Monday, May 17, 2010

Inglourious Basterds: Fairy-Tale War Film and Conservative Ideology

According to Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, knowledge is justified narratively. In prior periods of time, there were meta-narratives that people ascribed to. Such meta-narratives provided a framework for understanding and knowledge all sorts of different ideas and knowledge claims. Now, however (at least in the United States and the West), there is a general distrust of meta-narratives. In particular there is a distrust of dominant meta-narrative of the enlightenment, that of reason and the scientific method. While some people certainly believe in meta-narratives (witness the number of people who take the Bible as literal truth), culturally, we no longer have a single meta-narrative that we believe in or that provides unity. Instead, we have fragmentation and a diverse array of narratives which we use to justify all sorts of different knowledge claims.
For some time, it seemed that there was however, one narrative that people did not question by and large, that of history. People tend to believe that the past has actually occurred as we understand it. Certainly there is an understanding that history, our stories of the past, were written by individuals and groups and so may not be completely accurate. There remained however a general idea that the past happened, and while our understanding may be imperfect and partial, it is not wholly inaccurate. As such, we preferred our stories of the past to match up with our understanding of the past. This was particularly true in entertainment. Stories of the past needed to reflect our understanding of the past.
Now, however, we can see that something has changed. We have come to the point that we take everything as just another story, another fiction, to be received and interpreted by the audience. In August 2009, we saw the release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which seamlessly blends depictions portrayals of Nazi-occupied France with a modern day fairy-tale. Judging by its popular success, the audience was perfectly willing to forgive that the film clearly portrays events that never happened with the successful assassination of Hitler in a movie theatre in Paris in June of 1944. The ireverance towards history is forgiven because the film is entertaining. The audience takes pleasure in watching American soldiers scalp Nazi's, and has not complaint that there is a blending of fact and fiction.
In addition to the blending of fact with fiction, there is a clear and conscious blending of style. On the one hand, it is a war movie with a motivational speech given by Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine that is clearly reminiscent of the film Patton. On the other hand, the film opens with the text “Once Upon a Time,” just as many children's fairy tales do. This, however, is not a fairy tale in a far away lad a long time ago. This is a fair tale set in 1944 France, during the middle of the Nazi occupation. A time and place in which there are still people alive today who were present. There are references to and portrayal of real historical figures alongside the characters from Tarantino's imagination. The setting is real, individual scenes are clearly portrayed to evoke a sense of reality, such as when a Nazi soldier asks a young french woman her name and she interprets this as a demand to see her papers, a demand he had every right to make, and which she could not refuse.
Tarantino is often understood to be a postmodern film-maker. His films are very consciously a pastiche of different styles, of scenes derived from different films. Many of his films have been narratively fragmented, such that an understanding of the order of events of a film can only be gleaned at the conclusion of the film as in Pulp Fiction, in which the opening scene is the end of the film and the rest of the scenes are all a jumble in when they occurred in time. Inglourious Basterds follows a much more conventional narrative structure, only occasionally fragmenting its story with unannounced flashbacks. Instead, Inglourious Basterds betrays its postmodernity in that is is a pastiche of genres, and a parody of that staple of modernist cinema, the war movie.
Postmodern theory or philosophy is often critiqued as being value neutral. That is, it is unconcerned with real socio-economic conditions or the reality of oppression in society. Instead, it is concerned with language and symbols. It takes everything, even us as people to be nothing more than constructions of language, a collection of signs to be unpacked. Others have ctiricized postmodernism for offering an explanation of oppression for which there is no resolution. While such oppression is seen as only a construction of language, we too are a construction of language, so we can never escape from our linguistic situation. As such, postmodern theory is generally understood to be only offering an explanation, and not actually critiquing the conditions of people in the world at all, that is there is no suggestion that the conditions are to be seen as good or bad, merely understood. Building upon this, postmodernism is critiqued as lacking any morality. That is, following the line of postmodern reasoning, all morality is just a linguistic and cultural construction, as such, there is really no ground upon which to stand and assert that something is immoral, simply that it is from a different cultural construction, and not inherently better or worse than our own beliefs.
However, such critiques do not always hold true to art (particularly cinema) that is considered postmodern. As a cultural artifact, film is almost always ideological, particularly those films that are intended for entertainment value that fall into the realm of popular culture. Popular culture always contains ideological elements, either in support of or opposing dominant ideologies. According to the article “Just Like Independence Day!” The Falling Towers on 9/11 and the Hegemonic Function of Intertextuality, the film Independence Day was a work of modernist cinema, and though it was released prior to September 11, 2001 and the events of 9/11 the spike in rentals following 9/11 and a close textual analysis of the film reveals that it was taken following 9/11 to reaffirm the dominant American ideology of the day, particularly the rhetoric of President Bush. By contrast, the same article argues that the postmodern film Fight Club undermined and questioned the dominant ideology of the day. The article argues, following the reasoning presented by Boggs, that postmodern cinema with it “thematic emphasis on chaos, intrigue, and paranoia, death of a hero, disjointed narrative structures, and embrace of dystopia,” questions and critiques hegemonic ideologies. As such, the article breaks down how Independence Day supports the hegemonic ideology through the modernis focus on form, design, determinacy, and genital/phallic featured and contrasts this to the postmodern Fight Club with its anti-form, chance/chaos, indeterminacy, and polymorphous/androgynous features. These elements, which clearly delineate the two films as being modernist and postmodern in approach respectively also reflect how the two films relate to hegemony. The modernist features of the former reinforce hegemony while the postmodern features of the latter question hegemony.
The same article, likewise, treats Tarantino's earlier film Pulp Fiction as a work of postmodern cinema; evidenced by its disjointed narrative, lack of a clear hero, chaos over design and indeterminacy. By extension, the article implies that Pulp Fiction and all postmodern cinema should in some way question or subvert hegemony. How then, are we to treat Inglourious Basterds; is it a modern film, or a postmodern film; does it support or subvert a dominant ideology?
Given its subversion of the narrative of history, its pastiche of styles (fairy tale and war movie),
it seems to clearly belong to the category of postmodern cinema and not modern cinema. While its narrative is more linear that Pulp Fiction, it is still fragmented as it is broken up into chapters that have either thematic or temporal gaps between them. As such, the film seems to most clearly fall into the realm of postmodern cinema. However, looking at the film ideologically, Boggs' conclusion that postmodern cinema questions or subverts the hegemonic ideology comes into question.
Structurally and narratively, the film is clearly postmodern. However, the film also seems to have a clear delineation between good and evil, it is after all a story of American soldiers fighting the Nazi's in occupied France. The American soldiers led by Brad Pitt are clearly masculine, while the Nazi's, particularly Colonel Landa are more effeminate. There is no crisis of American masculinity present in this war film, in contrast to Mark Straw's take on how American men are emasculated in Gulf War films and how this is crucial to the perceived victimhood that is part of American national identity. In Tarantino's war film, the men are men, the women are all beautiful dames, and the Nazi's are effeminate villains to be destroyed.
While it is easy to read the Nazi's as clear villains, reviled as they are in contemporary mainstream culture, Tarantino's American soldiers can be harder to read as traditional heroes. These are not soldiers fighting in a battlefield, or storming the beaches. These are soldiers behind enemy lines, whose express purpose is to terrorize the enemy and inspire fear in them. To this end, they beat their victims mercilessly, scalp them as they lay dying on the ground, and mutilate those they allow to live by carving a swastika into their foreheads. Such are clearly not the actions of soldiers, at least not as commonly depicted. However, the film inspires no revulsion in the fewer at such actions. Instead, the film plays such actions as being justified. In Tarantino's world, such actions are justified in the fight against evil.
This is similar to how the Bush administration authorized the torture of prisoners to extract information, and indeed, former members of the Administration continue to argue in support of such activities occurring with the justification that they saved lives. Inglourious Basterds doesn't offer a critique of American soldiers torturing the enemy to extract information, instead it revels in and seems to clearly support such activities. While the film was released in 2009, it was made during the years of the Bush administration when the military was sanctioned to carry out activities that we ourselves considered to be torture following World War II.
So, Tarantino's postmodern fairy-tale war film seems to be fully supporting a hegeminic ideology of us against them, of American militarism, and the justification for torturing the enemy in pursuit of liberty and vengeance. It is telling that Tarantino's soldiers are all Jewish-Americans, and that the cinema owner responsible for locking the German high command in the theatre and burning it to the ground was a Jewish girl who witnessed her family murdered by the Nazi's when they were found in hiding. In the name of vengeance for the atrocities carried out by the Nazi's against the Jewish people and bringing liberty to occupied France, atrocities of war are fully supported and justified. Just as following 9/11, in the name of revenge against the terrorists and bringing freedom and liberty to the Middle East, the American government authorized torture and other atrocities.
This brings into question Boggs' argument that postmodern cinema questions or subverts the dominant ideology. With Inglourious Basterds we have a postmodern film that seems fully in support of, to the extent of relishing in, the activities authorized by the dominant ideology. As such, calling a film postmodern is not sufficient to mark it as being critical or subversive. Indeed, the stylistic features of postmodern cinema, going so far as the very questioning of meta-narratives that Lyotard defined as the core of postmodernism can be used to support a dominant ideology. There may be cases where postmodern films are indeed critical of dominant ideologies, but this can hardly be seen to be a feature of postmodern cinema. Nor can it be said that postmodern cinema is totally nihilistic or devoid of any value claims whatsoever as others have argued about postmodernism in general. Indeed, Tarantino's film clearly advances a moral judgement and can also be read as being in support of the dominant ideology. As such, postmodernism, at least in its cinematic form, for all that it plays with narrative and received meaning is certainly not devoid of meaning or argument.

Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Gournelos, Ted. “ Landscape and Instability in American Visual Culture: The Lord of the Rings, Matrix, and Terminator Trilogies.” International Communication Association, May, 2007, San Francisco.

“'Just Like Independence Day!' The Falling Towers on 9/11 and the Hegemonic Function of Intertextuality.” International Communication Association, May, 2005, New York.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 62-92.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 355-364.

Sobchack,Vivian C. “The Postmorbid Condition.” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. 6th ed. Eds. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 414-418.

Straw, Mark. “Traumatized Masculinity and American National Identity in Hollywood's Gulf War.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6 (2008): 127-143.

1 comment:

  1. if inglourius basterds was presented as being potentially historically accurate (ie if the history was 'right') then it'd be deceiving we the audience and he the auteur on (I think it comes to) 4 levels. (1 author fools audience that the text can be read accurately 2 author fools themselves they can create a text which can be read accurately by an audience 3 audience fools themselves they can read the text accurately 4 audience fools author his/her a text can be can be read accurately)

    So the author, in order to prevent the audience fooling (deceiving) themseves that the film might be an accurate representation - the film must be very clearly NOT an accurate representation.

    But although at the level of detail it could NEVER be accurate, and should never attempt to be so... the text can honestly communicate the broader truths - in this case the Yanks won coz they love freedom and justice and they're cool to boot, the Nazis lost because they're arrogant, evil d**kheads (technical term - the cutting into the forehead symbolised the slicing off of a head-grown phallus imho).

    Like Brad Pitt's character - you couldn't understand a word he said, but you always knew what he meant.

    To be fair, I freaking LOVED this film. Tarantino went all ubermensch on our asses.

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