Living as I do in the metropolitan area of our nation’s capital,
I sometimes seem to be surrounded by political technicians who
pride themselves on judging the speeches and interviews and press
conferences of our leaders by a detached and entirely
professional standard. “That was a good speech,” they will aver
of, say, a State of the Union address, even though they may agree
with not one syllable of its content — or, indeed, as is
increasingly the case, the content has become so platitudinous
that it doesn’t rise to the level of being either agreed or
disagreed with. You see? Such people are judges not of policy or
ideology or even rationality, all of which things they scorn to
notice, but of the craft of political speech-making,
independent of any content it may or may not have. Of course,
they have learned this from formalism in the arts, and
particularly the modernist mystique of the artist as craftsman —
someone to be judged on the formal skill with which his artifacts
are put together rather than their semantic content. I think this
is nonsense. A good speech, like a good work of art, is one that
says something interesting and true. The technique can never be
anything more than a secondary consideration.
Alas, I must pay a price for this belief, which is to submit
myself to the status of a naïf among my fellow critics,
an unsophisticated bumpkin who has simply failed to understand
that the first rule of criticism for those who know their
business is to ignore mere content. Shame on me! I can tell how
shameful it is to be thought such an innocent by the lengths to
which other critics are prepared to go in order to avoid the
stigma of being thought to be so ignorant themselves. About
Inglorious Bastards, for instance, the New York
Times critic
Manohla Dargis is in one sense quite right to say that
“complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is
about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence:
these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of
dialogue.” But what she appears to mean by this quite unnecessary
observation is that, because it is deliberately vulgar and
tasteless, the movie must somehow be supposed to have disarmed
criticism. Sophisticated critics are allowed only to animadvert
upon inadvertent tastelessness.
This is the ticket that Mr. Tarantino has used to ride to the
very heights of auteurish movie-making in America,
though admittedly these are not very high heights. His band of
Inglorious Bastards, like him, glory in their ingloriousness —
as well as in their illiteracy, ignorance and brutality. That is
the point of the movie which, like Pulp Fiction, is named for
what Mr. Tarantino takes to be at once its happy vulgarity and
its immunity from criticism. That’s why I refuse to be browbeaten
by the privilege of the auteur into imitating the
misspelling he insists on in his title. Inglorious
Bastards shall be here so called, in proper English
orthography, as my small and doubtless insignificant protest
against Mr. Tarantino’s attempt to appropriate the common
language for his own purposes and put his personal brand on it by
an egregious misspelling.
For that act of expropriation, a kind of enclosure of the
intellectual commons, is also what he is doing with history —
which is equally a common property and one that, in my naïveté, I
persist in thinking an important one for truth to hang on tightly
to her claims in. It is important for us to remember that those
known to history as Nazis were not cartoon characters. Nor were
those who fought and finally defeated them. Nor was that defeat
accomplished by a gang of bloodthirsty, free-lancing American
Jews in search of revenge who manage to commandeer a ludicrously
implausible scheme to assassinate the entire German high command,
including Hitler and Goebbels, in a small Parisian cinema by
setting fire to a pile of nitrate film. I know, I know. Mr.
Tarantino’s are not real Nazis, any more than these are
real historical events. But that doesn’t seem to me enough of an
excuse for them when American schoolchildren — for whose eyes
this film is principally intended — may scarcely be supposed to
know what was real.
The Germans are said, in a
report from the Agence France-Presse, to be big fans of Mr.
Tarantino’s blood-drenched fantasy, and you can see why they
might prefer that the descendants of those caught up in the
world-wide tragedy their ancestors gave birth to should regard it
instead as nothing more than a comic-book bloodfest between two
equally unpalatable collections of human grotesques. Other
Europeans glory in their reputation as sophisticates and
cinéastes — as, for example, does
Natalie Haynes in the Times of London:
The Second World War has produced endless fun-yet-serious
films: The Dam Busters, The Great Escape,
Where Eagles Dare. And Inglourious Basterds
is a heroic addition to the genre. Its leading characters are
mostly women and Jews, but there’s no trace of a worthy
Holocaust drama. This, after all, is the movie that one of its
stars, Eli Roth, referred to as “kosher porn.” Tarantino, in
other words, has made a war film about war films, not one about
war. His usual blend of smart dialogue and grisly violence is
perfectly matched to his subject. War may be hell, but
sometimes, on screen, it should be fun.
All true except for the bits about the movie’s being “a heroic
addition to the genre” and how “its blend of smart dialogue and
grisly violence is perfectly matched to his subject.” In other
words, for her the idea of an exciting war movie is
equivalent to the actual existence of such a movie. QT’s movie is
the reverse of exciting. It’s all fake and contrived, a comic
book that glories in its untruth to life. That the premiere in
Nashville of this phony movie should have been hosted by Al Gore,
the world’s biggest phony, is no more than appropriate. Only a
child could find such stuff exciting — and, these days you would
think, not many children either. But for her, the potential
existence of such a child, together with the blinding critical
insight that this is not a war film but “a war film about war
films,” is itself a justification of the movie. It will be a
matter of some cultural significance either way, I think, when we
know whether audiences agree with her or not.
