large scale, not only Jews fighting back, but African slaves (characters discuss the racial implications of "King Kong") and American Indians as well.
The next 3 chapters of the film involve Shosanna inheriting a cinema which is later used to screen a propaganda film called "Stolz der Nation", a Nazi version of "Private Ryan" in which German sniper Frederick Zoller fights off 300 Allied soldiers (an allusion to the Spartans). As Hitler is attending the film's premiere, both the Basterds and Shosanna plot his assassination (which they dub "Operation Kino", a nod to the Bolshevik propaganda movement). Significantly, the Basterds fail completely in their plot to kill Hitler. It is a flaming cinema screen and a stack of explosive film cans which kills him. In other words, cinema literally kills Hitler.
But the death of Hitler has no historical effect. It is 1944, the war's end. What the film allows, therefore, is simply a chance for Jews to kill Hitler days before Hitler kills himself. Like all of Tarantino's film, everything hinges on revenge. What's different, though, is that in this case the "revenge" plays out as an acknowledged fantasy rather than ideologically tainted history masquerading as "realism".
"Basterds" ends with three formally and narratively connected moments of "catharsis". In the first, Zoller mowing down hordes of Allies is inter-cut with the cackling faces of German audiences. In the second, a Basterd named Donny repeats the motion, violently mowing down helpless Germans. Significantly, the actor playing Donny is the director of the film Zoller is trapped in and Donny is given no audience reaction shot. We, instead, are positioned as the audience, and made to giggle at the spectacle of Hitler's body perforated by bullets. It's an implicative tactic used often by Verhoeven: we are the Nazis, cheering the murder of people for what they represent rather than who they are.
Later, during the film's third "catharsis", Tarantino literally puts us in the perspective of a Nazi being marked by a swastika, the director marking his audience for their sins. It is not only that the Basterds vengeful massacre is formally identical to that of the Nazis, but that both sequences are manifestations of ideology. Brad Pitt, the hillbilly leader of the Basterds, even sports a Hitler styled moustache and hair cut. The difference is, the Basterds' vengeance is authorised by the American state and "sanctioned" by the iconography of American movies and pop culture. In this respect, "Basterds" is one step beyond Tarantino's other movies, his old fan-boys turned into Nazi buffoons whilst his "new audience" is granted the privilege of ironic, self critique.
"This is a uniform you can't take off," Pitt growls as he carves a swastika into the forehead of a German. The scene embodies the ideology of the Allies in its very arbitrariness: the Nazis aren't Nazis because they're evil, they're evil because they're Nazis. The victors write history and history scars the Other as one-dimensional totems of evil. Moreso, the German is denied a chance to take off his uniform, to repent, and instead becomes the scapegoat for the entirety of Western evil.
By making Pitt an improbably hillbilly anti-racist vigilante, Tarantino takes the endemic racism of the American South and displaces it onto the figure of a Nazi with whom he has everything in common but the uniform. Message? Jew Hunter and Nazi Hunter are one and the same, both bent on genocidal quests. Sacriledge? It's important to note that the Allies were indifferent to the fate of European Jews during WW2, Europe/America was largely antisemitic, WW2 was not fought for "just" or "altruistic" reasons (but for old fashioned Imperialism), and all of Christian civilisation is itself based on both the hatred of Jews (the bedrock figure of Judas in the Bible is itself a calculated slur against Judaism) and the racial superiority of the white man over the black.
But the point is, this hypocrisy survives precisely because power is adept at turning history's Hitlers into alphas and omegas of racist imperial ambition. It fetishizes Hitlers and swastikas so as to disguise how widely shared the ideologies they represent are in the West. When we make the symbol evil instead of the ideology, we only end up vindicating those who share the ideology, the racism, and the imperial ambition. Europe/America might have conquered the world to acquire living space for the white race, you see, but at least they weren't Nazis.
Late in the film Shoshanna and a Nazi officer battle over a projection booth. The scene portrays two propaganda films, two bodies and two identical ideologies at war with one another, both vying for the same cinematic space. The message is not only that "historical truth" becomes dependent on whoever survives the battle for the booth, but that, maybe, the two competing reels aren't that much different anyway.
8/10 - Interesting, though its form totally undermines its content.