THE READ DECEMBER 15, 2010
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Last week, I attended the Marrakech Film Festival. I had never been to a film festival before, but the experience was in some ways no different from what I had imagined about Cannes or Sundance, albeit with a somewhat lower glamour quotient. The opening gala, complete with red carpet and paparazzi, was staged in a swanky convention hall surrounded by five-star hotels. The requisite stars made appearances: Jury chairman John Malkovich spoke acceptable French to his TV interviewer, while Keanu Reeves, displaying some alarming facial hair, didn’t bother to try. Some of the stars may have toned down their usual style of dress in deference to their Arab hosts (the festival was sponsored by Morocco’s king, Mohammed VI, whose patronage was gratefully and frequently invoked): Marion Cotillard partially obscured her décolletage with feathers, and Susan Sarandon went so far as to wear long sleeves. But Eva Mendes strutted for the photographers on opening night in a backless lavender gown, and later appeared in an above-the-knee strapless concoction.
The festival had an international (if largely French) orientation, but one of its goals was clearly to highlight the indigenous Moroccan film-making community. Among the actors and directors being celebrated was the Moroccan film-maker Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi, whose work I wasn’t familiar with. While other festival guests, together with the stars on the jury, were watching competition films in a vast auditorium, I attended a screening of Tazi’s 1989 film Badis in a smaller hall downstairs, sparsely filled with a mainly Arab audience. This remarkable film takes place in the year 1974 in the fishing village of its title, located on Morocco’s northern coast. The village has only one distinction: It was part of Morocco’s Spanish colony, and the Spanish army maintained a small base there, evidenced mainly by the presence of a single soldier tasked with crossing the village each morning to draw water from its well.
When the film begins, a schoolteacher and his wife have just arrived in the town from Casablanca. Their big-city sophistication immediately contrasts with the villagers: Both are dressed in Western-style clothing, and the wife has an aura of particular cultivation. The teacher, we soon learn, suspects his wife of infidelity and has brought her to this remote location as punishment. (Whether she was actually unfaithful or not is never clarified.) Here she won’t be able to deceive him, he tells her, because the entire village will be keeping an eye on her. No tenderness is evident between these two: He speaks to her gruffly and forbids her even to go out for lunch in the local café, while she sulks in response to his orders.
Solace for the teacher’s wife comes in the form of a local girl named Moira, whose father, a fisherman, rules her with a similarly draconian hand. The two have lived alone ever since Moira’s mother, who was Spanish, escaped back to her native country, an act for which the father continues to punish their daughter. Moira, who dresses up in her mother’s old gowns and sings Spanish songs to herself to escape the drudgery of life as her father’s housemaid, soon begins a flirtation with the Spanish soldier at the well. Meanwhile, she catches the eye of the schoolteacher, who suggests that his wife teach her how to read and write as a stratagem for getting her under his roof. It soon becomes clear that the two women are more interested in pouring out their miserable hearts to each other than in studying the Koran. Together, they come up with a plan to escape the village, which they finally become desperate enough to put into action.
When the men awaken to discover the women missing, the entire village is mobilized to hunt them down. Their escape route, which runs along the beach, is entirely exposed, and they are brought back in a fishing boat. Watching the men of the village gather around the two women in a circle on the beach, I ought to have realized what was about to happen, but somehow it did not process. Not until the first stone was raised did I understand. The stoning of the women was staged tastefully, without excessive gore, but it was among the most shocking things I have ever seen on a movie screen. As the scene ended and I sat back in my seat, shaken, something even more astonishing occurred. From the audience around me there came a smattering of applause.
Until that moment, really, I had forgotten where I was. Seduced by the glitz of the film festival, by the charm and warmth of the Moroccans I had met, by my vision of Morocco as one of the most free and open countries in the Arab world, I had forgotten that there is also a different reality here. Engrossed in a beautiful, sensitively made film about the sufferings of two women under the constraints imposed by male society—a kind of Moroccan Madame Bovary—I had somehow failed to realize that the rest of the audience might not interpret the movie with the same sympathy for the women involved as I did. And which reading did the director intend? Signals throughout—the loving and gentle portrayal of the two women, their luscious beauty and their tender treatment of each other, in contrast to the unkindness and brutality of the men—suggested that Tazi, an accomplished director, meant his film to be sympathetic to the women and critical of the strictures of Islamic law. (Another of his films, which I saw a few days later and which dealt with polygamy in a way that was both humorous and gently deprecatory to the husband, reinforced this impression.) But a companion suggested that parts of the film might have been deliberately ambiguous—not necessarily because Tazi himself believes that wayward women ought to be stoned, but in concession to a public for whom that does not constitute an atrocity, or a revelation.
When we read about stoning in the American media, it is usually in the context in which Bernard-Henri Lévy presented it in his recent TNR piece about Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian woman accused of adultery and murder who is currently in custody awaiting her execution. Stoning, in the Western imagination, takes place deep within the Muslim world, in a country known for its extremism, as a sentence handed down by a court of shadowy clerics—not in broad daylight on a sunlit Mediterranean beach, performed impromptu by a group of villagers against two women who were their neighbors.
Badis, a fictional film, was made in 1989 and set a decade and a half earlier; it cannot be understood as a report on the situation in Morocco today. And this was one crowd, on one evening, at one screening; and need it even be said that applause is not the same as stoning itself? But, as the lights went up in the theater and the men and women around me calmly gathered their belongings, I could not help but remember that in an Arab country—as Mona El-Naggar demonstrated last week in a New York Times piece on the Miss Arab World beauty pageant—liberation, at least for women, inevitably comes with limits. The glitz, the red carpet, and the celebrities might have been the same, but the atmosphere in the theater that night felt very far from Cannes or Sundance.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor for The New Republic.
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46 comments
I think you need more evidence as to why these people were clapping. We need exit polls.
- Nusholtz
December 15, 2010 at 9:02am
Ruth Franklin, Appalling, yes, but you should get out more often. Actually, just take a look at the reader comment pages on your average American newspaper, especially if the article being commented on has any racial, gender, or religious angle. (The Washington Post comment pages are among the worst.) It's like turning over a rock. Creepy, crawly things everywhere. Dan
- dbuck1
December 15, 2010 at 9:03am
It is very hard not to feel contempt for a culture that practices such barbarism, but then I remember the war in Iraq, water boarding, and other instances of our own barbarism, and the feeling shifts from contempt to shame. I think of all we could have done, but have not, for the women of Darfur, and of what we have done to men and women in places like Abu Ghraib, and I recognize myself and my neighbors, gathered on that beach in Morocco. At least those who throw stones do not pretend that the blood is not on their hands. It is amusing, if darkly so, that we regard the Muslim world with such disdain and have so little sense of our own damnable behavior. Neil
- purcellneil
December 15, 2010 at 9:06am
Disgusting. That sort of moral depravity can't be denounced strongly and consistently enough--I don't care what sort of cultural roots it has.
- bmoodie
December 15, 2010 at 11:30am
"It is amusing, if darkly so, that we regard the Muslim world with such disdain and have so little sense of our own damnable behavior." We question and rue what we did and could have done. They applaud what they do. You still don't see the difference?
- karlwk
December 15, 2010 at 1:47pm
Yeah, I'm with bmoodie and karlwk, and call "false equivalence" on Neil. Our culture sucks in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot better than this sickening shit. The closest you could come to this sort of thing in the West is to point to lynching in the U.S., but that's in our past, and the question is whether you would expect audience members at a film festival in, say, Atlanta today to cheer the depiction of a lynching. I don't think so. Many years ago, yes. (See Birth of a Nation.) Today, not so much.
- JakeH
December 15, 2010 at 6:11pm
I believe the name is "Tonto," not "Toto," and getting popular culture references wrong is worse than not referencing them at all.
- ironyroad
December 15, 2010 at 6:49pm
Based on the summary and review, I find the events portrayed in the movie disgusting and horrifying. I agree with JakeH's description as "sickening shit." However, I have yet to see any reasoning for this condemnation besides It horrifies me. Can any one reading here propose (briefly enough to fit in a comment box, or reference a convincing book on ethics if the former is not possible), that provides a more convincing and persuasive argument why stoning people we disapprove of is wrong?
- skahn
December 15, 2010 at 7:17pm
skahn, you're not serious, are you? It's hard to think of an ethical norm that this activity *doesn't* violate!
- JakeH
December 15, 2010 at 7:44pm
It should be noted that despite the enticing title at the top pointer (or whatever it's called) "I Went to a Film in Which Women Were Stoned to Death—And the Audience Applauded", the author herself reports a "smattering of applause" in the account itself. Smattering, as in very very few. She did not ask what they meant by these applause. Maybe they were applauding the art and courage of the director for tackling such a difficult subject. When I went to see “Inglourious Basterds” the first week it came out, I was sitting next to a group of young men who were speaking in Arabic amongst themselves, and who seemed strangely elated, almost giddy with excitement and anticipation. When the movie ended, they were the only people in the audience who applauded enthusiastically. To this day I cannot quite make sense of a group of young Arabs getting so excited about a movie in which a bunch of tough Jews goes about Europe killing Nazis and scalping them. Another point: unlike in Iran or Saudi Arabia where these stonings of women and gays are mandated by the state courts, this was a lynching. If anything it reminded me of another famous and horrifying scene from Zorba the Greek, the slaughtering of the widow played by Irene Papas, by ignorant rural angry and eager men for pretty much the same provocation as these two women gave.
- noga1
December 15, 2010 at 9:11pm
I was thinking of "Zorba the Greek" also, without doubt a great film. I'm wondering the people were applauding the film and not the abominable stoning?
- Sophia
December 16, 2010 at 1:20pm
Sophia: The more I consider Franklin's account the more convinced I am that she misunderstood the applause. Unless she is not telling us something about the people she saw applauding, about what they were wearing, how they were acting, etc. Marakesh is a pretty cosmopolitan, Europeanized city. And a posh affair like that? What kind of people go to see films in film festivals? It doesn't compute.
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 3:20pm
Noga, this more about the Arab audience members: I remember talking to a friend of mine a few years ago who was living in Mexico at the time. She was saying that she had seen The Magnificent Seven in a re-run theater in Mexico City, and that it had been incredibly popular, with cheering etc. I expressed some surprise, and asked if the audience wasn't bothered by the clichés in the movie, the Americans coming down to rescue the simple Mexican peasants and so on. She said no, Mexicans didn't really see westerns that way -- they viewed them as elemental folk tales, almost. They would identify with the good guys no matter who they were (obviously an intellectual college audience or whatever might be different but that's a tiny minority). Could it have been that the Arab guys sort of "short-circuited" the specific plot/setting of Inglourious Basterds and saw instead a bloody elemental revenge drama?
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 3:52pm
malahat -- I stand corrected. I was thinking Lone Ranger, not Wizard. Mea maxima culpa, as the Cowardly Lion said.
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 3:55pm
"Could it have been that the Arab guys sort of "short-circuited" the specific plot/setting of Inglourious Basterds and saw instead a bloody elemental revenge drama?" Yes, it could. The same thought occurred to me. And since they were all speaking Arabic, and they were young men, and if they were educated in an Arab country, chances are they wouldn't know anything about the Holocaust anyway. Or they were just Tarantino aficionados only interested in the action. (I wish I had the guts the ask them. They were sitting right next to me) Did you see the movie, btw?
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 4:34pm
I did, and I have it on DVD too. I don't know if it's a similar thing, but I'm an admirer of Wolfgang Petersen's movie Das Boot (I saw the slightly longer TV version in Germany too). The film is so authentic in its recreation of that environment, so filled with tension and terror and humor, and Jürgen Prochnow so compelling as the submarine commander, that for two hours I was totally with that Nazi German U-Boat crew.
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 5:08pm
My son likes "Das Boot", too. I don't like submarine movies (except for Ice Station Zebra).
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 5:15pm
My point was that we readily acknowledge and condemn the brutality of other cultures and express that condemnation without the slightest acknowledgment of the brutality of our own culture. I am not making an equivalence judgment here but I am saying that we don't need to go to Morocco to find examples of barbarous behavior, and - more importantly - that our response to such barbarism, when we are the actors, is as appalling as the applause in that theater. We are largely indifferent to our own actions, yet pause to shake our heads in disgust at the deeds of others. Why does Obama not punish those who have tortured? Because it is a political loser in a country that simply does not care about its own acts of barbarity, and will not be held to account. Neil
- purcellneil
December 16, 2010 at 5:17pm
Well noga and Sophia, I suppose you could be right -- we weren't there -- but I gather that the applause occurred in the middle of the movie, which is ususally reserved for cheering the events depicted, as opposed to the artistry of the filmic moment or some such, which seems like quite a stretch. And she did say it was just a smattering. I don't *want* to believe it, but it seems possible that she's got it right.
- JakeH
December 16, 2010 at 5:18pm
Jake: Both are possible, but I have to say that Franklin doesn't seem to be able to read her surroundings very well (I wouldn't be, either) and -- most importantly -- she doesn't know whether it was men who applauded, or women, or both. That might be important. Noga: Ah, Ice Station Zebra. All those cardboard icebergs at the denoument. But among other pleasures a wonderful cameo performance by Patrick McGoohan, with his teeth-gritting ". . . and get me there!"
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 5:35pm
I know it's not really a "cameo performance," he's a major character and third billing in the cast or whatever, but it always seemed to me way more eccentric and original that the movie itself.
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 5:38pm
Neil, okay, but I don't think that it's necessary to say 50 Hail Marys for our own sins before we can talk about others'. We are hypocrites if we condemn others for doing what we do. But such charges, like yours, are usually overstated. So, for example, the Nazis had fun making hay out of the fact that blacks were mistreated in the U.S. while we're on our high holy horse about democracy and human rights. Do you think Hitler had a point, or wouldn't you say that it's rather beside the point? And his point was probably better than your comparisons, and there's certainly no defending Jim Crow, but, no, it's not in the same class as the Holocaust. The argument falters when you really compare the two things. Neil, I'm sorry, but I don't buy that a little bit of light torture because we're scared of terrorists is in the same class as a patriarchal culture that routinely and egregiously violates the human rights of women to the point of occasionally carrying out self-righteous ritual murders! You could argue that the Iraq War involved two 9/11's worth of civilian deaths just during the air attack itself, never mind the disasterous aftermath, and that's a good, and underappreciated point to make. But it's still not the same. Suppose someone supported the Iraq War because she was worried about weapons of mass destruction, which were thought to exist, and figured that removing Saddam would be a net positive for the Iraqi people and the people of the region. I would have argued against that person at the time, as I did, but is that person a monster? Akin to happily viewing, cheering, or participating in the *hunting down* and ritual murder of women simply because they want to escape their Dogvillian village prison (referring to the Lars von Trier film)? Doesn't it seem kind of ridiculous to even compare the two? As I said before, lynching would be a good comparison. I don't think any of your other comparisons really belong in the same paragraph.
- JakeH
December 16, 2010 at 5:43pm
"Patrick McGoohan, " Ah, an actor my son admires enormously. He watched the entire "Prisoner" series not so long ago and has been so impressed by it that he keeps analyzing it and trying to figure out its meaning from every possible angle. In fact he decided to model himself after McGoohan and has taken to wearing dark turtle neck shirts like him.
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 5:52pm
Speaking of Inglourious Basterds, I found it unnecessary for both women to get killed -- really disappointing! I thought it was all going to be a revenge fantasy cooked up in the mind of the Jewish girl while trapped under the floorboards -- a sort of twisted Anne Frank story, where instead of happily contemplating a tree while hiding from Nazis, she instead imagines blowing them away, with the help of a strange outfit of Jewish soldiers led by a stereotypical American she might conconct in her mind's eye from the movies she's seen. Meanwhile, the daughters would somehow kill the Nazis outside the house, take one of their guns, and shoot the main Nazi, and everyone would live happily ever after. Now, come on, what's wrong with *that*?
- JakeH
December 16, 2010 at 5:57pm
It's a good idea. But it makes me think again that one curious element at the beginning of Basterds is that Landa becomes responsible for the "fantasy" of the rest of the movie in the sense that he seems to almost not care that Shoshana escapes from the farmhouse. The way he calls her name across the fields (does he deliberately aim wide with his shot, or does he just miss and put it down to her good luck?) like a sardonic cheer is strange, as if he wants her to do exactly what she is going to do.
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 6:34pm
I also noticed the strangeness in that moment of Shoshana's flight. It is my opinion that the scene is a very important moment in the movie. She seems to run without arriving, running away without much distancing. There is some infinitesimal shift during those seconds which I cannot be absolutely sure whether I saw it or just imagined it.What I think is happening is a rupture in reality. At some point during her run, the action shifts from the actual, irreversible past as we know it, into the future fantasy which Tarantino concocted. From that point onwards, everything that unfolds is clearly in the realm of impossibility.
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 7:00pm
Exactly! That's why I thought it would turn out to be a more literal fantasy within the film -- Shoshana's in particular. She imagines getting away and, being a Tarantino-esque little movie buff, she imagines outlandish, elaborate, and cinematic revenge. But she gets killed and the action continues, so that doesn't work, and we don't return to the farmhouse. The actual movie kind of bummed me out, because my reason for caring -- Shoshana, the protagonist, the heart of the movie -- got rubbed out, rather arbitrarily I thought. Pitt and the guys don't really cut it as characters to care about -- they're too over-the-top. So that leaves Diane Kruger, who gets killed, and Landa, who's a bad guy. The last third of the movie was really doing everything it could to take me out of it. Tarantino is not above a happy ending. Pulp Fiction has a great ending (though it happens in the middle). Bruce Willis does the honorable thing -- helps Marcellus -- in pursuit of a meaningful talisman -- evidence of a heart -- and rides off into the sunset on a motorcycle called "Grace." John Travolta, meanwhile, gets killed, because he was a vacuous, soulless hit man, unlike Samuel L. Jackson, who suffers a bout of conscience, professes faith in a higher purpose, and intervenes in the robbery. Jackie Brown -- probably my favorite Tarantino movie -- also has a feel-good ending. So it's not as though Tarantino is too hip for happy. He just adds tang. In fact, he's probably too tangy and silly for anything *other* than happy. You have to earn unhappy plot points. I often don't like Holocaust movies -- say, The Piano or Life Is Beautiful -- because they try to wring some redemption for the human spirit out of a situation that simply doesn't allow for it, and, in so doing, minimize the scale and force of the historical circumstances. Pretty piano playing is no match for a million-ton pile of Nazi shit. But *this* movie isn't serious. There's no pretense at doing a serious Holocaust movie, so it's oddly not offensive in the way that more earnest Holocaust-as-greeting-card movies can be. Also, because it's not serious, it doesn't have to be true to the moment and have an unhappy ending. Let's see Shoshana and family make it through in a tribute to tangy girl power. Sounds pretty Tarantino-esque to me. Damn, I wish I could redo the movie my way.
- JakeH
December 16, 2010 at 8:18pm
I think you're both missing some important things but it'll have to wait a while until I unload the benefit of my wisdom. Some of it is just subjective, of course, but still . . .
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 9:34pm
I'd just say as a quick trailer that the characters can't "evolve into something different and engrossing" because they are busy fighting WW2, and in the film its outcome isn't known yet.
- ironyroad
December 16, 2010 at 9:36pm
"Pitt and the guys don't really cut it as characters to care about -- they're too over-the-top. So that leaves Diane Kruger, who gets killed, and Landa, who's a bad guy." I think Landa pretty much owns the film. He terrifies, disgusts and attracts in equal measures. Every aspect of the movie is over the top, except for the first chapter, which was the only time the movie reflected historical reality. Two characters, Landa and Shoshana, get catapulted from reality into the impossible fantasy.
- noga1
December 16, 2010 at 9:43pm
Jake, I'm not saying we have to be silent about the atrocities of others. I am saying that the words turn to dust in our mouths, and that nobody with any sense at all is listening to us; that we utter our critiques without any shame for our own misdeeds is enough to invalidate our protests. We have no standing. We should do something about that, but we don't care. We don't have to care - we are above the law ourselves, are not accountable to anyone else, and have no plans to hold ourselves to account. So go ahead and point out the sins of others, and I will agree with you that they are often worse than any of ours, but I won't expect anyone to take you seriously on the subject. Neither will anyone else outside the USA> Neil
- purcellneil
December 16, 2010 at 9:52pm
Dude, I was being facetious. But I do have a couple of thoughts on it, regarding language and translation among others.
- ironyroad
December 17, 2010 at 12:19am
"I'd just say as a quick trailer that the characters can't "evolve into something different and engrossing" because they are busy fighting WW2, and in the film its outcome isn't known yet." Why can't the characters evolve because they are busy fighting? Characters can and do evolve, whatever they are busy doing. And as to the reason given, that "WW2, ..its outcome isn't known yet." does not make much sense. Charcaters evolve even when they are in the middle of a process whose outcome is not known. Were you just being nonsensical, ironyroad? Anyway, the fantasy was about bringing an end to the war by blowing up the whole Nazi leadership. And the fact is the even if the characters were not aware of how the war ended, the director and author of the movie knew very well.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 10:44am
Ok, here goes: Noga, I wasn't being nonsensical but I was just shooting from the hip. I can't quite recreate what it was I wanted to say, but I think I was making a fairly banal point that war movies have often quite limited space for character development (the innocence-to-experience structure being the most commonly available) and, apart from that, I think Tarentino's characters are often not so much characters as dark allegories -- they are people, not monsters, but their "personality" is always uneasy and unstable, psychotic in a way. malahat, I'm going back to your talk vs. shoot comment about the connection between spaghetti westerns and the basement bar scene. I agree with the, um, aesthetic proposition, so to speak, but I think what is going on in the bar is "shooting" except it's the German language rather than bullets. The barroom brawl or shoot-out has already been happening in the multi-side conversation (itself one of the most brilliant deployments of two/three languages and perfect subtitling I've ever seen in a movie), and the officer who's been sitting alone in the side cubicle comes out and barks "Wenn ich mich einmischen DARF!" (If I may intervene) acts the same as if he'd pulled out his gun and fired at the ceiling. I think it's rather important how much German is in this movie, as the languages seem to be at war too. I did find the film powerful and engrossing -- indeed, it's the most tense movie experience I'd had in a long time. But that's just subjective, I agree, and I could imagine people finding it frustrating or just disliking it. Jake -- I take your point about it not being a Holocaust film in any normal sense. But I one could, I believe, make a case for Basterds as a counterfactual revenge fantasy more about the history of the Einsatzgruppen or Polizeibattalione 101 than about, say, Auschwitz or Treblinka. But here's another odd thing about fantasy and impossibility in this movie. It's not just a story of Jewish revenge on the Nazis, it's also at one remove a story of Native American revenge on the white man. The Apache resistance to the U.S. cavalry and the loss of their lands is specificically invoked in lots of clear ways. So in a way a kind of double short-circuit takes place and the warrior spirit of the Apache, their courage and ruthlessness infuses the Jewish soldiers in their battle against the Nazis. The myths of the American West are clearly signalled in the theme music and the visual moves at the opening as the SS patrol approaches the farmhouse. In the western that Basterds isn't, but is too, someone would go after the killers and retribution would be exacted, as in True Grit or Once Upon a Time in the West or The Searchers, even though ethical categories would be bent and stretched -- in a pragmatic American way -- in the process. So I want to say that Inglourious Basterds begins at the moment Shoshana escapes Landa (or doesn't) and thereafter is the Sam Peckinpah western that we might have wanted WW2 to have been, where the methods of the evil guys are turned back on them -- the Jewish "Einsatzgruppen" striking naked terror into the Nazis's hearts -- but with the confusing historical irony that the Apache lost in the end. Although their spirit survives. Any of that make sense?
- ironyroad
December 17, 2010 at 12:55pm
"Noga, I wasn't being nonsensical but I was just shooting from the hip" Isn't it the same thing? "So I want to say that Inglourious Basterds begins at the moment Shoshana escapes Landa (or doesn't) " I also noted above (in a comment you ignored; so what else is new?) that this is a very important moment in the movie, where reality changes into fantasy. It's clever of Tarentino though to transfer two of characters from the historical reality into the fantasy, like it is done in some children's movies, like "Enchanted" where real life characters are transferred into an animated fairy tale world, and vice versa. But unlike the children's version, Tarentino creates confusion in the viewer who is not paying attention, as if it is one and the same story. It is not. Tarentino playing cat and mouse with the viewer? "the Jewish "Einsatzgruppen" striking naked terror into the Nazis's hearts --" This inverse parallelism is evident from Landa's nickname: "The Jew hunter" which I always assumed was meant to remind people of the "The Nazi Hunter". Consider the many layers of irony and retribution enfolded into this mirroring.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 1:31pm
Noga, get a grip. I didn't ignore your comment at all. First I said the following: ". . . that one curious element at the beginning of Basterds is that Landa becomes responsible for the 'fantasy' of the rest of the movie . . ." and then you replied: "I also noticed the strangeness in that moment of Shoshana's flight. It is my opinion that the scene is a very important moment in the movie . . ." And most of my comments after that in different posts have been, broadly, part of a discussion of the significance of that for the movie as a whole. I'm neither ignoring you nor even disagreeing with you.
- ironyroad
December 17, 2010 at 1:38pm
"Noga, get a grip. I didn't ignore your comment at all." It was a just a parenthetical complaint, ironyroad. I'd rather you paid less attention to that and more attention to what I had to say about the movie itself. Do you or do you not agree with my read of the "The Jew hunter"? Of the shift from historical time to fantasy land? I think people have a hard time making that shift, which is why some are not too happy about the entire project. BTW, I too thought the manipulation of language was masterful. Remember in the first chapter, when Landa, having conducted his interrogation in French, Switches from French to English, after he asks Perrier Lapadite whether the Jewish Dreyfus family could understand the language (They could not, so they would have no warning about what was to befall them). I think after that, the attentive viewer is conditioned to feel growing alarm whenever multi-lingual dialogues were taking place.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 2:30pm
Jake H (If you are still reading these comments), I am quite serious. What is the basis for your "ethical norms"? Your comment seems to boil down to "My ethical norms" are what I like or don't like. The ethical norms of the Arabs criticized in the review are what they like or don't like. As far as I can tell, that is what "ethical norms" boil down to. I believe this recognition is sometimes described as "nihilism." I would describe myself as an "ethical nihilist."
- skahn
December 17, 2010 at 3:20pm
Noga, yes I agree about the Jew Hunter/Nazi Hunter reversal -- there is something about Landa that is, as you say, terrifying and attractive etc simultaneously, and that something is in part the feeling we have that a sardonic intelligence and a capacity for empathy ("I think like a Jew") must be good things. So when they show up in the service of state terror and genocide there is a sharp disconnect. It was a peculiarity of Nazism that it could look bourgeois -- but in fact its character was a weapon aimed at civilized values. The SS officer could be genuinely courteous and urbane -- but he was out to murder you and yours all the same. And in a reversal of that reversal -- the Nazi Hunter has to think somewhat like a Nazi in order to hunt Nazis successfully? Does anyone have a comment on the "Apache" motif?
- ironyroad
December 17, 2010 at 3:36pm
Gee ironyroad, that's a wonderful explanation for the Landa phenomenon. I don't think I even dared to start figuring out the source of my fascination with him. I suspect that Tarantino must have been uneasily aware of this evil ambiguity because I remember him saying in an interview that he was enormously relieved when he found out that Christoph Waltz who plays Landa has a son who is a rabbi in Israel. Maybe that's why he couldn't bring himself to kill him at the end of the movie, though he did brand him.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 4:02pm
"Does anyone have a comment on the "Apache" motif?" It definitely adds an additional "glow" to the movie. It's the sort of detail that is so obvious you don't pay attention to it, until someone points out its subversive meaning.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 4:07pm
"Maybe that's why he couldn't bring himself to kill him at the end of the movie, though he did brand him." I just realized I spoke about Tarantino as if he were God. And I have to wonder if the whole idea for the movie didn't come to him in a flash: If I were God, what would WWII look like?
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 4:10pm
I'm not sure it's a negative stereotype. It's more like a complicated play with parallels and mirroring. In this movie, the Jews are to the Nazis as the Indians were to the whites. But American Jewish soldiers also inherit the warrior values of the Apache and revenge themselves on the Nazis in a way that upsets German stereotypes of the Karl May variety in which the Germans always imagined themselves romantically on the side of the Native Americans against encroaching civilization. I don't think, however, that Tarentino is making some kind of "postcolonial" equivalence between the destruction of North American Indians and the Nazi genocide on the Jews. He's not interested in smugly scoring an ideological point -- it's more that a counterfactual history may have a poetic "truth" that's not historical truth, but still be valid at some more basic level.
- ironyroad
December 17, 2010 at 6:07pm
"I'm not sure it's a negative stereotype." I agree. I think the Apache warrior has been absorbed into American mythology in a way that expresses both awe and admiration to the particular qualities that make an American hero. When I see the word "Apache" I see this: http://www.minihelicopter.net/AH64Apache/AH-64%20Apache.jpg And I hear this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLocafpLMi0&feature=related And now of course, Brad Pitt.
- noga1
December 17, 2010 at 9:27pm
skahn, you're missing the fact that it's possible to argue that people are wrong by invoking ethical norms that *they* subscribe to. The prohibition against murder, for example, is an ethical norm that virtually everyone subscribes to -- even these murderers -- and "disapproval" of the victim would not be recognized -- even by them -- as a defense generally. How would they like it if they were about to be stoned to death simply because someone disapproved of them? Do you think they would find something "wrong" with that? But, they say, we're talking about women -- not men -- who are obliged in our society to do as they're told, and are subject to severe punishment if they don't. Why? The only intellectual answer I can fathom is one that denies the simple fact of women's humanity, just as Hitler denied Jews' humanity and Americans denied blacks' humanity. These are errors of fact on their part which serve as a cover for the simple exercise of power, and an embodiment of the anti-ethical, and anti-human principle that might makes right. Perhaps they cite a divine command in an ancient book, which is, objectively speaking, unverifiable rubbish. If your point, skahn, is that there is no known universally accepted arbiter of ethical issues, such that we can't say with any credibility that ethical rules are handed down from on high like the Ten Commandments, then I agree with it. I don't think that acknowledgment of this fact condemns us to ethical relativism, where the only right one has to condemn another is, in the end, that person's might. This is because humans, unless they're severely and unusually defective -- sociopaths, are by nature cooperative animals, relatively civilized animals, and ethical animals, all of which, I would suppose, derives from our native empathy, and results in a surprising degree of concurrence over time and across cultures on ethical norms, the one against murder being a prime example. At the end of the day, harming others is going to raise a red flag, no matter who you are, and the burden, I would say, is on the one doing the harm to justify it -- to explain why it's in accord with fact and moral reason. Very, very few are *actually* ethical nihilists. These murderers have ethics, but, in this case, they're moral reasoning falls short. I would also point out that ethical relativism, as an argument, is self-defeating, because it is in itself an ethical appeal -- an argument that one doesn't have a right to condemn others. But if we subscribe to ethical relativism, then ethical appeals have no weight. I'll just say, "Fuck you, sir, and have a nice day," because might makes right. If your point is not to argue for an ethical norm -- to say that I can't condemn others, except to say what I feel -- but simply to describe reality as you see it, you are implicitly recognizing the moral value of truth and honesty, which your "nihilism" would reject. You might as well be writing "blah blah blah blah blah." In short, if we buy your argument, there's zero point in making it.
- JakeH
December 18, 2010 at 12:35am
Jake, thank you. That makes more sense, though I still have to process what you said a bit.
- skahn
December 18, 2010 at 4:27pm