Inglourious Buddies
Why I’ve written so many essays about movies this year
When the New York Times put out their list of the 100 Greatest Movies of the 21st Century earlier this year, it did not lead to me and my wife working our way through the list; rather, it led to a multi-day conversation in which I tried to persuade my wife to watch Mulholland Drive (#2 on the list) and I failed and the compromise was that we would watch Inglourious Basterds (#14 on the list) instead. We had to call it Inglorious Buddies in front of the kids.
This is my favorite Tarantino film for multiple reasons, but the plot point I appreciated the most on what was probably my seventh or eighth time watching it was that Nation’s Pride, the Nazi propaganda film at the center of the plot, a movie that is supposed to be a war drama with a high-profile premiere in a Parisian cinema, seems completely unwatchable as a movie. There’s no plot, no character, Nation’s Pride is literally footage of three hundred people getting shot one at a time. And the audience of German soldiers and cultural elite just eats it up, they’re cheering for this atrocious work. Hitler tells Goebbels it’s his best one yet.
Fascists can’t make art, that’s something. Starship Troopers, another favorite of mine, a movie made by a man who grew up under Nazi occupation, basically answers the question “what if Nation’s Pride was a sci fi movie and also it was real and a studio let us make it. What if we made the kind of movie that a fascist would want to see.” And it’s miserable unending violence carried out by beautiful Aryan people, with some not-so-subtle hints from Verhoeven that this is not a good thing (one of the not-so-subtle hints is a scene in which Neil Patrick Harris enters wearing an SS uniform).
I’ve written a lot about movies this year, and I probably have a few more of those essays in me. And I’ve written the occasional piece about a television show or a Marc Chagall tapestry. I think it is interesting right now, and maybe even valuable right now, to look at art. Art can nourish us in hard times and can get us to ask interesting moral questions and can bring people together but also fascists can’t do it. Walter Benjamin knew this. David J. Roth knows this which is why he wrote this awesome piece on Starship Troopers for the New Yorker. And I want to leave you with this from Lyta Gold, another great writer, because I think there are worse thoughts with which you can start your Sunday:
“…here’s something even bleaker: the liberal/left may have won the culture war in the last two decades, and lost everything else. This is, however, exactly why it’s important to not give up on art, or on social gains for marginalized groups, or on refusing AI. If the far-right is willing to cede the territory of art-making—or more accurately, if they’re giving up because they can’t hack it—then we can’t surrender it, or consider it useless just because the sight of a little diversity in TV shows didn’t magically turn Americans into good people. Art is worth making, even in a vacuum, even against a seemingly dominant tide of hatred, cruelty, and indifference…They want to reap the benefits of cultural capital without artistry: they want to dominate other minds, the mass mind if possible. I think we need to be realistic about the power that art actually has over other people’s minds: certainly creating art, even really extraordinary art, can’t possibly defeat fascism on its own. But its existence does remind those far-right assholes that they’re useless and talentless, and that history is often very surprising, and once again likely to pass them by.”