With news footage of the Haiti disaster relief still fresh on my mind Saturday, I took out the time to watch Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” which received a Screen Actors Guild Award the same day.
The relief efforts in Haiti and “Inglourious Basterds” are two opposed worlds. One is about saving as many lives and livelihoods as possible from an inexplicably cruel disaster. The other is about killing as many people as possible in the most fetishistic ways imaginable. The disaster in Haiti challenges us to show mercy and benevolence by giving of ourselves to those infinitely less fortunate. “Inglourious Basterds” calls us to resurrect and dwell upon very evil people in order to indulge in vengeful orgies of violence.
The day before I watched Tarantino’s newest excessively violent flick, I watched bits of the “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon, which featured celebrities singing to raise money. Brad Pitt made a showing at the telethon and spoke of a Haitian who played his guitar even while in the midst of rubble.
“He played for the fathers who had lost sons, for the sons who had lost mothers and the sisters who had lost brothers,” Pitt said. “He played to make sense of the incomprehensible devastation and soothed his broken city. And through the night and more than ever, he played for those who will carry on.”
We see Brad Pitt acting very differently as Lt. Aldo Raine in “Inglourious Basterds,” where sober reflection about a real atrocity is almost nonexistent. Contrary to most movies about Nazis and Jews, “Inglourious Basterds” does not deal with the suffering of the Holocaust victims, nor does it shed insightful commentary on the possible causes and consequences of fanatical and evil ideologies. It just tells us the bad guy is a really bad guy; now watch what’s coming to him.
Worst of all, Tarantino’s movie seems to exploit a real tragedy only to show the brilliance of Tarantino. What good does it do to fantasize about loading hundreds of bullets into Hitler’s body as you watch his flesh peel away or scalping a hundred Nazis? Daniel Mendelsohn aptly summed it up in a Newsweek article last year: “Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by – well, by turning Jews into Nazis.”
In fact, turning Jews into Nazis seems akin to what Pat Robertson has done in turning Haitians into pact-makers with the devil.
Good movies about Nazis and Jews deal with suffering, right and wrong, shades of gray or heroic attempts to overcome evil. Oskar Schindler doesn’t save all the Jews before kicking Nazi butt. He helps some Jews escape certain genocide, but tragically, he realizes in the end he can never do enough. No altering of history for entertainment purposes.
I hope the Screen Actors Guild award for “Inglourious Basterds” doesn’t foretell too much success at the Academy Awards. Knowing the moral standards of the Academy (see, for example, its endorsement of suicide for people with disabilities in “Million Dollar Baby”), they may very well indulge in Tarantino’s latest celebration of sadistic violence.
Matt Watson is a graduate student majoring in Spanish. He can be contacted at [email protected].