Inglourious Basterds (2009) : Cynicism VI

This film isn't about the birth of a cynic. It is about the downfall of one. Which is actually a bit paradoxical. The setting of the film is World War Two, which could very plausibly be seen as the birth through victory of the modern / post-modern world. So if the cynic is the common person in the modern world, then a film about World War Two should logically show how the cynical side persevered over the old-fashioned fanatically ideological one. Yet Tarantino turns this one around. The most modern character in the film is by far Hans Landa, while the Allied 'Basterds' seem much more driven by ideology than him.



I've written earlier about the western, and how it is the essential genre to depict the birth of modernity. Tarantino uses motives from Western canon right from the first words of the film, as the name of chapter 1 is 'Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-occupied France' This is of course a play on the famous Sergio Leone film (or films, he made both ...the West, and … America) and the homage becomes even more clear as the first scene takes place, when the soundtrack contains a parody (or homage, or whatever) of the famous Morricone-music from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Except it includes fragments of Für Elise, to illustrate that Germany plays a part in this setting. That whole first segment is very similar to one of the first scenes in Once Upon a Time in the West, where a family on a secluded farm is massacred by gunmen as part of a conspiracy concerning the coming railroad. Yes, OUaTitW is a revisionist western, where the 'evil' forces are actually connected to the onset of modernity. And this film copies that. The German forces are evil modernity, and their enemies? Well, they are constantly connected to Indian imagery (I'm going to keep on using the politically incorrect word 'Indian', as the imagery the Allies draw upon is the cultural idea of Indians, rather than actual Native Americans). Aldo is called The Apache, the Basterds scalpel their enemies, and when Shosanna prepares for the great night, she puts warpaint on her face like the Indians do in the movies.



And it's like that throughout the film. The Germans are the modern ones, the Allied forces are pre-modern. Landa is, as I've mentioned, a modern Cynic. He doesn't care for truth, while speaking to the farmer he says: ”I love rumours. Facts can be so misleading, while rumours true or false are often revealing.” Later on he tells a long story about why he hates Jews, even though he knows it is an irrational hatred, by comparing it to the farmers irrational hatred of rats. Yet as he says: ”However interesting as a thought may be, it makes not one bit of difference to how you feel!” He is Cynical, he is self aware about his prejudices, yet he doesn't care. Aldo Raine on the other hand, is an ideologue. In his first speech to his men, he says: ”Nazi ain't got no humanity. There the foot-soldiers of a Jew-hating mass murdering maniac, and they need to be destroyed. That's why any and every sum-bitch we find wearing a Nazi-uniform, they gonna die!” Throughout the movie, the Germans are able and willing to play with other roles and personalities than their own, to indulge in that incredibly modern condition of split personality or schizophrenia. We see the German soldiers spending their free time by playing a game where they pretend to be someone else, and has to guess who it is. In some ways, personality can be put on your forehead, and taken away again. The Allied, on the other hand, can't play roles (except Indians or animals). They are rubbish at pretending to be German or Italian, and they don't like the German game. They believe that once a Nazi, always a Nazi, and they hate the thought that the role can be taken off with the uniform and hidden away, even though they mainly fight enlisted men. While the Germans put identity cards on their heads and take them off again, the Allies carve identity into foreheads with big knives.



Most of the film consists of mind games between the Allied and the Germans. And every time both sides play fairly, the Germans win. Landa wins in the opening scene, the German SS-officer 'wins' in the scene at the tavern, and Hans Landa seemingly wins over everyone at the end. Every time there is a contest of intelligence, the Germans win, the only exception is the scene between Zoller and Shosanna in the projectors booth, which ends in a draw (and by the way, it's a funny view on man and woman. Shosanna tricks Zoller by pretending they are going to have sex, and then Zoller tricks her back by angling for pity. For men is libido and women is feelings.) The allied win by lying and being amoral. They trick poor Wilhelm into thinking that they will let him go, and they break every convention of war at the ending of the film. But throughout the film, they are losing. And when Aldo Raine has to utter his fake Italian 'Bonjornoh', it is almost pathetic (but the game is already over at that point. The point where Landa takes control is illustrated in a marvelously cinematic way, as Tarantino employs one of his beloved circular camera movements to circle Landa, von Hammersmark and the Basterds, and when Landa employs his fake laugh and shows that he has seen through the ruse, he takes a step back while manically laughing, yanking the camera out of it's course as he yanks the agenda out of his opponents hands).



The implications of the film goes further, and is in my opinion quite political. The Allied concoct themselves as pre-modern Indians, yet today, when the film was made, they seem more like terrorists. In Aldo's speech, he exclaims: ”The German will fear us!” He could easily have said that they would be terrified. The Basterds torture there prisoners and they use suicide bombers. And the Germans don't know how to retaliate. In the end, the war is won through lies and terrorism. This seems quite controversial, to show the Allies as the schemers, and show Jews as terrorists, but Tarantino employs a few safety hatches, so to speak. First of all, he makes sure to show that Landa and Zoller is not just banal soldiers and administrators, though they claim to be. Both of them make violent motions towards women, and Landa even chokes von Hammersmark with his own hands, showing that they are in fact 'bad'. And Tarantino is not trying to say that Allied and Jews are equal to terrorists. He is trying to show how powerful fanaticism and extremism is. How powerful the extreme forces of the US would be, if they were as fanatical and willing to play 'dirty' as the opponents of 'Democracy' has traditionally been, from fascists to insurgents in Vietnam or Iraq. If we in the west would compromise (more...) on our principles, and could employ true fanaticism, we could easily win every war. But we should not. And we can't. We are cynics, and so, we have to slog through.

This film probably ain't a timeless masterpiece. For one, the digital coloring is horrible, it's focus on orange and teal will hopefully seem dated in a few years (and not just does this coloring make the pictures look samey after a while, it makes everyone’s eyes look deep blue. When you are making a film about the fight against antisemitism, employing a filter that makes everyone’s eyes look more Aryan really sends weird signals). But the 'value' of the film doesn't really matter to me. It really seems to comment quite profoundly on the problems of the Cynics in our society, especially with regards to warfare, in a pretty daring way. Plus, it's entertaining as hell.

Next week: We step away from culture and into the real world, but stay in the realm of Basterds, with Cynical Historian Niall Fergusson.

[Part I: Introduction and Mad Men]
[Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & Police, Adjective]
[Part III: Brothers Karamazov and Melancholia]
[Part IV: Apocalypse Now]
[Part V: Inception]

Apocalypse Now (1979): Cynicism IV

When Sloterdijk speaks of Military Cynicism in chapter 8 of Critique of Cynical Reason, a chapter called The Cardinal Cynicism, he speaks of it in a way that seemed a bit strange to me. He speaks of three characters on the battlefield, the hero, the hesitater and the coward, and he traces these three figures from the feudal age, through the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, and up to the nuclear age. But I would have expected a chapter on warfare today, and especially in a book that seems to be very much on ideology, to have talked about insurgents, guerillas, terrorists. To me, that seems the main theme of post WWII military history: Empires loosing wars to nationalistic insurgents. Everyone has lost, Britain in Ireland and India, France in Algeria and Indochina, Soviet in Afghanistan, the US in Vietnam of course, and the wars this last decade. Big armies struggling against insurgent tactics. That Sloterdijk doesn't talk about this probably has a lot to do with his historical position: In 83 Soviet wasn't loosing in Afghanistan (and neither was the US, of course), nuclear warfare seemed a much more important subject to write about, and that the succes of insurgents/guerillas/terrorist had anything to do with their ideological strength could seem weird when the most recent groups were people like the RAF and the Red Brigades in Italy, people who seemed to have even less reason to fight than for instance the armies in Vietnam or Algeria, and who chose 'insurgent' tactics for strategic reasons. Yet now, thirty years later, I'd say that the fight against insurgents seems the most important military theme, and I think that Apocalypse Now has a lot of opinions on this subject.



Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now by implication, is not about a man succumbing to evil. That is the explanation that the generals give Willard in his briefing in the beginning of the movie, and obviously, it is untrue ideology. 'There's a conflict in every human mind, between rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph' This is obviously rubbish, the problem the common soldiers has is the complete absence of these concepts, and solid ground to differentiate between the two sides. When the soldiers massacres a boatfull of people by mistake, Willard gets up and executes the final wounded person, and it prompts him to think: 'It was the way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machinegun and give them a bandaid. It was a lie, and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies' An easy and politicized reading of the film would be, that the war was wrong and the soldiers struggled with that, but it is far from that simple.

The points of ideology and reasoning is spelled out in the scenes on the French plantation, that was restored to the film in the Redux version. The Vietnamese fight for their nation, the French people fight for their homes, the Americans fight for 'the biggest nothing in history' Keep in mind, it's not like the other sides fight for something real, they are caught up in their lies just as well as the Americans. But their lies are founded in something, so they can delude themselves. As the old man is followed out, he repeats to himself: 'I know we can stay, I know we can stay...' When Hubert deMarais explains their situation, he says at least two untruths: He claims that they created the plantation out of nothing, but they bought plants in Brazil, meaning that they created the plantation out of their own money. The Vietnamese could conceivably have done the same thing if they had had the same resources. And he claims that the plantation holds the family together, but we immediately learns that he has recently lost his wife and child, and Roxanne Sarrault has lost her husband. That they stay there tears the family apart, obviously, but they can deny that to themselves. The solid facts of the plantation and the family makes these people able to lie to themselves about why they do what they do.



The weird part of the story is then, that the thing that Kurtz and Willard struggles with is not that truth and goodness has gone, it's that they have had to stop believing in their own lies. The things Kurtz are being punished for turned out to be the right things to do. He executed four South Vietnamese officers, and it turned out that they were the traitors. Both Kurtz and Willard manages to suddenly see through the veneer of American ideology, but they react in two very different ways. Kurtz obsesses about lies and truth. He taunts Willard by reading obviosly propagandistic newsclippings to him - 'things felt much better, and smelled much better over there' - and the photographer even gives Willard a course on Dialectic Logic: 'No Maybes, no supposes, no fractions [...] There is only love and hate, you either love somebody, or you hate them!' We get to Kurtz' problem when he asks Willard: 'Are you an assasin?' 'I'm a soldier' 'You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by glocery clerks to collect the bill' The right answer is, of course, that Willard is all three of these things, but Kurtz is only able to see one side at a time. He has become obsessed with right and wrong, truth and false, love and hate, and he has become unable to function in grey areas.

But Willard chooses another path. According to the documentary Hearts of Darkness, the script originally had a scene where Willard was asked why he did what he did, and he answered that it made him happy. But the finalized film has a much better solution. Wilard has completely realized the falseness of the lies that brought him there, and he has realized the senselessness of his mission. What happens when a human being has finally awakened from Ideology? In this case, he chooses to return to the ideological world, even though he has made it through. He murders Kurtz even though he knows it makes no sense. It is brilliantly juxtaposed with the ritual slaughter of a bull, cause that's what it is. It's a ritual. American military Ideology has returned not just to the pre-enlightened religious phase, it has returned to pre-religious mythic phase. As Willard returns from the temple, he is a God, a painted apparation that the natives bows before, but he is also the new man, the true post-ideologue, who has killed and taken the place of the first failed attempt at post-ideology. He has completed his mission though it made no sense. He has taken his place in the military system, though he in no way believes it is right or good, and has as such become the exemplary soldier in the modern army. To say it as short as possible: He exits the temple as a newborn Cynic.

Birth of a Cynic

Next week: Propaganda, marketing and Inception

[Part I: Introduction and Mad Men]
[Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & Police, Adjective]
[Part III: Brothers Karamazov and Melancholia]
[Part V: Inception]
[Part VI: Inglourious Basterds]