Iron Man 2, dir. Jon Favreau (2010)

Nothing in Iron Man 2 seems old: like the arc reactor in Tony Stark’s chest, everything glows for no reason. The screens with which Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) interacts throughout the film go past physical presence and become the very air of Stark’s workshop, which he can manipulate with his touch. He not only tells robots what to do, he is himself a robot. It becomes difficult to stop thinking you’re watching The Jetsons.

Favreau’s camera follows things smartly: it follows Stark as a film camera, TV camera, or a security camera. Sometimes you watch through the eyes of Stark himself, or through the camera-eyes of Iron Man (they are, after all, one in the same).  When Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, who must utter five lines throughout the whole film) nearly axes Iron Man, we watch through a fake worldwide news agency. Vanko’s father worked with Howard Stark to invent arc reactor technology, though according to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, who has not, as of yet, left Pulp Fiction) Stark the Elder had him deported for wanting to profit off of the invention.  How someone was kicked out of the United States for desiring to be a good capitalist in the 1960s is the one piece of the film’s logic that seems far too far-flung.

Sometimes we watch the film through CNN or C-SPAN, as when Stark refuses hand his suit over to the American government because, he says, it’s not only his suit; it is him. This scene–featuring Garry Shandling–is the highlight of the movie’s awkward fist half hour.  Despite the rocky start, though, Jon Favreau picks the movie up and manages not to miss a beat until an out of place, whitewashed fight scene featuring Scarlett Johansson’s charmless shadow beating some guards senseless. Johansson, in fact, is a strange presence throughout the film. Unlike Gwenyth Palthrow, Johansson is eerily silent, as if Favreau simply didn’t tell her where to stand.

Later, at StarkExpo, competing weapons developer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) presents a veritable army of drone Iron Men, who attack Iron Man and his new sidekick, War Machine (Don Cheadle) in the film’s final battlesetpiece. Vanko controls the drones, and the film presents him much in the way we imagine all drone operators: with the malicious pleasure of someone playing a particularly violent video game.

All of this makes the film’s most shocking moment the point at which Stark, effectively under house arrest by SHIELD until he gets his act together, watches a 16mm film of his father Howard Stark (John Slatterly, who didn’t even have to leave the set of Mad Men for his brief role). The radical disjuncture between the smoky film and the smooth, gleaming, and edgeless atmosphere of Iron Man 2—both the world within the film and the film itself—serve as a melancholy reminder of what is both lost and gained in the digital age. Iron Man 2 begs everyone to believe that despite the apparent warmth of analogue technology, there is something exclusionary about it, while everything new and digital lets us in. Yet something under the surface of Iron Man 2 is running contrary, and it has to do with history: Stark is rediscovering his father, he is finding the key to America’s future. It is a key that was constructed after World War II–when America was America–and has been kept hidden until now, when Iron Man can bring it back. Despite the veneration of the new, there’s a serious nostalgia here for the past. It’s nostalgia not only for righteousness but also for a particular kind of familial cruelty, which Stark’s own aggressive alcoholism indulges.  In the final battle, Vanko’s distance from the machine he controls is a source of anxiety and evil; while Stark’s unity with the suit offers safety and stability. The coldness of 16mm film comes from Stark’s distance from it: a distance of time and a distance of knowledge, something about that analogue technology doesn’t let him inside. The best technology is the kind you can become. It’s the way of the future–rooted in the past.

]]> http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/screen-memories/feed/ 0 http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/on-watching-hitler-die-2/ http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/on-watching-hitler-die-2/#comments Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Giampaolo Bianconi http://sainteliotandco.com/?p=293

“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.