A Higher Ugliness

So we went to the cinema and saw Inglourious Basterds, the new, misspelled war saga by Quentin Tarantino. He is an exceptional film maker but with this film he did something none of us could have suspected was possible: divide our opinions.

I will take the liberty of summing up those opinions in a nutshell. To those people concerned I'll say please forgive me for simplifying all your well argued statements into something simplistic that could fit a tweet. It was a matter of brevity. It's not the main point here, it serves just as an illustration of the differences.

The opinions could be summed up like this:

• M. did not like the movie because she found it lacking an intelligent political statement.
• J. liked the movie because of the way it took on the traditional roles in war movies and turned them upside down as a political statement.
• K. liked the movie but found any searching for political statements pointless as it was probably not in QT's intent to give any.

So within our tiny little group we had two persons liking it for completely different reasons and one person disliking it for a similar reason.

To me the question boils down to this: Does Quentin Tarantino make movies with a political agenda in his mind or does he want to create top quality brainless entertainment?

An interesting question that can be argued about for ever. Most of the professional reviewers seem to at least take the fact that QT lets Jews do atrocities to Nazi's as something more than just an entertaining idea and try to look at the political consequences. This excellent article in Newsweek for instance is worth a read and leads to serious questions as should Jews be outraged?

The only thing that I am interested in for the scope of this post however is Quentin Tarantino's intent. Does he deliberately put political references in his movies in the hope to voice his opinion on matters close to his heart or does he make a movie primarily for entertainment purposes and considers political ideas in it - be it the blatantly obvious ones or those hidden behind a layer of symbols and references - merely an amusing afterthought to please the politically correct?

I wish I could ask him myself but alas, I'm not a professional movie critic so that will never happen. However much we can discuss about it, it is ultimately him and him only that can give a direct and clear response to this question. So I went out to watch some of the interviews he gave recently (and some not so recently) in the hope to find some hints in his own words from which we could draw some conclusions.

Not that I will draw any conclusions. Also, if there are any other clips or interviews that are interesting in this debate I'd be more than happy to collect them here and add them for later reference. But from the little amount of time I spent wading through all the promotional bullshit talk these movie makers go through to get the word out I was able to find a few quotes that relate to the subject at hand.

Read them, and draw your own conclusions. And Quentin, if you're out there, drop me an e-mail.

The first one I ever found was a quite agressive interview from the time when Kill Bill was released. QT is questioned about the violence in that film to which the interviewer obviously takes a great deal of offense. (pay attention at about 2m50s)

To the question why there is so much violence in his film he shouts out: "BECAUSE IT'S SO MUCH FUN, JEN". He could have tried to make a better point but he's obviously frustrated with the reasoning of Jen that movies have to mean something in real life, as he goes on to explain further on.

There's all too many late night shows to keep track of so I didn't know of the one hosted by a Scottish American called Craig Ferguson. Turns out he's quite a funny dude, like one could expect from a late night show host these days, but is not into those arty European films that require the reading of subtitles and the thinking of thoughts deeper than a puddle of water after a drizzle.

When he asks "do you ever get tired of watching movies with a good camera angle or a piece of subtext?" somewhere 50 seconds on the way in this youtube film QT responds:

Judging from the enthusiasm he uses to proclaim those last words it would certainly sound that being entertaining is a very important aspect that Quentin looks for in a film. Not that anyone in its right mind would have ever doubted that I guess.

Earlier in that interview there was a quote that could be considered at least as interesting to our subject.

That does not sound like he wanted to make a political statement to me.

But what we're looking for is a more political quote than the ones we have found so far. It's lamentable how no interviewer ever seems to come up with a similar question. This youtube clip here is a remote interview with QT not much different from all the rest but the interviewer does ask one question that would be an excellent opportunity for QT to expand on the topic. He asks at about 1m47s the question

"You're not Jewish so why was it important to make this. I mean, when I was watching this all I could think of was only QT can get away with this and pull it off and why did it take so long for a filmmaker to stick it to the nazi's, who doesn't love a nazi killing movie?"

This is the perfect opportunity for Quentin to say something political. This would be the question where he could, for instance, say that he wanted to portray the Jews as the bad guys for once. Just to question our beliefs. Because religion is as bad as nazism. Or something about stereotypes in war movies. Any reason. Here's his answer:

"I wanted to do a war movie with a genre that you can actually be entertained while watching the film". It's not a good sentence, I admit. It even leaves room for interpretation.

As long as QT does not write his memoires, as long as he himself does not respond to the question and as long as nobody even poses the question it is my conviction that he is primarily an entertaining filmmaker. He is on one end of the spectrum where entertainment is the most important goal of making a movie and politics are at best an afterthought to please the intellectuals, while for instance Lars von Trier is on the extreme other end of it. Even though his new film, about to be released, may contradict this.

We will see soon. Knowing Lars it would surprise me if it doesn't stir at least as much discussion as Inglourious Basterds does so I am looking forward to that. I will leave you with the trailer:

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