One thing you have to love about J.D. Vance is how close his “Midwestern nice” is to other folks’ impression of Satan.
I’m not talking about some towering H.R. Geiger Beelzebub. I’m talking about the kind of corny, well-fed Satan you’d see in a "Twilight Zone" episode, a community-theater production of Faust, or a Silicon Valley orgy up in Los Altos Hills.
I realize this is a bit childish, scrawling horns on someone’s photo, but watching this Ivy-educated man face the nation from CBS's podium and utter what he knew to be lie after lie — about the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, say, or Trump's love of the Affordable Care Act, or the national abortion ban he was never for — it was clear that the only thing this stocky bearded man on TV needed to complete his mascara-rimmed stare and ventriloquist-dummy head was a red cowl-neck jumpsuit with a merry little pointy tail.
His dialogue was already perfect.
Watching this quietly arresting moment in TV history, I cast back to similar ones and thought of something Albert Brooks' newscaster says of his telegenic rival in Broadcast News:
What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! He will be attractive. He'll be nice and helpful. He'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing. He'll never deliberately hurt a living thing. He will just, bit by little bit, lower our standards where they are important.
Of course, that’s not quite right for Vance, who’s much less charming in most other venues, and whose propaganda campaigns against marginalized people show quite an avid interest in hurting living things.
Nonetheless, for over an hour on live TV, this polite 40-year-old product of Yale Law School with the glittering opaque eyes managed to come off like just another prospective veep on just another presidential ticket. As opposed to what the.ink described, aptly I think, as a man who "presented outright fascist arguments and positions as simple democratic choices" in a "tidily disturbing package."
So if this is so obvious to ink.com and me, I bet it’s pretty clear to the tidily disturbing package himself, a canny tactician who simply perceives a society whose right-wing heroes need no longer worry about coming off a bit too Satanic, or more to the point, Hitleresque.
How did this happen?
How can someone on the ticket for our nation’s highest office put so little effort into disguising fashy vibes?
Such questions make someone of my generation acutely uncomfortable, because we spent most of our lives assuming certain issues were settled. And many of us, if we thought about Hitler at all, thought he was simply hilarious.
Flashback to 2009:
My friend Jeff and I are half-watching TV at my place when one of the old Nuremberg classics comes on and we stop talking to behold the animated speaker in the flickering clip: the crackhead eyes, the plastered hair, the flop-sweat-glistening face. The spastic head toss after every zinger. The hands, now clasped beneath the chin in a poor-little-buttercup pose, one palm now tremulously raised in an effete slay-queen high five. And I mean, Jesus, the treble sputter, the flying spittle, the choking necktie, the bulky Three Stooges fit of that two-dollar tan shirt. When it ended, Jeff, who's Jewish, could only sigh and deadpan: "Man, Hitler’s awesome."
Before you call Jeff a bad Jew and me an asshole, I submit that two facts can coexist: 1) Nazi Germany is a permanent stain on Western civilization; and 2) that guy on TV was a fucking riot.
I probably don’t need to tell you that the moment I just described took place before the president-approved white-power march in Charlottesville, Twitter’s transformation into the “Nazi Facebook",” and the use of AI to open youngsters’ minds about the Fuhrer. That is, before the ground was laid for someone like Vance.
While we’re look back to simpler times and consider certain generational blind spots, it seems appropriate to follow up last week’s post on Kill Bill Vol. 1 by exploring another more salient film by that same Gen-x fixation, Quentin Tarantino.
Though released in 2009, Inglourious Basterds actually has particular resonance in these weeks of fascist-curious candidates. And maybe its wise-guy aesthetic detachment from historic horrors will even prove instructive, helping us delineate shoot-’em-up fantasy from banality-of-evil reality.
Like nearly every Tarantino film after Jackie Brown, Basterds is a revisionist genre picture that's as much about film history as its ostensible story: a battle of wits and subterfuge involving a diabolical SS specialist in hunting and exterminating Jews, a team of black-ops US commandos in occupied France who are literally scalping captured Nazis, and the surviving member of a family said SS specialist killed, who she plans to assassinate, along with Hitler, in the Parisian cinema that she now runs. (The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check.)
As a vehicle for Tarantino's style and quirky cinematic preoccupations, Inglourious Basterds is certainly a marvel and, for the most part, the director executes his odd and provocative concept with a skill and dedication he never really surpassed. The campy Euro-exploitation moves carve out a space for the wildly ahistorical events while the scene-to-scene hyper-realism keeps you riveted. Yet the whole thing leaves you with a queasy feeling I’m frankly not sure what to do with.
In the film's biggest discovery, the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, whose performance won an Oscar, plays the playful, debonair SS officer Hans Landa, the point around which other characters' ruses and performances orbit, a merry bon vivant whose immaculate French, English, and Italian have been weaponized for peak performance a "Jew hunter." While his prey is the young French woman we see him orphan in the first scene, Landa's true opposite is the American soldier Lt Aldo Raine, a special-forces guy who assembles a crew of GIs for his titular crew of Nazi-hunting basterds seeking to take the likes of Landa out.
In the years since it came out, critics have made various claims as to what Inglourious Basterds is “about” — cinema saving the world, how you need a monster to kill a monster — but it seems pretty to me that above all its a film about code-switching, or "passing," by someone who’s more fixated on this subject than any other American director.
Since Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s films have celebrated the act of passing, infiltrating, crossing over, his heroes mastering the language, style, and skills of the Other, whether the other is organized criminals, kung fu assassins, or, well, Black people. And his interrogation of passing in Inglourious Bastards, which Tarantino tagged at the time as his career-defining masterpiece, actually seems to cash out in the kind of racial essentialism you’d find in some of the uglier X accounts followed by J.D. Vance.
Does the film go too lightly on Hitler? Not really, it shows him as the same vulgar lunatic you see in propaganda cartoons, raving to his staff about their failure to neutralize the marauders attaining folklore status by scalping Nazis. Does it minimize the Holocaust? Ask me after you watch the opening scenes in a French farmhouse. Is Tarantino's use of this vile chapter in human history for shoot'-em-up pulp fiction in bad taste? Yeah, that’s kind of the point. But none of that’s what makes the film sit so oddly this week.
After the film’s release, some critics dubbed its genre "kosher porn" for its revenge-fantasy of Nazi extermination by the Nazis’ historical victims. Because, as I guess I should have mentioned, the one quality Lt. Aldo Raine seeks in his potential basterds is their Jewishness.
So while they’re based on the American convicts that Lee Marvin recruits in The Dirty Dozen, this isn’t your usual crew of hand-picked guerrillas, with your sharpshooter, munitions expert, master of disguise, and so on. No, these guys simply are Jews, and therefore the Nazi's natural enemy, their antibody, Jewishness apparently an element on the periodic table. Like Jewtonium or something.
Which its quite a Nazi way of looking at things.
At the time, I chalked up this provocative conceit to the logic of blaxploitation or wuxia but I realize that on the level of image and association where films tend to communicate their deeper truths, Inglorious Basterds expresses something that’s just a tad psychotic.
This it does in its opposition between Hans Landa and Lt. Aldo Raine.
Landa moves effortlessly from tongue to tongue throughout the film and has a telepathic gift for detecting the least glitch in an otherwise perfect impersonation. He’s both a master and a critic of disguise. Raine, on the other hand, is played by Brad Pitt, who lately plays just one character, Brad Pitt. His Raine is a militantly unpretentious good ole boy whose quintessentially American quality is being stubbornly, sometimes ludicrously, unable to be anything other than exactly what he is. Which is, per the screenplay, “a hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee.”
Unlike Michael Fassbender's smooth German-fluent British OSS agent, Raine seems to have survived for years behind enemy lines without a word of French or German. Even when called upon to pose as an Italian film director in a cinema lobby full of upper-echelon Nazis, including Landa, Raine can't even say "Buongiorno" without hitting the hard twanging "r" of a pungent moonshine accent, like the one J.D. Vance turns up when he knows he’s talking to simple folk.
Inevitably, this essential white American comes face to face with a slippery, European aristocrat. In a climax posing as a denouement, the two foes meet in a forest clearing, where Raine learns that Landa has already arranged his own escape: having contacted Raine's own generals to strike a history-altering deal in which he hands Hitler over to the Allies in exchange for a quiet, moneyed existence as a respectable European man of letters in Massachusetts.
When we realize that instead of killing this venomous snake Raine must give him safe passage to America where he’ll simply shed his Nazi skin for another, this prospect so offends our sense of justice that we thrill to what Raine does next.
Brandishing his giant knife, he tells Landa, "I'm gonna give you something you can't take off." Then we’re treated to the sight of a blade entering forehead skin and the sound of Landa's screams as Raine engraves a permanent swastika on his victim’s forehead. The same one Charles Manson has in a famous photo.
That moment is so interdimensionally fucked up that you kind of have to applaud it, if only it had passed without comment. Instead, as Raine puts the final touches on Landa's face, the camera looks up at Pitt and his comrade in one of Tarantino's trademark car-trunk shots, framing up Pitt to deliver the film's final line before the director's name fills the screen: “This just might be my masterpiece."
His masterpiece. Other film characters have described similar efforts in such terms but they’re not usually war heroes or roguish outlaws. They’re usually serial killers. And even with 15 years’ distance, I can't tell how self-aware this gesture of Tarantino’s actually is.
Is this a confession or celebration? Are we meant to see America’s sweetheart Brad Pitt as one of this film’s villains? Or is this bloodthirsty, sadistic, red-state identity-essentialist Tarantino’s idea of a hero? Is he speaking to the American tradition of white-supremacist eugenics that inspired Hitler? Is he asserting style over substance, or making a semi-conscious revelation of his own unbridgeable psychic distance from human experience?
I hope it’s obvious that I’m not calling Tarantino a crypto-fascist or white-power propagandist. I'm tempted to blame some of these cringey fanboy vibes on this film’s association with Eli Roth, whose claim to fame is the sophomoric gorefests Cabin Fever and Hostel and who, like Tarantino, has had fun making white people say the n-word in his films. Which is of course his Constitutional right as a twit.
But while I like Tarantino's films enough to defend them against all kinds of accusations — racism, appropriation, superficiality, foot fetishism — the campy ironic distance from this particular horror feels a bit too close to home. At least when the world feels less like a French countryside roamed by American slashers and more like the America from that other WW2 alternative history, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
As you probably know, that novel (and David Simon-penned miniseries) follows a Jewish family in New Jersey before and after “America First” candidate Charles Lindberg unseats FDR in 1940. I have to say, it’s a lot less fun than Inglourious Basterds.
Early in the Lindbergh administration, Roth’s child narrator reports on his parents’ decision to go ahead with their plan to make a family visit to Washington, D.C. — a trip he senses they’re doing to convince him and his older brother “that nothing had changed other than that FDR was no longer in office:
America wasn’t a fascist country and wasn’t going to be… There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites — as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR’s own party — but that was a long way from their being Nazis.
Spoiler alert: it’s not that long a way.
If the people that Vance is fronting for manage to attain power, the inglorious bastards will be running things here for a while. And we’ll all have to see how funny that is.
I know I changed my tune after watching some Nuremberg oldies with the subtitles on, and swearing they were transcripts from Arizona’s Dream City Church in 2020. Because when the camera cuts from the ghoulish little man at the podium to the crowd filling the hall that the real horror show begins.