Quentin Off-Leash! Part II

Historical fact - or Tarantino fetish?  Or both?

(Part I of this series is available here.)

Whippings, and the welts they left on the backs of slaves, are a constant motif of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (above, one of the first shots of the film).  Django himself has been whipped repeatedly; his wife "Broomhilda" has been similarly abused; and we see scar after scar on back after back throughout the entire movie.  The whipping of slaves has been portrayed in film before, but never with the same level of intensity or repetition.

Horrifying as it is, Tarantino's imagery is hardly exaggerated.  At left is a photograph from 1863, of a slave in Louisiana (who some claim eventually fought for the Union).  Records from the era report that 39 lashes was a common punishment for even minor offenses, and escaped slaves who were recaptured (essentially Django's position in the film) endured far worse; one slave, Moses Roper, withstood 200 lashes upon recapture, and was only spared from death by the pleadings of his master's wife.  There are even newspaper reports from 1844 regarding an eight-year-old slave girl who was whipped to death (her master was tried but acquitted - the murder of slaves by owners was actually not permitted throughout the South, but as slaves could not testify against whites in court, only one or two cases of white-on-black crime ever reached trial).

And violence against black men and women hardly ended with the Civil War.  Below is an image from some seventy years later of Southern whites gathered to see, and be seen with, the bodies of two lynching victims - to them, murder and torture (note the bloodstains on the broken corpses) was a form of entertainment.  Indeed, such images were known to be sold and traded by whites as postcards - and the crowds depicted often included happy children, there with their parents.

Are we that different from the crowd in this photo? Is Quentin?

So one cannot fault Quentin Tarantino for lurid depictions of violence that are actually outdone by the historical record. Yet many observers of his latest film have nevertheless been disturbed by theatre audiences' reactions to the cruelties it depicts.  Critics have noted the knowing chuckles that greet its many scenes of torment from Tarantino's hardcore fans, who seem to view the movie almost as they might . . . a gruesome postcard.

And therein lies the rub regarding Django Unchained.  The film goes where few American movies have dared to tread in terms of the abuse of slaves; but in the end, it goes there for a thrill, and even a laugh.  Perhaps the more things change . . . the more in some horrifying way they remain pretty much the same.  For it's quite easy to imagine that many of the people in those postcards had their excuses; perhaps some were even there "ironically," to garner a grim chuckle at the moral horror of their neighbors - much like the audiences packing the cinemas for Django.

Or perhaps they simply liked violence - although it would be hard to imagine they enjoyed it more than Tarantino himself.  I wonder, has anyone done a tally of just how much mayhem his films have included (and how little they've included of anything else)?  He struck his template at the very beginning, in Reservoir Dogs, and has stuck to it ever since - hip conversational longeurs floated around heists or capers, spacing out torture sequences that were obviously the main event.  Tarantino borrowed this odd opposition from Godard - specifically from Le Petit Soldat; although to be fair, Tarantino has always acknowledged the plagiarism at the bottom of his sense of cool, and even named his production company after Bande à part, another Godard opus from which he borrowed much. (The French auteur was less than impressed by this homage, however - perhaps because his sense of cool was never designed to power a frathouse thriller, much less a grindhouse fantasy.)

Tarantino's great theme in a nutshell.

At any rate, from the bloody Mexican stand-offs of Dogs to the gallons of hemoglobin spattering Django, the beheadings, castrations, burnings, dismemberments, disembowelings, etc., etc. in the Tarantino oeuvre are surely now beyond count.  But I think it's worth remembering that it's not actually the amount of violence in Tarantino's pictures that make them, well, a band apart.  It's the style of that violence.

Consider the photo at left, from Quentin's previous opus, Inglourious Basterds; it's of Diane Kruger's broken foot, after her character has been tortured by Brad Pitt.  The shot struck me as the most interesting thing in the picture, as it seemed to fuse in a single image almost everything that motivates Tarantino at the deepest level.  Of course the image is absurd on its face - a cast in the shape of a nose-bleed heel?!?  But it nevertheless limns a certain kind of fantasy that Tarantino obsessively pursues.

Artist and subject.

For as most movie fans know, Quentin has a foot fetish (it's by now a Hollywood in-joke; one photo that made the rounds, at right).  So it's no surprise that Kruger's tasty lower digits are made up, and their nails polished; what's even more important is that they're encased, held stiff in a painful pose - and we get the odd sense that this restraint is actually, to Tarantino, the most sexually charged aspect of the shot.

For it's hard to miss the parallel between this encasement and the central scene of almost every Tarantino film ever, from the bound cop in Reservoir Dogs to the rubber ball stuffed in Bruce Willis' mouth in Pulp Fiction to Uma Thurman paralyzed (and then buried alive) in Kill Bill, to Zoe Bell tied to the hood of a car in Death Proof.  In fact, Tarantino is never really drawn to "action" (as some have claimed), he's drawn to inaction, to powerlessness - to helplessness, really, to the position of the torture victim, encased like Diane Kruger's foot and held immobile through unbearable pain.

A conceptual parallel to slavery itself is almost too obvious.  For what is slavery but a kind of torture (spiritual as well as physical), in which the victim is held powerless by political forces?  Hence Django Unchained equals Quentin unchained - he doesn't have to dream up any absurdly unlikely situations or characters (gay "hillbillies" in L.A., etc.) to indulge his fetish; the basic setting of the movie offers him limitless opportunities for the kind of scene he likes best.  

Hence the almost-self-parodic parade of atrocities on display in Django - although it's worth noting that Tarantino exercises some restraint in his treatment of these horrors; he knows exactly how much he can show and still hold onto the comic twist in his tone, and only once (in a scene in which hounds tear one victim limb from limb) does he arguably cross the black-comedy line.

A sly portrait of Tarantino himself?

Still, the violence does grind (they were called "grind houses" for a reason, Quentin) and grows numbing; the sadism quickly loses its edge, and becomes a kind of background hum.  So the comedy dominates, goosed on by moves like the showy zoom above, which first presents the sadistic Calvin Candie, owner of the plantation "Candie Land" (where Broomhilda is enslaved) - a gesture so clumsy and faux-naive that it all but begs for a laugh.  It's at such moments that A.O. Scott's claims for the movie's moral purpose ring most hollow; it's hard to understand how moral purpose could survive this kind of crudely comic technique.  (Indeed, the opposition of earnest feeling with klutzy presentation is a staple of sketch comedy today.)

So it's no surprise that audience members giggle at Django; they're constantly being cued to (by both the camera and the spaghetti-rock soundtrack).  But of course that happy laughter prevents and precludes any sense of building outrage regarding the context of the movie.  It also helps Tarantino deflect and dodge the demands of actual art - perhaps because that would put his own taste directly in the cross-hairs of his camera.

Indeed, in a canny performance, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to hint that he knows Calvin Candie is not very far from Tarantino himself (several gestures mimic the director's) and that the cinema we're all watching is likewise rather like the gladiatorial entertainment at Candie Land (we have, after all, come to watch slaves gouge out each others' eyes, haven't we?).

But he seems alone in that perception.  Jamie Foxx plays Django as almost a block - but then as a character (rather than a type), he barely exists - and the lovely Kerry Washington is likewise hamstrung by the limits of Broomhilda.  And while DiCaprio is sick fun, he is never given the chance to explore the psyche of his sadistic character (for obvious reasons).  As for Christoph Waltz, I suppose he's about as hammily enjoyable as he was in Inglourious Basterds, but his dialogue operates at a sitcommish level; this is how fans of That 70's Show might imagine a European.  Which may be why Tarantino patiently has to explain the ironies of such tropes as Broomhilda's Wagner-esque name; without cue cards, his audience would be lost.

Of course, I suppose I could argue in A.O. Scott's defense that Django Unchained does wrap with a vast Caucasian bloodbath, and the literal explosion of Candie Land.  The tables are turned, justice is done, and the oppressed ride off into the night triumphant (how Django and Broomhilda escape Mississippi, though, I've no idea).  

But it's odd how un-cathartic this sequence feels; the slaughter (being filmed, at left) feels labored, like a weary ritual, and also utterly pre-determined; there's no suspense because we know Tarantino wouldn't have the balls to kill off Django at the finish.  For that would inevitably beg questions of lingering injustice; it would hint that racism wasn't entirely in the past.  In short, it would demand that we engage with the accuracy of what we've seen.

And that's anathema to Tarantino.  He wants to enjoy slavery, and that enjoyment per force demands that the violence in question not be taken seriously; if it is, then his fans really are just like the people in those lynching postcards.  Which in turn means that in the end, Django Unchained is a most unusual form of propaganda - a kind of propaganda of disengagement.  It's for people who look at life, and history, from the other side of a screen.  And is art possible on the other side of a screen?

Samuel Jackson in Django Unchained.

There's really no way out of that conundrum, I'm afraid. As it is stands now, Django contradicts itself, and so is utterly un-serious.  Yet what does it mean for movies to not take American slavery seriously?  Few fans of Django seem willing to ponder that question.  Even the Nazis never made ironic black comedies about Auschwitz; so why are we making them about our own crimes?  Given our current political battles, and the fact that our president was often depicted as a lynching victim down South, Tarantino's stance seems even harder to defend.  (And perhaps it's worth remembering that Inglourious Basterds likewise glorified "enhanced interrogation" while that debate raged a few years back.  It's hard to think, in fact, of any time Tarantino's movies have had any kind of progressive political valence.)

Another, even more disturbing, way of looking at Django Unchained does come to mind. Tarantino, of course, is white, not black (and a Southerner, too).  Yet he seems to reserve his deepest contempt not for Calvin Candie and his ilk, but rather for Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a vicious "Uncle Tom" at Candie Land who - in the film's one cleverly subversive stroke - is a dead ringer for Uncle Ben, a long-time corporate mascot of Mars, Inc. (at right).  Tarantino seems to want to rip off the benign veneer of all such figures, from Aunt Jemima to Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

But the gambit lacks any real sting, because in Django Unchained, we can tell that the rules of this particular game have shifted. Isn't Tarantino himself really in charge of this plantation? And so we're not sure who truly counts as an Uncle Tom any more.

Blood spray on my popcorn! or Quentin off-leash! (Part1)

I knew early on in Django Unchained that I wasn't going to be able to take it seriously - even though according to A.O. Scott it's "a troubling and important movie about slavery and racism."  (HA!)  You see, right at the top there's this title card telling us that Quentin Tarantino's latest flick (although I think "cinematic fleshlight" may be the more accurate term) is set in "1858 - two years before the Civil War."

Two years before the Civil War?  Really?  You're sure about that - two?

Now we were only maybe five seconds into the film proper, but already I was thinking that maybe someone who wanted to make "a troubling and important movie about slavery and racism" might, you know, have fact-checked when the fucking Civil War started.

But then again, it turned out Quentin was actually just setting the proper tone.  Because his movie had nothing to do with history, it turned out.  I mean not real live history.  Not the history that African-Americans have endured in the United States of America.  Not that.

No, it's about movie history, of course.  (Is there any other kind of history for Quentin?)  And you know, if he can win World War II all by himself (as he did in his last opus) what does it matter when the "actual" Civil War occurred?  Tarantino's a cinematic god, goddamnit.  He may look like Jay Leno's grandma on meth, but hey - respect the genius, know what I'm sayin'?

Likewise, does it matter that the "mandingo fights" central to the plot of Django Unchained never really occurred - at least not according to those fusty old, you know, history-people?  I mean mandingo fights were in a movie - Mandingo, in fact - and hell, that's good enough for Wesley Morris! Oh, and wait - you're saying the Ku Klux Klan (which also appears, sort of, below) didn't exist until Reconstruction?  What the fuck does that matter, asshole?  THE KLAN IS IN A MOVIE - BIRTH OF A NATION - SO TAKE THAT MOTHERFUCKER!!  Seriously, what are we talking about here?

What indeed.  That's what I kept asking myself as I sat through this hilarious parade of movie-brat ignorance.  That is when I wasn't wondering - how did we ever come to this juncture?  How did we get to the point that a major studio release about slavery could sink to a lower moral level than Gone with the Wind?  Honestly.

I will admit this, though: I thought Django was going to be - I don't know, djisturbing or something.  Tarantino used to be disturbing; at least Reservoir Dogs is disturbing - it's a glimpse straight into the mind of a sadist, after all - a sadist who believes torture is like a pop song, no less.  Of course Tarantino immediately backed away from the honest nihilism of Dogs, and Disney-fied the finale of Pulp Fiction - and has sentimentalized his endings ever since. Fiction was still plenty creepy thanks to its homophobia; but I guess people were desperate at that point for any sort of new juice in the movies.

And Tarantino had energy and confidence, and in their carefully-calculated mind-fucks his films functioned as gauntlets.  They subtly played on the anxieties of their age - fatherless boys (and girls) flocked to them and saw the experience as a kind of rite of passage; an empty generation with no outlet but self-abuse found in Tarantino a perfect mirror.  And of course he expertly exploited the obvious stupidity of film critics (who think of Pauline Kael as an intellectual). Tarantino's films weren't so much works of art as a kind of cultural symptom - but at least you understood why the kids were buying tickets.

Now Django Unchained would seem poised to replicate the twistedness of those early hits.  Torture, Tarantino's forte, has gone mainstream, and slavery is the perfect environment in which to conjure it. At the same time, Obama's presidency has ripped the mask off Republican racism, so prejudice as a theme is fresher than ever. The Hollywood planets aligned in other ways - in fact Spielberg himself just wrapped a picture about slavery (these two directors are like mirrors, frankly, both grasping for prestige from different trash barrels with pictures about Nazis and slaves).  Thus the Weinsteins had granted Tarantino a larger budget than usual, and Christoph Waltz (who won an Oscar for the thinly-sliced ham he served in Inglourious Basturds) had joined the cast  - what's more, as in Pulp Fiction, the film's other lead was a closeted gay star (and the closet always adds a certain edge to Tarantino).  How could the movie possibly go wrong?

Oh, no, it's the KKK!  Where it shouldn't be!

But the surprise about Django Unchained is that it is so very un-disturbing.  In fact for much of its length it is quite boring.  Perhaps this is because familiarity breeds contempt (which is why all horror has a short shelf-life).  Fifteen years after Frankenstein was eliciting screams, he was meeting Abbott and Costello.  Tarantino is in something of the same fix.  The Saw franchise has out-grossed him (in both meanings of the word), and his outraged adolescent-masculine id has lost a bit of its fire.  He hasn't grown up, but he has gotten older (so have we), and his mind-fuck techniques only work as long as his anxieties match our anxieties - and you can't see (or don't notice) the strings holding up the puppets as he gouges out their eyes.

But everything feels painted and phony in Django Unchained, and Tarantino's twistedness feels tired.  Because let's be honest: as an auteur, he has never really gotten very far.  He's just not an intuitive cinematic talent.  When you go to a Spielberg or Scorsese picture, you quickly feel an inner coherence, a personality, behind the style - an assurance about camera placement, rhythm, and musical cues.  There's also a whole younger generation beneath these technical masters who are if anything even more facile (Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, for instance, is overstuffed with brilliant cinematic gambits).  And then there are the magisterial pop auteurs like David Fincher and Robert Zemeckis, who actually suppress their talent to achieve an atmosphere of restrained sophistication - and who can count on our ability to appreciate their cunning.

Compared to all these directors, Tarantino remains an amateur rather than an auteur.  Klutzy, crude, and simply under-powered as an image-maker, he's obviously a screenwriter with a bullhorn, not an actual director.  You can even sense in the raves the critics give him that they're minding this gap: Tarantino has "never been more fluid in his film-making technique," they'll say, or "His work has a new, more mature range and power!"  Uh-huh.

Now this may be technically true - Django has a few evocative images, and a handful of Tarantino's trademarked moving-frieze tracks and pans.  But mostly it's just a tedious series of establishing shots, medium shots, and close-ups (sometimes rendered as "ironic" zooms); the movie plausibly has a new, more mature range and power only because the starting point of this director's development is so far behind that of his peers.

Of course Quentin has always had a way to dodge this core truth about his ability; he works in pastiche, after all, and what's more, in pastiches of poorly-made movies.  Thus his crummy technique actually counts as a form of "tribute" - it's the air-quotes that count critically, his fans tell us, not what's in between them.

Once Upon a Time in the West.  Sergio Leone did things with the camera that Tarantino never could.

Okay . . . I guess you can believe that if you want to. But I wonder - why then, doesn't Tarantino ever  put air-quotes around something worth watching?  I'll explain: after sitting through Django Unchained - and seeing as Tarantino has described it as a "spaghetti western - exploded!" - I watched a little Sergio Leone on my computer. And I was once again stunned by Leone's sheer talent. Sergio Leone was fuckin' awesome; he was a director.  His sequences are superbly controlled; his vast spaces are all but sculpted (above); and it's obvious what his desolate tone brought to the spaghetti western: a profound and haunting sense of alienation - precisely the opposite of what Tarantino conjures in Django Unchained (which, for all its pretensions, is actually a gruesome form of comfort food).

Thus I knew that Tarantino could never pull off a "tribute" to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West.   He wouldn't know how.  Which is why he instead quotes obscurities like the original Django - they were forgotten for a reason; their directors were as bad as he is.  So the bottom line is that in Django Unchained, we're basically trapped for three hours in a bumping, halting cinematic contraption, in which we're chained to a chattering grindhouse maniac who simply cannot shut up.  And the excuse for the whole dreadful exercise is that we're engaging with our country's history of racism.

But are we?  Honestly - is this August Wilson?  Is it Faulkner?  Is it even Toni Morrison?  Sorry, I just don't think so.  And can a torture porn auteur really make a convincing moral statement about torture?  (In other words, is Tarantinoland so different from Candie Land?)  Hmmmm.  There's still more here to unpack, so I'll have to explain in full the contradictions that render Tarantino impotent as a shaper of art in the second half of this post.  (To be continued.)

American basterd II

Two equally-great directors?

(Being the second part of the three-part - probably - series "American basterd")

Quentin and Leni - A Love Story

If there's one thing you can say about Quentin Tarantino, it's that he's both highly self-aware, and hyper-aware of film history (or at least the segments of film history that suit him) - and his screenplays tend to be pastiches of film trivia that match his personal quirks. Thus the script of Inglourious Basterds is a blizzard of obscure film references (often even obscure to the director's fans). Of course you could argue - and I'm willing to play along - that the whole point of Inglourious Basterds is the mash-up of history and film fantasy: after all, the idea of the flick is that WWII is ended "early" by a Jewish girl immolating Hitler, and the entire Nazi leadership, in a movie theatre in Paris (by means of inflammable nitrate film!).

So in a way the many film refs represent the movie's plot gone meta: Tarantino's characters are not merely players in his fantasy of history, but are also avatars in his personal history of fantasy. "Aldo Raine," the supposed hero, is almost too obvious in its references, while "Emmanuelle Mimieux," I suppose, represents a polyglot of Yvette Mimieux and the famous 70's porn milestone; meanwhile "Bridget Von Hammersmark" is likely a combo of Metropolis star Brigitte Helm and contemporary director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; I'm sure I missed zillions more (indeed, perhaps everyone and everything in the movie is a reference). Just to drive the point home, in one scene (a kind of parlor game) all the characters are playing other famous characters, and even their characters (like Edgar Wallace and his creation, King Kong); everybody represents somebody else.

Yet it's surprising how un-resonant all this is; the references simply operate like links on a Wikipedia page - they don't build into anything. Perhaps that's because there's nowhere to build to. Tarantino's conceit, of an action-movie ending to WWII, simply doesn't correlate to the buried themes of the real, historical conflict - it doesn't illuminate anything, or extend anything; after all, it's an adolescent imposition on an adult situation. Thus it actually shrinks everything, draining away both moral and meaning: the Holocaust becomes an abstraction, the Jews become action heroes, and Hitler comes off as perversely comical. In fact the images of Goebbels's literal, burnt body photographed outside Hitler's bunker (above left) are far more shocking and resonant than the vengeful inferno conjured by Tarantino.

Maybe that's why the director seems not merely self-aware, but actually a little nervous about his own position vis-à-vis his creation: he clearly realizes he's gone a bit far by turning the Holocaust and the Occupation into objects of personal diversion; indeed, what he has done the Samuel Jackson of Pulp Fiction might think of as a sin! So Tarantino spends a lot of time subtly back-pedalling, and working through a veiled apologia for his own movie, by citing a lot of other directors with questionable politics. And perhaps that's why he has his blonde, blue-eyed (!) Jewish cinema owner ("Shosanna Dreyfus"), whose entire family was murdered by Nazis, nevertheless host a German film festival at her Paris theatre, because, she says, "in France, we respect directors." Uh-huh. (After all, why let a little thing like the slaughter of your family get in the way of your film-going?) At such moments it's hard not feel Tarantino fumbling for an excuse for whatever atrocities he may be about to commit - because after all, it's not like he's Leni Reifenstahl, is it?


White-on-white melodrama, proto-Nazi style.

Funny you should mention that name! Because Leni's movies likewise figure in Basterds - only not the ones she directed for Adolph directly, of course; Tarantino's not dumb enough to go gaga for Triumph of the Will. Instead he merely flirts with the edge of "controversy" by repeatedly referencing The White Hell of Piz Palü, a slab of mountain melodrama (above) in which Reifenstahl chewed the scenery under the direction of G.W. Pabst (while Arnold Franck shot the Alps - I think the whole thing is now up on Youtube). He even has one character (a film critic!) describe himself as "from Piz Palü" - in other words, he has popped right out of the screen, like Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo, from a magical land where pure film exists free of all historical and political reference.

But do you think there really is such a place, Toto? Even Quentin's not so sure - note the ironic escape hatch in that film title, The White Hell of Piz Palü. "White hell" = Nazi Germany, get it? And just in case you don't, Shosanna has a token "Negro" lover, "Marcel," to keep Quentin's Mandingo-thang going, and help hold his "progressive" badge in place (the exploitation of the Gen-X version of anti-racism is his only actual political stance). Marcel's status as agitprop is more obvious than usual, however, because he doesn't have much to do or say until the finish, when in another moment of big, dumb metaphor, he provides 'the spark' that creates the final conflagration. Although needless to say, the director still knows precisely how to flip the identity-politics card, and can't resist a few homophobic flourishes - his villain, Hans Landa, is hilariously epicene, and just to seal the deal, before Brad Pitt carves a swastika into his forehead, he whispers that he's doing it because the Nazi is a "pecker-sucker" (apparently "Nazi" isn't a bad enough insult). So I guess us faggots can keep our pink triangles in Quentin's parallel universe (although we can probably count as political progress the fact that this time around, Tarantino only whispers his homophobia).

But anyway, back to that big apology! If we decided, like Shosanna Dreyfus, to "respect" directors who collaborate with fascists (like Leni), or cohabitate with FoxNews (like Quentin), what would be, or should be, our reasons? Tarantino offers several arguments over the course of Basterds, but some of them are contradictory, and all of them are specious.

The Screen and the Smoke Screen: Triumph of the Will vs. King Kong vs. Battleship Potemkin

But first let's take a closer look at the little parlor game at the center of Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino makes his case via the "real" movies his characters discuss, and that haunt his own film - the work of Leni Reifenstahl, King Kong, and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. All of these, it is hinted, have horrifying political subtexts, which, it's also hinted, we should ignore.


Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Eli Roth's Nation's Pride.

Take King Kong, that primal RKO backlot fantasy of a giant, romantically-inclined ape taken from "Skull Island" to New York, where he meets a spectacular end atop the Empire State Building. In Tarantino's eyes, or at least the eyes of his Nazi factotum in Basterds, it's a tale of "the American Negro carried in chains to the New World from Africa." (Never mind that Skull Island was in the Indian Ocean.) Meanwhile Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's famous silent evocation of the first rumblings of the Russian Revolution, pops up in the imagery of Nation's Pride (above), the synthetic Nazi propaganda flick (directed by torture-porndog Eli Roth) that draws Hitler and his entourage to their doom. And the leading lady of Piz Palü, of course, wound up promoting the Führer himself.

Obviously, to Tarantino, these three very different movies, which land in various zones of "pop," "art," or "propaganda," are all similar at some level. King Kong is racist, Potemkin is fascist propaganda in reverse, and Leni may have looked good on an Alp, but she was a Nazi in embryo. Like his own work, they're all entanged in unsavory politics of various stripes. Therefore Tarantino's implication is that if we reject Inglourious Basterds, we must also reject them.

Yet is that really true? (And even if it is true, is it much of an argument for Inglourious Basterds?)


The white woman in peril! 1933's King Kong.

But first - sure, there's enough to some of these ideas to give them traction among college professors and video clerks. The claim that Merian C. Cooper's (and Ernest B. Schoedsack's) King Kong is racist, for instance, is by now a freshman-year film-course cliché. And not without cause: all kinds of racist and sexist tropes are at play in King Kong - the virginal "white woman" is what Kong most desires, before he dies atop the biggest phallic symbol in the world, etc, etc. Thus were a zillion academic papers born, as well as outraged commentary by the likes of the Daily Kos.

But at the same time Kong seems to transcend racist categorization; his attraction to Fay Wray's "Ann Darrow" is portrayed as love, not lust, and he can't be defined as "the other," either, because by the end of the movie we all identify with him, not his white persecutors. Every kid who sees King Kong thinks Kong is cool, and Ann Darrow is an idiot. And as the film has been repeatedly remade, it has steadily shed its bigoted baggage - in the Peter Jackson version a few years ago, Naomi Watts's Ann was openly in love with the big lug, and the "native dance" of the original was portrayed as, yes, a racist construct performed for a 30's white audience. The core of the movie had moved beyond its original trappings.

Time has pulled a kind of reverse number on Battleship Potemkin; its politics, frozen as they are in 1925, seem to hostile viewers like a naïve call-to-arms for Stalinism. Yet needless to say, the originality and power of its vision far exceed anything Quentin Tarantino has ever come up with, and of course the film does roughly transcribe an actual historical event, a real rebellion.

This correspondence with the real world makes Potemkin the antithesis of Basterds, and renders its parody in Nation's Pride more than a little bizarre. You have to wonder - did Quentin and Eli really think this through? They seem to be saying that while their auto-erotic torture fetish can be co-opted by crazed Republicans, that's no different from Eisenstein's vision going south with Stalin.

Only not really. The salient question is again whether the essence of Potemkin transcends the political outcomes that followed it. Did Sergei Eisenstein actually prescribe an oppressive political model, point by point, which Lenin or Stalin might have followed, as we can see by now is the case with the far right and Inglourious Basterds? Hardly. Indeed, Eisenstein found himself continually under fire from the Soviet dictatorship - they understood his movies were about liberation rather than pseudo-progressive autocracy. Projects were taken away from him by the authorities, and he was officially denounced for his forays into the West (unbelievably, he attempted to make films of Arms and the Man and An American Tragedy!). It's true that throughout his career Eisenstein tried to engage with (and influence) Stalin's dictatorship - a terrifying prospect, certainly (and far more frightening than standing up to the likes of Sarah Palin). But the great Russian director was certainly never some tool of tyranny, and the suggestion from the likes of Eli Roth that he was is nothing less than dishonest and insulting.

So despite Quentin's attempt to align himself with the likes of Merian C. Cooper and Sergei Eisenstein, there's really only one filmmaker in the trio he cites with which he's truly comparable: Leni Reifenstahl.

More on that correspondence in part three of this series.

American basterd

Our answer to Hans Landa?

Recent polls show 58% of Americans are eager to waterboard the undie-bomber to get information out of him. Less than a third of Americans seem to think this would be wrong (while 12% "aren't sure").

Surprised? I'm not - those numbers are probably why the Obama administration hasn't dismantled our torture regime (much less charged its true begetter, above, with war crimes). Granted, the poll in question is by the right-tilting Rasmussen, so we should knock a few points off those numbers. Still, it seems these days many Americans love torture even more than they love comfort food (of which it probably counts as a form).

And why shouldn't they? Hollywood has been feeding them a steady diet of it since 9/11. Indeed, Tinseltown's notoriously "liberal" culture seems to break down completely where torture is concerned; we're force-fed the virtues of diversity constantly, but it's hard to think of a single movie or TV show that has taken a strong stand against "enhanced interrogation." Instead, "torture porn" has become ubiquitous, in fact by now has devolved into sub-genres, from the police procedurals on TV to the fratboy stylings of Hostel to the Oprah-esque self-improvement regimen of Saw.

Of course the avatar of all this was Quentin Tarantino, the man who pulled "pulp" into the mainstream; indeed, what struck one immediately about his breakthrough movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (way back in the early 90's), was the centrality of torture to his vision. Curiously, however, his fans and critical supporters cast a blind eye on this predilection, even though Tarantino often interrupted the flow of his films for U-turns into bondage and sadism; his plots effectively stopped while characters got their ears chopped off or were sodomized. Given the grosses for Pulp Fiction, even fewer dared comment on the director's obsessions as he kept up the good work in further movies (and no one noted that his one film without an explicit torture sequence, Jackie Brown, was quite the bore).

Talk and torture

But with his latest, Inglourious Basterds, the bound and tormented elephant in the room became impossible to ignore: almost every sequence in the movie revolves around some form of interrogation. Indeed, there's no real "action" in the picture, and not much in the way of a chase, or love story, or political intrigue, either; the whole thing is either talk or torture (or both). As a result, at last the "progressive" mask so many liberals had clasped to the director's bloodied, union-busting brow began to slip, particularly as the far right crowed about his obvious support for "enhanced interrogation." And the far right was quite right to do so: every scene in Basterds, just like every episode of 24, devolves into a session of coercive questioning, in which the victim (a French farmer, a Nazi soldier, a German actress) inevitably gives up the truth to his or her tormentors. See? Tarantino says over and over. Torture works!

Of course whether or not the political meaning of that message was central to Tarantino is open for debate. Indeed, the fact that sadism is a sexual, not political, obsession for the director has been made pretty explicit by his partner in crime, Robert Rodriguez, who, in his portion of their double feature Grindhouse, inserted at the beginning of every sex scene a scratchy title telling us that this particular reel had gone missing; so we skipped the skin and dove right back into the severed limbs. The violence served as a sexual surrogate.

In this, of course, Rodriguez and Tarantino were only consciously operating in a long tradition. The essence of "pulp fiction" has always been the transliteration of violence (political violence included) into sex; its chained slaves and cell-block women were and are always devised and presented as fetish. And I suppose once upon a time, when sexual drives still had to find traction in the real world, an intellectual case could be made for them as a means of fomenting political progress and "liberation."

But is that still the case? Today many people find a simulation of freedom in a "second life" online, and the Internet has made masturbatory satisfaction so readily available that the new sexual problems are not frustration but impotence and boredom. Thus pulp isn't about liberating anything anymore: it is, instead, merely a cog of the system, a niche sexual product that Big Brother (along with, I'm sure, the Chinese communists) is happy to dispense on the Net, even if you can't find it at Wal*Mart.

At any rate, Tarantino doesn't present his scenarios as a means to the pleasure of liberation - no, the restraint, the encasement is the source of his satisfaction. His attitude maps intriguingly to his generation's fascination with tattoo and scarification: in effect, the only way to "rebel" for Gens X and Y, who have been smothered with acceptance and tolerance, is to attack themselves. Thus Tarantino is obsessed with pushing himself and his fans through endless gauntlets, and as soon as he works through one scenario, he has to start another - someone has to be bound in leather, or tied to the hood of a car, or paralyzed, or even buried alive, as soon as possible. In Inglourious Basterds, he even combines his jones for restraint with his foot fetish: his fictional German star, "Bridget von Hammersmark" (God), is shot in the ankle, then tortured, and finally appears with her broken foot encased in a cast, but in nose-bleed heel position, nails painted blood red. Quentin must have creamed over that one.

As, let's admit it, do we. Societies often mimic the psychological tics of their artists, so it's no surprise that something similar is going on in our public embrace of torture: like Tarantino, we conflate it with our entertainment (and I suppose it's inevitable that we eventually accord it an Oscar). Indeed, it's obvious that we torture with a difference. Hitler and Stalin tortured out of psychosis, but also, it must be admitted, out of cold, but realistic, political calculation - and neither of them made movies about it (meanwhile, we've even made comedies about Gitmo).


Why we torture.

In contrast, Americans torture for the sake of a fantasy - our chances of being caught in a terrorist attack are lower than being struck by lightning. And yet we persist in the practice, almost cling to it. We're torturing, at the deepest level, because it comforts us, much the way a Thomas Kinkade picture does, and in a perverse way reinforces our sense of cultural superiority: we can torture because we're trying to stop the killing of Americans, who are of course the most special people on the planet. And we revisit the mix of horrifying thrills and warm moral certitude that torture gives us in movie after movie, show after show.

Yet when you point out the new political meaning of this kind of pulp - that it re-inforces modes of subjection rather than liberation - those who are still in its thrall inevitably scream bloody murder. Don Hall, the "angry white asshole of Chicago," for instance, got his panties into quite a bunch last summer when I first brought up these points about Inglourious Basterds (Hall sent me emails calling me "a douchebag and a coward" for days, it seemed - an obvious sign I'd hit him where he lived). At that time, I promised a thorough dissection of Basterds, on which I never delivered - I'm busy, Tarantino is deeply dispiriting, and the continued applause from the far right seemed to make my political points self-evident.

But I sat through the movie again over the holidays - a nephew got it from a clueless relative - and I felt there was a bit more to say about Tarantino's intriguing self-critique (or perhaps apology) in the picture. And now this piece of Republican catnip has actually been nominated for an Oscar. Hence, this and the following posts.

Not to gloat, but . . .

You know Quentin Tarantino has jumped the shark when the Onion gets in on the action . . .

More from Don Hall! (You know you want it.)

Long time readers know that one of my flaws is that I simply enjoy belligerent stupidity too much to leave it alone. Indeed, I almost savor it. Yes, I know this is wrong - and I know someday I'll be in some circle of Purgatory blogging for Isaac Butler or something to atone for my sins. But in the meantime, the flesh is weak. And my inherent love of pleasure - even this perverse form of pleasure - is strong.

So I have to go back and make some more fun of Don Hall, a.k.a. "The Angry White Guy in Chicago" (above left), with my only justification being that he keeps sending me the material himself! I was good earlier today - you have to give me credit; I didn't publish the ridiculous comment that purported to justify his previous outbursts, but soon devolved into calling me a "douche." That's right. Ouch, that really hurt, Don! Stop it, you big bully! I did at least allude to the pointlessness of protesting one's reputation for homophobia by means of a slur against women. But somehow I think that was all lost on the Chicago blogosphere's answer to Einstein.

Because the funnyman is back! I got the follow-up below earlier today:

What a complete coward. And a douchebag.

I encourage you to admit openly that your argument about Tarantino/Thomas has nothing whatsoever to do with politics and that it has everything to do with your own Deadly Theatrical tendencies of artistic taste.

I understand that you are caught up in that conundrum of being so invested into [sic] an argument that you realize is false that it’s hard to admit your error. Do it anyway. The homophobe thing is a dodge and you know it.

This is pretty good, isn't it. Like so many commenters, Hall seems to feel that if he simply repeats himself he will somehow transcend his offensiveness, or the holes in his logic. And if that doesn't happen? Well, he just repeats himself again.

Also - note the intriguing capitalization of "Deadly Theatrical" (we'll ignore the misuse of "conundrum," and the ungrammatical "invested into," for the time being). Do I sense a theory of sorts banging around in that cute little pink tutu? Yes, I think I do!

But let's leave that hobbyhorse for another ride, too. In the meantime, let's simply savor the sheer blindness of the post - what I love about it most is Hall's claim, which sounds rather like a child singing to itself in the dark, that I "realize my argument is false but can't admit my error." Uh-huh. I hate to tell Hall that in fact, I'm just getting started. I've yet to really work out the parallel between Tarantino and Reifenstahl, or - better yet - the fact that Tarantino anticipates, even invites, the parallel himself, as evidenced by the many refs to Reifenstahl in Inglourious Basterds. In short, the meme has just begun, Bozo. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

As for whether you are aware of your own homophobia - please, who cares. Likewise your dependence on reverse class snobbery (and ageism!) as replacements for thought. That's how you run your blog, obviously - it's how you went so wrong on Under Milk Wood, for instance. How could I change you? I can't, and I'm not interested in doing so. You've served your purpose as Exhibit A, now move along.

"I'm not a homophobe, you aging queen!" Chicago's angry, dumb white guy lets out his inner bigot

What was that old Laurie Anderson line? "Oh boy, I said, right again?" I've been feeling like that quite a bit recently, as I've skirmished with various Quentin Tarantino fans around the web. My thesis on Tarantino, as you may recall, was that his aesthetic of torture and vigilantism might have primed us to accept the torture regime of Dick Cheney - confirmation of that idea came quickly, in various right-wing blogs applauding the film's politics (a typical line: "Tarantino has a message for everyone . . . enhanced interrogation works.") Meanwhile the Atlantic Monthly fretted over what the movie's sadistic, empowered Jews might mean for the Palestinians. Quentin apparently has something for everyone.

Most Tarantino fans, of course, just kept happily watching the torture and munching their popcorn. But some have been actually irritated by anyone pointing out that what they were doing was a bit like sliding into a red-velvet seat next to the Führer at the premiere of Triumph of the Will (excerpt below) and telling themselves, "Hey, it's only a movie!"



Because after all, it was only a movie, wasn't it? (That's what Leni Reifenstahl always said!)

No one's been angrier, however, than the eponymous Angry White Guy in Chicago, blogger Don Hall (above left), who has been tangling with me, in a rather discombobulated fashion, here.

Hall's "arguments," such as they were, ran along the following lines:

"I believe that Great Art asks questions that can be interpreted a variety of ways and I see Leftist interpretations of "Basterds" as valid as Rightwing views [sic]. That's why I love Tarantino."

Uh-huh. Now I'm not making that up, that's really what he wrote. Great Art. Shakespeare. Rembrandt. Quentin Tarantino. Yesssssss. Sensing a strong streak of inner stupid in Hall, I pressed on, and got huge geysers of idiocy for my pains:

You compare Tarantino's work to a recognized Nazi Propagandist yet won't admit you are then placing it upon the same cultural and political pedestal. You say it isn't "art" because we're all of a different generation than you - what're you - 70? Because I'm 43 and I think the man is a filmic genius. (Just btw, I'm only a few years older than Hall, and perhaps the only really interesting thing about Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's seeming identification with Riefenstahl!]

Now I couldn't follow that last bit, either, but there was more wackiness to come - and things took a turn for the worse once I began to look around his site. Because, of course, if someone declares that he can perceive Quentin Tarantino is "Great Art" than you're kind of curious about what else he might think is "Great Art."

This search was not edifying. Immediately I came upon Hall's review of a Chicago production of Under Milk Wood, in which he compared the Dylan Thomas classic to the "oozey, drippy unending sweetness of Hummel figurines and commemorative plates." Hall went on to apparently try to ape one of the twentieth century's greatest poets thus:

Anger Angryson and the Devil Vet saunter,
like two patrons of the Arts, the Theatrical Arts,
with their words and actions and motivations, costumes,
sets made of wood and rope and paint,
curtains, stools, steps and craft,
into the Storefront Theater, eager for an evening out.

The Actors, filled with Joy, Nerves, Sweat, and the Fulfillment
of a House Sold Out
take the stage slowly and with method, like
Cats or Slow Birds on the Prowl for Sustenance
and Begin the Play That is Not a Play
but a long series of behaviors described
and lists of details and metaphors and poetic statements.

Uh - what? Here's a stretch of Under Milk Wood, that I guess Hall imagines he is parodying:

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear
the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir
of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark,
Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover,
the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional
salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row,
it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,
the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.


Dylan Thomas.

Pretty wonderful, huh. James Joyce might have had a quarrel with it, but I don't.

So okay, Don Hall doesn't have an ear for poetry, or a hand for it, either (to him, the play's "beautiful language" is like being "beaten in the face with a thesaurus"). But he also doesn't seem to have a brain: "Baby, this shit is like staring at a beautiful Hummel figurine for 90 minutes," he insists, even though almost nothing in Under Milk Wood is sentimental or cloying in any way. Then again, he also seems to imagine that Dylan Thomas is Irish! Obviously he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a theatre, and I hope no one's wasting press tickets on him.

But back to Tarantino. See the problem for Hall's "Tarantino is Art" argument is that in his Dylan Thomas review, he reveals that he doesn't know art from a hole in the ground. This seemed to me pertinent, so I brought it up, and that's when things got really interesting:

Given that you have no more credential than I, you can stuff [that] up your lofty ass . . . why not just own up to the fact that your argument about "Basterds" is merely one of an effete poo-pooing the poor taste of a filmmaker [you despise] rather than all of your nonsense political right wing-sponsored horseshit?

I can just as easily make the claim that you are put off by Tarantino and love the nuance of Thomas because Thomas satisfies your Deadly Theatrical notions of what art should be rather than what art is, you aging queen.

Again, yesssss. Readers of this blog no doubt remember that one of my secondary points about Quentin Tarantino is that his fans tend to be homophobic. And what was that line from Laurie Anderson? "Oh boy, right again!"

Did Tarantino prime us for Cheney, Part III: The Incompetent Basterd

What Aldo Ray might have done to QT after seeing his latest.

I confess, I feel a little silly. I was girding up for a kind of epic takedown of Quentin Tarantino, after my mentioning of the obvious fact that his cult of vigilantism and torture matched precisely that of torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney.

But then I finally caught Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds, and was forced to view the situation in an entirely different light.

Not that Tarantino isn't pernicious (he still is, and how), and certainly the political case against him is still worth making.

But in a word, his movie sucks, which in a way makes it hard to take this debate too seriously. I expected to be perhaps outraged, perhaps angered, perhaps revolted by Inglourious Basterds. I didn't expect to have to fight to stay awake. Indeed, à la Dick Cheney, I found myself looking forward to the promised atrocities, if only to clear the current slate of cardboard characters trading film refs in French and German. Worse still, over the movie's course its director is revealed as so incompetent that his proponents' adulation looks utterly ridiculous. I feel a bit foolish for having ever taken them seriously.

For to be blunt, the only feeling a mature adult could have after watching Inglourious Basterds is "I wish I could get those two and half hours of my life back from that bastard!" But oh, you so can't. Carving a swastika in the perp's forehead might be some solace, but would it turn back time? No. And you'd still be left with the depressing realization that with Basterds, Tarantino hasn't merely jumped the shark, he's turned around and blown it, too. He has become Generation X's answer to George Lucas: a soulless director whose obsessions once overlapped those of the zeitgeist, but who was revealed as an artistic shell once history moved on. And recognized Inglourious Basterds as his Phantom Menace.

Still, the discovery of the movie's mediocrity does lead to a whole new arena of Important Cultural Discussion. Which I think I'll initiate right now! I promise to get to the insidious political import of Tarantino's oeuvre, really I do. But first I have to savor the sheer shittiness of the work in aesthetic terms. And taking a tip from the auteur himself, I've decided to divide my critique into chapters. To wit:

Chapter 1
In which our hero deploys the Holocaust as a marketing tool

Some have been offended by the "jewzploitation" aspect of Inglourious Basterds. I'm not sure how they've managed to maintain their indignation, however, as there is nothing at all Jewish - not a shred of that great culture, identity or spirituality - in the movie, aside from Eli Roth's missing foreskin, I suppose (which isn't there either). Sure, the spirit to offend that longest of humanist traditions is willing, but the execution is weak, because frankly, QT couldn't care less about Judaism except as an excuse for his own goy perversions. Thus the "Jews" in the movie are "Jews" the same way the homosexuals in Pulp Fiction are "hillbillies" - they're called that for marketing purposes, but they might as well be ninjas, or nuns on the rag, for all QT cares. In short, Inglourious Basterds is about as "Jewish" as Midnight Mass at St. Peter's. So sorry, but they still don't get to kill Hitler.

Chapter 2
In which it is revealed why our hero cannot handle a camera

The true mystery of Quentin Tarantino's career is how he managed to watch so many movies without learning anything about how to shoot one. Well, maybe it's not such a mystery - after all, he only really liked the bad ones. And while there may have been some effective chases in Reservoir Dogs, in Inglourious Basterds, as in most of his work, Tarantino seems to be handling the camera with boxing gloves on. Medium shot is followed by coverage shot which maybe is jazzed up with a POV - the gap was all the more glaring as I'd just seen the brilliantly nimble District 9, but it's hard to think of any other well-reviewed movie that's as clumsy as this one. (And you can completely forget about QT ever reaching the conceptual heights of, say, Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock. Not no way, not no how.) Inglourious Basterds plays, unsurprisingly, like some grindhouse flick from the 70's - which, I know, is the whole idea! And since 70's grindhouse flicks were often badly made, QT's aesthetic requires that things be done cheaply and crudely. You have to admire this strategy from a career perspective, but it's worth noting that many directors of trash, like say Mario Bava or Dario Argento, nevertheless look dazzling next to Tarantino. They did their trash up in high style because they had talent. But Tarantino doesn't, so we're stuck watching Mr. Majestyk over and over again, only this time with the occasional high-production-value money shot.

Chapter 3
In which our hero learns to destroy even his pretty-good sequences with a ridiculous soundtrack

No doubt you've heard about David Bowie's Cat People ditty popping up in Occupied France. What you haven't heard is that there are disastrous music cues sprinkled liberally throughout Basterds. Soemtimes there's a film-junkie justification at hand - mashing "Für Elise" with Ennio Morricone I guess would make sense if you were QT - but this doesn't make the resulting dislocations in tone any less laughable. Only of course I suppose QT fans will tell you that's the idea, too, just as an awkward little kid who trips and falls will insist, "I meant to do that."

Chapter 4
In which our hero discovers a postmodern disguise for an unfortunate gap in his writing ability

Back in the day, the fractured narratives of QT's movies seemed innovative. Now, they look like a crafty way of covering up the fact that he can't tell a story to save his life. Jackie Brown meandered, Kill Bill was clunky, and Death Proof stumbled repeatedly until its closing chase. But with Basterds, QT seems to have reached a whole new level of embarrasing incompetence, script-wise. He thinks he's juggling three or four separate story lines, but instead he's constantly dropping and picking them up again. There are the "Basterds," the fantasy pseudo-Jewish "band apart" who scalp Nazis, and then there's Shosanna Dreyfus, who escapes the clutches of the "Jew hunter," Hans Landa, and then there's the Paris cinema where the Basterds and Shosanna and Hitler himself converge, and then there's the German spy and the British film critic - and oh, what a godawful mess. People get offed before we even care who they are, and then sometimes return when we really don't care if we ever see them again. Given the lack of any actual dramatic development, the actors do the best they can, and a few (Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger) manage to impress with their skill, although not with the kind of genuine characterizations that should win awards. Meanwhile we hope - indeed we pray - that the torture's going to come quick, to spare us from the aesthetic pain of all the awkward exposition and labored film parlance. As for those who insist that various scenes in the movie are "unbearably tense" or that Tarantino "orchestrates the suspense superbly" - you really should get out more often.

Chapter 5
In which our hero demonstrates that quotation shorn of context is meaningless and insulting

As Inglourious Basterds grinds on, we realize that its many "plots" have been devised merely to create little scenes in which characters reveal that they're sourced from within movies, and that they're within a movie that's itself about movies, and that - are you still awake? Probably not, because somehow meta was never so meh. Yet the refs keep coming - QT even begins to add substitles, or even scrawled IDs, to the frame to help us out with who and what he's referencing. Perhaps the director does perceive at some level the airless absurdity of his conceit; that may be why his characters seem to float, untethered, in a weirdly empty environment. But at the same time, QT doesn't seem to comprehend the sense of vacuum his direction produces as anything like self-critique. That the meaninglessness of his own method should resonate with us seems to be lost on him. Likewise the fact that the great films of the past depended for their meaning on their own contexts likewise seems to fly right over his fanboy head. And thus the many, many "references" within Inglourious Basterds begin to feel more like smears. Aldo Ray in particular, who saw action at Iwo Jima, would probably choke to see how Tarantino has parodied him here, but something tells me G.W. Pabst, Sergei Eisenstein, and even Leni Reifenstahl would also gladly kick him until he was dead once they saw his weirdly pointless, yet somehow always patronizing, "homages." So Eisenstein was a Commie, and Reifenstahl was a Nazi - both choices begin to look rather good against Tarantino's vaguely libertarian vacuity. At least they "meant" something. And isn't that the bottom line of anything you'd want to call "art"?

Did Tarantino prime us for Cheney? Part II

Sometimes, it seems, a culture writes its own critique before a critic can even get to it. Despite the screams from several vapid bloggers over my bringing up the parallel between Quentin Tarantino and Dick Cheney, some on the far right are already making much the same point - only this time approvingly. Over at Big Hollywood, an offshoot of Andrew Beitbart's bizarre quasi-fascist new media empire, someone named Chuck Devore, a California State Assemblyman and candidate for U.S. Senate, is already wondering, "What if Tarantino had the 'Basterds' take Taliban scalps?"

And I have to hand it to Devore - he may not be a professional critic, but he immediately perceives the political subtext of Tarantino's new opus:

It is interesting indeed to see those who applaud Tarantino’s latest, admittedly excellent work, revel in the unbridled revenge against Nazis who get what’s coming to them. Many of whom, without batting an eye, view al-Qaeda killers as deserving of respect, protection, and the benefit of civilian law. Since all that separates al-Qaeda from the Nazis is the means - industrial power, modern education, and an organized national base - one wonders why a certain amount of cognitive dissonance wouldn’t kick in after a liberal enjoyed screening “Basterds.”

Devore goes on to point out the obvious parallel between Cheney's arguments and Tarantino's dramaturgy:

To the point, what would a liberal think of the scene where Lt. Raine interrogates a captured German sergeant, demanding the location of a German outpost and its supporting artillery? As the German NCO refuses to talk, Raine orders one of his men to kill the prisoner with a baseball bat. When the two remaining German prisoners see this, one runs in horror and is shot down, while the other is brought over and threatened with the same deadly treatment. He talks, saving the lives of the American commandos. For the prisoner’s troubles, Raines carves a swastika into his forehead. By comparison, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during interrogation seems rather pedestrian.

There's more, much more, about the Hague and Geneva Conventions, etc., etc. Go read the whole disgusting thing. And at least admit to yourself, Tarantino fans, that Devore is right - Inglourious Basterds is nothing if not a brief for the kind of abuses Cheney and the CIA got away with at Guantánamo and black sites around the world.

So I suppose the ball is now in 99seats' and Isaac Butler's court - if only either one knew how to swing a racquet! As for me, I'm not sure I even have to write a whole series on Tarantino anymore - I feel as if Devore's done the work for me . . .

Did Tarantino prime us for Cheney?

Did one inglourious basterd facilitate our acceptance of the other?

I confess I've been checking in regularly over at Parabasis as Isaac Butler has gone into full ethical meltdown mode - I can't even keep track of the conflicts of interest and levels of hypocrisy he's now juggling on a daily (or maybe hourly) basis. Still, you have to hand it to Isaac, the Vassar-speak and self-regard keep flowing in about equal measure, however ludicrous the self-serving arguments become.

But at the same time I've been drawn into an interesting debate elsewhere on the site about Quentin Tarantino. I've simply mentioned that as one of the leading forces in the mainstreaming of torture into American pop culture (via Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, various scenes in Kill Bill, and of course his producer credits on Eli Roth's Hostel movies), it seems obvious that there's a link between Tarantino's oeuvre and the political culture that aids and abets American torture today. In historical terms, Tarantino is Dick Cheney's artistic avatar.

This, of course, leads to all sorts of complicated arguments and denials, some of which it's worth working through, I think, for the light they shed on the assumptions of our critics and the film-going audience. Many people like to imagine that "sophisticated" aesthetic thinking must insulate the artist from his political milieu (and his influence on said milieu) - yet at the same time, of course, the efforts of "politically correct" critics to condemn, say, racism in film, etc., must be absurd if we simultaneously accept their thesis on Tarantino.

My gut is that, yes, Tarantino has always been a sadistic political reactionary cloaked in a "progressive" pop disguise, and that this irony is intensely abhorrent to his fans (for obvious psychological reasons). To me, the correspondence between Tarantino (and Roth, James Wan and Leigh Wannell and the rest) and the likes of Dick Cheney and John Woo, is at least suggestive, and generally, I admit, convincing; my gut feeling is that there is a moral loop between the political and the cultural spheres. But how Tarantino has operated within the political context of the past two decades is a longer topic than I can manage in a single post. Perhaps there's yet ANOTHER multi-post series in the Hub Review's future . . .

When Irish eyes are blinded

Colin Hamell pulls a John Woo on Lynn R. Guerra in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Photos by Andrew Brilliant.

Horror, like history, repeats itself as farce. Only when it comes to the tropes of Quentin Tarantino, that seems to have happened post-haste. Just two years after the premiere of Reservoir Dogs (its iconic torture sequence, below), British (not, actually, Irish) playwright Martin McDonagh retreated to his room to adapt Tarantino's cinematic sadism to the stage, churning out seven plays in nine months - his entire stage corpus, in fact, which has been premiering at a steady pace over the past dozen years to ever-mounting acclaim (he's been nominated for four Tonys, but never won).


Torture as staged entertainment: Reservoir Dogs.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the penultimate play in this brutal oeuvre (the last, The Banshees of Inisheer, has yet to be produced or published), and has at last reached Boston (at the New Rep through Nov. 16). And like its predecessors, it's got Tarantino's (and his own mentor, John Woo's) bloody fingerprints all over it. Which to cinéastes, who imagine theatre should be more like film, rather than its own art form, is undoubtedly a good thing. To theatre queens, of course, the fact that McDonagh is so obviously derivative is a bit more troubling.

Still, it's intriguing to ponder, through McDonagh's prism, how much like theatre Tarantino's early films often are (McDonagh may have been the first to perceive this, but was certainly not the last). Though fragmented, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs both operate via static scenes, often in enclosed surroundings, and it's rather telling that Tarantino has never managed the kind of purely cinematic sequence that, say, Scorsese or Spielberg (much less Hitchcock, Kubrick or Godard) toss off pretty much at will. No, like a playwright, Tarantino's always talking, and talking, and his camera stays at medium distance, watching his actors.

But to be blunt, McDonagh's a much better playwright than Tarantino, whose innovative structures are usually pretty sloppy. McDonagh, by comparison, is a precision engineer. Not for him the self-indulgent digressions that distend Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, or the tedious Grindhouse (which McDonagh would have boiled down to a short). Everything in a McDonagh play happens (or is said) for a reason; the author's a veritable neatnik of nastiness: by the bitter finale, every plot hole is plugged, every loose end tied up in a noose.

Which brings us back to The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Remember what I said about horror repeating as farce, about how Frankenstein inevitably meets Abbott and Costello? Well, McDonagh's brilliant insight in Lieutenant was that the torture scenes in Tarantino - which always involved ridicule of their victims - could easily be pushed to the level of boulevard farce. Which is precisely what The Lieutenant of Inishmore is; it's a comic contraption worthy of (actually, better than) Feydeau - only murder has replaced sex as the repressed desire of its characters, many of whom are members of the IRA.

This change, of course, gives the play whatever scrap of larger significance it has. While never making any explicit political points - and certainly never working through the actual checkered history of Ireland or Sinn Féin - McDonagh exploits his terrorists the way Tarantino did his gangsters: for every variation of violence imaginable. To these Irish wiseguys, even the slightest slight requires blood retribution, and mayhem has become routine, both for them and the larger culture (one funny exchange runs, "You can't walk down the street covered in blood!""Why not, who would notice?""The tourists!"). The only sentiment still allowed in Ireland, it seems, is for pets; hence even the most cold-blooded killer can have a cute attachment to, say, a kitten - indeed, the trigger for the plot of Inishmore is the murder of a terrorist's cat.

This soft spot, needless to say, is merely a contrivance (like fetishes are in Feydeau) to keep the plot going and the blood spurting - the aggrieved party is intent on vengeance, and even patricide seems nothing next to "catricide." To be sure, as the arterial spray becomes a gusher, than a geyser, it can be hard to recall that this is all slapstick. But at the same time it's impossible to read it as anything else. McDonagh has a point or two to make about the moral calculus of terrorism: in a nice exchange, a young IRA wannabe explains that the cows she blinds are "acceptable targets" because they were part of the food supply; the suffering of the poor creatures themselves, of course, has no place in the equation - tellingly, she eventually begins to put out the eyes of other terrorists, too, who become as literally blind as they were morally blind.

But without this very coldness, McDonagh would be without material, because he's rather a cold fish himself (I can't think of another playwright loaded with as much youthful contempt), and he doesn't seem interested in really developing his characters; they're just props intended for ironic effects (indeed, a last gambit to pull the play into semi-tragic, Synge-like territory goes wrong because of this utter superficiality). At the same time, though, it must be admitted that terrorists are McDonagh's perfect subject, in that we can share for them his cold regard - he can off them at will, and we won't mind. Indeed, he carefully metes out death only to the deserving in Inishmore, so the whole bloodbath ends on an upbeat note. The young woman in front of me stood up after the curtain, gazed at the blood-sprayed stage, and told her date, "That was cute!" and she meant it. It was cute.


Terrorists Ross MacDonald, Andrew Dufresne and Curt Klump convene in The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Still, there's something troubling about that attitude. There's a direct cultural line from Reservoir Dogs to Abu Ghraib, and you have to wonder whether McDonagh's audience is any less morally bankrupt than his terrorists are. There's something more than a little Senecan about today's entertainment, and even though we're not yet literally killing people on our stages, sometimes I think it's really only a matter of time before we are; I mean, how much further can synthetic violence go? (By the end of Inishmore, characters are lackadaiscally sawing up fresh corpses on stage.)

Still if McDonagh's - and Tarantino's - material is steadily losing its power to disturb, that also gives me some hope. Maybe even stage blood has a shelf life. Inishmore feels very much of its era - i.e., 1995 - when Pulp Fiction was pushing adolescent buttons around homosexuality and race, and there was a Weimar-like mood surrounding the Clintons. The form morphed into pure torture porn like Saw after 9/11, but now times have changed yet again, and Tarantino's giggling sadism and homophobia (and even his libertarianism) all look immature, and a little sad: Grindhouse bombed, Saw VI is going direct to video, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, produced twelve years after it was written, is chiefly interesting for its craft, not its content.

And at the New Rep, David R. Gammons's production is generally worthy of that craft, although foamy brogues thicker than a head of Guiness sometimes dowse the lines, and a key piece of action occurs a little too far offstage. The production does have a major gap at its center, in that Colin Hamell, a resourceful and precise comic actor, is utterly unconvincing as the lead psychopath - but then that largely helps along the farce anyway, particularly given only one of his terrorist rivals is remotely frightening either. (The comedy's likewise helped by the fact that in the end, even the bloodiest stage business is always more artificial than movie violence.) The standouts of the cast are probably Karl Baker Olson as the amusingly twitty boy-next-door who discovers the stiff kitty, and Lynn R. Guerra as his wannabe-terrorist sister. Guerra is actually almost too comely in her Jean Seberg 'do, and her performance is sometimes a little pushy; but then again, she nearly makes the last act work, and that's saying a lot. Rory James Kelly provides solid comic backup as the terrorist's very dim da, and for awhile Andrew Dufresne brings a few frissons of real menace to the mysterious Christy. The physical production is strong, although not perhaps all that original; the thrash soundtrack in particular is something of a cliché - although I did like Janie E. Howland's monolithic stones, which stick up from the loam like dead, severed fingers. If only they pointed a way out of all the carnage.