Great comment and also, oh man, do you mean that coming-out-as-goth thing I wrote some years ago? I’ll look for it, and anything else goth related I have in the archives.

first:
“I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge.”

It probably has to do with the perception of systemic anti-semitism as a thing of the past, so a film about Jews vs. Nazis is comfortably anchored somewhere else in time and place. Pretty much everyone else who got swept into the death camps for apolitical reasons (queer, Roma, Muslim, disabled, etc.) is still being oppressed to one degree or another, so it gets uncomfortable/incendiary for modern audiences pretty quickly. The fact that we haven’t really had movies about actual slave revolts out of Hollywood leads me to believe there’s no way in hell they’d make a revenge fantasy about it.

i think this is true to a degree, but i think it has at least as much to do with the relationship between folks in (political, social and cultural) positions of power in the u.s. and zionism. the uncritical support for the israeli state and its ideology that dominates the u.s. political landscape makes racialized violence involving jews one of the least threatening things to portray, as long as it sticks to one of the two main narratives: jews vs. nazis / jews vs. arabs. in either of these, jews killing people in messy ways is seen as A Good Thing, or occasionally A Complicated Thing (which makes it Okay After All). take “Munich” or “Waltz with Bashir” as parallels to “Basterds” and the pattern is pretty visible.

this is, clearly, pretty fucked up. and also disappointing. i mean, if i’m going to see a good revenge story involving folks an ashkenazi mischling like me shares a history with, can i get it without the racism (anti-arab and otherwise) (and btw, quentin, if i’m not horribly mistaken scalping’s a british thing that got introduced to the americas as part of a colonial bounty-hunting program)? and without making Those Evil Germans the point, as if the u.s. government and corporations weren’t pretty damn complicit in setting up that lovely little attempted genocide? and even without erasing the millions of non-jewish folks killed in that period (from anarchists and secularists in franco’s spain to queers and roma in nazi-occupied europe to tokyo and dresden’s incinerated citizens to the thousands upon thousands of radicals massacred by u.s.-supported post-war regimes all over southeast asia…)? thanks.

second:

constintina, you once wrote this brilliant post on why radicalism and goth go together. i can’t quite reproduce the argument, but i think it’s relevent to the gory movies too… can you cut & paste that snippet into this thread?

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/08/21/interview-eli-roth-talks-inglourious-basterds-going-method-to-play-the-bear-jew-nazi-atrocities-and-quentin-tarantinos-place-in-history/

Haven’t actually seen the movie, but plan to this week. There are parts of Tarantino’s work I like (Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction were corny but entertaining) and parts I don’t (Exploitation revival flick Deathproof and it’s conjoined twin whose name I forget dear god no), but I’ll give this one a shot.

I thought I’d reply to this. I don’t find it upsetting that people like these movies because I believe in freedom of choice and everyone has different likes and dislikes. But ever since I got out of high school (and was less influenced by friends) I stopped watching movies like this. I want feel good movies as much as possible and violence doesn’t make me feel good. Maybe it seems more real to me than other people even though I logically know it’s fake. And there is enough bad and violent stuff happening in the real world that I don’t want to watch it in movies. I want to laugh when being entertained. Drama without much violence is okay too sometimes.

Is this in a special edition? I’ve seen that movie like five times and never seen a rape scene.

The edition I own doesn’t have an explicit rape scene or anything, but theres definitely the implication. She gets delivered, Evil Ash makes some tasteless comments (can’t remember off the top of my head), grabs the struggling woman, reprises the “Gimme some sugar, baby” line from earlier, and leans in to kiss her as the scene cuts. Not exactly ambiguous.

Is this in a special edition? I’ve seen that movie like five times and never seen a rape scene.

“It’s a lot like Pulp Fiction, if Pulp Fiction was animated, set in the 1930s, and included immortal gangsters”

Title pls?

“Two of the last I saw that did live up to the hype were Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (and only sort of, I was over-prepared for it and so not as shocked) and a short film called Cutting Moments.”

You may want to check out Martyrs, if you haven’t.

“I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge.”

It probably has to do with the perception of systemic anti-semitism as a thing of the past, so a film about Jews vs. Nazis is comfortably anchored somewhere else in time and place. Pretty much everyone else who got swept into the death camps for apolitical reasons (queer, Roma, Muslim, disabled, etc.) is still being oppressed to one degree or another, so it gets uncomfortable/incendiary for modern audiences pretty quickly. The fact that we haven’t really had movies about actual slave revolts out of Hollywood leads me to believe there’s no way in hell they’d make a revenge fantasy about it.

Don’t gay, disabled, Roma, and political victims have just as much of a claim to fantasy revenge?

Ok, without spoiling too much, I’ll say this: the biggest act of revenge in Inglorious Basterds is carried out not by the Americans and their white leader but by a French woman of Jewish descent and her French lover of African descent. What happens transpires in Paris, as a direct result of occupation, with no outside aid or knowledge. The Basterds are ultimately irrelevant to the major events of the film’s climax.

Dena:

I think for me it’s a safe way to vent about the idiots in the world you’ve always hated but can’t do anything about. Many times I actually root for the monster.

Absolutely! Same. And I will check out shutter, thx for the recomendation!

chava :

I feel similarly. I actually hated Requim for a Dream, though largely cuz I thought it was at heart an exploitative, psuedo-edgy DARE psa that was racist, to boot. It came out around the same time as Traffic, and I found the portrayals of black people in both films to be frighteningly similar and A Problem, but that’s really a whole other bowl of fish.

I had mixed feeling towards Sin City–parts were so visually strikining and awesome, others made me want to smack someone, and not in a nice way. Mostly it pissed me off cuz I like Clive Owen and hated how he swept in to save hookertown, when the hookers were really doing just fine without him. Sigh. Wait, there were lots of other things I hated too…

cpinkhouse:

You are totally right, and that’s exactly why I threw it in there–I read multiple reviews that derided it as “torture porn”. They completely missed the point, of course, but still that’s part of how the film (the remake, at least,) was marketed and categorized in the public imagination, which is ridiculous.

Linoleum Blownaparte:

Thank you! I will watch that asap.

groggette (Ali) :

I’ve always considered torture porn as the kind of films that show women being tortured all sexily.

Yeah, I think that’s the impression a lot of people have, but a lot of it it (maybe most of it? hard to quantify) isn’t that at all. Hostel, which may be the archetypical “torture porn” film, isn’t that. There are tons of problems with it in terms of playing into sexism and homophobia, but the crux of the film is some stupid (male) US American sex tourists getting punished for their misogynist imperialism. Really. The Saw movies didn’’t even really go there, to my recollection, until the third one, which is a big part of why I’ve been so hesitant to watch the most recent few. That and the fact that they’re terrible movies, but the first two were fun, terrible movies.

Kate J:

I am also morbidly curious. I just have to see the so-called extreme or “torture porn” movies for myself, can it really be that bad?

Same, I still have that 7 year old girl in the video store inside me. I actually have a standing date to watch Salo with a friend who doesn’t want to see it alone. I’ve never heard of Cutting Moments, I’ll look into it.

preying mantis:

Maybe it was just the length diluting the action, but Watchmen seemed way less violent than it should have been, given the ass-beating-prone characters and mass-murder-conspiracy plot.

For real. Wish they coulda cut that godawful sex scene and thrown some more violence in.

Asenath Waite:

But I really don’t like Tarantino, and the idea of a Jewish revenge fantasy helmed (in the movie and in reality) by a non-Jew bothers me quite a lot. It seems to imply that we can’t defend or avenge ourselves without the guiding hands of “real men.” Or maybe I’m being too sensitive. Plus, what about all the other people who weren’t part of the perfect Nazi world? Don’t gay, disabled, Roma, and political victims have just as much of a claim to fantasy revenge?

I have really mixed feelings towards Tarantino. Sometimes I hate him, sometimes I kind of like some of his stuff, etc. He’s talented, but often infuriating. I also had kinda “huh?” feelings about Tarantino/Pitt leading the Jews through their revenge–I still want to see it and hope it will be fun, but it totally does seem to play into stereotypes.

Your point about others persecuted in the holocaust is REALLY important and I agree 100%. I think that perhaps at this moment, Jewish fanatsy revenge against Nazis is probably more palatable (or at least seen as more profitable) in a Hollywood film than queer or romany or disabled revenge. ?uestlove recently tweeted about whether Hollywood would make a big revenge fantasy set during US slavery with enslaved blacks brutalizing whites–probably not.

Quentin Tarantino is not Jewish, so far as I know, nor is the fictional head of the Nazi-vanquishing title outfit played by Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is supposed to be part American Indian, however, which is why he and his Basterds like to scalp Nazis. This all rings a little…problematic to me.

I went and saw Inglorious Basterds over the weekend and I think the movie has gotten some uneven press because its structured in an odd way. I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers. There is certainly some degree of revenge fantasy in the film, but thats mostly parallel plot and character motivation. Fundamentally, the film is a genre western set in Nazi occupied France.

In Deathproof QT took the basic “maniac killer hunting women” trope of Grindhouse fare and had a bit of fun inverting it and turning the maniac killer into the hunted party. I think he’s doing a similar thing in Inglorious Basterds. Because the film is so deeply rooted in the western genre, you have the old trope of “cowboys and indians.” The Jewish soldiers, the German/Aryan soldier in the Basterds, and their part-Native American leader, are playing the part of the “savage indian” that is so central to the whole western genre while the Nazis are playing the civilized, intelligent, white lawmen. With a bit of perspective QT fucks around with how you’re generally supposed to approach those tropes. That inversion is part of why the final scene in the film is so satisfying. QT uses perspective to invert who gets to be the hero and who gets to be the villain just as in Deathrpoof he inverted who gets to be the hunter and who gets to be the victim. There are certainly a ton of problems and blindspots in the film (which pretty much sums up QT’s career), but I don’t think the problem of a non-Jew directing a Jewish revenge fantasy is among them because that really isn’t what the Basterds plot is about (the theater plot could well be, though).