Month: September 2009

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If anyone is interested, I tried to make a few H-Bomb- and 9/11-related points in the thread appending Michael Shermer's recent Scientific American column, "Paranoia Strikes Deep." The commentfest is cacophonous and some dude with a French surname keeps breaking my balls, but that's the way it goes.

In other news, Andy Nowicki's Considering Suicide is expected to arrive from the printer next week.  This is the fourth release from Nine-Banded Books, and I am very happy with the way it turned out. I realize it will seem like a bit of a curveball since Andy's worldview differs so starkly from my own, but I'm a sucker for sincerity and there's something about the guy's unreconstructed-Catholic-reactionary-with-a-dash-of-Kierkegaard take on the world situation that feels like forgotten romance. Andy speaks for a seldom acknowledged genus of the shit-upon, and his purity of conviction allows him to confront the postmodern crisis — specifically what JG Ballard called "the death of affect" — in ways that simply elude the professorial class. He feels the sting.

Andy's book will close the year for 9BB, but there's no stopping the juggernaut.  2010 will see the release of new books by Ann Sterzinger, Jim Crawford, Bradley Smith, and the notorious Samuel Crowell. Possibly a couple of others. It's going to be interesting.

 I sometimes get emails from nice people who say I should post more often. I suppose I should. I wish I could. It's a temperamental thing, really. I write in fits and starts. I lack discipline, and I am easily distracted by snacks and bright colors. For what it's worth, I have been scribbling diligently (for me) at a few long-promised posts in follow up to my previously launched series (what's the plural of "series" — series?) on antinatalism and the H, my two main beats of late. I'm also writing a review of the fascinating book Outbreak! for Richard Widmann's online journal, Inconvenient History.  Reading about mass delusions and fads and sundry episodes of "Extraordinary Social Behavior" has jogged a lot of questions about what we might be missing. I may have a few questions for you.

Memento mori.

Posted on by Chip Smith 5

The Subversive Basterds

Richard Spencer's dissenting review of  The
Inglourious Basterds eerily mirrors my own impression.

 

An excerpt:

. . . it kept hitting me that on a
dialectical level, the film’s message might actually be the exact opposite of
what it’s purported to be (and what The Producers think it is.) Basterds might
offer Jeffrey Goldberg the chance to experience a kosher wet dream—and another
opportunity for Germans to scold themselves—but then, as incredible as it may
sound, this Bob and Harvey Weinstein-produced film includes some of the most
anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews that have ever seen the light of day in
America. Both Steve Sailer and Stefan Kafner have suggested that Tarantino, in many
ways, puts himself in the position of Joseph Goebbels in his filmmaking. Put
another way, if one were to imagine the ultimate anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi
propaganda film about how the Second World War was marked by distinguished
German officers being terrorized by a band of Jewish maniacs, would it look
much different than Inglourious
Basterds?

I should clarify that I rather liked the film. On a purely visceral level, as an eccentric and intriguingly uneven exercise in cinematically contained sensation, it "works" — but not as a war film. Nor, exactly, as a Holocaust film. When you sense what Tarantino is up to, Steve Sailer's formulaic expectations seem as misplaced and clueless as Jeffrey Goldberg's hardwired Rorschach response (though neither reaction is in the least surprising). But Spencer is on to something. Beyond the much remarked allusions to spaghetti westerns which critics are trained to spot, Tarantino's masturbatory romp is layered with telling references to the same psychopathically amoral grit-and-gristle 70s-bred one-week-only grindhouse horror and exploitation subgenres that influenced Eli Roth's excellent Hostel franchise.

Yes, Hans Landa, the seductively genteel polyglot Nazi, loves his dairy — just like Alex from A Clockwork Orange. But the repeated promotional POV shot, where the not-so-good Gentile, Aldo Raine (and whichever Basterd) loom over their victims to mark the flesh (circumcision, anyone?), is an unmistakable aesthetic nod to the famous lobby card for the original Last House on the Left — which, needless to add, depicted the bad guys in like pose. The scalping gore may be explained by convenient reference to western lore, but have you seen Dr. Butcher M.D. or William Lustig's Maniac? Something tells me that Tarantino has. Just as I'm sure he's seen Ilsa She Wolf of the SS, which I less certainly suspect to have influenced the mise en scène of the more sadistic sequences in the The Inglourious Basterds. I should mention that the film is genuinely funny. Not "Bloodsucking Freaks" funny, but "Eaten Alive" funny. And I mean this, sincerely, as a compliment. From one death pussy to another.

Spencer is dead right to suspect that Tarantino is playing games, even subversive games, where perpetrators and victims are as interchangeable as sockpuppets. He is also right to see, as revealed in the closing line of his review, how the game ends in the pure spectacle of splatter, without cultural resonance beyond that available to an erstwhile VHS glutton who knows the form and does it well. Goldberg's reaction isn't catharsis; it's latent bloodlust — the same impulse that drew the pockmarked lonerboy to the horror aisle at the old neighborhood video mart — to rent I Spit on Your Grave. For the fifth time.

Later, the kid will think about all of it and ask the next question. I'm not sure if the question would interest Tarantino. I don't think it would even occur to Jeffrey Goldberg. Eli Roth is another matter. Consider this a fan letter, Bear Jew.

Memento mori.                      

Posted on by Chip Smith 5