My Ongoing Thing with Tarantino Goes On
Tarantino has been criticized plenty for the violence in his films. One would add nothing to the discourse is one were to accuse him to causing an increase of violent tendencies in his viewers and, as an aside, one would also be wrong. But one may wonder if perhaps the violence depicted specifically in Inglorious Basterds represents an ideological shift in reflection on Nazism and the holocaust that has, as time buries memories of the true events deeper into history and fewer and fewer people are alive who can recall them from actual experience, had an unexpectedly disturbing effect on how people today view the persecution and mass murder of Jewish, LGBT, and Roma peoples.
A question I get asked by students who take an interest in 20th Century history with escalating frequently is why the Jewish populations of concentration and later murder camps did not put up “more of a fight” and I find the concept behind the question more and more disturbing each time. They are essentially asking why the authoritarian persecution of Jewish people in Hitler’s Germany and its territories was not answered with overt violence. This concept essentially undermines one of the most horrifying and tragic aspects of the holocaust – the fact that it was done to people who posed absolutely no violent threat whatsoever. Perhaps it is the lens of American culture and it’s popularization of the fearless lone cowboy defending against oppression in all its forms, the every-man-for-himself bearing arms and not relying on others, through which we are beginning to view the events that is causing us to collectively see this non-violence or pacifism as a weakness that in some way invited the persecution. It’s a disturbing thought. Non-violence and pacifism are elsewhere considered admirable attributes, rightly so.
In contrast, Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds totes itself, in the dialogue, as “Jewish vengeance” and depicts the Jewish oppressed, personified by a woman on the run and a crack team of specialist American-Jewish soldiers, committing atrocious acts of violence against Nazis, culminating in the Nazi high command being locked in a theatre (with their spouses and families) and massacred in essentially the same way the Nazis themselves were often documented to do. Satisfying, perhaps. But is this a helpful light through which to reflect on history? The Jewish people, and the LGBT and Roma peoples who were predominantly targeted by Nazis, were not a violent people. It was for this reason, and not the reasons documented by Nazi sympathisers and propagandists themselves, that they were targeted in the first place. Because they were pacifists. Averse to mass murder, as it might still be hoped most peoples are. The Nazis were not a sophisticated war machine that targeted for extermination an aggressor, they are a delirious collective of subservient buffoons who targeted an easy “other” who could not – and because they could not – defend themselves.
Tarantino is known to depict morally ambiguous characters but there was nothing morally ambiguous about the holocaust.
This brings me to the depiction of Hans Landa. While most of the Nazi high command, including Hitler himself, could be seen to be depicted in Inglorious Basterds as rather vacuous thugs, Landa is their antithesis. A highly intelligent, sophisticated, handsome adversary for the anti-heroes. In Landa, Tarantino courts the Heroic evil of Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago or Lucas’ Darth Vader that saw them become villains oftentimes more popular and more iconic than the heroes of the stories in which they feature. Can anyone name the “heroes” of Inglorious Basterds of the top of their heads? But there’s a problem with this. Milton’s Satan was a loyal servant whose pride was injured. Iago was jealous of a dashing newcomer. Darth Vader was an innocent boy subjected to terrible tragedy and abuse and groomed by an emotional predator. They represented fictional scenarios and had sympathetic origins. Landa was a fanatic racist whose sole diabolical purpose was to hunt down and kill people who are very real in ways that were really done. Landa represents real human evil at its worst.
Let’s contrast this with how Nazis are depicted in the Indiana Jones films.
Sure they dress well and are shown to be a genuine threat, such as when Gestapo torturer Toht has Marion Ravenwood in his clutches, but it’s never so long before they commit some bumbling folly of almost pantomimic buffoonery, such as Toht burning his hand with a Jewish pendant and dancing around in the snow. Throughout Raiders, their names are seldom mentioned. They make absurd faces and are shot from comical angles as they lose control of the situation. Most importantly, they are time and again agents of their own destruction rather than being brutally murdered by Jews. The gigantic fighter who gives Jones a run for his money at the airstrip is eviscerated by the plane’s rotor because he’s not paying attention to his surroundings. Nazi drivers veer off the road and plunge into chasms at the slightest push. And the film’s infamous ending shows all the surviving Nazis of the piece, and important Nazi sympathiser Belloq, meddling in Jewish mysticism and being destroyed by supernatural powers they themselves invoked.
It's disheartening then to hear a rather misinformed punchline from The Big Bang Theory be repeated by viewers who say that Indiana Jones essentially had no effect on the Raiders’ plot. He just bumbles his way through it, trying to stay alive, and merely witnesses the Nazis destroy themselves as result of their own arrogance. This may not be classic American storytelling, but it does serve to remove all the power from the Nazi characters AND save Indiana Jones from any moral question.
The morality of Jones’ actions is thrown at him in both films in which Nazis feature. And rightly so. He is a mercenary, essentially a gun for hire, and he plays his part in the imperialist theft of sacred artefacts from various part of the globe. And he kills a lot of people in the process. I emphasize now that we’re not talking about Temple of Doom, which certainly did have problematic, imperialist overtones. We’re talking about Raiders and Last Crusade, in which Jones’ adversaries are Nazis. By having Jones stand back and let the Nazis destroy themselves, his hands are kept clean of too much blood, unlike Tarantino’s Jewish characters in Inglorious Basterds. And here’s another point – Indiana Jones is an American with a distinctly Welsh surname. Not a Jew. He does not represent the victims of Nazism, but those militarized forces which outmatched and defeated them historically on a battlefield. With Jones, it’s war. Not murder.
Last Crusade again shows Nazis and they are if anything even more pantomimically comical than they were in Raiders; shaking their fists at Zeppelins after being thrown through the windows, crashing their vehicles into each other in the chaos Jones stirs up, and in the end again largely being killed by their own stupidity rather than the entrapment and massacre featured in Tarantino. There are no Hans Landas in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones. The closest we have is arguably General Vogel, but even he has many instances of buffoonery and ultimately serves as an agent of his own destruction. Unlike Landa, none of the Nazi adversaries in Jones walk away, and yet this total annihilation is accomplished without costing Jones any heroic points.
That is not to say that the villains of Spielberg’s films are weak. As with Toht, they have their moments of power such as the multiple times Jones is captured and tied up, but even then Spielberg is careful to frame his shots so as to not elevate them too highly or for very long. His displays of Nazi horror, while not absent, are toned down and more cartoonish than Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan because these latter two are serious studies in the consequences of fanaticism whereas Jones can be seen as an exercise much the same as undertaken by the creators of the Loony Tunes, Marvel and DC comics, and Allied military propaganda of the era in which the Jones films are set; that is, taking the Nazis’ power away from them while still showing them as a credible and immediate threat. We see them burning books, we see them planning war, and we see them appropriating cultures they saw as inferior to their own ends. We just don’t see them do any of it very well.
Inglorious Basterds shows true visceral horror within its prologue. Like a strange comical mutation of the Jones films and Schindler’s List spliced together and formed into one violent, morally ambiguous, crass, wholly inappropriate mess.
It is true that the holocaust itself is never mentioned in the Indiana Jones films, although the fanatic racism of the Nazis is touched upon, and this is for good reason. Such an event has no place in pantomime. Real human suffering must be given the gravity it deserves and Tarantino’s idea of the mechanised mass-murder comes entirely from an era blessed with the hindsight knowledge that factories solely designed for the bureaucratised killing of human beings could exist. That is, everyone knows what’s going on and, unlike the victims of history, they’re fighting back.
When writing history certain prejudices must first be tackled. In 1939, your average European Jew wanted nothing from life but to continue living and they existed in a society that, while not entirely welcoming of them, either ignored them or hurt them with little more than harsh language. They got bye. For LGBT people it was different. For them there was no solace, no comfort, no freedom to be who they were anywhere they went but their existence was largely ignored by the mainstream and so they could be imagined not to exist to the average heterosexual cisgendered person. Mass murders had historically been carried out, but they were little noted in schools and of little consequence to 20th Century Western Europeans. And they were obvious. They involved mass shootings, mass starvations, mass poisonings, they were done in the height of violent aggression, and they were usually done thousands of miles away. Nobody had any concept of a shower that spewed Zyklon B into a room full of people. Not anyone in the general public anyway. Nobody except those vicious fanatics who were planning them had ever conceived in their wildest fantasies that factories could be built for the sole purpose of murder. Even as the oppression stepped up gradually as the years before the Final Solution was put into action, a peaceful people whose focus in life was to make a modest living and simply carry on existing did not have among them minds sick enough to imagine what awaited them.
Tarantino, perhaps unintentionally, proposes through popular fiction that the Jews could have made more of a fight of it. But that does entirely undermine the whole origin of the Holocaust. The victims of Nazism were not weak. They were easy targets chosen by weak monsters because of their peaceful nature.
A question I get asked by students who take an interest in 20th Century history with escalating frequently is why the Jewish populations of concentration and later murder camps did not put up “more of a fight” and I find the concept behind the question more and more disturbing each time. They are essentially asking why the authoritarian persecution of Jewish people in Hitler’s Germany and its territories was not answered with overt violence. This concept essentially undermines one of the most horrifying and tragic aspects of the holocaust – the fact that it was done to people who posed absolutely no violent threat whatsoever. Perhaps it is the lens of American culture and it’s popularization of the fearless lone cowboy defending against oppression in all its forms, the every-man-for-himself bearing arms and not relying on others, through which we are beginning to view the events that is causing us to collectively see this non-violence or pacifism as a weakness that in some way invited the persecution. It’s a disturbing thought. Non-violence and pacifism are elsewhere considered admirable attributes, rightly so.
In contrast, Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds totes itself, in the dialogue, as “Jewish vengeance” and depicts the Jewish oppressed, personified by a woman on the run and a crack team of specialist American-Jewish soldiers, committing atrocious acts of violence against Nazis, culminating in the Nazi high command being locked in a theatre (with their spouses and families) and massacred in essentially the same way the Nazis themselves were often documented to do. Satisfying, perhaps. But is this a helpful light through which to reflect on history? The Jewish people, and the LGBT and Roma peoples who were predominantly targeted by Nazis, were not a violent people. It was for this reason, and not the reasons documented by Nazi sympathisers and propagandists themselves, that they were targeted in the first place. Because they were pacifists. Averse to mass murder, as it might still be hoped most peoples are. The Nazis were not a sophisticated war machine that targeted for extermination an aggressor, they are a delirious collective of subservient buffoons who targeted an easy “other” who could not – and because they could not – defend themselves.
Tarantino is known to depict morally ambiguous characters but there was nothing morally ambiguous about the holocaust.
This brings me to the depiction of Hans Landa. While most of the Nazi high command, including Hitler himself, could be seen to be depicted in Inglorious Basterds as rather vacuous thugs, Landa is their antithesis. A highly intelligent, sophisticated, handsome adversary for the anti-heroes. In Landa, Tarantino courts the Heroic evil of Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago or Lucas’ Darth Vader that saw them become villains oftentimes more popular and more iconic than the heroes of the stories in which they feature. Can anyone name the “heroes” of Inglorious Basterds of the top of their heads? But there’s a problem with this. Milton’s Satan was a loyal servant whose pride was injured. Iago was jealous of a dashing newcomer. Darth Vader was an innocent boy subjected to terrible tragedy and abuse and groomed by an emotional predator. They represented fictional scenarios and had sympathetic origins. Landa was a fanatic racist whose sole diabolical purpose was to hunt down and kill people who are very real in ways that were really done. Landa represents real human evil at its worst.
Let’s contrast this with how Nazis are depicted in the Indiana Jones films.
Sure they dress well and are shown to be a genuine threat, such as when Gestapo torturer Toht has Marion Ravenwood in his clutches, but it’s never so long before they commit some bumbling folly of almost pantomimic buffoonery, such as Toht burning his hand with a Jewish pendant and dancing around in the snow. Throughout Raiders, their names are seldom mentioned. They make absurd faces and are shot from comical angles as they lose control of the situation. Most importantly, they are time and again agents of their own destruction rather than being brutally murdered by Jews. The gigantic fighter who gives Jones a run for his money at the airstrip is eviscerated by the plane’s rotor because he’s not paying attention to his surroundings. Nazi drivers veer off the road and plunge into chasms at the slightest push. And the film’s infamous ending shows all the surviving Nazis of the piece, and important Nazi sympathiser Belloq, meddling in Jewish mysticism and being destroyed by supernatural powers they themselves invoked.
It's disheartening then to hear a rather misinformed punchline from The Big Bang Theory be repeated by viewers who say that Indiana Jones essentially had no effect on the Raiders’ plot. He just bumbles his way through it, trying to stay alive, and merely witnesses the Nazis destroy themselves as result of their own arrogance. This may not be classic American storytelling, but it does serve to remove all the power from the Nazi characters AND save Indiana Jones from any moral question.
The morality of Jones’ actions is thrown at him in both films in which Nazis feature. And rightly so. He is a mercenary, essentially a gun for hire, and he plays his part in the imperialist theft of sacred artefacts from various part of the globe. And he kills a lot of people in the process. I emphasize now that we’re not talking about Temple of Doom, which certainly did have problematic, imperialist overtones. We’re talking about Raiders and Last Crusade, in which Jones’ adversaries are Nazis. By having Jones stand back and let the Nazis destroy themselves, his hands are kept clean of too much blood, unlike Tarantino’s Jewish characters in Inglorious Basterds. And here’s another point – Indiana Jones is an American with a distinctly Welsh surname. Not a Jew. He does not represent the victims of Nazism, but those militarized forces which outmatched and defeated them historically on a battlefield. With Jones, it’s war. Not murder.
Last Crusade again shows Nazis and they are if anything even more pantomimically comical than they were in Raiders; shaking their fists at Zeppelins after being thrown through the windows, crashing their vehicles into each other in the chaos Jones stirs up, and in the end again largely being killed by their own stupidity rather than the entrapment and massacre featured in Tarantino. There are no Hans Landas in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones. The closest we have is arguably General Vogel, but even he has many instances of buffoonery and ultimately serves as an agent of his own destruction. Unlike Landa, none of the Nazi adversaries in Jones walk away, and yet this total annihilation is accomplished without costing Jones any heroic points.
That is not to say that the villains of Spielberg’s films are weak. As with Toht, they have their moments of power such as the multiple times Jones is captured and tied up, but even then Spielberg is careful to frame his shots so as to not elevate them too highly or for very long. His displays of Nazi horror, while not absent, are toned down and more cartoonish than Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan because these latter two are serious studies in the consequences of fanaticism whereas Jones can be seen as an exercise much the same as undertaken by the creators of the Loony Tunes, Marvel and DC comics, and Allied military propaganda of the era in which the Jones films are set; that is, taking the Nazis’ power away from them while still showing them as a credible and immediate threat. We see them burning books, we see them planning war, and we see them appropriating cultures they saw as inferior to their own ends. We just don’t see them do any of it very well.
Inglorious Basterds shows true visceral horror within its prologue. Like a strange comical mutation of the Jones films and Schindler’s List spliced together and formed into one violent, morally ambiguous, crass, wholly inappropriate mess.
It is true that the holocaust itself is never mentioned in the Indiana Jones films, although the fanatic racism of the Nazis is touched upon, and this is for good reason. Such an event has no place in pantomime. Real human suffering must be given the gravity it deserves and Tarantino’s idea of the mechanised mass-murder comes entirely from an era blessed with the hindsight knowledge that factories solely designed for the bureaucratised killing of human beings could exist. That is, everyone knows what’s going on and, unlike the victims of history, they’re fighting back.
When writing history certain prejudices must first be tackled. In 1939, your average European Jew wanted nothing from life but to continue living and they existed in a society that, while not entirely welcoming of them, either ignored them or hurt them with little more than harsh language. They got bye. For LGBT people it was different. For them there was no solace, no comfort, no freedom to be who they were anywhere they went but their existence was largely ignored by the mainstream and so they could be imagined not to exist to the average heterosexual cisgendered person. Mass murders had historically been carried out, but they were little noted in schools and of little consequence to 20th Century Western Europeans. And they were obvious. They involved mass shootings, mass starvations, mass poisonings, they were done in the height of violent aggression, and they were usually done thousands of miles away. Nobody had any concept of a shower that spewed Zyklon B into a room full of people. Not anyone in the general public anyway. Nobody except those vicious fanatics who were planning them had ever conceived in their wildest fantasies that factories could be built for the sole purpose of murder. Even as the oppression stepped up gradually as the years before the Final Solution was put into action, a peaceful people whose focus in life was to make a modest living and simply carry on existing did not have among them minds sick enough to imagine what awaited them.
Tarantino, perhaps unintentionally, proposes through popular fiction that the Jews could have made more of a fight of it. But that does entirely undermine the whole origin of the Holocaust. The victims of Nazism were not weak. They were easy targets chosen by weak monsters because of their peaceful nature.
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