March 5, 2010 | 12:48 pm
Jews Get the Last Word as Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Rewrites History
Posted by Danielle Berrin
In the eyes of Jewish audiences, “Inglourious Basterds” has become the most important movie of the year—whether it wins the Oscar or not.
Beyond Tarantino’s inventive and satiating revenge fantasy, “Basterds” is a departure from a Holocaust genre that mired Jews in helplessness and victimhood. And as a result, Tarantino has helped establish a new cinematic Jewish identity. By looking at World War II reflexively, Tarantino has used the reality of modern Jewish power—embodied in the American Jewish community and the State of Israel—to solidify the archetype of the strong, empowered Jew. In bringing these ideas to the fore, “Basterds” offers modern Jews a chance to avenge the blood of their ancestors and reclaim their sense of communal power.
Check out my cover story on the cultural significance of the film as described by the director, the stars, rabbis and Holocaust scholars:
Two days after this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” — a film about a band of Jews who kill Nazis — screened for an audience of Holocaust survivors.
It was at the Museum of Tolerance, and the director himself sat quietly in the third row. This was probably his thousandth screening, and on this night he seemed more interested in the crowd than in his film.
Tarantino watched as 300 Jews sat transfixed, eyes wide and jaws gaping, as Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) whipped out his Bowie knife and began carving a swastika into a Nazi’s forehead. There was a collective gasp and a few “ohs,” but no one turned away. This was too good, watching Nazis get scalped, brutalized and beaten; this is what should have happened, the audience seemed to be thinking; this is what the Nazis deserved. It wasn’t hard to sense the visceral reactions that scene provoked, especially among those who had been victimized by real Nazis: relief, revenge, disgust, pleasure. And the awkward bursts of nervous laughter. “Basterds” drew out long-buried emotions that suddenly became raw and immediate.
By imagining an alternate ending to World War II, in which Jews incinerate Hitler along with all of the Nazi high command, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has done more than craft the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy; he has effectively penetrated the Jewish psyche and given vent to a deep-seated Jewish rage — a rage that has been stewing through the generations since the Holocaust. There remains so much unresolved fury at Hitler’s crime that the primal urge for wish fulfillment “Basterds” satisfies is welcome, even craved, because by some small measure it evens the score - if only in fantasy - with the murderers of 6 million Jews. And in Tarantino’s world, the only morality is the morality of vengeance, so audiences are forgiven their sadistic side. Besides, what Jew is going to have any compunction about killing Hitler?
After the article appeared in this week’s issue, The Journal received two more responses to the movie, deeply felt and worth reprinting here. The first is from Sgt. Benjamin Anthony (Res.), who runs the organization Our Soldiers Speak. During his military service Anthony carried out missions and operations both within and beyond Israel’s borders, specialising as a heavy machine gunner.
Sgt. Anthony is the founder of the Israel Advocacy group Our Soldiers Speak - www.oursoldiersspeak.org - which works to bring the apolitical truth from Israel’s battlefields to the people of Diaspora. He has lectured at college campuses throughout the US and Great Britain with the aim of engaging in dialogue with all who are willing to grant him and his message audience. Here’s what he wrote:
It is a rare thing indeed to witness the confluence of awful reality with redemptive celluloid fantasy; yet that is precisely what I experienced when viewing Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds.’
His opening scene adheres to a narrative we have heard many times, and must continue to hear as often as is necessary, lest we forget. We must not tire of it.
Beginning with a serious and sinister portrayal of the callous acts of Colonel Hans Landa, Tarantino showed the viewer the murder of Jews who sheltered beneath floor boards. He outlined just how bereft of mercy that period was.
I am certain though, that even Tarantino’s masterful attempt to recreate on film what actually took place in reality will always be limited to being just that – an attempt. For such acts of evil cannot be encapsulated. That’s what I have been told time and again by the survivors with whom I have met and spoken. Some things are beyond even the realm of the movie world to harness or portray.
In that sense, Tarantino did what others have done before him and, I hope will continue to do; he tried. He tried his very best and as far as that scene is concerned, I felt he did so honestly, earnestly and brilliantly.
My interest though was piqued not by the movie’s opening, but by its climax. That for me was what went beyond anything I had viewed until that point.
How fantastic it was to see the demise of Adolph Hitler and his henchmen in the movie theatre at the hands of the gun toting ‘Basterds.’
How utterly refreshing a cinematic notion - to see the Jews fighting back and not merely resisting, but emerging with their mission accomplished, stopping evil in its tracks.
How thoroughly inspiring to see a unit dispatched to decapitate the proverbial snake of Nazi tyranny led by the brash Aldo, supported by Donny the Bear Jew Donovitz.
It was exhilarating and in my opinion, by not trivializing the horrific acts of Landa at the movie’s outset, Tarantino earned himself the right to delve into an alternative narrative; to portray it as only he could, to embellish as only he does. It is obviously a mere fantasy, but what a fantasy to indulge!
And yet, for me, the success of the Basterds was at once triumphant and tragic. For Hitler did not meet his demise in a movie theatre, nor did his henchmen. They were not stopped in their tracks, at least not soon enough.
Nor was there a band of ‘Basterds’ dispatched by the Americans to make its way across Europe in order to crush the Nazi party’s leaders.
If there was, they certainly never managed to accomplish their goals.
In truth, the free world stood by, and it stood by for far too long as the body count of innocents rapidly accrued into the millions.Yes, tragically, the ‘Basterds’ were a mere figment of Tarantino’s imagination. And so, continuing in that vein, I thought that if he was entitled to imagine, then perhaps I am as well.
I wondered whether during that blackest of times, the Jews of that day ever dared to conceive that a militia might be dispatched by the US to destroy the Nazi party from the top down. My answer, a question; why not?
Why should they not have believed in such a possibility? Unlikely as it may have been, surely it was more likely a concept than the alternative - namely that the world would do precisely nothing.
Yet no such cadre came.
And so, once the movie had concluded, once the adrenalin within me had subsided, my questions left me with a feeling of emptiness and abandonment. I felt wounded by the reality that innocents had been forsaken. In short, the fantasy of Basterds could not endure. History’s harsh reality came crashing back to me and the feel-good ending gave way to a feeling of dejection - at least until I convinced myself to imagine for just a while longer, during the car-ride home. Seeking to return to the euphoria I felt in the theatre I confined my wondering to a path that would lead to optimism.
I wondered again about the Jews of Europe. Had they dared to believe in something far less likely than anything I had just viewed?
Did those Jews ever conceive that salvation would come from within the bosom of a people so persecuted, tortured, brutalised and ignored?
My answer is no. They cannot have done so – at least not from a platform of evidence, reality or reasonability.
Did the Jews of Poland, of Austria, of Germany and of France ever imagine a time – a mere three years after the atrocities of the Holocaust - where soldiers with names such as Pfefferman, not Aldo, would be lieutenants charged with defending against those who assail the Jewish people?
I doubt it.
Could the Jews of that blackened era ever have thought that those who lived on would know of a body of defenders who at its helm has Captains carrying names such as Horowitz, Commanders named Rosenbaum, and strategists called Schwartzman - victims none of them, heroes all?
It is very unlikely.
Could those whose families had perished ever have rationally dreamed of a time when those who ply the traditional trades of law, medicine, accountancy and finance would equally wield the tools of their own defence and determination ready to answer the call to arms whenever it is sounded, each one of them carrying a creed in their heart that beats to the rhythm of ‘Never Again?’
I cannot believe that they did. Such concepts would at best be the figments of a wild imagination. Perhaps one employed to escape the most sinister of realities – a reality in which hope seemed not to exist.
And yet, those unimagined fantasies were given their genesis in 1948 with the establishment of the modern State of Israel. They have morphed and taken shape. They are precisely the realities that prevail today and they exist in the form of Israel and her soldiers.
They are the extant result of actual events. They are not fantasy, merely fantastic! And, for as long as their existence continues we will never again be required to imagine a source from where the salvation of the Jewish People will spring. We will never need to construct a hope that is founded on the readiness of others to protect us. We have been provided with the answer; and that is to look always within ourselves.
And so, as I arrived at my home, I was left with the following thought; Yes, it is a rare thing indeed to see the confluence of awful reality with redemptive fantasy as I had seen in the movie theatre that night; but it is rarer still to have a living, breathing example of a reality that transcends even fantasy and is beyond its realms to harness or to envision.
That is what Inglorious Basterds gave me cause to see.
The protectors of Israel, though once unimaginable are a reality today. Israel is a reality today. Such realities were brought about not by the imagination, but by true heroes and pioneers.
I thank G-d for that.
Mr. Tarantino’s movie reaffirmed my pride in those who defend the people of Israel and the values we all hold dear. His movie, intentionally or otherwise, underlined why they are so needed and why abstract concepts such as fantasy and hope must never be the only courses upon which we we embark when working to ensure our own survival.
In helping me to remember that, I, as one Jew, as one individual whose grandparents fled the Holocaust, as one man who has served in the company of the soldiers of the IDF, as one sergeant from the line, I am grateful for this film and what it unearthed within me.
It led me to understand that just once in a while, reality can indeed transcend even fantasy - and on the odd occasion that it does, such a reality must at all times be protected for it is nothing short of being actually and factually glorious.
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March 4, 2010 | 4:38 pm
Sascha Baron Cohen scrapped from Oscars
Posted by Danielle Berrin
Sascha Baron Cohen likes to play naughty.
Remember his little butt-in-your-face trick with Eminem at the MTV Awards last year? It caused a sensation when the disgruntled “8 Mile” star stormed out of the ceremony. But in the end, it turned out to be a big ploy. A little jab at homophobia all in good fun.
Of course the Oscars are too stiff for Baron Cohen’s unbridled insolence.
According to reports, Baron Cohen was scheduled to present an award during the upcoming ceremony but his plans to play a small practical joke on James Cameron, who apparently, has no sense of humor, got him barred from the telecast. (Anyone who read the New Yorker profile of Cameron last Fall learned that his ego is every bit as big as his box office, so no wonder).
The producers of movie’s biggest night ended up cutting the “Borat” and “Bruno” star from the presenters list because they know they can’t control him. So out of boring old fashioned deference to the self-declared “king of the world”—or at least of Hollywood—(at least, right now) the producers scrapped Cohen from the presenter list in order to prevent him from offending the “Avatar” director.
Read more from the Daily Mail:
Sacha Baron Cohen has been dropped as a presenter at the Oscars, allegedly over fears he may drive Avatar director James Cameron to storm out of the ceremony.
The Borat star, who had been invited to introduce one of the awards, planned to poke fun at the film by dressing up as one of its characters - a blue-skinned, female Na’vi - and revealing to the audience that ‘she’ was pregnant with Cameron’s love child.
But sources say that fears over Cameron’s reaction led show producer Bill Mechanic to axe the sketch and order Baron Cohen, 38, to be dumped from his first ever Oscars appearance.
‘Let’s just say that Cameron isn’t known to be, shall we say, “self-deprecating”,’ said a show insider.
As an Oscar nominee, Cameron, 55, will be sitting in the front row of Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre during the show this weekend.
Baron Cohen’s spokesman Matt Labov confirmed that the Ali G actor was no longer part of the Oscars.
‘I hate to use the term, because it’s so ubiquitous, but there were “creative differences”,’ he said.
‘Nothing acrimonious, but both sides felt that since they couldn’t agree, [Cohen] might as well remain in London.’
March 3, 2010 | 4:59 pm
Hollywood Jews don’t profit from religious practice
Posted by Danielle Berrin
It’s tough to be religious in Hollywood.
How could it be otherwise, since the industry itself demands absolute devotion? Ask anyone how they got their start, and they’ll tell you amusing stories about early bosses who treated them like indentured servants.
They’ll tell you about the egos, the interminable hours, the impossible errands, the inadequate pay.
Back when I first moved to Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of working for a so-called billion-dollar producer. And the measure of my success in that position depended on only one thing: Could I single-handedly return an enormous Persian rug to Pottery Barn?
The exciting part was figuring out how to fit the rug — which I’m certain was delivered by a truck — into my 4-door sedan (at least that required more creativity than ordering lunch). Imagine my parents’ pride at their brave daughter driving through Santa Monica with 4 feet of woolen rug hanging out both sides of her car.
The first time I asked one of my many superiors — and superior in Hollywood means a far more evolved and elevated human being — if I could leave work a few hours early on a Friday, she replied, “If you want to do Shabbat, this isn’t the place for you.” Obviously, she was Jewish.
But she was right. There really is no Shabbat in Hollywood. Creation happens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round. Which is actually nice proof that the lords of the movie business are not God. Even God took a break.
Success in Hollywood is consuming, and it demands all of you. There’s barely enough room for family, let alone commitment to a Jewish community.
There are always exceptions — the handful of rare souls who somehow manage to balance the rigors of Hollywood with the rigors of halachah. But, for the most part, Hollywood is anti-religious — unless you consider devotion to box office and fame a spiritual pursuit.
And why begrudge Hollywood Jews for being secular? That’s how they’ve always been — assimilated since the days of the industry’s Jewish founders. Secularism allows them to share the cultural values of Judaism and still eat treif at the commissary. That little trade-off has blessed us with the gifts of everyone from Woody Allen and Mel Brooks to Jon Stewart and Judd Apatow.
Because, secular or not, being Jewish means something in Hollywood.
“If you have that cultural background, you have an advantage without knowing why or without being able to name it specifically,” Sharon Waxman, founder and editor of the entertainment Web site The Wrap, told me during an interview last fall. Hollywood’s Jewish characteristic may be inexplicable, but it’s real, and it has in-house benefits. “It may not be fair, but I think that it’s true,” Waxman, who is Jewish, added.
The Jewish influence of Hollywood, while obvious on screen, is hardly limited to the movies. Let’s not forget the endless agents, executives, managers and lawyers who fuel the economy of the industry.
Take for instance, Ari Emanuel, the intemperate, bullying agent who is known to curse, threaten and cajole to get what he wants. What do you expect from a guy whose father was a member of the Irgun, an Israeli militant group that operated in British-mandated Palestine? Emanuel’s alter ego, Ari Gold, on the HBO series “Entourage,” is a lesson in Jewish ruthlessness and power. Maybe Gold is not the guy you want to marry, but he is definitely the tough, smart Jew you’d want negotiating your contract.
Emanuel’s covert merger-cum-takeover of the William Morris Agency last year cemented his status as one of the industry’s most feared and powerful figureheads. And as long as brother Rahm holds the highest office in the White House cabinet, the Jews are in able hands.
When it comes to articulating Jewish identity, Hollywood has the biggest pulpit. And the past year at the movies offered an eclectic take on Jewish themes and characters: There was the charming but devious male lead in “An Education,” whose seductive wiles sparked complaints of anti-Semitism; the Coen brothers’ Book of Job-inspired “A Serious Man,” which used the milieu of a Midwestern Jewish community to challenge ideas about faith; and who hasn’t heard of “Inglourious Basterds,” the stylish Tarantino film that indulged long-held Jewish lust for revenge against the Nazis?
Movies like these offer Jews the chance to do their favorite things: argue, analyze, challenge and argue some more. And even movies that don’t seem Jewish at all, like Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” or Nancy Meyers’
“It’s Complicated,” give Jews a good reason to scratch their heads and wonder why these smart Jewish women, who write with an urbane, sharp-tongued Jewish sensibility, insist on disguising their very Jewish characters by casting shiksa goddesses.
Aren’t there any middle-aged Jewish actresses out there?
Guess we’ll have to wait for Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz to sport a few wrinkles.
March 1, 2010 | 4:31 pm
Top 5 Joan Rivers red carpet one-liners
Posted by Danielle Berrin
Reigning Oscar fashion guru Joan Rivers talked to The Journal’s Naomi Pfefferman on the good, the bad and the ugly on the red carpet. Rivers has had her trademark job sniping at red carpet faux paus since 1996, though she’s recently retired the live carpet for the post-show round-up. What makes Rivers great—besides her dirty, dirty comedy and her excessive plastic surgery—is that she makes the very drab topic of fashion fun.
Here are a few of our favorite Rivers one-liners:
Why she’s quit the live carpet in favor of round-up shows: “It’s gotten so boring,” she said. “You can’t ask anybody a real question, because their PR lady will then not let you have the next four people that they own.”
On how she managed to incur $37 million in debt: “I love to live very well, and I was taking anything. I still take anything. If I have $1, I spend $1.05.”
On whether she’ll ever interview Mel Gibson, whom she deems “an anti-Semitic piece of shit”: “God, no,” she said. Would she comment on his clothing? “Constantly,” she said. “I’ll always say he came dressed wrong because his SS uniform is at the cleaners.”
On why she can talk about her own plastic surgery but not anyone else’s: “The lawyer from E! came running down the hall yelling, ‘Don’t say that — she’s very litigious.’”
Read the full story here.
February 28, 2010 | 10:20 pm
Basterds “A Mirror to Our Soul”
Posted by Rob Eshman
Rabbi Irwin Kula
The Journal will have a story this week looking at the reaction and conversation generated by Inglourious Basterds, one of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture. The movie has been in general release for several months, plus there have been screenings in Los Angeles and New York recently for rabbis and other Jewish leaders.
Rabbi Irwin Kula saw the movie this past week. Kula is the President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a leadership training institute, think tank and resource center. Through books, television appearances and lectures, Kula has sought to bring Jewish values into the broader marketplace of ideas. He is someone we always look forward to hearing from when he’s in town—provocative, unpredictable and revelatory.
So naturally we were interested to know what he thought about a movie that has stirred such powerful emotions. Here’s what Rabbi Kula wrote in an e-mail:
Please know I think the film is the most important film of the year and will be the source of conversation, study, PhD’s for years to come. I believe it represents the end of the dominance of one genre of Holocaust films - the victim/perpetrator trope - and the opening of potentially new veins of wisdom that challenge our easy labeling of good and evil, justified and unjustified violence, as well as our self-evident definitions of torture and terrorism. Great films like all great art invite meanings far beyond the author’s conscious intentions and Inglorious Basterds by inviting us, with artistry, erudition, humor, and psychological sophistication, to see how rage and anger and vengeance can turn victims into torturers and the good guys into “suicide bombers“ will have a life of its own far beyond the movie year 2009 - a quality that makes it the best movie of the year whether it receives the Academy Award or not.
Ultimately Inglorious Basterds is far more than a Holocaust film or a WWII spaghetti western - all names that simply domesticate and tame the destabilizing and terribly unnerving truth of the film: that we human beings, however good we think we are, have within us the diabolical capacity with intention and justification to humiliate, to hate, and to be violent at levels no other living creature on the planet can even imagine. This is one of the central mysteries to this moment in the evolution of our species. As an 8th generation rabbi who knows the evil of the Holocaust from my own family’s history and who has travelled to sites of genocide and great destruction I can witness at least from my own experience as well as the countless conversations I have had about Inglorious Basterds that maybe, just maybe, a film like Inglorious Basterds can by putting a mirror in front of us and having us look into our own souls help us in solving the riddle of our darkness. Few films even attempt to do this. Worthy of the Academy Award? Yes. Yes.
February 25, 2010 | 12:18 am
Oscar Watch: “The Hurt Locker’s” Mark Boal
Posted by Naomi Pfefferman
I met Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer of “The Hurt Locker,” the day the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences determined that he would be one of four producers to receive a statuette should the movie win best picture on March 7. (Check out our full profile of Boal and the film in the Journal’s Oscar issue on March 5.) The film is certainly one of the best movies of the year, with nine Oscar nominations, tied with James Cameron’s “Avatar.” The white-knuckle action thriller is the story of members of a bomb squad battling Iraqi insurgents and each other during some of the most dangerous days of the war in 2004.
Boal, who is Jewish, joked that the Journal story “is the single interview that will make my mother the happiest.” He didn’t tell his mother where he was going, however, when he became the first reporter ever embedded with the Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit (a.k.a., the bomb squad), while working for Playboy in 2004.
There was more to worry about than being blown to bits by homemade devices cleverly hidden in a dead dog or a pile of detritus: “When I got off the plane, [officials] asked me my blood type and my religious affiliation,” the 37-year-old writer-producer said. “When I asked why, they said, ‘In case we have a funeral for you.’ And then they said, ‘Since you’re Jewish, you should really keep that under your hat because they behead Jews over here.’ And Daniel Pearl had just gone missing.”
So Boal didn’t advertise his Jewish background (in a “leftie, counterculture-y, sandals-wearing, granola-crunching” home in Greenwich Village) as he trekked about with the expert technicians who sometimes had to disarm explosives with just a pair of pliers.
His script incorporates the fear he himself felt during those harrowing weeks, and the psychology of the men he observed who had volunteered for the most dangerous job in the military. The screenplay also realistically depicts what the soldiers called “The Lonely Walk:” The steps taken toward a roadside bomb. “They were literally walking toward the device that’s designed to kill you, and at a certain point it’s just you and the device; there’s nobody who can intervene,” Boal recalled. “I think that really gets to the heart of the job. It’s a very small club of people who have done it and only they can know what it feels like. But to a man they talk about it being this experience of a lifetime, and something you just never forget, if you’ve done it once. And to do it five or ten times a day is staggering.”
One tech told him about his mindset during The Walk: “You kind of review people close to you, but the closer you get to the bomb, the more it becomes just this almost animal, existential kind of confrontation.”
Shooting the film, Boal’s solo screenwriting debut, in Jordan was safer than Iraq –Amman isn’t a war zone – although there were dangers about. “I remember waking up in the morning and reading on the front page of the Times about how anti-American sentiment was really strong in this particular town,” he said. Apparently an Al Qaeda bigwig was born there. “And the interview was, the reporter sitting and having coffee with two guys who were just waxing with so much enthusiasm about how they wanted to kill some Americans, and I’m like, reading this and spitting out my coffee, because I had been in that neighborhood a couple of days before, scouting locations. And so I thought, ‘OK, we have to be really careful here,’ and we were careful. We tried to be very respectful of the local religion, and we shot during Ramadan, which is their holiest time, and that was complicated for the crew (a number of them were observant).
“But I found the Jordanians to be extremely professional and welcoming,” Boal added. “I would shoot another movie there in a second.”
At times, the set seemed as chaotic as the film’s setting. “We had cameras everywhere,” actor Jeremy Renner (who is nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the cocky but brilliant tech Sgt. William James) said in the movie’s production notes. “We called them Ninja cameras, just hiding all over the place. We never knew where anything was. Barry (Ackroyd, the director of photography) was out there himself running around. It was absolutely amazing seeing him run as fast as we did, carrying his camera down these dirty alleys full of syringes and kids throwing rocks and he always had a big smile on his face. That inspired me.”
During some scenes, Renner wore the real, 90-pound Kevlar body suit techs don to disarm bombs. “That sweat is real sweat. Those tears are real tears of pain,” he said of his performance. “[The suit is] heavy, it’s hot, it’s hard to move in, but it put me right in the moment. Just the idea of getting into it – I wanted to dry heave whenever they said to suit up.”
“The Hurt Locker” includes cameos by Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce and David Morse, and is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who will compete for the Oscar against her ex-husband, James Cameron.
February 24, 2010 | 7:57 pm
Yes, that’s David Beckham wearing a yarmulke
Posted by Danielle Berrin
As Jews, we learn early on the importance of the grieving process and we respect it. Which is why it’s such an outrage that some unscrupulous opportunist photographed David Beckham mourning at his grandfather’s funeral. So it is in absolute protest of this kind of exploitation that I post this adorable photo of David Beckham wearing a kippa.
This, of course, isn’t the first Jewy thing Beckham has done. In the past, he has said that he’s “half Jewish” from his mother’s side, but never observed a religious practice. He does, however, seem to care about Jewish education; at least one of his children is enrolled in school at Stephen S. Wise Temple.
February 24, 2010 | 1:51 pm
Oscar Buzz: The impact of “Inglourious Basterds” on the Jews
Posted by Danielle Berrin
My upcoming cover story in The Jewish Journal will examine the cultural impact of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” on the Jews. It will be posted online this week, and appear in the print edition next Thursday. I spoke with Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, Rabbis David Wolpe and Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dr. Michael Berenbaum and other scholars.
Why shine a light on “Inglourious?” The movie marks a strikingly new depiction of Jews on screen. Off screen, Jews seem to have a cultural aversion to violence. They think of themselves as a people of the book, not the sword. But Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar nominated film “Inglourious Basterds” depicts a very different kind of Jew; a violent, vengeful and aggressive one. You might say, a Jew without a conflicted conscience.
Tied into an American Jewish identity as empowered and strong, buttressed by the image (and reality) of Israel, the Jew in “Basterds” is clearly a new kind of Jew.
Tarantino himself acknowledged to me that his conception of the post-Israel Jew might have informed characters that otherwise sprung from his imagination. I asked Tarantino what came to his mind when he thought of the word, “Israel,” and he shot back: “Jewish homeland. Kick ass army.”
Israel or not, the movie taps into another buried truth about Jewish consciousness: seriously, what Jew in their right mind is going to feel bad about killing Nazis? And Hitler? It’s the ultimate revenge fantasy fulfilled. Indeed, for many Jewish audiences, the experience of Tarantino’s film has tapped into a deep-seated Jewish rage, allowing Jews to act out violent impulses—even in fantasy—that they’ve been collectively repressing since the Holocaust.
“Every Jew I know has a tremendous sense of ‘if only I could have killed that basterd,’” Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum said about Hitler’s cinematic offing. “Wouldn’t any Jew love to be engaged in battle and be able to bring World War II to an end and Hitler to his demise? The fact that Hitler was able to kill himself was too good for the basterd.”
And yet, a morally unconflicted Jew (which, let’s face it, is highly unlikely) challenges Jewish self conception. That’s why the movie provoked long and fascinating discussions in special screenings before audiences of rabbis and other Jewish leaders in New York and LA. At a screening at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, Rabbi Marvin Hier deemed it “quite exciting” and “ingenious.”
But others found it more problematic. Because, well, it isn’t traditionally Jewish: Jews are supposed to be uber-moral—God’s chosen—and God’s partners in the redemption of the world. So what happens when a big Hollywood movie makes obvious parallels between Jews and their killers, between Jews and terrorists? As Tarantino told me, “That’s exactly what they were. They were prepared to bring the building down as suicide bombers.”
The questions here pose the kind of moral challenge Jews revel in. Is the Jew of Inglourious Basterds troubling, or ideal?
According to Gavriel Rosenfeld, author of “The World Hitler Never Made,” portraying Jews as violent and powerful could have consequences—mostly for Israel.
“If Jews are not going to be pristine, morally, ethically upright people and are instead, willing to use sadism and violence, that changes the moral calculus a little bit,” Rosenfeld, who is also an Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University said. “Maybe that changes the equation of how people perceive victims and perpetrators in the Middle East.”
If Jews get their revenge, then they have less claim to victimhood. Which means less sympathy for the many existential threats facing Israel. The way Rosenfeld puts it, “Jews have historically been accused of using the Holocaust to defend anything Israel does and making the world feel guilty for their inaction during Holocaust; but that guilt is dependent on Jews being in role of victims.”
Maybe so, but there are also benefits to the new, empowered Jew.
For one, the film puffed up the image of Jewish men. Before ‘Basterds’ a Jewish man was Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld—funny, nebbishy, but the antithesis of masculinity.
Eli Roth, who plays The Bear Jew in the film, said, “It was time to redefine Jewish masculinity on film. That’s one of the reasons I hit the weights so hard; I wanted people to go, ‘Wow, Jews are tough!’”
To read the full story check back later this week and don’t miss our special Oscar issue, available in print March 5. To read more of my interview with Tarantino, click here.
February 23, 2010 | 3:41 pm
Who knew ‘Shutter Island’ was a Holocaust movie?
Posted by Danielle Berrin
Just when you thought you were safe from Jewish content in a Marty Scorsese thriller starring Leonard DiCaprio, “Shutter Island” takes you to Dachau.
Now, unless you read the Dennis Lehane novel upon which the film is based, it may have come as a shock that the weekend’s $40.2 million hit was fueled by Holocaust imagery and narrative. Turns out, DiCaprio’s character is haunted by memories of liberating a concentration camp. And throughout the film, Scorsese drives forward his plot with vivid flashbacks of death camp carnage, where thousands of bodies lay frozen in piles.
As an American soldier during WWII, DiCaprio’s character is forced into some horrific scenes. These eventually lead to the accidental slaughter of a hundred SS officers. The unintended massacre plagues DiCaprio with guilt; but not too much: he still stands idly by while a Nazi commander botches a suicide attempt and bleeds to death, fully conscious.
The trauma of the death camp experience sends DiCaprio on a psychological spiral. Back home, he starts drinking. Then he marries a woman (Michelle Williams) who turns out to be clinically insane; they have three children together, who drown. DiCaprio sees his dead children in nightmares that take place at Dachau. His wife and children lay with the other dead bodies and call out to him.
“Why didn’t you save me?” his daughter asks.
“I couldn’t get there in time,” he answers, an easy metaphor for Americans arriving at the camps way too late to save the Jews.
As DiCaprio’s character descends into madness, the imagery continues. When he shows up at Shutter Island, he is a Federal Marshal, but soon he is wearing the garb of the inmates. At one point, DiCaprio opens the door to a vast room that looks a lot like a gas chamber. And he stands alone beneath the shower heads.
Scorsese’s parallels are obvious: The scenery and the prisoner dress seem to put DiCaprio in the position of the Jewish victim. The difference is that the Jews suffered from external forces and DiCaprio suffers from his own inner demons.
February 19, 2010 | 1:09 pm
Steven Spielberg falls in love (with new film technology)
Posted by Danielle Berrin
Some people think technology disables art, while others think it can create art. After completing his latest project, the internationally bestselling graphic novel “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” director Steven Spielberg has fallen into the latter camp.
In a rare interview with L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz, Spielberg talks about the pleasures of using performance-capture technology, the same technique James Cameron used in “Avatar.” The new rage in Hollywood, motion-capture technology is a way for cameras to model the emotional and physical expressions of actors and transfer them to a digital character.
After directing films like “Indiana Jones,” “Saving Private Ryan” and “Jurassic Park” the old fashioned way, Spielberg is relishing the experience of the new medium.
“I just adored it,“ he told Abramowitz. “It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.”
While some actors worry the technology may replace them, this particular method needs actors. In order for it to work, there must be a performance to “capture”—though it doesn’t require an actor’s real physical presence on screen, but rather a computer generated animation.
Spielberg tells the Times why he was inspired to make the film:
“It was based on my respect for the art of Hergé and wanting to get as close to that art as I could,” says the director, referring to Tintin’s author-illustrator, who created the international blockbuster graphic novel series (200 million copies in print) starring intrepid cub reporter Tintin, and his irrepressible canine companion, Snowy, as they venture through the pre-WWII world.
“Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe,” Spielberg said. “It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”
Read more at the L.A. Times
February 17, 2010 | 4:39 pm
Could “Inglourious Basterds” win the Best Picture Oscar?
Posted by Danielle Berrin
The word on the street is that Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” could upset Oscar frontrunners “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” for Best Picture.
According to The Wrap, “Tarantino has been making constant public and private appearances” doing press, parties and promotional events in order to boost the film. And it comes as no surprise that the mad scientist behind the plot is Harvey Weinstein, who is famous for the 11th hour campaign blitz. It certainly worked for “Shakespeare in Love.”
Last week, I asked Tarantino how badly he wanted the Oscar. “I think I deserve it for screenplay,” he said. “By sheer definition of the category I deserve it.” Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean he’ll get it. The Wrap’s Steve Pond writes, “I’m not buying it. [Basterds is] too sprawling, too audacious, too violent and too brazenly, defiantly revisionist to be an everybody’s-top-five kind of movie.”
I plan to argue a counterpoint in our March 5th Oscar issue that investigates the impact ‘Basterds’ has had on the Jewish psyche. The story features interviews with Quentin Tarantino, actor Eli Roth, Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, Rabbis David Wolpe and Marvin Hier and film expert and author Lester Friedman. Stay tuned.
February 16, 2010 | 9:48 am
A Hollywood Purim spoof on ‘Wolfman’
Posted by Danielle Berrin
Last week I blogged about a Purim sketch show in New York created by a bunch of Hollywood comedy writers known as The Shushan Channel.
Every year, this group of self-deprecating and comedic Jews uses the holiday as an excuse to poke fun at Jewish neuroses and gentile behaviors. The main event, of course, is a big bash thrown at the 92nd Street Y, so if you don’t live in New York, you can’t join in the fun. But for those of us who live on the West Coast, like one of its creators and former “Tonight Show” writer Rob Kutner, or even elsewhere in America, you can enjoy their annual video spoof, which circulates widely via youtube.
“Wolfman DDS” is about a Jewish dentist who is part werewolf and disturbs his family by eating uncooked meat and not paying taxes on time. It’s not quite as funny as last year’s “Meshugene Men”—a Jewish version of “Mad Men”—which could have won a youtube Oscar had such a thing existed. “Wolfman” is a valiant effort, but it doesn’t quite tap into the zeitgeist the way “Meshugene Men” did.
Watch it nonetheless and judge for yourself: