Morally akin to
Of Basterds and idiots
September 15, 2009 19 comments
Among the tangential pleasures of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds has been the tsunami of perfectly dunderheaded things said about it by the serried ranks of idiots who comprise the transatlantic critical-opinionista corps. Feeling uncharacteristically charitable as I am, I will not here dwell on Johann Hari’s attempt to wound Tarantino with what he fondly (but, predictably, erroneously) supposes is the lance of “postmodernism”. Instead, I suggest that we think about the “criticism” of the film made by Jonathan Rosenbaum, ((Via this excellent reading of the film. (Thanks to Daniel F.) )) who says that Tarantino’s work
seems morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that
Hmm, really? Okay, let me get this straight. Inglourious Basterds, you say, seems morally akin to Holocaust denial. But of course, it does not constitute Holocaust denial, does it? Rather the opposite, in fact: the entire film only makes sense as long as the director is able to assume a knowledge of the actual truth of the Holocaust in his audience. This seems to be what Rosenbaum is grudgingly admitting when he concedes that the film “proudly claims to be the opposite of that”. He (as he must) acknowledges that the film in no wise denies the Holocaust, but indeed depends on the truth of the Holocaust for its effects (“proudly” or not — and for my part, I have seen no publicity for the movie, still less any internal evidence in the movie itself, that is crassly self-congratulatory in this specific regard). So what on earth can be meant by Rosenbaum’s insistence, nonetheless, that the film is “morally akin” to a crime that it objectively does not commit?
I feel that this weasel phrase of militant aesthetic disengagement, this trump-card of unearned moral superiority, “morally akin to Holocaust denial”, is something of a pinnacle of idiotic economy in the cultural criticism of our time. What it really seems to mean is:
I know this film isn’t denying the Holocaust, yet in some unspecified way it makes me feel bad and angry, so I will say that it is somehow like denying the Holocaust, although even I can see that the film, far from denying the Holocaust, is entirely predicated on the Holocaust’s truth; but nonetheless, I don’t like it, and the strongest expression I can think of to signal my dislike of this movie that I don’t understand is to accuse the film of being a bit like Holocaust-denial, because, y’know, Holocaust denial is a really bad thing, and this is a really bad thing too, so you know whatever?
There may be a way to shorten this exegesis-translation further, but that’s the best I can do right now, which surely indicates that “morally akin to Holocaust denial” is some sort of masterpiece of intellectual car-crash linguistic compression, cleverly engineered to make idiots sound like superior human beings. What do you think, readers?
And of course, accusing people who vaguely piss you off of being Holocaust deniers is in itself morally akin to Holocaust denial…
True, John B, if you’re stuck in the old habit of using the actual literal meanings of “morally” and “akin.”
In the new style we can accuse, say, Maus of being “morally akin to Holocaust denial” because Spiegelman seems to think it was mice in the camps rather than people.
“…seems morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that.”
I’m not sure what he is saying the film claims to be, then, but “proudly” would indicate he doesn’t love that idea either?
I didn’t love Inglourious Basterds as much as I loved, say, Pulp Fiction, but that’s no reason to make up bizarre crimes against humanity for it to be guilty of.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but I read this Mark Ames’ review of it. He writes:
So, if the Nazis in the film are indeed portrayed as real human beings, it’s only natural that to a fundamentalist it would feel like a sacrilege. And, in fact, pretty much the same sort of sacrilege as Holocaust denial.
I was trying to make some sense out of the bit where Ames is talking about “Eurofags”, and then I just gave up?
There’s been so much commentary on IB that I haven’t been able to keep up with it, so I’m a bit loath to jump in here while only partially informed, and I have no brief for defending Rosenbaum’s specific comments on the film – but I just want to jump in and say that, if this is the only exposure Unspeakers have to JR, please don’t write him off on this basis. He’s one of the most interesting and thoughtful movie critics out there, even if I frequently disagree with his judgements, and he’s an unlikely member of either “serried ranks of idiots” or “the transatlantic critical-opinionista corps”, being quite ornery and unfashionable in his views. (And also quite awkward in person, judging by a talk I once saw him give.) He’s certainly not a controversy-mongering blowhard like Johann Hari.
But, as I say, I’m not going to defend what he says here. I didn’t care for IB, but I can’t see him managing to justify that kind of claim…
So, if the Nazis in the film are indeed portrayed as real human beings…
Not really. Almost no one in the film can be confused with a real human being, with a couple of exceptions like Diana Kruger’s and Daniel Bruhl’s characters.
The main Nazi character, Christoph Waltz’s Colonel Hans Landa, is a caricature – hyper-educated, beautifully-mannered, gratuitously evil. Which is a lot of fun, but it’s not ‘Downfall’.
Without returning to previous dicussions of postmodernism and the understanding thereof which we have all charitably agreed to drop, shared Johann’s reaction to ‘Inglorious Basterds’ – that it had some really great scenes, but that Tarantino’s shallow attitude towards violence and indifference to fairly recent history spoiled it somewhat for me.
Incidentally, Jeffrey Goldberg’s review in the Atlantic is probably the weirdest response of any out there. Abb1 – your jaw will drop at the sheer horror of the personal revelations therein, trust me!
Incidentally, has “morally akin” ever been used in a sentence that isn’t disineguous?
It’s usually a red flag warning you that no insight of any interest lies ahead.
I’m still struggling with Inglourious Basterds.
One of the odd things about the crashing wave of reviews that followed its release, drenching us with all the violent thrust-and-tug of a critical tsunami caused by the IB meteorite smashing somewhere over the horizon into our sea of tranquility, is how very right everybody feels about it, how right they are in their interpretations. What is it about this film that makes people so sure about it? I mean, I think Rosenbaum is groping for this sense of certainty by calling upon something that appeals to our sense of certainty. After all, something “morally akin” to Holocaust denial is just, entirely wrong – those who disagree are hardly participants in any sort of dialogue I would be willing to have, and I suspect the same is true of JR. Even though the evidence is not there, even though he admits it is not there, and even though what he subsequently says to support this, ahem, seeming equivalence is ill-thought-out, reactive, and glib, he has invoked this standard where morality and truth convene. It’s a rough charge, I suppose, to say that he is turning the Holocaust into simply a register of moral truth and as such a proxy for his gut-response to a film, but since the film is not in any way “morally akin” to Holocaust denial, he’s the one who blinked. Credit Tarantino with this: he’s really pointing a gun at our bollocks, and most of us are not suave enough to resort to the King’s English and a final appreciative sip. But we’re pretty damn sure of what will happen if he pulls the trigger?
And so, not to pick a fight with anybody, but it seems to be the same with Hari; he goes in all sorts of different directions to explain what is “wrong” and how “the critics are right”. Tarantino used to be a director about whom he could say “[h]ere was a director showing violence as it really is” but now is engaging in a “merry joke”, violating a rule Hari has just come up with: art
Where does the confidence come from that say art should never do these things (it does these things – all the time)? Where does the confidence come from to say that “the critics are right”, as though there is one critical position, one critical voice?
IB really is a very unsettling film – in the brilliant review you link to above, Chris Stangl writes about how uncanny and weird it is. It is. It’s a veritably fucked up film. In fact, I don’t think Stangl goes far enough in describing its fuckedupedness. But my point, I guess, is that critics of all stripes seem to be struggling mightily to respond with anything approaching the intellectual integrity they are a) demanding of Tarantino, b) assume they are evincing through ostentatious displays of moral-aesthetic conviction. We see this in JR’s review, in an utterly confused sentence that seems (dares?) to splay the factuality of the Holocaust from any moral statement about the Holocaust. We see this in Hari’s confusion about “postmodernism” and “posers”, who apparently think that there is no connection between art and reality whatsoever and need to be reminded “aesthetics and the rest of life are not entirely separable spheres”. Now, I don’t mind pontification about films. If I did, I wouldn’t have any friends left. They all pontificate about films. All the time. It’s all they do! But, Holocaust denial and thinking that aethetics and the rest of life are entirely separable spheres? Really?
As for the film, well –
‘Among the tangential pleasures of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds has been the tsunami of perfectly dunderheaded things said about it by the serried ranks of idiots who comprise the transatlantic critical-opinionista corps.’
For me ‘tangential’ has been the word. I found the trailer painfully cringeworthy and have no plans to watch it. Still, as you say watching the ‘critical-opinionista corps’ mount their high horses is always fun.
Maybe Jonathan Rosenbaum has been reading our favourite satirist:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=480
‘Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.’
‘Incidentally, has “morally akin” ever been used in a sentence that isn’t disineguous?
It’s usually a red flag warning you that no insight of any interest lies ahead.’
The word ‘morally’ is itself something of a giveway. As is ‘akin’ and its cousin ‘equivalent’ and indeed ‘amounts to’.
The Witch from Next Door — thank you; I will try to read some more of Rosenbaum.
Alex H —
Definitely not!
sw — bravo! You are, among other things, right that Hari’s rule about art is risible nonsense. So, as for the film—?
Gregor —
Yes: this is what I hadn’t quite managed to put my finger on, and you nail it. “Morally” basically means not, doesn’t it? (Compare “a moral victory”, which means a defeat with certain alleged extenuating circumstances.) So “morally akin to” means “not akin to, I admit, but I am going to plead the bullshit likeness all the same”.
Hmmm. That’s interesting –
Sometimes! Yes, this does, as you say, hit the nail on the head. And it is akin – not morally, but nevertheless akin – to what I was trying to say before. Something itchy and internal is gnawing at you about something, making you fussy and irritable, and you can’t put your finger on it, but it annoys the fuck out of you and you want it to go away, but you can’t name it, you can’t describe it, so you turn to “morally”.
But I’d go one step further, and suggest that it is not only “not” – though sometimes it is – but a deeper negation. JH calls the film – or Tarantino, or Tarantino’s post-RD oeuvre, I’m not going back to check – “morally empty”, and he doesn’t only mean “not empty”. (For he is not writing about a vacuum: he is writing about a film with, at the very least, some drama and snazzy scenes and the spectacle of violence). But within this – if I may – presence or substance, he senses an emptiness, something that he cannot connect with and fill with meaning and with desire and with pleasure (and pre-emptively lashes out at anybody who might disagree by calling them poseurs and post-modernists). The easiest way to express this is to call it “morally empty”. At face value, this seems fair enough: he is identifying a presence (the film, the aesthetics) and an absence (moral values); but this in itself assumes that films and aesthetics can be segregated from morality, and JH specifically argues otherwise, attributing this belief to postmodern poseurs; rather, he exempts himself from having to explain any relationship between, say, fantasy and revenge, between propaganda and art, between betrayal and loyalty, between chivalry and butt-humping your interpreter, those moral-aesthetic themes, amongst others, that permeate QT’s work. In other words, I’m trying to say that “morally empty” is unspeak. And! This is sort of a mirror image of JR’s use of “morally akin”. JR admits “there is no kinship” (i.e., there is an emptiness, a space that separates the one from the other, in the sense where “morally” means “not”), but nevertheless there’s something he senses that connects them, that forms a kinship; he unspeaks this lack of kinship with a “moral” kinship, one that is under no obligation to explain the consanguinity.
The point is this. I think it would be fair to say that a recurrent accusation against Tarantino is, basically, that he represents cruelty and violence without condemning it and without forcing the audience to condemn it? Is this fair? Close enough to be fair? Well, if so, it is not true, but if you want to make this charge, then you need to do two things. You need to make the case that Tarantino represents cruelty and violence without condemning it and you need to make the case that Tarantino represents cruelty and violence without forcing or allowing the audience to condemn it. To do this means that you have to find a kinship between the work of art and a) Tarantino’s intent, and b) the audience’s interpretation (and, this part is optional and often forsaken: you need to do so with a modicum of respect for or interest in the art itself). Now, my argument is this: the impossibility of actually doing so, of actually accomplishing this by explaining how Tarantino fails to shoot any moral shadows on the bright movie screen, and fails in such a way as to indict himself and his audience, will emerge in a paradoxical negation that unspeaks this impossibility. The expression acts as if it is linking the work of art with Tarantino’s intent and the audience’s interpretation while smuggling in the concession that there is a breach (imagine a chain that, as soon as it is pulled taut, dissolves; now imagine that chain in the split second at the moment when it is both taut and dissolving). In other words, “morally” evokes something powerful and earnest, something of such terribly high stakes that it can be linked to Holocaust denial and human violence, but it unspeaks a failure to connect the object of condemnation with the crime.
Perhaps all this is, as my World War II veteran Grandfather would have said, “horseshit” – but if one accepts for a minute that ‘”morally” basically means not’, then one may, if only for a moment, pause and be freaked out: the moral is extinguished, evaporated. And suddenly these particular critics of QT are the ones who are, indeed, peering out from the void.
Now, my thoughts on the film –
Morally” basically means not, doesn’t it? (Compare “a moral victory”, which means a defeat with certain alleged extenuating circumstances.) So “morally akin to” means “not akin to, I admit, but I am going to plead the bullshit likeness all the same”.
‘Morally’ and ‘moral’ can be used in this way, but in some ways I think it is worse. It seems to embody the Russian term ‘poshlost’, which is largely untranslatable but which means ‘vulgar/stupid whilst apparently in good taste/ foolish’. Christopher Hitchens and Johann Hari both love using the word ‘moral’ which is ironic in a sense, given that they are ‘anti-religious’ they both believe themselves to have an unquestioned ethical superiority.
And there is also the excruciating term ‘moral equivalence’ which far from counterbalancing ‘Godwin’s Law’ actually seems to multiply the idiocy of such arguments, and introduce idiocy into arguments where no moral equivalence was stated.
Incidentally, I consulted the invaluable Decentpedia and noticed that there are five ‘moral’ articles, which should say something.
@7, I read the review (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc.....tino-nazis), and I don’t find his personal revelations particularly weird, I’ve heard a lot of this stuff before. In fact, I remember when I was a child, my own grandmother (a saint of a woman, seriously) used to share with me her Nazi-killing fantasies; cutting them alive slowly into small pieces, piece by piece was her thing.
Anyway, Goldberg has the same sort of concern there:
See, for a Zionist true-believer morality is quite one-dimensional, and the metric under that single axle goes simply: “good for the Jews?” Consequently, the situations like “creating sympathy for Nazis and conventionalizing Jews” and “Holocaust denial” (as well as many, many other situations) end up having exactly the same coordinate, same position on that moral axle. Hence “morally akin to”: if A and B are equally “good (bad) for the Jews”, then A and B are morally akin to each other. And it’s not disingenuous, just very crude and simplistic.
Does it make sense, what I’m saying?
sw — thanks for reading Johann Hari so that we don’t have to! And:
That is beautifully devastating.
Gregor — thanks for reminding me of poshlost, a word that I had once encountered via Nabokov.
I’ll second the endorsement of J. Rosenbaum as a very good movie critic. I used to read him regularly in the Chicago “Reader”, (i.e. not a mainstream, nor very remunerative venue). I don’t think his point amounts to cheap moralism, (though, mind I haven’t seen IB nor any other Tarrantino, and have no desire to do so), but his point concerned the weird inversion of the historical truth, against the utter impossibility of any such fact set, even in fiction. In other words, it did not just partake of the counterfactuality of fictive invention; it obliterated the very fact set that would be its premise. Maybe brushing up on Hannah Arendt might help to underline that point, as she to brushed against the received facts and their manipulation, at some considerable personal expense.
D. Mendelsohn, by the way, wrote a good, searching and even rather oddly favorable review of “The Kindly Ones”.
Um, no, it didn’t!
I think the coinage was due to Paul Foot – in a book about Private Eye, I remember him quoted as regularly saying that some scurrilous story or other was “morally true”, meaning “almost certainly bullshit, but the target was such a nasty person it ought to be true of them”. But he was joking.
Something itchy and internal is gnawing at you about something, making you fussy and irritable, and you can’t put your finger on it, but it annoys the fuck out of you and you want it to go away, but you can’t name it, you can’t describe it, so you turn to “morally”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3944549.stm