![Quentin Tarantino needs movie reviewers. They are among the few pedantic enough to follow his allusions, as Manohla Dargis does in her New York Times review of Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ when she writes that “you admire how neatly the German soldiers outside are positioned within one of the windows, a shot that recalls the framing of an image in Monte Hellman’s 1971 cult classic, ‘Two-Lane Blacktop.’” Tarantino loves movies with the same indexical fixation that film reviewers do, but for some reason (self-loathing?), reviewers resent this quality in his movies. They see these winks and nods as mere cleverness.
Dargis seems to share this view that Tarantino makes movies for the love of moviemaking, rather than storytelling. Dargis argues that the opening sequence encapsulates Inglourious Basterds’ strengths and weaknesses, as though the movie were a fractal, composed of littler versions of itself. The strengths, she says, are formal: marvelous camerawork, “tightly coordinated performances,” framing, development of suspense. The faults are all content: the vulgar, boundary-pushing insensitivity of the dialogue; the uneasy juxtaposition of humor and horror; and the film’s (Tarantino’s) referential narcissism. “What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking,” she observes.
Here, Dargis is aligned with the prevailing take on Tarantino: that his films are well made but empty, the Dargerian opuses of a semi-autistic auteur who cares more about the medium than the message - a virtuoso without virtue. Dargis herself is given to formal indulgence: of Brad Pitt’s performance, she notes with a writerly flourish Pitt’s character “pulling his southern-flavored vowels out like chewed gum.” It’s a nice reference to Keats. So it’s intriguing that her opposition to the movie is not based on its vulgar discomforts. “[T]oo often in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ the filmmaking falls short,” Dargis writes:
The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa [Christoph Waltz] simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma[.]
Casting and screenwriting are formal problems, but it’s not clear that Dargis is actually referring to something merely formal. To say that Nazism is polarizing is the understatement of the last century; the discomfort that Dargis voices presumes that the charming Nazi should have a counterpoint. That presumption isn’t based on the filmmaker’s techniques, but on his values, which Dargis hints are either weak or sinister, most pointedly articulated in her reference to Tarantino’s “chortling exploitation of spectacular violence.”
Do Tarantino’s movies exploit violence? There are whole sections of university libraries devoted to this question. Some argue that Tarantino’s movies are in fact about cinematic violence, or violence in general, commenting on exploitation more so than perpetuating it. That’s all beside Dargis’s point, though, which has more to do with the moral integrity of the world in which the movie is set. Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review speaks to this stuff more directly:
By making the Americans cruel, too, [Tarantino] escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. […] It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes.
Tarantino’s fascination with the moral trials of criminals pervades all of his movies, and just because the characters may not wrestle with self-doubt doesn’t mean that the audience isn’t meant to. But Dargis thinks the movie’s frightening ambiguity is a fault:
Mr. Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. […] ‘Inglourious Basterds’ […] is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.
It appears that Dargis is the one who’s insistent about the movie’s status as fiction. The idea that a charming villain needs to be opposed by a compelling hero is an entirely fictional conceit. Dargis may have borrowed a nice image from Keats, but she apparently missed this passage, from a letter Keats wrote to his family:
several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Not having seen the movie, I can’t comment on whether Tarantino employs that negative capability in ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ but Dargis’s and Lane’s reviews make it sound that way. That Nazis are evil goes without saying. And precisely because of that, I’m not at all convinced that the “eerie blankness” in Tarantino’s movie, or the seductiveness of its villain, is any kind of error.](http://14.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kopgo3OrFU1qzcnpmo1_400.jpg)
Quentin Tarantino needs movie reviewers. They are among the few pedantic enough to follow his allusions, as Manohla Dargis does in her New York Times review of Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ when she writes that “you admire how neatly the German soldiers outside are positioned within one of the windows, a shot that recalls the framing of an image in Monte Hellman’s 1971 cult classic, ‘Two-Lane Blacktop.’” Tarantino loves movies with the same indexical fixation that film reviewers do, but for some reason (self-loathing?), reviewers resent this quality in his movies. They see these winks and nods as mere cleverness.
Dargis seems to share this view that Tarantino makes movies for the love of moviemaking, rather than storytelling. Dargis argues that the opening sequence encapsulates Inglourious Basterds’ strengths and weaknesses, as though the movie were a fractal, composed of littler versions of itself. The strengths, she says, are formal: marvelous camerawork, “tightly coordinated performances,” framing, development of suspense. The faults are all content: the vulgar, boundary-pushing insensitivity of the dialogue; the uneasy juxtaposition of humor and horror; and the film’s (Tarantino’s) referential narcissism. “What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking,” she observes.
Here, Dargis is aligned with the prevailing take on Tarantino: that his films are well made but empty, the Dargerian opuses of a semi-autistic auteur who cares more about the medium than the message - a virtuoso without virtue. Dargis herself is given to formal indulgence: of Brad Pitt’s performance, she notes with a writerly flourish Pitt’s character “pulling his southern-flavored vowels out like chewed gum.” It’s a nice reference to Keats. So it’s intriguing that her opposition to the movie is not based on its vulgar discomforts. “[T]oo often in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ the filmmaking falls short,” Dargis writes:
The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa [Christoph Waltz] simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma[.]
Casting and screenwriting are formal problems, but it’s not clear that Dargis is actually referring to something merely formal. To say that Nazism is polarizing is the understatement of the last century; the discomfort that Dargis voices presumes that the charming Nazi should have a counterpoint. That presumption isn’t based on the filmmaker’s techniques, but on his values, which Dargis hints are either weak or sinister, most pointedly articulated in her reference to Tarantino’s “chortling exploitation of spectacular violence.”
Do Tarantino’s movies exploit violence? There are whole sections of university libraries devoted to this question. Some argue that Tarantino’s movies are in fact about cinematic violence, or violence in general, commenting on exploitation more so than perpetuating it. That’s all beside Dargis’s point, though, which has more to do with the moral integrity of the world in which the movie is set. Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review speaks to this stuff more directly:
By making the Americans cruel, too, [Tarantino] escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. […] It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes.
Tarantino’s fascination with the moral trials of criminals pervades all of his movies, and just because the characters may not wrestle with self-doubt doesn’t mean that the audience isn’t meant to. But Dargis thinks the movie’s frightening ambiguity is a fault:
Mr. Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. […] ‘Inglourious Basterds’ […] is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.
It appears that Dargis is the one who’s insistent about the movie’s status as fiction. The idea that a charming villain needs to be opposed by a compelling hero is an entirely fictional conceit. Dargis may have borrowed a nice image from Keats, but she apparently missed this passage, from a letter Keats wrote to his family:
several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Not having seen the movie, I can’t comment on whether Tarantino employs that negative capability in ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ but Dargis’s and Lane’s reviews make it sound that way. That Nazis are evil goes without saying. And precisely because of that, I’m not at all convinced that the “eerie blankness” in Tarantino’s movie, or the seductiveness of its villain, is any kind of error.
