The following post contains an extended discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds. There will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film, please enjoy this short video from the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers. Otherwise, feel free to click below.
Quentin Tarantino is underrated as a feminist.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s not perfect. He has his moments of exploitation and ham-handedness and lunk-headedness, like most anyone who’s got unexamined privilege does. But watching his work, one can’t help but feel that his heart’s in the right place.
Tarantino is an action director whose female characters don’t exist solely as eye candy. Oh, they do appear as that sometime (though the body part Tarrantino lingers on most — feet — is at least atypical for the genre). But more than that, they’re fully-realized, living, breathing characters. Their conversation sparkles no less than the men’s, they are no less intrepid than men, they are no less capable than men — indeed, in his last five films, they’ve been more capable than men. And if the women in his films face violence, including the threat of sexual violence, they live in no less dangerous a world than the men, and they are no more vulnerable.
No, Tarantino isn’t perfect. But he’s more ally than enemy, and a powerful one at that. After all, Tarantino writes and directs films that are marketed to men, first and foremost. And yet they manage to slip through some deeply subversive views on women’s equality. Kill Bill 1 & 2 masquerades as an homage to grindhouse kung fu movies and spaghetti westerns, but it’s ultimately about a woman’s right to control her own reproductive destiny, to choose for herself whether and how to bear her child. Death Proof is an inverted slasher flick, in which the poor vulnerable women end up brutally defeating their would-be killer. Jackie Brown is a caper film with a strong African-American woman as the mastermind. And his latest, Inglourious Basterds, is a film about a woman’s revenge on the regime that killed her family.
Now, if you’ve watched the ads, you probably didn’t realize that. You probably assumed that the film was all about the Basterds going through France, killing Nazis. But the Basterds are just a subplot. No, the interesting story is that of Shoshanna Dreyfus, her escape from a charming, evil Nazi officer, and her ultimate revenge on the entire Nazi regime.
I could spend several posts dissecting Inglourious Basterds, and I may; if you want a good, complete, spoiler-laden review of the film, you can check out Amanda Marcotte’s post here. But in this post, I simply wanted to talk about one thread of the film: the thread about the nice guy.
Shoshanna Dreyfus escapes the murder of her entire family by Nazis, and runs to Paris. There, she establishes herself as Emmanuelle Mimieux, the owner of a cinema that she says she inherited from her aunt and uncle. We see Emmanuelle late one evening, changing out the marquee in preparation for the next film. As she stands on the ladder, removing the plastic letters, a young German soldier, Frederick Zoller, greets her and attempts to engage her in conversation. The scene — all in French — echoes a thousand other meet-cute rom-com scenes, with the earnest, friendly, handsome young man attempting to woo the icy, cool, disdainful woman. Zoller ignores Shoshanna’s anger and bitterness; he attempts to engage her in a discussion of cinema, but she’s barely civil to him. And why would she be? He’s a Nazi, a part of a force that’s occupying her country. When he asks her what her name is, she shows him her papers indignantly. She hates him, and everything he stands for.
So needless to say, he’s smitten. And in a thousand similar rom-coms, the young man would begin to woo his intended, slowly but surely breaking down her defenses as he shows just how much he loves her.
Tarantino mirrors the formula. Some time later, Shoshanna is reading a book in a café, and Frederick returns, trying to talk to her more about movies. She tells him, flatly, that she’s not interested, but he persists. Suddenly, a few German soldiers notice him, and they greet him warmly, telling him what an honor it is to meet him. After the interruption, Shoshanna asks him about it, and he says, with what appears to be embarrassment, that he was a sniper who killed 300 enemy soldiers during a siege, that his exploits got him noticed by Joseph Goebbels, who had cast Zoller as himself in a movie about the siege. He is almost apologetic about it, though he clearly is interested in the cinema. Here, again, we have a classic part of the formula — the pursuer is now not just some clod, but a guy who’s important, a guy who’s going places, a movie star and a war hero. And in a thousand rom-coms, Shoshanna dismisses him again, but this time thoughtfully.
Shoshanna is tending her theater again. After a few moments’ discussion with her co-worker and lover, a Francophone African named Marcel, she goes to work on the marquee, when a car pulls up. A German soldier orders her brusquely inside. She goes, scared witless, sure that her masquerade has been seen through, that she’s been caught out, that she’s to be executed like her family before. Instead, she’s taken to lunch with Goebbels himself, a meeting arranged by Frederick, who has insisted that the Parisian premier of his film, Stolz der Nation, be held at Shoshanna’s theater. It isn’t really presented as a question, but more as a directive. Frederick is sure that the woman he knows as Emmanuelle will be thrilled. He’s sure this will win her heart, her love. And in a thousand rom-coms, the grand gesture would get him closer.
Shoshanna stays after the meal to discuss security with Hans Landa, a German officer who led the execution of her family; throughout the lunch he appears to drop clues that he knows who she is (ordering her milk, as she was hiding on a dairy farm; ordering her strüsel, but imploring her to “wait for the cream,” and asking probing questions about how she came to operate a theater). When he finally leaves, Shoshanna dissolves, finally, into tears or terror, tears she had held back throughout the ordeal. When she returns to the theater and Marcel, she has decided on a course of action; she will hold the premier, and she and Marcel will burn the theater to the ground with the German high command inside. She will get her revenge.
She and Marcel film a new ending to the film, one in which she proclaims her actions to be the vengeance of the Jews murdered by the Nazis. As she operates the projector, Marcel waits behind the screen, waiting to set the cinema’s entire library of highly flammable film ablaze.
Zoller watches the film in the private box of Hitler and Goebels. He appears, during the film, to be discomfited by the film, to be upset by the bloodshed he caused. He’s sensitive, you see. He asks permission to leave. And he heads up to the projectionist’s room, where he makes his intentions toward Shoshanna clear.
In a thousand other rom-coms, the hard work and sensitivity of Frederick Zoller would lead Emmanuelle Mimeux to fall for him. But she doesn’t; she rejects him.
And Zoller lashes out. He tells her he’s not the sort of person you reject, that there are 300 dead soldiers who know that. He tells her all the things he’s done for her, the emotional support he’s given her, and Shoshanna relents, just long enough to distract him, grab her gun, and shoot him.
There is one more inversion left. After shooting him, as he falls, Shoshanna feels something. Not love — there is no indication it is love. But pity. She goes to roll him over so that he can die in peace. And Frederick Zoller, who has through his dogged pursuit of Shoshanna shown nothing but the Hollywood version of love, shoots her dead.
I don’t know if Quentin Tarantino would know what a Nice Guy™ is, but he sure as hell created one, and had things act out exactly as they do in real life. Zoller was never in love with Shoshanna; he was intrigued by her. He found her attractive. He decided he would have her. And he behaved throughout as movie conventions tell us he should.
But Zoller never loved Shoshanna, never cared a whit about her. He ignored her feelings, ignored her rejection, and in the end, threatened violence against her for rejecting him. And when Shoshanna relented, just a little bit, showed him the slightest bit of kindness? He made it his dying act to kill her for it.
It is a perfect inversion of the trope, the exact opposite of what is “supposed” to happen when a earnest, handsome young war hero starts to woo an icy, cold woman. But Shoshanna was not icy or cold — she was clearly in love with Marcel, and there was nothing but warmth between them.
She just didn’t love Frederick Zoller. And rightly so.
There is a happy ending to the film. The man who truly loves Shoshanna, Marcel, sets the film ablaze right on schedule, as the redone ending of the film clicks on. Shoshanna’s face on the screen — and later, projected like an apparition onto the smoke — is the last thing the laughing Nazis see before they die. And as you’ve no doubt heard, that includes Adolf Hitler, whose death is moved from Berlin in 1945, on his own terms, to Paris in 1944, at the hands of the people who he set out to wipe of the face of the Earth. (The Basterds help, but ultimately weren’t necessary to the victory.) In death, Shoshanna wins. A French, Jewish farmer’s daughter, with the help of an African, bring down the Aryans. She and Marcel consummate their love in victory over horrible oppression. And Frederick dies, without gaining her love. And though the fanboys who went to the theater hoping for ultraviolence might not understand that outright, the seed will be planted in the back of their minds that the Nice Guy™ doesn’t always get the girl, and indeed, the Nice Guy™ actually turned out to be a tremendous douche. It’s a powerfully feminist message — and one that is rather amazing to see in film, even as one knows it’s the truth.
wow! Awesome interpretation. There’s another, more Israel politic related reading of the film here: http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/08/glorious-bastards.html
This is exactly what I came out of the theatre saying. I really enjoy Tarantino’s feminism. I don’t think it’s always profound or even particularly well thought out, but I do think that it’s conscious and sincere, and the Shoshanna/Frederick storyline was a particularly well done example.
I also liked that their last scene together showed that if she had genuinely been intimidated by him and had sex with him out of fear, he would have considered that a romantic happy ending. The idea that as long as she says yes it doesn’t matter why she says it is a particularly insidious part of the Nice Guy mentality.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen the movie. And you write very persuasively about it. Nonetheless, I got the chills when you got to the part about Zoller shooting Dreyfus dead. I’m willing to believe there’s a good argument for your interpretation, and I certainly don’t expect all characters to get a happy ending. But the cynical half of my brain wondered if killing her wasn’t payoff for the Nice Guy – both for the character and the imagined Nice Guy audience members, who sort of get the final word. Perhaps it’s clearer in context, but even in your glowing review I had to wonder.
I’m just saying that in my previous experiences with Tarantino film, the feminist critique happens for a good reason. It’s fair to say that he subverts and complicates gender tropes in his films, but I haven’t yet seen anything that deserved unqualified praise for its treatment of women. So in the case of this movie*, I wondering if more *qualified* praise is appropriate. Like, “see this plot thread? It’s interesting how it depicts a common destructive behavior described by feminists. . . but it is ambiguous! Here is a possible interpretation of the ambiguity!”
*that, again, I have not yet seen. But fair point: the erasure of a major female character in the trailer does not exactly support a persuasive case for me to shell out high movie prices for the experience.
Wow, that’s a really illuminating analysis of Tarantino. I’ve seen very little of his work because I avoid most movies which contain violence. I really enjoyed your reading of this as a movie which introverts the romcom stereotype.
I haven’t watched this movie, so I checked on imdb to read a synopsis and found another feisty woman in this: Bridget von Hammersmark. But she’s strangled to death for her transgressions.
It bothers me that the women are killed in the end. It’s what often happens, but it doesn’t lend to a feminist reading of this movie for me. Didn’t you say Shoshanna is killed but her plan succeeds because her boyfriend carried it out along with the Inglorious Basterds? Just for once I’d like to see a movie where the feisty woman prevails, succeeding herself at what she set out to do and actually surviving to boot.
This movie has been marketed as an action movie for the boys (and, possibly, for the girls who want to watch Brad Pitt). The trailer shows Brad Pitt talking with great anticipation about how much violence his troop will engage in.
Imdb says “The film ends with Raine carving a swastika into Landa’s forehead and declaring that it may just be his greatest “masterpiece”. In the end, the one who comes up trumps is Brad Pitt’s character. Surprising, much? Shoshanna’s a fuller character than most in the genre, but ultimately she’s there to personalise what Landa has done, which then justifies what the Basterds do. It’s still all about the men.
I may be wrong in all this, but I’m not going to watch the movie to find out. That trailer was a complete turn-off for me.
I’ve seen the film, and I actually agree more with Tanglethis and Cinnamon Girl. I feel like calling this a feminist subversion is giving Tarantino a little more credit than he deserves. Yes, I enjoyed that he subverted the “Nice Guy will break the girl down in the end” trope, but he only does that to a point – though Shoshana may not have succumbed to Fredrick’s attempt to make her love him, he still succeeds in conquering her. The implied violence of his wooing is fully enacted in the end – not by the subversion of her will, but by the utter destruction of her body. I was enjoying the film until that point, and I ended up leaving the theater absolutely livid that Zoller had killed Shoshana while Landa got to live. For me, a truly feminist ending would have been one in which Shoshana was able to somehow defeat Landa, or at least escape the theater with Marcel. As it was, I felt the takeaway was that, after all these different kinds of outsiders attempt to destroy the Nazis, the only ones who get to enjoy the results of their labors are the white men, one of whom isn’t even Jewish and another of whom is the worst Nazi in the film. And that’s to say nothing about the way the British spy, von Hammersmark, is murdered by Landa in a death scene that almost lovingly focuses on her strangulation. I can’t think of a single other death scene in the film that is captured in such an intense, intimate and (yeah, I’m gonna say it) almost sexualized way.
I was also bothered that we know almost NOTHING about the only black man in the film. Who is Marcel? Why is he in Paris during occupation? How did he come to know Shoshana? Does he survive at the end? We don’t know, because he’s apparently not important enough for us to know about. That really bothered me.
In all I felt this film was a positive step for Tarantino – it’s certainly more mature, less overly brutal and more complex thematically than many of his previous films. And though I will give him credit for thinking a little more outside the box when it comes to female characterization than many other action/horror directors out there (*cough* Eli Roth *cough*) I really don’t think he deserves a feminist cookie for it.
I think that the focus on Shoshana’s death at Fredrick’s hands may be missing the point, as I’d assumed from the beginning that her revenge scheme involved both her and Marcel dying in the blaze, and despite Fredrick’s murder of her, her plan went off without a hitch.
—Myca
I don’t think I’m missing the point – there’s a vast difference between her dying in the blaze she set as part of her revenge and her dying prematurely at the hands of a nasty Nice Guy who’s also a Nazi war hero. I maintain that there could have been other, more progressive and more feminist ways to end the film than the way he chose. Is intent really what matters when we’re talking about the reception of a piece of art? You may have seen a different point than I did, but that doesn’t mean I’m missing some all-important “truth” of the film.
I also think her “triumph” over the Nazi’s is questionable given that her plan is supplemented by the work of the Basterds (it’s not her success alone, in other words) and that the one Nazi who’d done her the most harm gets to go off and live in Nantucket on the American government’s dime. I understand that many people enjoyed the film, and I liked a lot of it, too. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room for critique, surely?
I maintain that there could have been other, more progressive and more feminist ways to end the film than the way he chose.
There could have been, but as I said at the beginning, Tarantino is not a perfect feminist. Frankly, though, I saw the killing of Shoshanna by Frederick as a confirmation of Shoshanna’s essential humanity, and Zoller’s essential evil — the final proof that Zoller never cared for her, not at all.
And Marcel didn’t do everything himself. Shoshanna succeeded in her jobs; she and Marcel together stacked the film behind the screen, she herself is seen at one point threatening a film developer in order to get their new ending developed. And before Zoller interrupts her, she throws the switch on the projector that has that ending on it. Indeed, Shoshanna’s plan comes off perfectly.
Is intent really what matters when we’re talking about the reception of a piece of art?
It depends on what school of thought you belong to. Being a formalist, I say no, and your interpretation is no less valid than mine. And both of our interpretations are no less valid than Tarantino’s himself.
I suppose I didn’t need to see a confirmation of Fredrick’s essential evil and Shoshana’s essential humanity. For one, I think it’s pretty well assumed that “Nazi=evil” in US society – we have a whole history of films showing us that. And for two, it’s a very shallow characterization of the different motivations people have for their behavior. He could have just as easily shown Shoshana’s humanity by having her interact with Marcel more, but he didn’t.
And I never suggested that Marcel did everything by himself – obviously it was a plan they enacted together. Nor did I suggest that Shoshana’s plan didn’t come off perfectly. I don’t understand why these points are being brought up to counter what I said, when they’re not related to my critique in the slightest. My critique is that I didn’t like that it was Fredrick who killed Shoshana, or that the only people who get to see the fruits of their labors and enjoy them are white men. How is that a denial of the success of Shoshana’s plan?
There is zero room for this interpretation. Tarantino isn’t even remotely interested in humanizing Nazis. On the contrary, he rolls around and gloats in the opportunity to make them the worst bad guys ever.
Against Nazis. She’s killed by a psychopath, who is also a Nazi. Remember, these bad guys are Nazis. Their evil isn’t ambiguous, either. Tarantino isn’t fucking around. I think there’s a sense that he subtly wants you to ask why you, the good liberal, are cheering throatily for the violent deaths of all these people, but then again, they are Nazis—willing, eager, bloodthirsty Nazis—so fuck ’em. Seriously.
This isn’t about women or men. I fail to understand why violence against men onscreen is acceptable, but against women it isn’t?
The framework is not eroticized violence against women, but the storytelling convention—based in reality—where Resistance fighters all end up dead. It’s a convention that’s probably acted out in parody as much as in reality by now—think of the South Park movie, with the nihilistic Resistance fighting kid—but it’s played perfectly straight in this movie, and with great respect for why this is a storytelling convention. It’s dishonest to give Resistance fighters a happy ending onscreen, as most—especially in France—did not meet one in real life.
I don’t find this to be a persuasive argument, given that the entire film is a big Jewish revenge fantasy. How is Tarantino at all constrained by “reality”? He has Hitler murdered by a bunch of Jews, for goodness sake. If we do see places in which he’s constrained by reality, then those places are also telling. Why be “constrained by reality” when it comes to showing the fate of female resistance fighters but not when it comes to showing how the American forces actually approached dealing with the Nazis? How is “reality” even an issue when the film starts off with the words “Once Upon a time…”?
And whether or not the violence against the women is meant to be eroticized isn’t really the point when it comes to examining how Tarantino captures specific deaths and how some people might have experienced those moments. I was disturbed by the extent to which he focused on vonHammersmark’s face as we see the life being choked out of her. There is no equivalent death for a man in the film – even Hitler’s shooting is comical by comparison. The issue isn’t that violence against men is acceptable while violence against women isn’t but how and why certain, markedly difference choices are made when depicting violence against each.
Perhaps this is why the film wasn’t as successful for me as for some others – I wasn’t throatily cheering for the death of all the Nazi soldiers, because I didn’t feel we were given sufficient cause to believe in their unequivocal and willing participation in the war and I don’t enjoy the site of torture, regardless of the target. I’m not arguing for the innocence of Nazis, but I’m a little tired of this “all Nazis were evil and deserve horrible torture” stuff that runs through every single film about the Holocaust. Tarantino makes no distinction in the film between the Nazis and average Germans, and that I find frustrating. It’s simplistic, not historically supportable and does a good job of encouraging us to think of every soldier we encounter in the opposition as less than human, which isn’t something we need in the world at the moment.
“Once upon a time” is also an oft-parodied story telling convention that sometimes gets played straight with respect for its power.
I was disturbed by the extent to which he focused on vonHammersmark’s face as we see the life being choked out of her. There is no equivalent death for a man in the film – even Hitler’s shooting is comical by comparison.
You’d prefer vonHammersmark’s death be portrayed as comical?
Amanda Marcotte, I don’t think violence against anyone on screen is acceptable. That’s why I avoid most movies which contain violence.
Yes, we get that these guys are Nazis. What is being pointed out here is that Zoller displays all the characteristics of a Nice Guy™. That does not mean he is actually nice.
Yes. Because it’s clearly an either/or proposition.
So the movie’s not supposed to be a revenge fantasy? It’s supposed to be straightforward and direct? Really?
So – and I’m not being flippant, here – why would any particular aspect of your thoughts on the film – one which you must therefore find essentially unacceptable from start to finish – be of interest? I mean, if ALL onscreen violence is unacceptable, how can you make an honest consideration of one particular act thereof?
Actually, I disagree with this exact contention. The focusing on von Hammersmark’s face and the focusing on Hitler’s face are actually pretty decent parallels, considering that the method of death was different.
That’s a completely different topic, therefore, and unrelated to feminism per se.
You’re misconstruing my argument worse than his movie! I said he’s responding to a long narrative convention, and to flout it would be disrespectful to a convention he chooses to honor for a good reason, which is that it’s based in a reality experienced by European Resistance fighters.
Good! It was supposed to be disturbing. The movie was effective. Tarantino set up Landa to be so charming that it’s easy to forget that he’s a violent psychopath….until he reacts as a violent psychopath does to someone he considers “inferior” trying to get one over on him.
The problem is that you reacted like the filmmaker wants you to—by being disturbed—and instead of giving credit to the filmmaker, you decide to lash out at him. Alas, people’s desire to hate Tarantino for being unwilling to hide his intelligence, and even being an arrogant, mouthy asshole, makes them unwilling to give him an ounce of credit for being good.
If you think my opinion of screen violence is unrelated to feminism, then why did you accuse feminists of believing that violence against men onscreen is acceptable, but against women it isn’t?
So, and I’m not being flippant here, why are you asking me to tell you what other people find interesting about my opinion?
As a moderator, I’m going to ask folks (mostly preemptively) to watch their tones a bit. I’m finding the conversation interesting and enlightening, and I’d like for it to continue being so.
—Myca
Ok, I’m getting really tired of being told I’m misconstruing the movie simply because I had a different reading of it and reaction to it that you. That comes awfully close to saying that you have the one, supreme reading on it and that there’s only one reading of it possible, and that’s one of the most unfeminist things I’ve ever read on this site. For what it’s worth, I have two degrees in film. I don’t believe this gives me a superior reading to yours, but I do believe that I have some background in understanding and interpreting the art of film as well as cinema theory. I might bring a different set of experiences and lenses to the film than you, but that does not mean I’m misinterpreting and misconstruing. And since I’ve never once come even close to such an attack on your logical faculties, I think your response to me is wholly inappropriate and offensive.
I recognize he’s responding to a long narrative convention, but I found fault with his response. Ok?
Oh for goodness sake, nowhere did I say I hated Tarantino, and how exactly is my critique of his supposed filmmaking prowess “lashing out”? So a feminist critiquing something from her subject position is “lashing out”? Good for you.
For the record, I don’t love or hate Tarantino – if anything I have complex reactions to his work. That’s a good thing, and I didn’t say it wasn’t. I’m sorry if my attempt to critique the film seems like lashing out to you, but your adoration seems a little hollow and uncritical to me. I’m a film scholar, and I teach media, and one of things we often talk about is how you should be open to critiquing even things you love. I frequently critique things I enjoy – including this very film.
And no, the problem, as you put it, is not that I reacted the way he wanted me to. I know how he wants me to react – his filmmaking is heavyhanded and obvious. I had a wholly different reaction to her death than to Hitler’s, but not the one I believe Tarantino intended.
Now I’m done with this conversation, because I seriously cannot believe that I’m being told I’m “lashing out” and misconstruing arguments by another feminist. I feel like I’m being unfairly bullied here, and that’s not what this site and feminism is supposed to be about. If you’re angry that I have a different interpretation of the film than you, good. Maybe that’ll make you think about it differently. But somehow, I doubt it.
Well, cinnamongirl, fair enough. I suppose I was reacting in surprise to someone who finds all movie violence unacceptable attempting to discuss the various levels of unacceptability. Because that implies there is nothing Tarantino could have done with the death of von Hammersmark to make it acceptable from any framework.
You said: “It bothers me that the women are killed in the end. It’s what often happens, but it doesn’t lend to a feminist reading of this movie for me.”
You didn’t talk about the way in which they were killed, or the way it was shot. You just made a comment which, until you added further context (“all violence is unacceptable”) sounded a lot like singling out women’s deaths as anti-feminist filmmaking.
Your response to Amanda’s query of why men’s deaths are any more acceptable than women’s was, duh, they aren’t. Not “Well, because of the way in which women’s deaths lend themselves to the reading of a film as anti-feminist, as I was saying before” which is what Amanda was asking, which would have at least started a dialogue. But “No violence is acceptable.”
So if the answer to the question of why women’s deaths have any bearing on the feminism or non- of a film is that they don’t, but your contention is they do, I guess I’m still wondering how we’re supposed to take a cogent stance on movie violence vis-a-vis women.
In other words, when I said I wasn’t being flippant, I also meant I wasn’t trying to be offensive. From my reading of your comments, you’re not parsing your views on violence against women from your views on violence against all characters, and therefore I ask again and in a different way, with all that framework, how is that helpful to determining whether the deaths of the woman characters in this film is or is not feminist?
Actually, that wasn’t the question. This was:
Whether violence on screen is acceptable in films is one issue. Whether a movie in which the main female character is murdered for choosing to say no to a man can be called a feminist movie is a different issue.
Weren’t you? You could have fooled me.
Okay, let me put it yet another way:
I apologize that I offended you.[Edited: I apologize that I said something offensive. Sorry, I INTENDED that to be a non-non-apology-apology, distinct from “sorry if you were offended”, but upon re-re-reading I realized it didn’t make the distinction plain.]What I SHOULD have said was, I think that you, who reject all on-screen violence, had not yet convinced me that you, coming from that framework, are capable of having a reasonable take on whether specific women dying on-screen makes a film feminist or non-.
The above is carefully phrased, so if it offends you, then I guess my intention is to offend, or at least, my opinion about the water-holding of your argument is what it is regardless of the offense it gives. My phrasing it as a question may have sounded flippant, but I didn’t want it to be, hence my admittedly futile disclaimer. I knew it might SOUND that way, but it was the best way I had thought of thus far to get my point across.
Also, I don’t know how I got so lazy as to have not noticed the lack of space between Cinnamon and Girl, but that one I definitely apologize for and meant nothing by it.
Auguste, I wasn’t offended.
I just didn’t realise that you weren’t trying to offend me.I just saw your edit and I very much appreciate your clarification there. :-)I’m not sure what you find so confusing about my opinions though. My beliefs about violence in movies were only brought up due to a ‘you don’t care about men’ type of accusation. Just because I don’t like violence, doesn’t mean I can’t critique a movie’s feminist credentials.
I fail to see any reason why Shoshanna’s murder was necessary for the plot. I understand how it fits into Jeff’s original ‘subversion of the romcom’ theory, and I agree in his analysis of what it shows about Zoller.
What I see is a woman who gets murdered for saying no to a man.
If this movie was exactly the same, but ended with Shoshanna surviving, I would have far less desire to critique its feminist credentials, regardless of the level of violence. It’s not that I think woman dies=not feminist (Thelma and Louise is generally considered a feminist film, and both women die at the end). It’s that I don’t think her murder was necessary to the plot. It’s about context. Why did Tarantino give Zoller the last word, the power to destroy the woman who rejected him, when in other respects it’s the the Nazi’s who get their come-uppance? Hey, she could have had a fight with Zoller full of violence – and won. Why didn’t she?
This is one of the reasons why I don’t think this is a feminist film.
I just watched the movie for a second time, liked it even more than the first time, so some thoughts:
1) Hans Landa isn’t just a villain, but like Zoller, he too is a perfect Nice Guy ™. He’s charming, likable, hell, if not for the fact that he performs the most despicable acts in the film, you almost like the guy. He’s also charmingly and gently flirtatious with the women he meets, the farmer’s daughters in the beginning, Shosanna when he questions her, and with van Hammersmark right before he strangles her to death. The women are violently killed, but they are both killed by the Nice Guy(tm) Nazis, who, if this were any other film and had they not been Nazis, would likely be portrayed heroically.
2) The final vengeance against Nazis is entirely women’s work. There’s, of course, Shosanna’s revenge. But don’t forget that Operation Kino and the basterds’ involvement was all planned by Bridget Van Hammersmark. As Mike Myers’ character put it “you could say Operation Kino is her brain child”.
3) It’s the men who fuck it up. Sure the basterds’ help things along, and are the ones who actually get to shoot Hitler and Goebbels while taking pot shots at the panicked Germans trying to escape the theater, but they were unnecessary, Shosanna’s plan would have worked flawlessly, as Landa never suspected her, and the German high command would have been burnt to death. It’s only because Landa discovers the basterds’ plot that he, rather than dying in the blaze with everyone else, gets to live in comfort for the rest of his life. Brad Pitt takes some vengeance against him in the form of carving a swastika in his forehead, but it’s because of Pitt’s character that he’s still alive in the first place.
4) Shosanna and Marcel both planned to die in the blaze they created. Zoller killing Shosanna only in the end served to spare her being burnt to death. Furthermore, yeah we know Zoller is a Nazi, but he was being set up for being a different kind of Nazi. He’s charming, self-depecrating, and seems genuinely disturbed by watching his own killing exploits on screen. As such his killing of Shosanna is an important character point that reveals he’s a heartless murderer all along.
This is exactly right. This is what I’m hoping, Cinnamon Girl, that if you ever did see the movie (or maybe admit that this is the possibility) is the real purpose of Zoller’s final actions. Not to punish Shoshanna, but to punish any member of the audience who’s believing in the nice guy myth – believing in it so strongly that they’re believing it about a NAZI. Shoshanna’s death is a tragedy for her character, but only a punishment for anyone who believed Zoller was redeemable, rom-com style.
Plus, the problem with nice guys turned assholes, such as Zoller does, in most movies is that a certain subset of the audience thinks “Hey, this guy’s acting perfectly rationally, considering that bitch led him on!” Tarantino, whether consciously or not, has made that nearly impossible for anyone but a psychopath, considering that a) the audience loves Shoshanna by that point, and b) he’s a NAZI. :P
Raznor, I really appreciate your comment. I think you clarify those points very well.
The thing is, I get that Zoller is a Nice Guy ™. But the fact that he’s also a Nazi really makes it difficult to see how this is a revolution in film making. The smarmy Nazi Nice Guy ™ trying to get into the pants of the local girl is not something new in cinema. And it’s not hard to spot that he’s a Nice Guy ™ when he’s also a Nazi. It’s not very radical to have the conclusion of the movie become guess what, the Nazi isn’t actually nice after all.
The whole point about Nice Guys ™ is that they distinguish between themselves and Nasty Guys. That wouldn’t be hard for Tarantino’s audience – his movies aren’t being watched by Nazi Nice Guys ™. It would have been far more radical to show that Raine was a Nice Guy ™ by having him pursue and then kill Shoshanna (perhaps having that as the thing that nearly fucked up the plot she had laid). Having the hero exposed so graphically would have been a subversion of the romcom and a subversion of the revenge flick. That would have messed with both the paradigms.
Tarantino likes making movies with graphic violence, so he picks plots which allow him to do so – specifically a revenge flick in this case. The graphicness of the violence (all in the name of revenge) was emphasised in the movie trailer. Tarantino is interested in the aetheticization of violence, and lot of other people are entertained by it. That’s fine. I think Shushanna can be placed in the context of a violent revenge flick.
To justify and enjoy this kind of violence, you must demonise the person you’re being violent towards. In that sense, Tarantino isn’t lazy. Even though it’s incredibly difficult to think of Nazis as victims at the best of times, what the Basterds do is very graphically portrayed and sometimes gratuitous. You can’t tell me it is necessary, even in war, to carve a swastika into someone’s forehead. However, if he’s a really bad guy, you can see why someone would. That’s how revenge can make violence more satisfying (and in his closing line Raine sounds very satisfied). This is where Shoshanna comes in. It could be somewhat satisfying to see someone gets his forehead carved up on the basis of hearing that he did bad things; but when you have seen and begun to identify someone who barely escaped him, lost her whole family to him and is at risk of being found out and killed by him – well, then it’s a whole lot more satisfying when another man tortures or kills the asshole or his associates and takes great pleasure in doing so.
However, satisfaction at revenge works when it comes to explaining the violence in the movie in every aspect that I can see except for one. Shoshanna gets her revenge on Zoller before he shoots her. He is already dying – satisfaction is had. Where, then, is the further satisfaction that will be gained by her death? Zoller’s already had his death wound. Landa has already earned what happens to him and isn’t involved in Shushanna’s death. If her death isn’t designed to start a revenge cycle, it must be the end of one. And which one is that?
Zoller is getting revenge on her for rejecting him and for killing him. And as you all say, Zoller is portrayed as being actually quite nice – in rom com and Nice Guy ™ terms. So which part of the audience is her death satisfying for – the feminists? The Nice Guys ™? the people who would like violence even without the added satisfaction of revenge?
I think it’s the last two of those. If Tarantino wanted to make people think, he could have turned this movie into one where we had to question whether or not the hero Nice Guy ™’s motives were as pure as he made out. He could have made a movie where no Nice Guy ™ could have walked out from the cinema saying “well I’m not a Nazi, I’m a Nice Guy”. Or if he simply wanted to entertain us he could have restricted this movie to one where Nazis get what’s coming to them. But he chose to also make it a movie where a woman gets what’s coming to her when he didn’t need to, and chose to leave all those Nice Guy™’s an open ticket to do what they always do and miss the point. I don’t think that’s very feminist.
What I find fascinating is the idea that Marcel was willing to die to kill off all those Nazis. OK, we know why Shoshanna was prepared to imolate herself to strike a blow against the Third Reich – why was Marcel? Was it because he was a patriotic Frenchman who didn’t like seeing his country occupied? Was it because he too had suffered comparably under the Nazis? Did he just love Shoshanna enough that he was willing to immolate himself because she wanted to as well? It’d have been interesting to find out more.
daedalus_x- What you’re seeing another nice subversion of common gender dynamics common in movies. It’s the woman who is the character and the loyal boyfriend who goes along and is only defined by his relation to the woman. I do fully sympathize with those who take issue that the only non-white character in the film is a non-character, though.
But for all this talk that “it’s easy to demonize them, they’re NAZIS!” Tarantino plays with you on that one too. There’s the Nazi officer who’s beaten to death by the Bear Jew, as he hears his approaching death the camera looks into his eyes, with a heroic mixture of fear and determination which forces the audience to sympathize with him. As the Bear Jew takes his baseball bat and points it to a medal on the officer’s chest and says “You get that for killing Jews” he looks him in the eye and says “Bravery” and we in the audience believe it, right before he’s beaten to death.
edited to add: The point here is that the killing of the Nazi officer occurs before we first meet the charming Fredrick Zoller, so by the time we meet him, Tarantino establishes that we might – just might – have a sympathetic Nazi character.
Raznor, I agree with you that Shoshanna and Marcel represent an inversion of the standard gender dynamic, and that it typifies a standard race dynamic.
can you clarify what the audience believes – that the enemy is displaying bravery, that he got his medal for bravery, that the Bear Jew looked him in the eye… ?
Like I said before though, this isn’t the first movie that portrays Nazis as more than one dimensional characters, and it’s not the first to show a Nazi Nice Guy™. What I can’t see though is how seeing a Nazi officer being killed in revenge for killing Jews establishes that there might be a sympathetic Nazi character. The level of fear and determination in the officer’s eyes seems to fit perfectly into a revenge movie – after all, if the enemy isn’t heroic, it’s very difficult to establish that the hero is heroic for taking the villain on.
What I also can’t see is how a movie in which a woman is killed for saying no to a man is a feminist movie.
I wasn’t planning to see the film, mainly because of Pitt, but I will now.
But on a different point, a minor one perhaps, Tarantino often provides feminist messages in his films, but is he necessarily a feminist, or is he just not sexist? I don’t think one is any better or worse than the other, just different. Or is anything not sexist, feminist by definition?
I had a friend once who wouldn’t identify as feminist when I tried to label him that way. He didn’t care about furthering the plight of women, he just had a strong sense of equity that led him to treat everyone equally – like it’s a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t women have a similar number of lines, similar ability to defend, similar abilities in general as men? We’re just so used to sexist films, anything different is revolutionary.
Ooooh, trying to be tricksy to win instead of intellectually honest! Always a fun internet tactic, but alas, in my old age, when I see it, I just give up arguing. Next argument, this one in good faith, please!
Because this post was about feminism, you were disagreeing as a point of feminism, you didn’t object to the infinitely more numerous explicit deaths of men, and when called on it, you were disingenuous. Sorry, I’m done.
Look, I accept that there’s different interpretations that are equally valid. But there are those that aren’t as valid. If you’d come in saying the movie is about bunnies and kittens, I’d have to say you’re wrong. Don’t hide behind the “all things are equally valid” dodge. Make your argument. Reference textual evidence. You can do this. I don’t hide behind the “all interpretations are equally valid” dodge when someone disagrees. When someone whips that out, I hear, “I’m either too lazy to make a good argument, don’t have enough time, or I know I’m wrong and I’m not giving up.”
See? This is a useful assertion. I can see your point, but I respectfully disagree. The murder of the first Nazi in the movie that’s beaten to death with a baseball bat is the one that bracket’s Bridget’s murder. Except it’s played comically, and her death is a tragedy. As befits a Resistance fighter of her bravery.
The mysteries around Shoshanna and Marcel add to their mystique as romantic, glamorous Resistance fighters, I thought. It’s one reason I’m eager to see the movie again. Knowing what happens, I can concentrate more on the subtleties of their dialogue.
My sense, having seen it once, is that the answer is, “All of the above.” As I said to my boyfriend as I left, “If you had a chance to burn up a theater full of the Nazi high command, would you?” I’d like to think I would.
Yeah I think you’ve hit the nail Sage. It could be said that Tarantino isn’t engaging in some of the more overt forms of sexism generally present in his medium. And Jeff Feck noticed that the females in Tarantinos films were
But in this case, like mamafortuna said beautifully
A woman being murdered for saying no to a man is a profoundly anti-feminist image.
In the betcha-didn’t-know-this fun trivia facts: Did you know that Quentin Tarantino dated feminist and pro-queer comedian Margaret Cho for a long time? (The link is about his guest spot on her show “All American Girl”.) If you watch her stand-up act “I’m The One That I Want”, she never mentions him by name—just calls him “my boyfriend”—but if you know who she’s talking about, it makes the whole thing a million times funnier, because she imitates “my boyfriend” on a number of occasions, and she has her QT imitation down cold. The main ones I remember are a bit she does about how he walks around with just a shirt and no pants and she’s incredulous that he doesn’t care that he’s flapping in the wind, and the other bit is about how his belief in her talent and her worthiness sometimes embarrasses her. She does a dead-on impression of getting the full QT “you’re perfect, hilarious, beautiful, and if those assholes don’t get it, they’re in the wrong” treatment in her act. It’s funny and touching.
CG, we’re not “giving a cookie” for feminism. Don’t you think that someone who is one of the best filmmakers of his generation, who made this movie that managed something that it nearly impossible—being both ironic and postmodern, while also being deeply touching—deserve a “cookie”. Since when it is wrong to praise great art?
I had no idea this was about winning something. I thought it was about people discussing their varying beliefs regarding this particular Tarantino film and its relation to feminism. But on re-reading your posts you haven’t been intellectually honest about your opinion either way.
mommafortuna was intellectually honest, and her entire post was full of sound analysis which is backed up by both a tradition of feminism and an extensive education in critiquing film. But you had a go at her with some sketchy crap which you can’t back up about how it’s dishonest to give French freedom fighters a happy ending (go tell that to the French) which is not only bs but is illogical in a context where the Jews end up killing Hitler and triumphing. Not only that, when mammafortuna became fed up because you refused to address her from an intellectually honest interpretation, you insist that this must mean she can’t have made a logical argument in the first place!
I have stated why I don’t think murdering a woman for her refusal to sleep with a man is a feminist image in the context ofa movie which is about taking revenge on people who do really bad things. There has been nothing disingenuous about my arguments. You employ fallacies rather than address the points we have raised.
You have been tricksy in trying to win instead of being intellectually honest, and you’ve given us the reason why – you say it’s
You have also been disingenuous: in other words, lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; and insincere. If you would like to be intellectually honest instead of disingenuous, I suggest you start by telling us whether you actually think that this is a feminist movie or not.
Edited as the spam filter doesn’t like long quotes:
I direct you to the first sentence of this post (under the spoiler warning and video)
No one has said that it’s wrong to praise art. This post was about Tarantino and feminism. Did you read it? It was really interesting.
I think that that’s incredibly simplistic, and (as incredibly simplistic statements often are) incredibly wrong.
The thing is, women are murdered for saying no to men. That’s unjust fact. It’s no more non-feminist to portray that in a movie than is would be racist to portray the death of Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. It has to do with how you portray it.
When you’re analyzing whether ‘a woman being murdered for saying no to a man’ is a feminist image or not, you have to examine how it’s presented, its place in an overall story arc, whether the woman killed is presented as helpless and weak or whether she’s presented as powerful. Is the death played for laughs or presented as a tragedy? Does her murderer get his comeuppance? Is there justice for her death? If not, how is that portrayed?
Shoshanna was killed in part for refusing to knuckle under, but even in death she got her revenge and did not submit. I think taking an entire film about how she’s smarter, braver, more strong willed, and more capable than the men around her and judging it as non- or anti- feminist based simply on her death is too reductive to be worthwhile.
—Myca
My sense, having seen it once, is that the answer is, “All of the above.” As I said to my boyfriend as I left, “If you had a chance to burn up a theater full of the Nazi high command, would you?” I’d like to think I would.
Well, personally, no, but then I’m pretty much a pacifist. That being said I can understand why somebody would seize with both hands the chance to kill a lot of senior Nazis. But killing oneself in order to do that? No, I don’t think most people would do that – I don’t think I would, if I imagine myself as a non-pacifist. Would you? Maybe you would, but I think your reasons for being willing to do so would be interesting and worth exploring.
That’s really what irks me, although it’s not necessarily a problem with the film – Shoshanna’s motivations are fully laid out, Marcel’s aren’t.
It’s also interesting, while I think about Marcel a bit more, that at no point does Shoshanna say to Frederick “I’m seeing somebody else”. That may be entirely tactical, or it may be a subtle commentary on the fact that, even in ‘democratic’ France where black people could become citizens, an interracial relationship would be seen as something one didn’t openly acknowledge.
(And an aside, as somebody who’s done a fair bit of reading on French history in the pre-war period – is the idea of a family of rural Jewish dairy farmers a bit, um, unlikely?)
(And an aside, as somebody who’s done a fair bit of reading on French history in the pre-war period – is the idea of a family of rural Jewish dairy farmers a bit, um, unlikely?)
No. Not typical, perhaps – most French Jews of the time were urban – but not off the charts.
Except that your position seems to be that a sizable portion of the audience still sympathizes with Zoller, despite everything that he is and everything he’s done – and that, presumably, Shoshanna’s death was intended as emotional payoff for these people. How much larger would this minority become if, instead of a Nazi, it was Brad friggin’ Pitt? Perhaps tying a guy like Zoller with Nazism specifically is what’s necessary?
Or perhaps everyone in the audience is already rooting for Shoshanna at this point, and such concerns are misplaced?
I wasn’t expecting Shoshanna’s death at the time, though I was wincing when she was inching over to Zoller’s prone body, because by that point what was about to happen was obvious. But, this is a movie with a lot of senseless deaths. The most sympathetic Nazi in the film, which wasn’t either Landa or Zoller but the newlywed father in the bar scene, is killed off just as we think he’s going to make it. (In fact, it would probably be more accurate to call him a German, not a Nazi, because he was obviously a conscript and a grunt.) Why the two good guys who survived everything were pasty white Brad Pitt and the kid from The Office is a fair criticism to make, but micro-analyzing why violence happens and people die in a QT movie is silly. If Stiglitz was murdered in a long, drawn out scene while von Hammersmark was offed unceremoniously, would that have been better? Or would that have just emphasized his heroism and her unimportance?
Personally, I thought it was to protect Marcel. If Nazi war hero guy found out about the competition, I think it would relatively easy for him to make the other guy “disappear”.
(In fact, it would probably be more accurate to call him a German, not a Nazi, because he was obviously a conscript and a grunt.)
Interesting point – of course this goes for almost every single German killed or mutilated by the Basterds outside of the cinema and the deed with Landa at the end. The Sergeant, Gerfreiter Butz, all of Wilhelm’s friends in the tavern (including the woman) were conscripts who, had they refused to join the Wehrmacht would have been terribly punished. And yet Raine’s position is that they need to be either killed or permanently mutilated, and he insists on referring to them as “Nazis” even though few, if any, of them are likely to be strong believers in National Socialism, let alone official Nazi Party members.
I don’t want to stray off the path into the whole ‘good Germans’ argument, but I do wonder if we the viewers were intended to empathise with the Basterds’ death-or-mutilation line.
Personally, I thought it was to protect Marcel. If Nazi war hero guy found out about the competition, I think it would relatively easy for him to make the other guy “disappear”.
Quite possibly, but if so it raises an interesting point – that Shoshanna, unlike we the audience, was never remotely drawn in by the whole ‘nice guy’ thing.
No, that wasn’t my point at all. My position is that a standard feature of the Nice Guy™ is that he thinks he is nice, and he doesn’t see any similarities between him and a man who treats women badly. This movie makes that easy for him; the anti-romcom is a subplot in the overriding story context of revenge against the Nazis. Since the Nice Guy™ is also the villain in that context, it doesn’t force any Nice Guy™ watching the movie to think about the Nice Guy™ aspects – it actually perpetuates them, by making it easy for the Nice Guy™ to come out of it saying “see, that guy was a Nazi. He nearly fooled us, but in the end it all came out. But I’m not a Nazi, I’m a nice guy.”
Yes, it is. Unfortunately, no one here is responding to complex arguments. This was only one out of many ways I tried to put my point across; I did so in detail further up the page.
You are writing as if I didn’t analyse these factors, when in fact I did, over the course of several posts.
Here again is my point in succinct form:
I feel like I’m being asked to prove why this movie isn’t feminist, and I’m not sure why. While I agree that it has strong female characters, I have only heard one reason suggested as to why the woman is murdered for saying no to a man if this is, indeed, a feminist movie – and the only answer to that I have heard is that she can’t have a happy ending because she is a Resistance fighter. That’s patently absurd, as it misses the point – an equally unhappy ending would be Shoshanna dying in the theatre fire along with everyone else. Why the assumption that she needs to be killed for saying no to a man in order to make her ending unhappy?
When someone holds this movie up as evidence of Tarantino’s feminism, critiquing an aspect of the movie which contradicts this isn’t micro-analysing why violence happens and people die in a QT movie. It is fair criticism.
The problem here seems to be that we have two different objectives – I’m trying to take Jeff Fecke’s ideas seriously and discuss them on their merits. But all I’m getting from the other people here are straw man arguments and logical fallacies.
daedalus_x, that’s a really good point. But I would be very interested though to ask female members of the audience if they were in fact drawn in by the whole ‘nice guy’ thing.
Most women actually spot a Nice Guy™ in the early stages of this.
One of the reasons romcons are so unrealistic is that the Nice Guy™ actually turns out to be ‘the one’. This is essential to Fecke’s analysis of this movie as an inversion of the romcom genre.
This is also an essential flaw when it comes to real life. Hence, most women quickly develop an ability to sense when a man is a Nice Guy™. If she doesn’t, and thinks life is like a romcom, she get burned in the end by a Nice Guy™ gone bad.
Shoshanna’s ability to see through the Nice Guy™ act was entirely consistent with real life, and was also an inversion of the romcom. Fecke’s analysis of this movie as a romcom inversion is sound.
Honestly, I thought the Basterds were monsters.
Yes, what the Nazis did was evil. Yes, it needed to be stopped. Yes, possibly it would have been a good plan to horribly murder and mutilate some Nazis and make sure word gets back to high command – terrorism does work, of course, to make people terrified and terrified people are less effective in battle.
But the Basterds seem to LIKE doing it. The scene with the baseball bat nearly made me lose my lunch, especially with everyone laughing, both in the movie and in the audience.
To me, there were different levels of evil when you look at the Nazis:
The high command were evil,
Landa followed orders but was especially evil because he revelled in it,
Zoller was not evil because he was a sniper (all armies have snipers) but because he was the epitome of Nice Guy-ness (irrespective of nationality or allegiance, I might say),
the General that was killed by the Bear Jew was probably at least a little evil or he wouldn’t have risen so far in command,
and all the other soldiers and ‘Hermann,’ Landa’s driver in the final scene, were probably as evil as any youngster found in any army in the world. Whether that’s ‘extremely’ or ‘not at all’ depends on your point of view.
So to me, just because ‘Nazi == bad guy’ doesn’t mean ‘everyone else == good guy.’
I think the Basterds come in somewhere around the Zoller level, perhaps even between Zoller and Landa – Zoller’s evilness is unrelated to his Nazi-ness, although he sure loves to wield the power being in the good graces of the high command gives him. He’d be the same under any command that likes to misuse power, though.
People who enjoy the fear and pain of fellow humans (the Basterds, in this case), however, are monstrous no matter what side they’re on. If there’d only been one scene that showed us their modus operandi was selected for effect, not for fun, that’d be different.
I get that in wartime, sometimes the best way to remove a threat is to kill. However, this can be done cleanly, even if it is for revenge. (My idea is that burning down the cinema was the way most likely to succeed in making sure everyone who needed to die would die, not because Shosanna wanted to torture as much as possible. However, that could just be because that’s how I would think.)
(Besides, the ease with which they murder Hermann while letting Landa live sure screams ‘priority mix-up!’ to me. Hermann was probably no threat at all. If you’re going to be chewed out for killing someone against orders, at least make it the dangerous one!)
Honestly, I thought the Basterds were monsters.
I don’t disagree. One of the reasons I think this film is so interesting and important is that Tarantino sets you up, gets you cheering for guys who are terrorists and thugs. Does the fact that they’re fighting Nazis make it better? Really?
Also, twice in the movie Tarantino goes out of his way to have the Nazis comment on race relations in America. I know Marcel was a bit of a cipher, but I think his presence at the end, combined with the fact that we never see an African American in the film, was Tarantino’s way of saying that yeah, the Nazis were monsters — but back in the land of the free, there was an Apartheid system that was deeply entrenched and horribly evil.
Jesus, Amanda. I generally like reading your posts, but your comments do pretty much the opposite of what good discussion should do. In the thread above, you (1) shut down discussion without offering evidence (that was in response to my first comment), (2) mock and insult commentors who are trying to tease out nuances in an ambiguous statement (if, as Jeff says, Tarantino isn’t a perfect feminist, then what’s so wrong with teasing out what works as well as what doesn’t?), and (3) offered little evidence to support your own claims even after criticizing other commentors for doing the same. Well, you gave a few onscreen examples in the first few comments and the Margart Cho non sequitor (which doesn’t contribute much – Cho herself is not above constructive criticism but didn’t you recently write several posts about separating the life of art from the life of the artist?).
But I’m not persuaded and I’m wondering what the point of all the mockery was, as it neither defended your argument or added depth or nuance to the discussion.
[Deleted by request of Mommyfortuna. Please note that I generally only honor requests for deletion if no one has yet replied to the post in question, as is the the case here. –Amp]
Maartje, bear in mind that with the exception of Reynes and Stiglitz (the latter of whom appears to be an unreconstructed pyschopath – it’s implied there was some kind of anti-authority or anti-Nazi agenda to his murders of Gestapo officers, but I’m not buying it) all of the Basterds are Jewish, so their desire to extract gory revenge on Nazis has to be seen not just as visceral enjoyment of the power of life-and-death (as with Landa) but as the revenge of an oppressed people against their oppressors, and at least somewhat in keeping with Shoshanna’s.
Now admittedly none of the Basterds, with the possible exception of Wicki, have personally experienced Nazism, but it seems not outside the bounds of possibility that many of them will have lost friends or family members to the Nazis. So, again, it is not as easy to separate their sadism towards Germans as it is Shoshanna’s.
The main thing that separates it, apart from the fact that Shoshanna had direct experience with genocide while the Basterds had at best indirect experience, is that Shoshanna targeted her revenge only at those who were directly complicit in genocide*, while the Basterds seem to mostly aim at foot soldiers who aren’t generally National Socialists.
*Although, now that I think about it, maybe not. The fact that the Basterds were able to pass themselves off as film industry figures without comment implies that there were probably other film industry figures present. Admittedly, the German film industry was heavily politicised under the Nazi regime, but to say that somebody needs to die because they made propaganda films is a step too far.
Re the way deaths are potrayed in Inglorious Basteurds: I haven’t seen the movie, don’t know anything about the context and if it is based on reality more than vaguely (i.e. do the Basteurds represent a real group?) but since the movie apparently ends with Hitler dying in a fire in 1944 I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s not a documentary. That being so, the potrayal of the characters is something that the director and writers chose. They decided to play certain deaths for laughs, for example. They chose to make the “heroes” thugs. That says something about Tarantino and his expected audience.
Yes, the victims of the “for laughs” deaths were either Nazis or people supporting the Nazi regime (by failing to rebel, if nothing else.) But isn’t that the same excuse as has been used since…well, since people started entertaining each other with gory stories, which probably means during the H. erectus era or so? The victims are just the “evil others”, not really worth worrying about at all. Maybe that’s an inevitable human characteristic and if we have to have deaths played for fun in movies I’d certainly rather the victims be Nazis than, say, the stereotypical (black or other minority) “evil gang member” of a Bronson film or the “evil terrorist” (aka stereotypical Arab) which is the current standard. But do we have to play it that way at all?
Dianne, Cinnamon Girl
Pardon my bluntness, but what the Hell bizarre sense of entitlement makes you think that your opinions are useful, or anything other than excessive white noise, when you are commenting on a film you haven’t seen. Do you attend book clubs for books you haven’t read? Do you offer medical advice to people whose ailments you don’t understand? Is your opinion so remarkably wonderful that we’re all entitled to it, even when it’s completely uninformed?
And yes Cinnamon Girl, I’m aware that you read a synopsis on imdb. Sometimes in university I would read a synopsis instead of the actual text, too. But I damned well wouldn’t go to class try to steer the conversation with it!
I’m sorry, but I’ve been reading a lot of “criticizing something I haven’t seen” posts on a lot of blogs lately, and I find them all horribly offensive. It’s like a celebration for the death of critical thought in favour of knee-jerk reactionism.
Excuse me SamL. I thought I was responding to a post and comments that I have read. I suppose I should bow to your superior male understanding of what I was and was not commenting on. Especially since you’re being such a nice guy about it all.
Sam, that was entirely out of line. If you can’t be civil, then please don’t comment here. (You could have questioned whether or not people can fairly comment on a film they haven’t seen without acting like such a jerk about it.)
Everyone, please try and dial down your rhetoric a couple of notches.
Although I pretty much liked the film (finally saw it yesterday), I think this is giving Tarantino too much credit. As far as race goes, it was just another film that didn’t have a single significant role for anyone who wasn’t white.
Cinnamon Girl wrote:
That doesn’t bother me, in and of itself. For me, the question is if the female characters are full, equal characters, and Bridget definitely was.
I was bothered by the way Hammersmark was killed. As someone on the thread (can’t find the comment now, sorry!) already remarked, her death wasn’t staged like anyone else’s death; she was strangled by a man straddling her as she lay on the floor, with many close-ups of her face and of her feet moving back and forth. It was shot more intimately, and with more parallels to sex, than any other character’s death.
So I don’t agree with those who say her death was treated the same as all the other character’s deaths. It wasn’t.
Maybe there was a good point to that, that I missed. But to me, it just came across as the thoughtless echoing of a sexist trope that’s common for how movies (mostly horror movies) have shown women’s murders.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate that Bridget was a great character, apart from how her death was staged. But acknowledging that the character was good, as a whole, doesn’t preclude criticizing the choices made about how her death was staged and shot.
With respect, I disagree. Female characters in this genre can’t be full, equal characters if they can’t be killed (and in this movie, many of the “good guy” men get killed, as well). So actually, I think it’s more feminist this way than it would be if the female characters were immune from death (or only died to further a male character’s story arc, as is the case in most action movies).
Tarantino’s three previous films (Deathproof, Kill Bill, and Jackie Brown) all featured strong female protagonists who prevail, succeeding at what they set out to do, and surviving. So I don’t think it can be fairly said that he’s unwilling to do that sort of plot (not that you said that, of course!).
I don’t know. The movie makes it clear both that the Bastard’s plan would not have worked (ETA: or only would have worked because of an incredibly unlikely changing of sides of the Nazi in charge of security), and that Shoshanna’s plan would have (and did) work. And Shoshanna is not just a fuller character than most in the genre, but a fuller character than any other character in the movie. (Pitt’s character, in contrast, is a complete cipher.)
I think Tarantino was trying both to give Shoshanna’s life a tragic end, and to show her triumphant revenge in the end. The last image we see of Shoshanna isn’t her being shot to death; it’s her face looming over a room of dying nazis, far larger than any of them, laughing triumphantly. The “tone” of her story arc, at least for me, struck me as one of a hero dying tragically while destroying the enemy, which traditionally has been a story arc that only male characters get. (Although there’s also the end of season 5 of Buffy.)
So I see your objection, but I disagree.
For me, part of the problem is that there were really only three female characters in the movie who had more than walk-on parts, and none of them survived. (I’m counting the translator as more than a walk-on part, although it was a pretty small part.) I don’t object to any of the female deaths taken individually; all the deaths are justifiable in the context of the story (even though I wish they had staged Greta’s death differently).
But it would have been better for me if there had been just one female character of importance who didn’t get killed. Or if all the characters of note, male and female, had died.
Of note here: this is the first Tarantino film since Pulp Fiction that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. But then, it’s a war movie, and someone may want to enlighten me as to this point, I don’t know as there’s ever been a war movie made that passes the Bechdel test, and I can’t think of any with as strong woman characters as Shosanna and Bridget VonHammersmark.
Secondly, I would say that the only two fully realized characters in the movie are Shosanna and Landa. As such I greatly disagree with the interpretation that Shosanna’s only there to personalize what Landa’s done, I would say rather that Landa’s only there to personalize Shosanna’s vengeance.
Of possible interest: In the original script, there was at least one more female character, who was to be played by Maggie Cheung. The character got cut to make the film shorter.
But then, it’s a war movie, and someone may want to enlighten me as to this point, I don’t know as there’s ever been a war movie made that passes the Bechdel test,
Depending on what you mean by “war movie”, I can think of several:
1. Aimee und Jaguar, which is also set in WWII. It’s an interesting movie in that although you never doubt the evil of the Nazi regime the allies are not the saviors but just another danger (they appear only as bombers) and soldiers appear acting normally as well as doing evil. For example, clearing up wreckage after a bombing and flirting in a friendly manner with the protagonist who they don’t realize is Jewish.
2. Gone With the Wind. Icky in many ways but passes the Bechdel test easily. Heck, I’m pretty sure the book even passes the POC Bechdel test, obviously unprogressive on race as it is.
3. I think that Das Leben ist Schoen (sorry, don’t remember the original title) passes although I’m not sure the mostly peripheral female characters ever talk about anything but the male protagonist.
“Das Leben ist Schoen”? Is that “La Vita `e bella”? If so, what’s with the German-translated title? Maybe you saw it in Germany and thought it was a German film?
Is that “La Vita `e bella”? If so, what’s with the German-translated title? Maybe you saw it in Germany and thought it was a German film?
I did see it in German although I knew it was an Italian film. The problem is that my Italian is unspeakably bad so I remembered the title as a bunch of random letters which translate to “Das Leben ist Schoen.”
Of possible interest: In the original script, there was at least one more female character, who was to be played by Maggie Cheung. The character got cut to make the film shorter.
Tarantino has said he wants to work this back into either a director’s cut, or a prequel that he’s working on. The other scene that I know he’s mentioned as cutting sorrowfully is one where a Jewish refugee played by Cloris Leachman signs the bat that the Bear Jew takes to France, asking he gets revenge.
And actually, I think this movie (barely) passes the Bechdel test as cut; IIRC, Francesca asks Shoshanna if she liked Lucky Kids, and Shoshanna says she liked Lilian Harvey in it, prompting Goebbels to complain about Harvey. I don’t recall that she was translating for Goebbels, but I could be mistaken. Even if so, though, it’s more technically passing than actually doing so.
Raznor
If the Bechdel test stipulates that a film should include proper woman-to-woman dialogue on a subject other than heterosexual romance, then Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” (which has many points of similarity with Tarantino’s latest effort, by the way) is a war-movie which passes with flying colours. The film’s protagonist, Rachel Stein, is at least as strong a woman character as Shosanna and Bridget V. H. Highly recommended from a feminist point of view.
Amp & Dianne
You’re right. I packed the vitriol on way too heavily there, but it really does cheese me when people attempt critical discourse without (what I see as) proper grounding. I will endevour to be more civil in the future, however, and wish to respectfully apologize for my tone.
More calmly, I would say that the film is highly self-reflexive about its nature as a war film, and is thus fully committed to exploiting its audio-visual components to their fullest in creating its meaning. A plot synopsis, lacking in all of the filmic elements Tarantino uses in the film, cannot begin to truly summarize the experience of watching the movie, and therefore cannot really be said to convey its meaning accurately, if at all.
If the medium is the message, it is true even moreso in something as metatheatrical as Inglourious Basterds.
Wow, I guess I’m late to the party. But early on, someone said:
It’s really important that this isn’t true. Like Schindler’s List, which had a protagonist who was a “Good German.” Or The Reader, aka, The Hot Illiterate Nazi. Or Valkyrie, about those “Good Germans” who tried to stop Hitler (even if, in the real-life story the film was based on, their reason was merely that he was an ineffective war leader). Plenty, like Sophie’s Choice and The Pawnbroker just don’t have a lot to say about Germans, and are really more about how Jews are toxic to anyone around them.
True, sometimes Nazis are treated as a short-hand for evil (which makes it hard for anyone to ever interrogate antisemitism short of Nazism, as if no ordinary human being could possibly be antisemitic), but most Germans in WWII films are not given that treatment. That’s one of the reasons it was so satisfying for me that Landa had that swastika carved into his forehead.
I’d recommend Judith Doneson’s The Holocaust in American Film for an overview of how many American films have completely and utterly failed to deal with the Holocaust. Or, less satisfying, but broader and shorter, I wrote this on Defiance.
Amp,
It would be one thing, as others have already said, to note the limited role for Marcel or the absence of others besides whites and Jews, but I think this goes too far. In this context, it’s too much to fold Jews into whites and dismiss the diversity that is there. That really doesn’t properly acknowledge the ways in which Jews have been othered and may not feel quite, exactly white.
I’ll grant that my statement was an exaggeration. But for this film to work you have to buy into the idea that all the Nazis deserve to be tortured – in that sense, this film, at least, does use German soliders/Nazis as shorthand for “evil” and it’s that conflation I objected to.
Point taken, thanks.
So I have an issue I’ve been sitting on my hands not to raise so as not to derail, but I think the thread has touched on enough subjects and petered out a bit that it will be okay. If you (Jeff? Amp?) would rather we take it up in an open thread, that’s fine too.
When I heard about the premise of this movie, I was, frankly, repulsed. It struck me as a kind of well-intentioned, but still seriously messed up kind of Holocaust denial to create this alternate history where a bunch of bad-asses get to blow up Hitler. That’s not how the world works. And yes, I understand it’s supposed to be a fantasy and a revenge fantasy at that, but this is the fantasy that’s peddled by every single action movie ever made. I fail to see anything transgressive about taking that fantasy and applying it to a genocide. To me, it’s no different than Rambo, with its fantasy that if we’d just let the bad-asses do their job, we would have won the Vietnam War.
I haven’t seen the movie because, like I said, I find the concept repulsive, but to avoid incurring the wrath of Sam, let me put this in the form of a question. Why am I wrong? There’s a lot of people here who are pretty smart and good at critical analysis, and no one has even the slightest concern about this. So what, from the description of the movie, am I failing to pick up on?
(For the record, I’ve grown a little impatient with Tarantino over the years. I liked Pulp Fiction, and I’ve liked some of his other movies, though none as much as Pulp Fiction. I saw both Kill Bill movies and left disappointed. He obviously is very into the aesthetic of violence, and I understand that people find that entertaining. In the Kill Bill movies, I felt it reached the level of just being violence porn, with the violence drowning out any plot, character, etc., and I got bored. So, I’m not one to dismiss his work out of hand, but I’m also not inclined to the most charitable reading.)
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Tom Nolan:
Bechdel:
Ampersand:
Aside from the naming criterion, I see no substantive difference between the two formulations. Neither limits criterion 3 as applying to “heterosexual romance”. Anything “about a man” would fall foul of that exclusion. Most people seem to interpret “about a man” to included “about a man’s actions”, as do I.
I haven’t seen the movie because, like I said, I find the concept repulsive, but to avoid incurring the wrath of Sam, let me put this in the form of a question. Why am I wrong? There’s a lot of people here who are pretty smart and good at critical analysis, and no one has even the slightest concern about this. So what, from the description of the movie, am I failing to pick up on?
I’d recommend reading Amanda’s review, as she touches on this. But the quick summation is that you’re supposed to find it repulsive. Tarantino makes films about films, and this is a film about war movies and their excess. He turns the knob up to eleven to make the point that when we’re cheering for the “good guys” to kill the “bad guys,” we’re really not that different from the bad guys.
Daran
So, for example, two women discussing the state of Holland in the final months of WWII wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test, because both the state of Holland and the war can reasonably be construed as the deeds of men?
Thanks, Amp.
mommyfortuna, I disagree. Your statement was more than exaggeration. Seriously, go over a list of Holocaust movies, and most are problematic. (Exceptions will mostly be documentaries and a few European films, but they don’t treat Nazis as pure evil, either. I quite like The Pianist, and a major figure is a kindly Nazi.) Look at the poster for Life is Beautiful — fun for the whole family! Despite intentions, it’s rare that a film deals with the Holocaust in any serious way. Jews are often shown as the cause of their own misery. Nazis are not shown for what they are. The German people, if shown, are unknowing. WWII movies that don’t touch on the Holocaust are prone to portraying Germans as noble warriors. Your statement wasn’t just an exaggeration, it was backwards. For The Reader they actually cut a scene showing the burning church because it made it difficult for audiences to sympathize with her. It’s forgiveness without any account of what happened.
That gets into chingona’s point. When I first heard of the movie — and I’m not a Tarantino fan — I was repulsed. Even as I walked into the theater I was expecting not to like it, though not because I thought of it as some kind of denial. But so many Holocaust films are so deeply screwy. It’s tough to give Jews any kind of agency in a Holocaust film (though I recommend The Counterfeiters for that reason). It’s not Nazis who are portrayed as the ultimate evil, but Jews who are portrayed as the ultimate, romanticized victim. That’s one reason so many Holocaust films are about Good Germans. There’s just this incredible need for a different way to engage with the history. Going off the rails with history was, for me, probably the single most significant thing that Tarantino did to change the stakes of the fantasy. We could indulge in the fantasy without being “vengeful Jews” a la Shylock.
Jeff,
I read Amanda’s review, and I don’t think either of you quite get at what I’m getting at. It’s not that it’s violent that’s repulsive. Or rather, I get that by not shying away from gruesome violence done to really bad people, he’s conjuring up all sorts of feelings that we’re meant to wrestle with.
Matt, perhaps not surprisingly, gets closer to my issue. A lot of Hollywood Holocaust movies have this problem with their subject matter. A.O. Scott had a piece in the NYT last year (well before Inglorious Basterds) that was good on this, but I can’t seem to find it now. If I turn it up, I’ll add it. Anyway, it IS hard to make a Holocaust movie where the Jews have agency, and without agency, you don’t have much of a protagonist. And so you get, like Matt said, the Good German.
So I appreciate that Tarantino is trying to swap that around. The Nazis really are unequivocally bad, and the Jews, including a Jewish woman, get their own agency. But the way he’s done that strikes me as really problematic in its own way. It bothers me that this is the only response to movies that portray the Jews as romantic victims and give us German protagonists – a complete counterfactual that pretends that a little ultraviolence will magically defeat a totalitarian regime. Something that’s probably feeding my skepticism here is my sense that Tarantino often is trying to have it both ways with the post-modern, self-referential stuff – he can be all deep and we all get to analyze it and feel smart but he and we also get to thrill to his incredible aesthetic sense around violence. When I bring that concern to my other concern, it adds up to being really hesitant to see this movie.
I’ll probably wait until it comes out on Netflix, and by then, everybody else will be done talking about it. Maybe I’ll make it a double feature with Defiance and really give myself something to mull over.
Matt,
I disagree about the kind German in the Pianist. He’s a “major” character in that without him, the protagonist would not have lived and we’d have no movie. But he’s a bit of a cipher otherwise. He saves Szpilman because he plays so beautifully. He’s like someone who gases dogs all day at the pound and decided to take one home because it could do some particularly impressive trick. He saved him on a whim, not because he’s a good person in an impossible situation seizing an opportunity to be better. To me, it just underscored the complete capriciousness of who lived and who died, and I didn’t feel that sorry for him at the end.
That’s interesting, chingona. I think it’s more likely that he saw Szpilman as creative, beyond a mere trick, while Nazis insisted Jews were merely imitative. He certainly risked an awful lot.
He’s clearly very moved by the way Spzilman plays, and it’s seems pretty likely that being moved by the music allows him to see Spzilman as human in a way he doesn’t see the other Jews as human. I guess to me, though, it’s so self-evident that playing piano beautifully doesn’t mean you “deserve” to live more than some other person that it’s hard to find real morality in what the officer did. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but my recollection was that he does take a risk in that moment, but it’s a one time, on a whim, type of thing. I’m certainly not saying that he should have been consistent and killed Spzilman or turned him in. What I’m trying to get at is that he held this kind of God-like life-and-death power over other people that no one should ever have. He uses it to save our protagonist, and Spzilman is glad of it because his life is valuable to him, and we’re glad of it because we’ve been following him all this time, but it doesn’t redeem the German anymore than a Roman emperor was redeemed by giving thumbs up from time to time.
That’s a good point. My feeling is that “Holland is in a mess” might qualify, but “Hitler has made a mess of Holland” wouldn’t.
What it comes down it is not just whether the agent is a man, but whether he’s visible, and visibly a man.
I agree, though, that the boundary isn’t as clear-cut as I thought.
I disagree. What about the (Sgt?) Wilhem character? All he wanted to do was live to see his newborn son but ended up getting killed. Of course his death was perfectly understandable but he does not come off as a bad-guy, much less some avatar of evil.
Here’s an interesting quote from Tarantino that definitly suggests that Basterds isn’t just some exploitation-propaganda film.
http://www.fangoria.com/features/21-fearful-features/3663-quentin-tarantino-one-helluva-basterd.html
Kill Bill and Death Proof
Ok you don’t like violence… and these films are violent. But if you like women kickig asses of dozens of men (and other women), getting their rightful vengeance, being strong and smart, and – of course – surviving.
Then it’s for you :)
Kill Bill part 1 was mainly over-the-top violence porn. Kill Bill part 2, on the other hand, had actual character-driven drama.
I found this blog late, but would like to comment anyway. I do agree that the movie while marketed as a “men on a mission” revenge fantasy, is more interested in developing the characters of Hans Landa as evil incarnate and Shosanna. I would not say that Tarantino is necessarily always going for a feminist angle. There certainly was not one in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though that theory can be easily and intentionally applied to his last three films: Jackie Brown, Kill Bill and Death Proof). But those who think this movie betrays women or depicts them as inferior to men because the two female leads both die, misses what Tarantino is trying to do.
I quite like the reading of the Zoller subplot being an inverse and perversion of the Hollywood romantic comedy formula. It is quite evident that that is where Tarantino was going with the material. However, his killing Shosanna does not make her a weak woman or a bad character. She is rather the most fully developed character in the film (Hans is too inhuman to be quite as real). Shosanna’s death is a rejection of any sort of political reading in the film and to increase her tragedy.
While Tarantino draws greatly from Italian pop culture by mimicing Sergio Leone films, especially in the first chapter and also the Hollywood “men on mission movie,” a la Dirty Dozen, he is captivated with German film culture of this period. He chooses not to talk much about Hollywood other than a passing reference to MGM and David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind). It talks little about French cinema, even though it is set in France. It mostly considers 1930s post-expressionist cinema and parodies the 1940s propaganda films. He duplicates the loving and obsessive photography that German directors gave their leading ladies, especially Marlene Dietrich. While Bridget Von Hammersmark seems loosely based on Marlene, she is a supporting character that represents the glamour of cinema in this movie (which functions also as a love letter to the artform of film).
Therefore, Shosanna gets more of that special treatment and helps him develop her as the central protagonist of the piece. She is the face of Jewish Revenge and she literally gets the last laugh at the Nazis as they roast in her trap. She, as the movie, literally comes alive through the smoke and reaches out to kill the Nazis. The symbolism is far more haunting than watching the Bear Jew blow away Nazis from the balcony. She gets the last laugh.
Her death acts on several levels. It first makes her a tragic character and gives some artistic pathos to the proceedings. But it also goes full circle in perverting the “nice guy” cliché. It also further stands as red herring to deceive audiences trying to put morality on Tarantino’s movie. There is a scene of Nazis laughing at dead Americans. You can claim he is saying the Basterds (or Shosanna) are no better. But it is a trap, because the nazis are really evil BASTARDS. Here, Shosanna shows a bit of humanity that she has had to lock away for the last 4 years after her family’s blood was splattered on her face. She sees the humanity in a Nazi, the trap of moralizing it. And she is killed for it.
Why didn’t Tarantino go for the more feminist PC ending with a woman standing victorious? Because that is how his last three movies ended. Seriously, check them out. The whole point is even though he gives us the cathartic gratification of seeing Hitler die at the hands of Jewish Americans, what you expect to happen doesn’t. Zoller isn’t a nice guy who wins Shosanna’s heart and gives up being a Nazi. The villain does not die even though Aldo (Brad Pitt) could have killed him at the end and the female protagonist does not get to live. It isn’t because he is talking down to women, but he is neither pandering to male or female audiences. He doesn’t want political theories or opinions to ultimately be placed on this film, so he contradicts himself intentionally and gives nobody something to hang on, beyond hating Nazis. And after thoroughly confusing his audience he declares he has made a masterpiece. Shosanna walking away the victor with Marcel is just too Hollywood post-mainstream feminism for him.
As for Von Hammersmark her death was not meant to sexually gratify the audience. It was meant to disturb them. Nobody cheered when she died (and the few who write happily about it on the Internet tend to come off as the equivalent of sexually frustrated empty-headed rednecks). Hans Landa is so calm and friendly (even as he is having people executed) the whole movie we never see the monster underneath. This is his “Hannibal Lecter” moment to show what he really is. Why a woman? Because Tarantino is playing with gender stereotypes by already having established Von Hammersmark as the essence of Hollywood beauty or classic cinematic glamour. It is supposed to make the audience uncomfortable. Add to that she is helpless with a broken leg it makes him all the more despicable. There was some sexual undertones to that moment. But only to infer that he is sexually frustrated. One senses he had a pass with Von Hammersmark that did not end well with him and this is in some way his cathartic revenge. He also carries a huge pipe at the beginning, Tarantino is not being subtle in implying the man is compensating for his inadequacies. And before any suggest it was just the horror of being betrayed, he betrays his homeland within minutes of killing Von Hammersmark. It was sexually impotent, weak man lashing out and showing his true colors.
Just wanted to add that to the of a feminist reading of this film. Also, furthermore check out Kill Bill, Jackie Brown and Death Proof. While the first and last on the list are gratuitously violent, they both feature strong women who come out on top (Kill Bill it being over the woman’s right to have a child without the father and Death Proof about women taking out and stalking the typical B-stalker woman killer). And Jackie Brown is the best movie of the three which is a typical, but Tarantino-ized caper where instead of being George Clooney, Brad Pitt and a virtual male’s club behind it all, it is a woman playing a bunch of men as saps from scene 1.
This review adds to the conversation in several ways.
The Forward had an interview with Tarantino, and there was an interesting bit (with regards to this conversation) about how the movie developed. He originally conceived of the Shoshanna character as a lone assassin getting her revenge, but a lot of that ended up in Kill Bill.
As a side note, on the role of women in mainstream cinema and its relationship to feminism, I was somewhat stunned to read the following line in Roger Ebert’s review:
“Shosanna calculatingly flirts with Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi war hero and now movie star[.]”
Shoshanna “calculatingly flirts”? Really? Far as I am from contemplating the possibility that someone like Ebert can review a film without actually watching it, I am left to assume that in Ebert’s book, flatly and explicitly rejecting a man’s advances over and over amounts to nothing less than calculated flirtation. I am not suggesting that Ebert is overtly misogynist, but he does betray an adherence to the classic misogynistic principle that once a man decides that he will have a certain woman, that woman is in no position to reject him. Simply by attracting a man (by being young, pretty, intriguing, or merely female), she has expressed that she wants it. If she flirts with the guy, she’s flirting, and if she tells him to go to hell, she’s still flirting (calculatingly), because that’s just playing hard-to-get, don’t you know. Incidentally, that’s exactly how “nice guys” like Zoller see it.
We’ve got some neoNazis protesting in my city tomorrow at a day laborer site but that’s all the info they’ll give out until tomorrow. Except they pretty much already gave the location out just by saying that. They picked the wrong neighborhood to protest. Well, they’ll do better recognizance next time. I guess they’re trying to start a chapter here.
There’s going to be a counter rally at City Hall with organizations and churches getting involved. It’s almost funny how shocked the people who bash undocumented immigrants are at the fact that they’ve attracted neo-Nazis when everyone knows the Nazi flags that are waved at Minutemen marches and rallies in this state.
“Nice” or not, you can forget who they were especially when they are.
Wow — he really failed to follow the movie whatsoever. That’s amazing.
Radfem, good luck with the counter-rally!
Yes, good luck with the counter-rally. I’m sure a lot of people here know more than I do about counter-protesting the far-right, but let me offer that Neo-Nazis want polarizing confrontation. It helps solidify the identity of newcomers who might still be on the fence, and it encourages their sense of victimization. That’s part of the reason they always choose “the wrong neighborhood.” There’s a lot of disagreement, but my view is that quiet protest works best.
Thanks Amp!
They were supposed to announce their protest location today and they delayed it until tomorrow. I think they’re feeling the scene out. The counter demonstration is actually in a different location than their rally. The neighborhood is aware of possibly having them show up there and if they want support, they’ll ask and they haven’t done that. They prefer asking for it rather than people showing up unannounced and that’s their prerogative.
The day laborers have been hit hard by BP sweeps lately so there are fewer there.
The Nazis will probably get some strange looks but if they’re looking for a polarized reaction, then they didn’t pick out their neighborhood very well. Unless they’re viewed as an Aryan gang by some people living there.
Nine Nazis, surrounded by police and about 100 people at one demonstration across the street and a big rally down town. Most of the people in the neighborhood kind of watched both.
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