On Watching Hitler Die
by Giampaolo Bianconi
“Facts can be so misleading,” says the S.S. colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz as a truly devilish take on Claude Rains, towards the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s new film. He prefers to stick to rumors, in a sense, to dreams: the collective dreams and whispers that form rumor, eventually codified into some kind of historical record, to be proven or proved apocryphal. By the end of the film, as the colonel discusses the terms of his heroic surrender over the radio, he makes sure to emphasize that when the history of Operation Kino is written, he will be recorded to have been a crucial member from the beginning (Operation Kino is the name given to a successful plot to kill the German high command). Before Tarantino, Ronald Reagan was the last person to exhibit such a preference for the Hollywood version of history.
It’s this kind of history that let’s us watch Hitler die – and we’re supposed to rally around it, it’s gladiatorial and makes me nauseous. It’s too easy to write it off as spectacle, as boyhood fantasy – these things have qualities to them, and the spectacle itself – not only the spectacle of Hitler’s fictional death – has consuming, controlling, coma-inducing tendencies that dull our judgments and fold the audience into “the audience.” Boyhood fantasy – let’s stop beating around the bush – becomes nothing more than rape and murder.
Watching Hitler die isn’t fulfilling, it isn’t cathartic – it’s fascist.
Landa himself is the most unique character in the film, embodying the terrifying urbanity of Nazism. Tarantino chooses not to mine the disconnect between Nazi civilization and Nazi cruelty, and instead uses Landa as an unwitting expression of the Nazi mind. Landa prides himself on his ability to think like a Jew – and, when he cuts a deal at the end of the film, we realize it is Landa who is, in fact, the rat. Landa himself equates Jews with rats, which is nothing new – to do so was a standby of the German propaganda machine. The world remains divided into the very categories the Nazi’s organized for the purposes of control: the shoe is simply on the other foot. This kind of adolescent reversal is the whole premise of Tarantino’s film.
Full of the expected postmodern paradigms, no character in the film exists beyond their mythologies, which we can glean from our own cinematic knowledge of history. They emerge from the darkness before the film, and fade back into it. However, one thing the Basterds never mention – mentioned in practically every other World War Two movie – is women. Isn’t this how GI’s are usually characterized–missing their wives and naming their guns after their girlfriends? In one scene, Brad Pitt sticks his finger into a woman’s fresh bullet wound, as a form of torture to make sure she’s telling the truth. For all extensive purposes, he fucks her wound, with the same sadism we see, in a brief cutaway, when Joseph Goebbels is fucking his French translator. Later in the film, Landa takes his only on screen victim – the same woman – he cruelly strangles her. The handsome German private Frederic Zoller, irritated that Shoshanna Dreyfus continually rejects his advances, yells at her in the projection booth. “I’m not the kind of man you tell to go away,” he tells her. He only locks the door when he thinks she’ll finally fuck him. All the men of the film exhibit the same sadism, the same murderous joy that keeps their killing sexually charged, be they Basterd or Nazi.
Inglourious Basterds has been most associated, in the press, with “wish fulfillment.” Wish fulfillment also characterizes the way in which Tarantino expects his audience to approach the film: as a kind of frat boy revisionism, in which Jews man up, fight back, kick ass, and end the War. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, Tarantino explained his vexation with other World War II movies: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”
In a sense, Tarantino is correct: it is frustrating. But for Tarantino, there’s a point when the frustration becomes murderous. Thus his creation of the Basterds, lead by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and comprised of Jewish psychopaths who, we’re lead to believe, traipse across occupied France and kill Nazis. The Baserds are two things – most clearly, they’re an exculpatory device, designed to rid us of our guilt. As we watch the Basterds, we can relax into our thick seats and be comforted that there is some other glittering celluloid past in which “we” got it right. Tarantino is looking to use the cinema as a powerful tool – which the cinema is – to rewrite history, the right way. It’s unsurprising that so much of the plot hinges on movie theatres, film critics, and nitrate film. But beyond these fanboy odes to the very real force of film, there’s very little more than the same male fantasies characteristic of fascism itself. Video games have been doing this for a while now, and as the logic of the film unfolds – logic that J Hoberman described as that of “an alternate universe: The Movies” – is really the logic of a video game or the Columbine massacre.
It was inevitably to Columbine that my thoughts turned when, in the film’s holocaustic finale, two of the Basterds fire blindly from the balcony of a Parisian cinema into the crowd of Nazi luminaries below. Tarantino shows us their faces, stretched taut with smiles as terrifying as the Nazi laughs that permeate the film. Bloodthirsty and righteous, the Basterds shots are meant to be our shots–the shots we should have taken, the shots that should have killed Hitler. The same thoughts must cross the mind of any killer, shooting at the formless mass (without any identity other that identity appellated by the killer) and Tarantino thinks that because they’re Nazis, it’s not only okay but necessitated. “Why would they condemn me? I was too brutal to the Nazis?” he told Jeffery Goldberg.
Yes. This is what Tarantino can’t quite wrap his head around, and it’s the reason why no discussion of the technique of Inglourious Basterds will ever account for its inexcusable moral ignorance. This isn’t about the offended bourgeoisie intellectuals versus the pedal to the metal, git ‘r done tough guys: it’s about enemies of fascism versus fascists. To eliminate the Reich, the Basterds must literally don the Nazi uniform, which affords them the cruelty of the Nazi’s themselves (beyond this, a member of the Basterds is himself a Nazi, another is an Austrian emigre to the United States). “I’m more than just a uniform,” Fredrick tells Shosanna. “Not to me,” she responds. What the film looks to
take from Nazi Germany is its very humanity, which not only requires our respect but makes them like us. It’s simple displacement. It starts with shooting Hitler and it ends with youtube videos of Saddam Hussein’s execution, with spirited defenses of waterboarding. Tarantino, unfortunately, chosen to simultaneously distance “our“ righteousness from “their” evil – ignoring how much of us is in them, how much of them is in us. It encourages us only give up our own humanity because the enemy, it seems, has already surrendered theirs. But the oppressed have a doubly hard challenge, not only to preserve their own humanity but to save the humanity of their oppressors.