HOLLYWOOD’S NAZI REVISIONISM DOESN’T THE TRUTH MAKE A GOOD ENOUGH STORY?
Hollywood’s Nazi Revisionism
Doesn’t the truth here make a good enough story?
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
Last year we were treated to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a film in which Hitler died not in Berlin by his own hand but in Paris in a movie theater fire; Jewish-American freedom fighters scalped the Nazis they captured and carved swastikas in the foreheads of those they let go; and Sgt. Donny Donowitz, aka “the Bear Jew,” bashed in Nazi skulls with a baseball bat.
Mr. Tarantino, when asked about the ultimate meaning of his film by the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, did not hesitate to explain that, for these exterminating anti-Nazi angels, whose European “grandmas” had remained “powerless” the first time the Germans had “come knocking at their doors,” times had changed and the “hour of vengeance tolled.”
With “Inglourious Basterds,” it’s clear that the director of “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” has lost none of his genius. But it’s hard not to wonder what a moderately informed adolescent in California or Minnesota or even Europe would make of such a film. And it is impossible not to perceive the kind of shake-up in the order of truth that—despite or, in reality, because of Mr. Tarantino’s talent—this film would inevitably engender. Anti-Nazism as a response by Jewish-American soldiers to the humiliation of their European grandmothers? The 1939 war as a retort to that of 1914? Revising the details of Hitler’s death? What’s wrong with a cowardly suicide in a Berlin bunker?
One is almost afraid to utter the phrase, because it might come off as overly politically correct. And yet in the joyously macabre pranks of “Inglourious Basterds” lie the beginnings of historical revisionism.
Now, with his latest film “Shutter Island,” it’s the turn of another giant of American cinema, Martin Scorsese, to grab hold of the highly sensitive material that is the history of Nazism. Once again, there is no question of the talent behind this effort, which blends references to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, and the “Isle of the Dead” by Val Lewton and Mark Robson, with stunning virtuosity.
But what of Mr. Scorsese’s implicit identification of Guantanamo with Hitler’s death camps? What of this Devil’s Island, located in the heart of the United States, where the U.S. administration has supposedly recycled former Nazi criminals after the war? And Dachau? What can one say about these images of a Dachau confused with Auschwitz, since the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign has been mounted on the gate? What can one think of the mass graves where colorized dead Jews gaze at us with the eyes of plastic dolls? And finally, how can one keep from starting at the shot of the kitsch gas chamber whose door Leonardo DiCaprio inadvertently opens in his underground meanderings at the psychiatric hospital where he is conducting his investigation, and the presently inactive shower heads he glimpses?
The Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo earned “the deepest contempt” of French director Jacques Rivette in an article in Cahiers du cinéma nearly 50 years ago for a scarcely more insistent shot in the 1959 film “Kapo.” The shot was of the raised hand of actress Emmanuelle Riva, her character Terese electrocuted on the barbed wire of the concentration camp from which she was trying to escape. The criticism hung over Pontecorvo until his dying day. He was ostracized, almost cursed, for a shot, just one.
So shall we just let pass the piles of candy-colored, Photoshopped cadavers in “Shutter Island” that look like they just popped out of a Jeff Koons composition? And should we allow these doctored, computerized images of the Holocaust to banalize the most horrible, incomparable event of human History?
The truth is that Nazism is becoming a new playing field for the amusement of the bad boys of Hollywood, whose moguls, like Berkeley’s God instantly renewing his Creation, have decided they are entitled to decree what is real and what is not. Since stories make the world go ’round, they tell themselves, reality is merely another form of fiction. Art comes out on top. Not memory. Nor, even less, morality.
Mr. Lévy is the author, among other works, of “Left in Dark Times” (Random House, 2008). This article was translated from the French by Janet Lizop.
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