Emotional Rescue

CINEMA GUILD
Grégoire Colin and Mati Diop in 35 Shots of Rum

It came as no surprise that every response to Inglourious Basterds came as no surprise. When word goes out that a film will be about the Holocaust but not really, because it's actually about old movies; when it's expected to be a slam-bang adrenaline-powered summer thrill ride but not really, because a major American filmmaker has conceived it, then positions about the picture become so many pre-dug holes, waiting for occupants to tumble in. Merely by calling the film Inglourious Basterds--as if its contribution to the vast body of World War II cinema might amount to a couple of misspellings plopped into a title copied from an earlier, cheaper film--Quentin Tarantino promised indelicate pleasures to those who wanted them and pre-emptively shrugged off criticism from those who might want more. It was, in a way, a self-protective move--perhaps even a timid one, coming from a filmmaker who makes his living by a show of boldness; and many more were evident in the trailer, the print ads and the prerelease puff pieces, all calculated to ensure that nothing could be said about Inglourious Basterds that Inglourious Basterds had not first said about itself.

So I choose to have no opinion about this film. Indifference is the only unforced response left to me.

This isn't to say I'm indifferent to evidence of widespread credulity among those viewers of Inglourious Basterds, fans and detractors alike, who accepted the improbable claim that a film can refer to nothing but other films. Nor am I indifferent to a situation in which the entire reception of a film can be produced along with the movie. We have gone beyond cinema's long-familiar modes of culture and commerce: DeMille marketing his epics as a redemption for their own sins, Minnelli both exposing and reveling in the dream factory's artifice, Hitchcock instructing audiences in how to think about a Hitchcock movie, Herschell Gordon Lewis outraging every decent feeling (and so, predictably, attracting a cluck of admirers). With Inglourious Basterds, we reach one of those moments that tell us we're in new territory, where unforeseen, uncontrolled reactions are being foreclosed as never before.

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