Who's The Victim?
Jonathan Rosenbaum, who regularly mixes politics with film criticism, is up in arms about Quentin Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds. Agreeing with a Newsweek piece, Rosenbaum feels the film is a revenge fantasy that turns its avenging Jews into the Nazis of the piece.
Tarantino's films are often controversial for their violence, which is usually fueled by revenge, but I don't recall any objections before that have been so political.
Rosenbaum may have a point. I haven't seen the film, so I can't say. Even so, I'm guessing it'll be hard to get too excited about the politics of Inglourious Basterds in a world where quite a few people make the obscene comparison of real Jews in Israel to Nazis. Furthermore, Rosenbaum blows his credibility with a silly parting shot at Sarah Palin.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:20 AM
4 Comments:
Does he have trouble with Zorro carving a "Z" into people?
Having now read his article (but not seen the movie), I find much of his criticism of the movie persuasive.
However, he has one comment that makes me very nervous:
An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future.
Here, Mendelsohn argues that preserving the memory of Nazi atrocities is preferable to butchering Nazis for two reasons: (1) It is morally superior. (2) It helps prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.
I think a very good argument can be made for # 1.
But what possible argument can be made for # 2? Many of the top Nazis, including Hitler and Goering, clearly were terrified of being hurt or killed in retaliation for their deeds. Were they even more frightened that their deeds would be remembered in history? If the Nuremburg judges had told Goering, "We were going to hang you, but we've decided that as a worse punishment we will let you live and teach schoolkids about the Holocaust," does anyone think Goering would have felt anything other than complete relief?
More important, no group thinks they're the Nazis. We have fascist/racist enemies today who'd gladly kill us all (especially Jews), but they believe they're fighting for truth and light. (And plenty of people in the West don't want to fight them, and would rather politically face off against those who do.)
I don't know how to stop the recurrence of atrocities, but if it turns out (as I somewhat suspect) that many of the people who'd attack this film for its politics would also attack Israel for being too Nazi-like, then I'd say that Mendelsohn (though I was referring to Rosenbaum in my original post)is worried about the wrong things.
I agree with your point re: Israel. In 1968, people who said "Israel should return the occupied territories" could claim they only said that because the conquest was so new. But now, 42 years later, their hypocrisy is blatant: Israel has owned the West Bank almost as long as Russia and Poland have owned chunks of the former Germany, and my grandmother (now deceased) was born the year that the United States seized Puerto Rico. Yet everyone knows that Israel oppresses the West Bank, and nobody is upset that the Palestinians' very own government stole all their tax money and refused to build any infrastructure or social network for their people.
I think Israel is utterly unlike Nazi Germany. In fact, if you want a good analogy, I would suggest Hamlet. Annexation with citizenship, annexation with an official non-citizen second-class status, independence with a big impassible wall, or annexation and forced expulsion: none of these options would lead to any louder anti-Israel outrage than already exists, since the outrage volume is already set to eleven. Instead, Israel, by vacillating between possible options for decades, has prolonged the problem.
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