Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Immortalism and Interplanetarianism with 1,157 notes
Really you would think ‘woops! Accidentally made my obvious fascist analogues a bunch of physically deformed substance abusing perverts and gender nonconforming decadent schemers who are simultaneously pathetic and contemptible and a sinister and shadowy conspiracy threatening everything that’s good and righteous’ would be a pretty easy mistake to avoid, and yet
Related but distinct to the also incredibly common 'woops! I accidentally made my analogue for fascism an endless horde of literally inhuman alien Others who want nothing more than to overwhelm and destroy the heroes culture and civilization, savage and brutish or uniform and robotic but in either case totally devoid of individuality except for a few cartoonishly malevolent, larger-than-life leaders.’
I’ve long been amused that the place of “Nazis” in American cinema is “disindividuated masses to be brutally exterminated en masse without compunction” even in works where that’s explicitly framed as the moral issue with Nazis
Post with 100 notes
Like, everyone gets that the conceit of Inglourious Basterds is that the (enlisted) Basterds are all monoethnic, weakly distinguished horrific monsters driven by ethnic hatred while the Nazis are noble, individual down-home types with distinct regional accents who share tales of the homes and loved ones they’re fighting to protect?
That the Nazis are multilingual humanists with a sense of chivalric honor, a taste for art, an appreciation of the nuances of foreign cultures, and a desire to end the war with a minimum of death while the Basterds are provincial, monolingual, sadistic thugs who have a superficial understanding of German culture, kill for joy, torture their own allies, and mutilate captives they’ve promised safe passage?
That the marketing campaign for the movie involved the principals doing interviews about how awesome it was to have a movie about Us wreaking mayhem against Them, while the principal of the Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film leaves the premiere because he hates how it valorizes the act of killing?
That after the whole movie we’re expected to cheer the Basterds as they go on a nihilistic homicidal rampage, setting fire to fragile artworks to destroy a temple of high culture, because after all what matters is that they’re Us, and anyway our popular media has long constructed Them as an insect collectivity to be incinerated en masse without compunction?
Right? But, I never saw anyone mention that, even though Tarantino made it COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS.