The Plot Against…

I know I’m about a zillion blog posts too late on Inglourious Basterds, but then again, one of the best pieces I’ve read on the film as myth was published thirty-three years ago in Rolling Stone: Greil Marcus’s article on Nazi-hunting thrillers, “Götterdämmerung after Thirty-One Years,” collected in The Dustbin of History. (It should be said the film has prompted an unbelievable torrent of web criticism, much of it impressive—and, giving me hope yet, some of the best stuff is coming along after the first several waves, e.g. the immersive conversation between Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy at The House Next Door and this very strong piece by Chris Stangl).

Anyhow, “Götterdämmerung” is one of my favorite essays by Marcus, and certainly an elegant encapsulation of his primary themes: the allure of counter-history, the intersection of mystery and myth. In it, Marcus details the way these thrillers, no matter how tactless, give the disquieting sense that history is not through. Marcus wrote the article at a time when Nazi power was first being historicized, the Holocaust subjected to statistics, economic rationales, and other materialist causeways by which, in his words, “the irrational vanishes”—at the same time, it wasn’t so long after that the rumors of Nazis living comfortably abroad in South America, the Middle East and the United States wouldn’t send a tingle down the spine. Most of the thrillers he describes run the opposite direction of Tarantino—instead of reimagining the sudden and total end of the Nazi era coming at the hands of avenging Jews (and cinema), these conspiratorial novels uncovered former Nazis infiltrating governments around the world, a claim which, whatever its factual merits, does nonetheless speak to the stubborn persistence of the “unimaginable” (genocidal evil) in contemporary times.

Marcus’s essay cannot be read either for or against Inglourious Basterds, but there are several passages which might enrich the conversation, starting with the opening:

“Thanks to a birth date falling between V-E and V-J days, I absorbed a fair amount of World War II folklore, and grew up with more or less conventional, popular-culture ideas about Nazis. They were bogeyman (albeit more personal bogey-men for me than for my friends, because I was Jewish and my friends weren’t). Thinking about what the Nazis had done to the Jews was scary, but it was scary in the way thinking about kidnappers was scary: I couldn’t sleep, but I knew my father would never let anyone do that to me. Sometimes I tried to think hard about atrocities, about crimes I knew were as tangible as streets and houses, but I couldn’t do it. I drew a line between the world of the war in which I had been conceived and the world into which I had been born. Fantasies—not all of them self-produced—replaced flesh and blood. As the movies I would later see defined the men my parents’ generation had fought—cold, blond, thin-lipped automatons with riding crops—Nazis were merely the most effective component of a mythology that I, like other children, sometimes liked to scare myself with. They stood in for Grimms’ fairy tales. Nazis had another function: since I was raised in a strongly liberal household where one learned not to hate people because they belonged to a certain national or racial group, Nazis were the single commonality onto which one could project fantasies of hatred without the slightest feeling of guilt. Like other children, I found guilt-free object of hatred useful.”

But the speculative thrillers produce the same dissonance in him as Hannah Arendt’s philosophical inquiries and a documentary about German adults reconnecting with their birth parents, Jews who were forced to put their children (“lucky” because they had Aryan features) up for adoption. “Here were people close to my own age who were just now emerging from Nazism,” he writes of the documentary.

“What the Nazis did, Arendt said, was something new: they altered the limits of human action. In doing so the Nazis provided humanity with more than a burden—the need to comprehend their actions—they also provided a legacy: ‘It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past…Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” It is this sort of uncompromised language, and this sort of daring, daunting thinking, that has mostly disappeared from respectable works on Nazism—and it is this sort of vision, which incorporates [Isser] Harel’s vision, or anti-vision, that the thriller writers have taken up and used as the basis for the contemporary genre of Nazi-hunting books…

…This is a powerful basis for any genre of fiction. No matter how luridly the theme may be carried out, it raises a moral question that, given the Nazis living and holding economic and political power in South America, the United States, the Arab countries, or present-day Germany, has not been resolved, and in serious fiction has hardly been addressed, because the Nazi-hunting theme is so sensationalistic as to destroy the pretensions of serious fiction in advance. Thus the Nazis belonged to the thriller writers, and they have seized on them, these best-selling authors of The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, Marathon Man, The Wind Chill Factor, and so many more, for many reasons, no doubt most of them less than noble.”

Fantasies are unavoidable, and while this fact surely shouldn’t prevent us from interrogating historical representation, so too does it make it illogical to argue against a version for being a fantasy. Or as Michael Wood puts it at the close of his Basterds review, “We can accuse Tarantino of seeing reality as a movie, which he certainly does. But then we need to make sure we don’t just mean we prefer another, more sentimental movie.” The amoral braid of Tarantino’s representations of cinema—as corrosive propaganda, subversive salvation—is, at the very least, bound to foul up a lot of well-intentioned arguments. As far as the film’s “high” aspirations, I’ll still take Army of Shadows—but Tarantino’s booby-trapped comedy of manners (no battle, no sex) is quite a bouquet.

But transcribing all that Greil Marcus has me thinking two things. First, it’s great to read criticism written as an essay, not a response. And second: really? Rolling Stone?

~ by maxgoldb on September 4, 2009.