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Expertise, Criticism and HolocaustMemory in CinemaA. Susan OwenPublished online: 28 Jul 2011.

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Expertise, Criticism and HolocaustMemory in CinemaA. Susan Owen

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplifycontrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The mael-strom: A family chronicle and Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. Onefilm is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essayexplores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctivespaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of historyas comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claimsto expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust mem-ory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysisreveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cine-matic memory construction of the Holocaust.

Keywords: Memory; Film; Aporia; Expertise; Rhetoric

Introduction

I encountered a jarring posting on Facebook while writing this essay. It was a You-

Tube clip likening the University of Alabama football program to Adolf Hitler’sNazi Germany. A playful bricoleur had re-written the English subtitles of a film

scene where Hitler is berating his high command, in German. The re-write figuresHitler as the head coach of Alabama discussing plans with his coaching staff to

undermine arch-rival University of Auburn’s football program. The college-agedAuburn football fans responding to the clip thought it was hilarious. In later (face-to-face) discussions with people of my own generation and profession, I encoun-

tered two common responses: “They don’t mean to be disrespectful” and “They’veall seen Inglourious basterds.” The use of Hitler as an extravagant metaphor is but

A. Susan Owen is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Puget Sound. Correspondence to:

A. Susan Owen, Communication Studies Department, African American Studies, Gender Studies, University of

Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA 98416, USA. Email: sowen@pugetsound.edu

Social EpistemologyAquatic InsectsVol. 25, No. 3, July 2011, pp. 233–247

ISSN 0269-1728 (print)/ISSN 1464-5297 (online) � 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2011.578303

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one illustration of the shifting terrain of Holocaust memory and its public uses.How one views that shifting terrain depends upon a number of variables, including

competing claims to “expertise.”E. Johanna Hartelius (2011, 1) argues that expertise is “grounded in a fierce

struggle over ownership and legitimacy. To be an expert is to claim a piece of theworld, to define yourself in relation to certain insights into human experience.”

Moreover, “the process of establishing oneself as an expert entails an eventualjudgment that is contingent on a rhetorical effort” (Hartelius 2011, 3). This is a

good definition of criticism and the critic. My work as a critic and teacher is com-plicated by my own social positionality. How does one reconcile the sometimes“fierce struggle” between the viewer-self and the critic? How does one teach criti-

cism, a particular kind of expertise, so that students learn to arrive at thoughtful,yet independent judgment?

Hartelius’s work on the rhetoric of expertise invites reflection upon these ques-tions. As she observes, academic scholars in the humanities (particularly those

interested in history and memory) are methodical. We systematically deconstructthrough dialectics, we develop refutational strategies to deal with counter-claims,

and we make judgments about putting our objects of study in appropriate contexts(Hartelius 2011, 80–81). Hartelius (2011, 23) is particularly interested in the peda-

gogical process of teaching. How do I put my expertise “into practice” in the class-room? What levels of expertise must I and my students have in order to performcriticism?

I answer these questions through examination of two recent Holocaust filmsthat exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s

1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle arguably is a high modern example of film-making. Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds arguably is a low (post)

modern example. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurativeexaggeration. I explore how The maelstrom positions viewers within the con-

structed subjunctive spaces (Zelizer 2004) of the film, while Inglourious basterdspositions viewers as spectators of history as comic book.

Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claims to

expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust mem-ory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis

reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cine-matic memory construction of the Holocaust. As I would in the classroom, I posi-

tion the films in their broader cultural contexts, examine each for manipulation ofaesthetic form and function, consider key patterns of reception, and offer for con-

sideration a critical judgment.

Situating the Objects of Study

The cinematic construction of Holocaust memory is a public forum rife with con-testation and controversy. Holocaust memory stems from cultural trauma; thus,

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“knowing” in and of itself is always already problematic. As Hartelius (2011, 73)observes, the rhetorical challenge of traumatic representation lies in the ability “to

create an intelligible discourse of the traumatic event” particularly when “wordsseem to fall short” (2011, 89). Trauma produces silences and anxiety about the

adequacy of representation. Hartelius (2011, 73) posits that witnessing is itself aform of rhetorical invention. Thus, any consideration of the history of Holocaust

representation requires consideration of the productive force of an anxiety thatboth demands and refuses representation; that couples necessity with impossibility.

Rhetorical aporia, anxiety over the possibility or adequacy of representation,1

has been at the center of cultural struggles over memory construction of the Holo-caust. Many scholars (for example, Huyssen 2001) mark Theodor Adorno’s cau-

tionary advice about poetry and Auschwitz as the most significant articulation ofthe problem of Holocaust memory and its representation. At the same time, schol-

ars have disagreed about how to understand Adorno’s perspective on the Holo-caust (Gubar 2003; Huyssen 2001; LaCapra 1998). Elaine Martin (2006, 2–3), for

example, argues that “Adorno did not cancel the possibility of art after Auschwitzbut rather highlighted the aporetic situation in which [he] found himself; an aporia

so extreme that it leaves [little] space for meaningful resolution.” Martin (2006, 3)reads Adorno as anxious about whether any representational form could express

the double bind of aporetic anxiety; that is, to “produce the knowledge of its ownimpossibility.” Art historian Mark Callaghan (2010) argues that the representationof impossibility is the hallmark of “post-Auschwitz aporia.”

More recent works on visual representations of the Holocaust have problema-tized the privileging of rhetorical aporia as the inventional force of cultural mem-

ory (Zelizer 2001). Andreas Huyssen (2001, 30), for example, suggests that narrowinterpretations of Adorno have produced “dogmatic” practices that have resulted

in “official Holocaust memory and its [attendant] rituals” (2001, 39). Zelizer(2001, 2) observes that the representational “template” for the Holocaust has

tended to “valorize visual forms like the filmed testimony, archival photograph, ordocumentary film more than representations that track reality in a less manifestfashion.” Zelizer (2001, 2) and the contributors to her edited collection look at

both the “high and low ground of Holocaust representation,” including “low”expressions such as popular film, virtual reality, comic books and body art tattoos.

I now turn to an analysis of The maelstrom and Inglourious basterds to highlighttheir strategies for negotiating and moving beyond the productive (restrictive)

force of aporia.

The maelstrom

Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs tells the story of the extended Peereboom fam-ily, Dutch Jews living near Amsterdam, in the years leading up to their deportation

to Auschwitz. Viewers know what the Peerebooms may or may not have knownwith any clarity—that they are doomed—and only one member of the extended

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family will survive the death camps. Viewers last see some members of the familyfilming themselves as they pack for Auschwitz, sewing clothes for their children,

and checking off items they are allowed to take with them.2

It comes as no surprise that The maelstrom produced less anxiety among

reviewers and scholars than Inglorious basterds (see Alphen 2007; Nichols 2003;Roth 2005). This is the case, in part, because Forgacs creates from 13 years of

home movies a montage of images organized through the grammar of documen-tary film form. The documentary film form offers indexicality (“this happened”)

as rhetorical proof of authenticity, authorial expertise and transparency, therebysatisfying the aporetic urge to transcend or circumvent the necessary slippage of allrepresentational forms. Moreover, The maelstrom easily fits the generic expecta-

tions of the poetic documentary, characterized by: “the filmmaker’s ability todevelop a personal vision”; “the absence of an omniscient voice-over”; and “the

film’s capacity to create a sense of private connection with the viewer in spite ofthe presence of a public gaze” (O’Brien 2006, 13). Significantly, the form of the

poetic documentary mimics the communicative dimensions of human experiencethat “fuel the desire to document,” including the urge to record, persuade, interro-

gate and express (O’Brien 2006, 13). The poetic documentary negotiates the apo-retic contradiction of necessity/impossibility by merging visual indexicality (“this

happened”) with “the primal desire to mimic” (O’Brien 2006, 13). In other words,the authorial voice of documentary fulfills our desire to make sense of what we seearound us through re-presentation. The poetic documentary thus reduces aporetic

anxiety because it presents itself as a rhetoric of authenticity that meets the condi-tion of necessity and obviates impossibility.

As poetic documentary, The maelstrom invents the possibility of a “private con-nection” for viewers through the manipulation of the grammatical subjunctive

voice of “what if,” thereby opening “a space of possibility, hope and liminalitythrough which spectators might relate to images” (Zelizer 2004, 163). As Barbie

Zelizer explains:

[i]mages that might not be inherently uncertain, hypothetical, or emotional become sodue to the attitude of spectators. It allows them to move through what might be calledthe “as if ” of visual representation and memory. The “as if ” thrives on contradiction,on often illogical, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic connections, whereby the originaluse value of a piece of visual culture is easily negated and undermined. (2004, 163)

Viewers of The maelstrom see the Peereboom family over a period of 13 years,

always knowing that they are “about to die” during the Nazi occupation ofHolland. Zelizer explains that images which focus viewer attention on the time

before death function rhetorically to create the “illogical conclusion of its post-ponement,” thereby marking “the moment[s] before death, rather than after, as the

most powerful and memorable moment of representation in the sequencing ofevents surrounding human demise” (2004, 165). Forgacs acknowledges this rhetor-

ical dimension of The maelstrom and notes:

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We know immediately what [a] date means, but the [person in the film] does notforesee . . . the historic time. Why can’t we warn [them]? This is a powerful motiveand gives an uncomfortable feeling for the viewers . . . We know ahead of time thatthe innocent victim will fall into the hands of the killer. We want to warn her/him;watch out! (Quoted in Nichols 2003, 9)

The film focuses attention on the vital, complexly contextualized moments of the

extended Peereboom family, neither sentimental nor tragic, always already forestall-ing disaster.

The power of subjunctive positionality is amplified for viewers through inten-

tional acts of the Peerebooms. Because these are “home” movies (Roth 2005;Stalter 2006), we know that the Peerebooms represented themselves from their

own point of view. Viewers are positioned to see how the Peerebooms constructedvisual memories of their lives. Forgacs’s montage invites viewers to participate in

the imaginary that the Peerebooms envisioned for themselves: their relationship toDutch public life; and selected moments in the private spaces of their lives.

Forgacs constructs repeated motifs of the Peerebooms representing themselvesas assimilated to Dutch public life. These motifs include the family participating inpublic ceremonies for Queen Wilhelmina. Forgacs is particularly interested in the

family’s participation in the Dutch Red Cross; he fashions a montage of the Peer-ebooms (as they film themselves) participating in safety drills, swimming contests,

and first-aid exercises. Significantly, he repeats the Red Cross motif just before hebegins to interweave with the Peereboom home movies representations of the Nazi

occupation of Holland. After the arrival of the Reich Commissioner of the Nether-lands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Peerebooms and other Dutch Jews are gradually

stripped of their national identity. Chronicling the de-humanization and de-nationalization process, Forgacs marks the moment when Seyss-Inquart proclaims:

“We do not regard the Jews as part of the Dutch people.”The private lives of the Peerebooms are visually and sequentially memorialized

as joyous celebrations of birthdays, weddings, trips to the seaside, the first snows

of the season, ice skating, trips to Belgium and Paris, and special events in the syn-agogue. The Peerebooms represent themselves as loving parents and grandparents;

they lavish care, patience, and attention upon their small children. In particular,Forgacs focuses on the children of Max and Annie Peereboom, daughter Flora and

son Jacques.Flora and Jacques are particularly important to the subjunctive construction of

the film because contemporary viewers understand these children are about to dieat Auschwitz. Flora is born before Nazi occupation and the subsequent loss of herfamily’s prosperous businesses and comfortable homes. Flora’s nursery is cheerful

and well furnished; father Max uses the camera to document a Mickey Mousewallpaper border in his daughter’s room. Jacques is born after Nazi occupation in

a hospital designated for Jews only; he lives with his family in the cramped quar-ters of the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam. Shortly before Max and Annie and their

children are sent to Auschwitz, viewers see toddler Flora playing with Jacques,helping him sit up and roll over. There is perhaps no less sentimental and more

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devastating way to represent “profundity of loss” (Nichols 2003, 11). These beauti-ful, cherished children will be destroyed. The subjunctive space refuses interven-

tion, but privileges the possibility of present and future action to protect otherchildren from systematic slaughter.

Forgacs heightens the intensity of the about-to-die subjunctive spaces by cross-cutting between Peereboom home movies and amateur clips of Nazi youth groups

practicing salutes in 1935, visual references to Hitler’s 1938 visit to Vienna, andhome movie footage of the Seyss-Inquarts, the family of the Reich Commissioner

who arrived in 1940.3 Perhaps the most chilling scene in the Nazi family homemovies is the appearance of Heinrich Himmler and his family—riding horses andplaying tennis at the estate commandeered for the Seyss-Inquarts. Forgacs inserts

representations of Nazi laws regulating the Jews: the kosher killing of animals isforbidden, travel is restricted, access to public facilities is limited or forbidden,

bank accounts are “centralized,” and Jews are forced into Amsterdam ghettos(Roth 2005). In an interview with Bill Nichols, Forgacs explains the logic of the

gradually restrictive Nazi laws against Dutch Jews: “Dutch society’s resistance [toNazism] demanded a different Nazi psycho-script for that stage: the gradual intro-

duction of Jewish laws (1940–43), and the perfectly camouflaged separation, plun-dering, and extermination of the Dutch Jewry” (Nichols 2003, 5). Viewers are

positioned to know the historical outcome of the story, but not the situated partic-ulars of this family. The film asks viewers: how might ordinary people in thismoment have coped with the onslaught of genocide?

Forgacs answers the question: even as Nazi occupation constricts their lives, thePeerebooms persist in documenting themselves as fully human, enduring with

grace through everyday living. They film themselves with new babies, getting mar-ried, and lighting the menorah; their lives grow smaller and more restricted, but

the camera continues to construct visual memories of the pleasures of familialbonds and “ordinary” life. Forgacs occasionally informs the viewer that various

members of the family have been arrested; viewers learn that some family membershave died in the camps. Significantly, viewers do not know whether the Peereboomfamily knows about their looming fate or about members of their family who pre-

cede them into the camps. Viewer omniscience about their private lives is limited,even as viewers know the broader historical outcome.

Literary scholar Michael S. Roth (2005, 10) asks of The maelstrom, “From wheredo we watch and remember?” He observes: “we have knowledge of history that the

families in the film lack, even though this history will soon become their own. Didthey feel the maelstrom pulling them? Did they feel themselves being reconfigured by

its force?” (Roth 2005, 9). Roth repeatedly wonders what the family knew about theirhistorical fate, and when (if ever) they knew it: “When we watch the Peerebooms . . .

we know they will confront death in ways they could never have conceived” (2005,10–11). Roth’s reading underscores the rhetorical forcefulness of subjunctive posi-tionality. Viewers participate in the construction of the story with their own inven-

tional resources, perhaps knowledge of history or the visual and narrativeconventions of Holocaust films. In The maelstrom, the absence of melodrama, of

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smokestacks, of sadistic Nazis, of striped prison camp apparel and barbed wire, isstriking. Forgacs comments on the rhetorical significance of this intentional absence:

For us today, here and now, with our historical knowledge, we add an unforgettableand unforgiving dramatic perspective: the invisible shadows over their happy moments.[These] happy moment[s] conjure in our mind other constructions . . . torturous deathin a gas chamber – an undercurrent hidden . . . to the future victims. It is thereforenever realized, made visible, in my films. (Quoted in Nichols 2003, 6)

Forgacs compels his viewers to imagine the “profundity of loss” (Nichols 2003, 11)

through an appreciation of the mundaneness of everyday life rather than throughiconic images of atrocity. Hartelius (2011, 89) observes that the “trope of ordinari-

ness privileges personal experience . . . [inviting viewers to] consider the possibilityof [their] own normal, daily routines being ruptured by a trauma.”

The subjunctive voice necessarily opens a space of contingency, the “what if”of our imaginations. Forgacs manipulates this space by positioning his viewers tointervene symbolically. Unlike horror or suspense dramas, viewers know, as Forg-

acs puts it, this film “anticipates real blood, real suffering” and viewers “aredeadly sure it’s a real thing” (quoted in Nichols 2003, 9). He impels viewers to

call out a warning: “Watch out!” In so doing, viewers become witnesses. But, towhat end?

The Peerebooms are alive in the subjunctive spaces of this film. The possibilityof intervention always already exists, since the story begins in 1933. But the para-

digmatic “Modernist event” (White 1996), the racial politics of American foreignand domestic policy, and the failure of compassionate action trump momentaryinvestment. The Peerebooms persist in living and representing their lives, perhaps

two of the few available means of resistance for Dutch Jews after 1936. As such,The maelstrom offers a rhetorically complex point of view: an illustration of how

ordinary people used moving images to remember themselves in the midst ofdehumanizing circumstances; a call for the necessity of remembering the past; the

manipulation of subjunctive spaces to engage viewers in the telling of the story;and the withholding of viewer omniscience to underscore the impossibility of

“knowing” what cinema typically promises us—that we can at least master thestory, even as we cannot intervene. Thus are viewers positioned as witnesses to the

impossibility of intervention in the past and the moral necessity of confrontinggenocidal possibilities now and in the future.

Inglourious basterds

Twelve years after The maelstrom, Tarantino released Inglourious basterds, a post-

modern parody. The narrative arc is sub-divided into five chapters, imitating theform of a graphic novel or comic book. American commando Lt Aldo Raine andhis band of Jewish Nazi “hunters” join forces with British Intelligence to kill Adolf

Hitler and several of his high command in a small Parisian cinema. The cinema isowned by Shosanna Dreyfus, the only member of her French Jewish family to

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survive the murderous activity of Col. Hans Landa and his SS soldiers. The finalchapter of the film brings all of these characters together in a tongue-in-cheek

revenge fantasy wherein Adolf Hitler and his high command are trapped in acrowded theatre and shot or burned alive. This low culture Holocaust fantasy

stands in stark contrast to The maelstrom’s high cultural status as documentary.Tarantino’s postmodern parody drew disparate responses from popular and

scholarly critics. Responses ranged from those who found the film “shockinglysuperficial” (Fox 2009) to those who praised its “multi-lingual pulp poetry”

(Travers 2009). Critics across the board recognized Tarantino’s Bakhtinian (1981)double-voicing (Morson and Emerson 1990) of cinematic genre and stylized visualpastiching of characters and narrative motif. “It’s a fool’s errand to criticize Quen-

tin Tarantino for historical inaccuracy or chronic amorality. Everybody knows hismovies are inspired by and respond to other movies, not real life,” said a critic for

the Chicago Jewish Star (Fox 2009, 1).Working primarily from his knowledge of cinematic convention and genre

memory, Tarantino responds to the aporetic double bind of Holocaust representa-tion through parodic playfulness. Parody frequently is used as rhetorical invention

when conventional modes of representation are exhausted, corrupted or resistantto generational shifts in memory formation. It is Tarantino’s rhetorical response to

impossibility. He uses three interwoven rhetorical strategies in Inglourious basterdsto negotiate the aporetic paradox of impossibility/necessity: complex manipulationof simulacrum; stylistic exaggeration and hyperbole; and a conversion of the “as

if” memory spaces into the “if only” spaces of revenge fantasy.Simulacrum is the production of a copy for which there is no original

(Baudrillard 1993). Brad Pitt’s characterization of Lt Aldo (“The Apache”) Raine,leader of the Americanized Nazi hunters, stands as exemplar. Raine is a parodically

inflected pastiche of movie and television characters: he is Jim Bowie, with an ico-nic scalping knife, and Davie Crockett, a folksy Tennessean. American cinema and

television (particularly during the Cold War) re-invented Crockett and Bowie asicons of benevolent Anglo-American romantic heroism, Disney-esque colonialistfantasies that proliferated through the “limitless reproduction” of popular con-

sumption (Baudrillard 1993, 118). Tarantino recalls this pop-culture production inthe opening moments of the film. Inglourious basterds begins with theme music

from John Wayne’s 1960 The Alamo, humorously double-voicing Raine’s anticsand offering sly commentary on the western’s conservative ideology. Moreover,

visual composition and audio editing throughout the film reference the Italian“spaghetti” westerns of Sergio Leone and the romantic anti-heroes of that genre.

Raine has the drawl of the Tennessee backwoods, and remarks at one pointthat he has “run moonshine” in the Smoky Mountains. Yet his rejection of anti-

Semitism strains credulity.4 His mission to kill Nazis arises from his understandingthat Nazis are “Jew haters” who “ain’t got no humanity . . . they need to bedestroyed.” Explaining that he is “part Apache,” Raine instructs his fighters to dis-

member, disfigure, disembowel and scalp all Nazi soldiers they encounter.“Through our cruelty, they will know who we are,” he intones with deadpan

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sincerity. The scene cross-cuts to a pouting Adolf Hitler who complains childishlyto his high command about Raine and the “Bear Jew,” one of Raine’s men who

beats German soldiers to death with a baseball bat (while nonchalantly discussingAmerican baseball). Raine and his men relish Donnie’s performances. “Quite

frankly,” says Raine to an uncooperative captive German officer, “watching Donniebeat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies.”

Tarantino repeats a motif where Raine carves a swastika into the foreheads ofany German soldier he lets live. In each instance, Raine rehearses his concern that

the Germans will take off their uniforms after the war and thereby go undetectedas “Jew killing” Nazis. The penultimate scene of the film features a camera close-up on the forehead of Col. Hans Landa, the hyperbolic Nazi “Jew hunter” and

nemesis of Raine. Landa has made a deal with the Allies to betray Hitler and theGerman high command. In return, he has negotiated a very favorable arrangement

for himself, including private property on “Nantucket Island.” Raine exacts revengeon Landa by carving (in extreme close-up) the icon of the Third Reich into his

forehead. Landa screams in agony while Raine and his one surviving Nazi hunter,in an extreme low angle close-up, note with satisfaction that this carving is a mas-

terpiece.The exaggerated visual style of Inglourious basterds reinforces the pastiche of

genre references used to characterize key players in the story. Reviewers commenton the significance of Tarantino’s stylistic choices. Walters (2009/2010, 19) callsthe postmodern fictionalizing of a Holocaust story a “queasy collision of the car-

toonish and the real.” The fictionalized and cartoonishly gory deaths of Hitler,Goebbels and the rest of the German high command draw considerable ire from a

broad range of reviewers, described by some as “potential fodder for Holocaustrevisionists” (Pfefferman 2009, 15; see Fox 2009). Others, like Cineaste’s Richard

Porton (2009, 75), comment on Tarantino’s “fervent, if cartoonish, take on . . .‘tough Jews’ – Jewish warriors who reject the image of the timid shtetl dweller and

embrace macho values.” Gene Seymour (2009, 81) notes the carnivalesque style ofthe film, claiming that Tarantino “works conscientiously at upending decorum,good taste, and historical verisimilitude by presenting the European theater as

Wild-West-meets splatter punk vision.”The “splatter punk vision” supplies both visual aesthetic and narrative logic for

Inglourious basterds. Postmodern splatter films “pastiche both themselves and theculture that produces and consumes them” (Arnzen 1994). That is to say, they are

ironic, intertextual commentaries, reveling in “fragmentary visions” and “manicmontages” (Arnzen). This “comic-reflexive element” (Arnzen 1994) revels in the

artifice and spectacle of special effects, particularly the hyper-violent destruction of(fake) bodies (i.e. simulacra). The films de-center cinematic narrative conventions

of resolution by refusing closure. In particular, the films articulate the anxiety that“both viewer and filmic text are ‘the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity’”(Arnzen 1994).

Tarantino approaches Holocaust memory through the postmodern simulacraof prosthetic bodies and parts that are extravagantly “splattered.” Throughout the

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film, bodies are enthusiastically machine gunned, shot at close range, stabbed,sliced open, blown up, burned, and mutilated. He interweaves with splatter-horror

a pastiche of cinematic and pulp fiction genres: the hyperbolic violence of SamPeckinpah and Sergio Leone, the graphic novel and comic book, the video game,

the neo-noir crime film, and the explicitly masculinist war film. For the expert(and willing) eye, these exaggerations permit gazing upon sadistic predation, the

disintegration of the human body, and an evil that, as Arnzen (1994) notes, “can-not [easily be] contained.”

Tarantino’s playfulness with violence is notably constrained in one key scene.The most explicit reference to Holocaust memory in the film involves the JewishDreyfus family. In Chapter One of the film, Shosanna and her family are in hiding

with a partisan dairy farmer in the French countryside. The notorious Col. Landatracks them to the farm. As he interrogates the farmer, the family lies quietly hidden

beneath the room’s floorboards. Landa notices minute movement through thecracks of the floorboards and orders his SS soldiers to machine-gun the family. At

no time does the camera permit visual access to those bodies. Rather, audiences areleft to imagine the horror, thus rendering murdered Jewish bodies as something

other than artifice (simulacra). The camera cross-cuts to the exterior of the farm-house to reveal a traumatized Shosanna desperately clawing her way out from under

the house. Covered with her family’s blood, she flees toward the woods under thewatchful and amused gaze of Landa. Significantly, the viewing audience is suturedinto his predatory gaze. In this one moment early in the film, Tarantino references

the historical violence enacted in the ghettos and prison camps of central Europe.Tarantino’s third strategy for negotiating the impossibility and necessity of

remembrance is parodic playfulness, which works rhetorically to invert the possi-bilities for audience engagement of conventional storytelling. For Tarantino, the

primary deficiency of Holocaust films is the conventional representation of passivevictimization. What is wrong, asks Tarantino, with making a film about aggressive

Jews and sadistic Nazis “as a thrilling adventure story?” (Pfefferman 2009, 15).Many reviewers answer that question with angry denunciations of the film.

Writing for both the Baltimore Jewish Times and the Chicago Jewish Star, Michael

Fox (2009) describes Tarantino’s efforts as “blathering, self-indulgent drivel that(among many examples of its creator’s hubris) leaves uneducated moviegoers with

an erroneous perception of where and how Adolf Hitler met his end.” Respondingto the revenge-fantasy killing of Hitler, Susan Hanley Lane (2009, n.p.) similarly

remarks: “History is not a matter of opinion . . . In the case of the Holocaust, thetruth is far more compelling than any attempt at cheap humor by a director with

an oversize appetite for revenge.”Other reviewers embrace Tarantino’s revenge-fantasy film with pleasure, and

relish the opportunity to imagine “what if” Hitler and his high command had beenmachine-gunned to pieces or incinerated in a crowded theatre by vengeful Jews.Identifying himself as a Holocaust survivor, Abraham H. Foxman (2010, 13)

explains his pleasure with Inglourious basterds: “the film is entertaining, yetthought-provoking. Hopefully the millions who see it will understand the horrors

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of the Holocaust and echo my view of ‘if only it were true!’” Writing about “Jewswith attitude” in American cinema, Simcha Weinstein (2009, 10) offers a similarly

glowing assessment of Tarantino’s film: “the unabashedly Jewish characters are amajor selling and plot point. The movie has inspired a tingle of ‘what if’ wish ful-

fillment in [audiences], Jewish and non-Jewish.”The polarized responses to Tarantino’s work highlight the film’s ambivalent

structures, particularly with regard to viewer pleasure or disgust with the film’srevenge fantasy. Parody necessarily destabilizes conventional understandings of

human experience and problems to produce ambivalent possibilities. “Ambivalenttexts are structured through complex contradictions or incompatible possibilities. . . [that are] capable of sustaining incompatible readings and perspectives . . .”

(Owen, Stein, and Vande Berg 2007, 199). The response by Walters (2009/2010,19) exemplifies the point: “Ambivalent seems about right . . . The sadistic bloodlust

of his Jewish avengers is as unsettling as his revisionist chutzpah is disarming.”Reviewers unhappy with the film respond specifically to the structured ambivalence

of Tarantino’s revenge fantasy. For example, Lane (2009, n.p.) argues that:

the unprecedented barbarism of that time will be neutralized at best and justified atworst if we allow the Holocaust to become repackaged as nothing more than a tit fortat ‘‘you shoot me I shoot you’’ contest that happened in the middle of the 20th cen-tury.

Reviewers who liked the film responded positively to the “what if” spaces of

the revenge fantasy of the film.In the pastiche of Inglourious basterds’s fiction, the impossible is constructed as

spectacle, the viewer is positioned to find pleasure in the absurd, and the inven-tional resources called upon are grounded in popular culture genres where force

can only be met with force. There is no romantic hero(ine) in this film, no melo-dramatic resignation, no moral promise to remember. Instead, there is carnivale,“a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and

excess” (Stallybrass and White 1986, 8). Vengeful Jews exact spectacular paybackon the bodies of German soldiers and high command. In the setting of a cinema

house, the master of Nazi propaganda is trapped and burned alive with highlycombustible film stock. The characterized US soldiers are not so much heroic as

they are unrelentingly brutal, ultimately out-witting the sadistic SS officer, HansLanda. Only the murdered family of Shosanna Feldman, characterized as histori-

cally authentic Jews, is sheltered from the spectacular gaze of splatter punk ven-geance.

Critical Judgment

At first glance, The maelstrom and Inglourious basterds appear to represent nearly

opposite rhetorical strategies. Forgacs positions his viewers as witnesses to histori-cal trauma, whereas Tarantino positions his as spectators of the fantastic. Forgacs

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figures Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as more banal than evil, echoing HannahArendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (see Nichols

2003, 11–12). By contrast, Tarantino figures the Nazi SS (and Heinrich Himmler)as comically sadistic, particularly in the figurative characterization of Col. Hans

Landa. Forgacs never tells his audience that Seyss-Inquart, like Eichmann, washanged as a war criminal (Nichols), whereas Tarantino wreaks splatter punk ven-

geance upon the celebrities of the German high command. Forgacs’s Jews areordinary people; Tarantino’s are pop culture superheroes. Forgacs sees himself as

an expert on found footage documentary and an arbiter of what counts as “cor-rect” representations of the Holocaust (Nichols 2003, 10). Tarantino dismisses withimpatience the claim that Inglourious basterds is even about the Holocaust

(Pfefferman 2009). Each filmmaker posits an implicit audience with specializedexpertise—one of history, the other of the history of popular filmmaking.

At the same time, there are significant similarities in the approaches taken byeach filmmaker. Each rhetor negotiates the aporetic double-bind of Holocaust

memory in ways unique to conventional practices. Both films manipulate “impos-sibility,” positioning viewers to engage historical memory from strategically differ-

ent perspectives (albeit with different motivation) enabled by their directors’authorial expertise. Three similarities, in particular, are important for consider-

ations of cultural memory.First, Forgacs and Tarantino construct voice and agency for the Jewish subjects

of their films. To be sure, the visions for subjective agency are markedly different,

as borne out by comparative analysis. Nevertheless, these cinematic memories ofthe Holocaust ask audiences to imagine Jewish subjects making decisions, taking

action and speaking (or filming) for themselves. Thus, rhetorical aporia is signifi-cantly diminished as the inventional trope for Holocaust memory.

Second, and closely related to the first, Forgacs and Tarantino expunge certainvisual memory cues from their cinematic stories; conspicuously missing are iconic

images of prison camps, emaciated bodies clinging to barbed wire fences, stripedprison apparel, railroad cars, smoke stacks, or stunned Allied soldiers staring num-bly at piles of corpses in liberated camps. Neither filmmaker relies upon melo-

drama or sentimentality to tell his story. And this is key to the third similarity.Tarantino and Forgacs are unblinking in their examination of human brutality.

In Tarantino’s fantasy, the US soldiers are as amoral as the Nazis; but while thelatter lose, the former win. Brutality can be met only with brutality, hence Taranti-

no’s affinity for the characterization of evil in splatter punk films. For Forgacs,melodrama and standard documentary are problematic representational practices

because, he believes, they obscure the truth about human brutality. Melodramaand documentary have tended to frame German Nazis as extraordinary (and there-

fore outside of history or civilization) rather than emblematic of the human capac-ity for genocide (Nichols 2003), which recurs with some regularity (Douglas 2001).

A comparative analysis of The maelstrom and Inglourious basterds demonstrates

that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematicmemories of the Holocaust. Yet, as Huyssen observes, one of Adorno’s less cited

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quotations remains relevant to contemporary representational practices: “Even themost extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter”

(quoted in Huyssen 2001, 40). The maelstrom stands above idle chatter because itdemands historical engagement and positions audiences as witnesses. What about

Inglourious basterds?Tarantino’s film is far more sophisticated than a Facebook meme comparing a

college football program with Nazi Germany. However irreverent, Tarantino is anastute cinematic historian, able to discern and negotiate the cultural currents of

change. Putting Inglourious basterds in dialectical tension with The maelstromrevealed parallels I did not expect to find. That said, I prefer the historical, sub-junctive spaces of The maelstrom over the ambivalent spaces of revenge fantasy in

Inglourious basterds, not because I value “high” over “low” art, or because I amtoo unhip to appreciate sophisticated play, or because I prefer “history” to “popu-

lar memory.” Rather, I consider Tarantino’s irreverence through what we owe tomemory held in reverence.

Expertise, in this case, is a matter of trust. Hartelius (2011, 91) explains therelationship between expertise and ethos: “The part of ethos that depends on

eunoia, or goodwill, is present insofar as [rhetors] demonstrate their concernwith the welfare of others.” Tarantino categorically denies that his film is about

Holocaust memory, although it is about Jews, Nazis and World War II. Hereduces Holocaust memory to scene, a convenient backdrop for cinematic het-eroglossia. From my positional perspective, Inglourious basterds lacks goodwill

for the dead whose story it tells. Moreover, the figurative exaggeration of thefilm positions National Socialism outside history—no more real than splatter

punk zombies or pulp-fictional criminals. Tarantino offers an invitation to for-getfulness that may prove costly in the future; similar forgetfulness has proven

so in the past.

Notes

[1] This understanding of rhetorical aporia can be found in Jasinski (2001), LaCapra (2001),and Owen and Ehrenhaus (2010).

[2] The fact that the adult women are still wearing gold wedding bands in these scenes sug-gests that perhaps the footage was shot substantially earlier than the eminent departurefor Auschwitz. The Nazis most probably collected all the gold owned by Dutch Jews wellbefore the Peerebooms were sent to the camps in 1942. My thanks to Judith Kay for thisinsight.

[3] Bill Nichols reports that the home movies of the Seyss-Inquart family were housed in theRoyal Dutch Film Archive (2003, 5). He also reports that Seyss-Inquart “was executed as awar criminal at the conclusion of the war” (Nichols 2003, 12).

[4] In an interview, Tarantino explained his creative imagination with this character. Heclaims that Aldo has “been fighting fascism since he got into the war . . . Nazis, Kluxers,they’re all the same to him. But he’s a war history nut, so he knows all about Geronimo’sbattle plans and the idea of doing an Apache style resistance against the Germans” (Pfeff-erman 2009, 15A).

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