Triumph of the Cliché

The other night, I sat in a packed Berlin cinema watching Quentin Tarantino`s Inglourious Basterds, which in its first week has stormed to the top of the German cinema charts. In this movie, as you no doubt know, a group of Jewish U.S. Army soldiers romp across German-occupied France killing and scalping every “Nazi” – meaning any German in uniform – they happen to come across. Those they don’t kill are marked for life by a swastika carved into their foreheads. The audience loved it. At the end of the movie, there was spontaneous applause. I have to admit I couldn’t join in.

It’s not that I was sickened by the violence or anything. If you’re the kind of person who can’t bear seeing a helpless prisoner clubbed to death with a baseball bat while the bystanders egg him on and enjoy their sandwiches, you don’t go to a Tarantino movie in the first place, period. I loved Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and those Tarantino masterpieces are no less bloodthirsty than Inglourious Basterds. And anyway, a movie that pretends that war is anything but a bloody business is surely worse than a movie that shows the gore. No, it wasn’t that.

Inglourious Basterds has two intertwined themes. There’s the theme of Jews taking revenge. And there’s the theme of a plot against Hitler and the Nazi leadership. (At the end of the movie, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Bormann die in an exploding Paris cinema and the war is over.) As it happens, these two themes were at the center of two other movies that premiered this year. There was the Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie (like Inglourious Basterds a German-American co-production, shot mostly in Potsdam’s Babelsberg studios) about the officers’ plot to blow up Hitler on June 20, 1944. And there was Defiance with Daniel Craig, a.k.a. James Bond, about the Polish Bielski brothers, who led a Jewish partisan band in the Ukrainian forests and saved thousands of Jewish lives. Both movies stick fairly closely to the historical facts. Both movies flopped.

Now, I’m not saying that they flopped because they were realistic, or that Tarantino’s film is a hit because it is totally unrealistic (which it obviously is). What bothers me is that Tarantino uses his exceptional talent as a director – and this movie is further proof of that talent – to reinforce dangerous stereotypes.

Stereotype number one is the consummately evil Nazi who is so evil that he doesn’t even believe in the ideology or the country he serves. In this movie it is the “Jew Hunter” SS-Colonel Hans Landa, played with chilling empathy and intensity by the German actor Christoph Waltz. In a brilliant twist of the plot, it is Landa who ensures that the Basterds’ attempt on Hitler’s life succeeds – in return for a pardon and a hero’s reward in the United States. Now, there is a moral here: when fighting evil you can’t be too squeamish about the deals you make. But there is also a deep misunderstanding about the motives that drove Hitler’s “willing executioners.” Their motive was neither an abstract bureaucratic perfectionism (which was Adolf Eichmann’s line of defense) nor the abstract enjoyment of evil combined with boundless opportunism (as personified by Landa). They were driven by a fanatical, murderous, psychopathic hatred of the Jews. There is none of that in Landa, or in Tarantino’s Hitler, Goebbels and Co., and this lack of motivation serves to obfuscate the meaning and danger of anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, the movie itself reinforces the stereotype of the Jew who seeks revenge according to the biblical commandment “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” No matter that Moses’ injunction is the first historical example of an attempt to tame justice and make it fit the crime (whereas in Christian England, they were still hanging children for stealing bread 1700 and more years after Christ). The “avenging Jew” who finally gets his own back for the million injustices inflicted on his tribe haunts the collective European imagination as a corollary to Europe’s collective bad conscience. Witness Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Shylock; witness the fact that Goebbels used the allied bombing campaign and the Morgenthau plan as proof of a planned revenge of the Jews on Germany. Not without success, by the way: the fear of a Jewish “final solution” to the “German problem” helped stiffen resistance in the final days of the war.

Tarantino shows the inglourious basterds as the unforgiving, avenging Jews of Goebbels’ propaganda. They sadistically club a German officer to death because his concept of honor will not allow him to reveal the positions of his comrades; but they make a deal with the Jew Hunter Landa when that serves their purposes. The fact that they are led by a Gentile – Lt. Aldo Raine, a mountain lad from Tennessee, that haven of racial equality – does nothing to weaken this impression, but only reinforces the stereotype that Jews lack leadership qualities.

Am I saying that Inglourious Basterds is an anti-Semitic movie? Of course not. On the other hand, well, maybe I am. I certainly find it slightly obscene that it was in part financed by the German taxpayer; and that Germans are flocking in droves to see it. Don’t get me wrong: Tarantino is a brilliant director. But so was Leni Riefenstahl.