Notes on spectacle: Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"

It is obvious enough that Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is not about World War II, but about cinema.  It is a film about the theatricality of film and its uses.  It is ultimately a highly entertaining meditation on what can and cannot be done with these resources.  What I mean by theatricality here is above all, show.  I call it theatricality if the film’s image and/or sound, or a style of acting, are put to use in such a way as to call attention to themselves.  If you think about what it means to act, both in life and in art, right away we can say that there are at least two possibilities, two meanings of acting: to do something, usually for a purpose; and to do something in a way that is meant to seem like something someone would do, and to make yourself seem like that person.  We can call the first instrumental, and the second performative.  To do something in order to accomplish some end is to act in the ordinary sense of action; to do something, and perhaps in a certain way, in order to achieve something by way of seeming, is what we understand theater acting to be.  These can be combined in various ways, including in strategic actions that are dependent on managing appearances in order to get something from another person by way of how one and the other react to what each seems to be doing.   Now, what is war but the playing out of such strategic thinking and behavior?  

An interesting possibility of theater and film is for a show to be made of the show.  Then people can seem to be partly caught up in appearances.  One does something in order to seem a certain way, and such seeming can even drive much of what appears meaningful in the lives of those doing this.  This is now a well-remarked possibility in films that might be called postmodern.  We could date the beginning of postmodern cinema from Godard’s “Breathless.”  Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the film’s hapless antihero, is a man whose purpose in life is to seem to be someone.  He does this partly to impress the young American girl Patricia (Jean Seberg), but even more so for himself.  This is a narcissism that cinema itself can seem to give rise to, since many of the resources of this preening narcissism are themselves cinematic.  The reflexivity of this in all its potentialities of irony, comedy, and simply cuteness (of the sort that film school students sometimes seem to rather get off on) is what makes this artistically to have the interest that would come to be associated with a modernist reflexivity that in ‘postmodernism’ was married to “low” art and characters, often with strongly anti-heroic rather than ennobling tendencies.  The cinema of the New Hollywood that emerged in the 60s and 70s (with films like Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”) would make much of this.  It was social commentary making maximum use of the resources of cinema itself, because it was the popular culture of cinema that itself seemed to give rise to the phenomenon.  The main difference between Godardian ironic reflexivity and that of the New Hollywood was that the American films were less concerned to seem to step outside of the film medium itself and its narrative possibilities and genres.  This is what makes “The Godfather” such a perfect film: it criticizes not only American capitalism in connection with patriarchal familialism, but also, crucially, the forms of cinematic narrative in the film itself, which seem almost perfectly to fit their content.  The adept viewer sees this, and much of the film’s intended effect lies in the uncanniness of this seeing into the thing itself.  The film ‘sees’ itself and its own mechanisms, and in this way succeeds both as a traditional narrative film with all of its resources of entertainment, including a pulpy plot about a rebellious son who winds up replacing the father in a way that makes him the epitome of patriarchal normality, and at the same time is ‘postmodern’ in seeing through itself.  The idea in this reflexivity is that by drawing on the power of art to comment on itself, its resources are used at the fullest.  

Certainly, Tarantino is a filmmaker who from the beginning was working quite self-consciously in this mode.  Watching his films, I cannot forget how they are preceded by films like “Taxi Driver,” with its famous “Are you taking to me?” scene with Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) pointing a gun at his image in a mirror.  Scorsese developed variations on this theme in a number of his key films up through at least “Goodfellas,” which is largely about a man who becomes a gangster because he wants to be cool.  Like Michel Poiccard, in all his pointed futility.  

So where does “Inglourious Basterds” fit into this picture?  It’s another film about film.  It’s a film that imagines a key set of episodes in the greatest of wars, as if they were lost and won in a movie theater, or by movie actors, and with some formal gestures on the part of the filmmaker, all of which amount to a meditation on winning and losing (in a matter of some consequence) by means of these forms of theatricality.  That certainly is not how the war was fought or won, but it may be about a different kind of combat that is by no means unimportant. In a media society, it may be that important battles are fought and won in this way.  

The film starts and ends with gestures.  In the opening scene, we first see a house on a hill, where a certain farmer lives with his family.  This shot is so perfectly designed and composed, that we know the filmmaker wants us to see an image not of a farm in occupied wartime France, but an image of an image of such a farm.  An image of an image.  Tarantino’s many cinematic and pop cultural (music in particular) references may be for film students the stuff of trivia games, but this kind of referentiality works best when it’s obvious, and not because we know what is being referenced, so much as we can tell that we are being shown something in a way that we are supposed to take the showing as self-conscious and deliberate.   And what happens in this scene?  The farmer is chopping wood.  All of this is a farm story image for the ages.  But look closely: the farmer is not chopping wood, he is swinging an ax above a tree stump as if he were chopping wood on it.  He is engaged in a gesture.  Why?  Is there a purpose?  He does not yet see the approaching cars which he will correctly guess are German.  We soon will learn that he has a reason to want to appear in a certain way.  He is a farmer hiding a Jewish family who very much needs to look like a farmer who is just a farmer.  Though in this initial moment he seems to be acting for himself.  The director shows us that he is performing a gesture, because gestures performed for show, and the uses that these have, which, as here, can be quite serious and consequential, are much of what the film is about.  

The film also ends with a gesture to a gesture.  This one does require some knowledge.  A filmgoer who knows international cinema well might get it, even if most viewers won’t.  We may as well admit that Tarantino does make his films partly so that those who get the references will get more of what is happening.  And this can surely only be done if those references are half-concealed, because that at least sets them up as meaningful within a horizon of what is concealed and revealed, and these films need that, even at the price that viewers will need some of us critics to let them on some of the secrets.  What I am getting to is this: The long ending credit sequence is set to a piece of music by Ennio Morricone, the film composer whose music was often used in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, which certainly are a very important influence on Tarantino, and one that he surely would like us to recognize.  The song in this case, titled “Rabbia e Tarantela” (which means anger and the tarantela, which is a dance from southern Italy) is from “Allonsanfan,” a film by Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.  The Taviani Brothers are known among other things for making historical films about the use of myth and its theatrical enactment.  Their most celebrated film, “La Notte di San Lorenzo” (“Night of the Shooting Stars”), is about how a group of villagers in an Italian town during the German occupation and the partisan/resistance war that accompanied it, which happens to be one of Italy’s great national episodes consecrated like myth, manage while escaping the town and its immanent bombing by the Nazis, to imagine themselves playing heroic roles drawn from sources ranging from the Iliad to popular lore about the then-current war.  The villagers become involved in the partisan fighting when they link up with a group of resistance fighters, but the core of the film’s meaning is the various incidents of this self-consciousness dramatization.  This is history as myth.  The Taviani Brothers’ earlier film Allonsanfan (whose title is a bastardization of the French national anthem adopted during the Revolution, which begins “Allons enfants de la patrie”; this film is about children of a revolution without a country, Italy still being divided into small states) is about a group of aristocratic men from a Northern town who, in the wake of the Napoleonic war, dream of starting a revolutionary uprising.  They wind up traveling to a southern village where they intend to meet up with a revolutionary of sorts whose ambiguous destiny involves his having killed some people and gaining the reputation conferred by his name, “Gianni Pesti,” named as designating a plague.  The uprising is unsuccessful as the local villagers are not impressed, and when the “Sublime Brothers,” as the aristocrats have styled themselves, go out to meet the approaching villagers, they are killed by them.  But not before doing a dance.  They have developed a dance that is set to this stirring martial music, in which they basically step forward, back, and to the side, in a manner that seems like the performance of some grand heroic gesture.  In fact, this song and dance is in a way the key to the film, or at least to their pseudo-revolution.  It is a revolution made to order, and performed as opera.  I believe that Tarantino uses this song because in its stirring way it is a reminder of the possibility that some kind of real world political action will in the end come down to some grand gesture, some operatic dance, that the participants engage in because it gives meaning to their lives, but that is, after all, at some remove from real effective political action in history.  Tarantino in this way bookends the film with evocations of gestures that bring together the two senses of acting I mentioned.  In doing so, they pose the question of the relationship between action that is performed for the value of seeming, and action that is meant to have some instrumental success.   This is not the question of most wars, recently or at any time, but it is a question that can certainly be asked about today’s “society of the spectacle.”  It’s a real question and not a rhetorical one in so far as sometimes the performative and the instrumental qualities of staged action depend on each other, rather than just the one betraying the other, as the radicals are betrayed in Allonsanfan by their own confidence in the dramatic, their aestheticization of the political.  For, as The Night of the Shooting Stars shows, that rendering poetic of meaningful action does not necessarily undo it, but may even form a key part of its conditions of success.  

Highly dramatic encounters can work well or badly; they can be more or less successful from the point of view of either, or any, of their participants.  The French farmer at the beginning of Tarantino’s film is rather unsuccessful.  This is because he has met more than his match in the infamous Nazi “Jew hunter” Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz), though it must be said that in general it is a mistake for anyone to think they can outwit the police in an interrogation.  Landa controls their encounter throughout.  The farmer thinks he can withstand the interrogation without betraying the family he’s hiding, and he’s wrong about that. 

Landa is a most interesting opponent; indeed, he is often rightly seen as carrying much of the film.  I find other aspects of and characters in it to also be strong, like Mélanie Laurent as Shoshana Dreyfus, whom I will get to, but Landa is remarkable in part just because he is so good at controlling conversations in order to get what he wants, and in a way that calls for some comment.  The key to Landa’s character is revealed near the end when he is negotiating with Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt).  What would make such a man so eager to switch sides and want to be counted as aiding the Americans?  At this point, we realize that what motivates him is not loyalty to the Führer but something closer to narcissism.  He likes exercising power, and winning for him is part of that.  He is performing for himself, like Michel Poiccard and so many others in postmodern cinema. This man who is seemingly able to talk his way anywhere he wants to go will meet his match in Raine’s tattooing of a Nazi swastika on foreheads.  This is anti-theatrical because it undoes the separation of being and seeming that theatrical acting depends on. 

Theater as such is make-believe; it gives us a world of the “as-if.”  The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto called this “the ‘is’ of artistic identification.”  When you see something that is artificial and you say “That’s me,” you are engaged in that.  Oedipus on stage only seems to tear his eyes out.  The actor doesn’t lose his eyes, the blood isn’t real, and the audience, like the actor himself, is in two positions simultaneously: inside and outside the event.  Inside it, it seems real, and the audience’s shock, or pity and terror as Aristotle put it, is dependent on the identification that “believes.”  That believing can be powerfully affecting, and in a way it “is” real because it so seems.  But of course in another way it’s not, and we in the audience like the actor know that we are “outside” the event, that we are not really painfully losing our organs of vision or even watching as someone (really) does.  Now, since the kind of cinema we are discussing here is one that is centered around making a spectacle of spectacle, its characters tend to be people who are like actors portraying characters.  In “Pulp Fiction,” when Mia (Uma Thurman) is seducing Vince (John Travolta) in the restaurant, we see someone playing a role who knows that she is.  This is nothing new in theater, as it is central in Shakespeare’s comedies, where a boy playing a woman on stage incarnates a character who plays at being a man, as part of her efforts to stage a desired consequence.  There is certainly something of an uncanny effect on us in such scenes, but more fundamentally in many cases, it isn’t that reflexive irony that is important but just the fact that for a character being played by an actor it might be quite germane to have the persona of a character who like an actor is playing at being something he is not—or that he is, for that matter.  Col. Landa is a man whose way of being in the world is to control appearances and direct conversations so as to get what he wants from people.  Since doing this depends on seeming to be in a way that one (perhaps) is not, tying the Nazi identity that he would now disavow to his forehead in the film’s final tattooing is a brutal gesture that destroys the very possibility of such scheming seeming.  It also is one form of mise-en-scène, that operated by Lt. Raine and in direct contrast to the staged situations that Landa up to this point has been engaging people in.  That is why the farmer loses at the beginning; theater includes acting and directing, and if you are acting but not directing, you are at some potential risk that your performance will be used to do or say something that is not what you intend or would prefer.   

Another theatrical strategy is that of Shoshana Dreyfus.  That she succumbs to sympathy for the sniper Friedrich Zoller, making a tender gesture towards his body, and then being shot  by him, after she has shot him, in the projection room, is the reverse side of her triumph when she dresses up in red, and with a black hat, in scenes that show her outfit as clearly matching the colors of the swatiska flag, which is ubiquitous in the theater on the “Nazi night.”  She clearly enjoys dressing in this very sexy way, in a 40s style, here associated with Nazism and its film industry; this is her preparation for a seduction of the entire Nazi regime, in a situation that is partly her own mise-en-scène, underscored with the David Bowie song (which I recall in the theater being suitably very loud) “Cat People,” with the line, “I can stare for a thousand years” marking the irony of the Nazi millennium, which will not survive the evening.  This is her rendezvous, her moment.  Her vengeance is not equal to what it repays but always more than it, a surplus, a getting off and out, that works by adding to the flames of wrong the fuel to turn them on itself: “putting out the fire with gasoline.” She won’t survive the evening either, but doesn’t plan to.  Without remarking on the obvious fact of this matter, she plans with the assistance of her lover to heroically, and romantically, die in the theater in the same flames that will consume the German establishment, and in a manic surplus of enjoyment in overdrive, that builds on the pleasure we see Hitler and Goebbels as audience taking in the scenes of Zoller in the Nazi film shooting people from his bell tower.  Horror will not replace enjoyment here, but morph out from it; she uses the excitement of terror of the Nazi regime that has murdered her family and which she had to endure silently in the face of “the Jew hunter” Landa when he shows up in the restaurant with Goebbels and his entourage only to order her a glass of milk reminiscent of the one Landa ordered from the farmer, to let her know that he knows who she is.  Powerless when merely affected, either by the terror of meeting the murderer Landa (which she handles by being prudently silent, not forced into the folly of the farmer who thinks he can talk his way to safety) or the sentimental gesture towards Zoller, who after all is in a way her match: a man who strategically uses a posture of naive innocence in his efforts to seduce her, whom he clearly thinks owes her something just because of that, he like her is a man with a rage for killing, who clearly enjoys it, and whose persona combines this innocence with the rageful enjoyment of the man trapped in his perch, killing, and killing, and killing: the film of his exploits just goes on, as one after another person is shot and falls or dies.  Shoshana and Zoller’s shooting each other is their mutual love-making, and the agony with which she screams out as she is shot is her ecstasy qua affected.  But her great triumph is post-mortem, as her image, spliced into the film of the sniper’s killings, will announce to the gathered Nazi bigwigs in the theater, “You are going to die….This is the face of Jewish vengeance!” This image and her taunts of manic rage-filled enjoyment, overcoming everything, including her own death, appropriately comes not just from the projected image on the screen but out of the flames set with the nitrate film stock by her dutiful lover from behind the scene.  Shoshana’s vengeance is a staged sacrifice that overwhelms both auditorium and spectacle itself.  It is also that spectacle in flames, flames that come out of film’s very stock of possibilities, and from an image, hers, larger than life, and in a love and hate that in its manic, sacrificial, and exuberantly violent way, is, like the Song of Songs, a love “stronger than death.”  A love that is both a patriotic fidelity to her nation and people, and to film in all its monumental greatness, the two also brought together in the comic line in which, while setting the letters that compose the names of storied directors and films on the theater marquee, in this case German ones, she assures Zoller, that her country (France) is one in which people love cinema.  The spectacle image, and the cinema image, which in a larger sense she is also participating in and contributing to when she dresses sexily in the Nazi colors, which are also the colors of anarchy, red and black, this is what will announce itself as the face and voice of the Jew who has been hunted, has escaped, and in another incarnation in the film will kill German soldiers with baseball bats and inscribe swastikas on their foreheads, this is the image and sound that can truly destroy Hitler’s Germany.  Ironically, cinema was part of it; Goebbels’s being head of the German film industry is a fact remarked on repeatedly.  Raine’s team of killers and circumcisers of foreheads is comically inept; Shoshana is the other side of this, tragicomically apt.  

Tarantino is known for staging revenge fantasies of society’s victims (including women in the “Kill Bill” films and “Death Proof,” and black slaves in “Django Unchained”).  What is the meaning of these fantasies, in which, certainly, the good guys triumph, often quite unrealistically?  And what is the meaning of this one?  I think it stages what in a sense really did happen.  The entertainment industry was deliberately, and particularly with the personal role of Goebbels as both Minister of Propaganda and head of the German film industry, employed to make fantasies reality enough for audiences to aid in legitimating a machine of killing that was designed partly as a rite of purity for the German nation.  Germany lost that war, but who won?  The Americans, of course, with some help from the British, pictured comically here, and the French and other European resistance fighters, as well as the Soviets, not pictured here at all.  Today, what do we have of this victory?  Among other things, Hollywood.  (Maybe that is why the Soviets are absent: their film industry did not share in quite the same spectacular and celebratory character that Nazi cinema in fact shared with that of America, whose aesthetics it largely copied, as is shown in Rüdiger Suchsland’s recent film “Hitler’s Hollywood”).  What if the real battles that decided the recent course of world history were stagings of spectacle?  And if they were, what would we find ourselves wanting to see?  Wagner said that the spear that wounds is the one that heals.  If art were as therapeutic as people from Aristotle, theorizing theater, to our time, have wanted it to be, what better image of victory than the laugh of Shoshana Dreyfus the victim at an audience that was enjoying watching a sniper shoot one person after another, gets theirs?  The cinema of theatricality has not lost its aesthetic distance, but inscribes it close upon the enjoyment of violence.  Today, the most potent acts are gestures.  Whether or not we understand them rightly, we see, and generally enjoy, their staging and self-dramatization.  For some, this enjoyment may be stronger even than the will to live.  One can wonder and doubt if there is in this any real lesson to be learned; but if there is, it shows itself not as showing something behind it, but as showing itself showing.