(Spoiler alert for Quention Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in effect)
Eli Weisel’s Night is the archetypal holocaust novel. It was the first account of its kind that presented a narrative of the experience of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe. As such, its influence over the succeeding stories that have become a part of the wider narrative surrounding the genocide is immeasurably vast.
With any archetypal narrative, the succession of media that follows tends to either directly continue the semantics established by the founding narrator, or consciously diverge from said pattern.
Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life, a French comedy from 1998, and Quentin Tarantinos’ latest blockbuster Inglourious Basterds (2009) both take the latter route. In doing this, not only do they diverge from the popular narrative, but also from the undeniable facts of history. They are fantasies, but their escapist, idealized storytelling doesn’t just serve to pose “What if?”. Instead, they reflect back on the reality of the holocaust as we know it, and allow us to question the very archetype that Weisel established in Night.
The primary narrative pattern that both films diverge from is that of the characterization of Europeans Jews as passive, helpless victims.
The Night narrative begins with them being unaware – almost blissfully ignorant – or their impending fates as they live in their villages, then ghettos. They submit to authority when it rears its face, allowing themselves to be subordinated by the flash of a gun and the tenor of an authoritative Nazi officer. Like cattle, they are pushed into trains in bulk, and shipped off to their manufactured deaths. If the holocaust was a death machine, in Night, the Jews are swept helplessly off of their feet and placed on a conveyor belt.
Each movies responds to this passive stereotype in a different way.
In Inglourious Basterds, the Jews are given ability to protect themselves. Where the power of the weapon instilled fear in the Jews of Night, the Jewish American soldiers – and most importantly the European Jew Shosanna – reverse the Nazi dominance by possessing weapons of death themselves.
And with these weapons – whether its a baseball bat, a carving knife or a Tommy gun, the Jews enact vengeance, reversing the Nazi power of persecution. Brad Pitt’s character Aldo Raine and his team of Basterds mark the Nazis with a symbol just as Night‘s Jews were marked with the Star of David. But the imagined Nazi mark is permanent – a swastika carved into their foreheads.
The Jews of Inglourious Basterds are no longer burnt alive; instead, it is the Germans who are turned into cinders and mass executed by a firing squad. Shosanna burns her theatre down, trapping the congregation of high German authorities inside while the Basterds gun down anything still moving. A metaphor of public atrocity in a private space.
By the film’s end, the Jews have not only reversed the Nazi persecution: they have won the war, killing Hitler, Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi death machine.
In Train of Life, a group of Jews escape from persecution by posing as a fake concentration camp train, compete with pretend prisoners and Jews in Nazi disguises.
Rather than staying put in their village to await their fate, this movie’s Jews cooperate as a group and out-smart the Nazis (rather than out-brawn them, as in Inglourious Basterds).
Train of Life‘s Jews reverse the power of the Holocaust by placing structures of selection and difference-making in their own hands. They separate into groups – Nazis, older rabbis, lovers, communists – and much of the film’s tension comes from the internal problems of the group as a whole – even taking the Nazi’s ability to be the “enemy” out of their hands.
The film’s sad ending – where we see the protagonist Schlomo in a concentration camp, revealing that the narrative was simply a fun fantasy in his mind – serves to show the impossibility of evading persecution.
In these movies, the Jews become active in their fates, instead of passively accepting death.
Both films have faced criticism. Inglourious Basterds can be seen by many as insensitive, boasting of an American superiority: i.e., if the Jews had been ‘Americanized’, they surely would have fought back and the holocaust could have been avoided.
Likewise, some have criticized Train of Life of trying to find humour in atrocity.
However, both films are fantasies, and make this very clear. They carry no pretense that their events ever actually took place, nor that they could have been realized. The Jews (and the Gypsies) didn’t escape Germany by train. They didn’t enact revenge and kill Hitler.
By showing us the Jews in an active role in a fantasy setting, the films show the sad facts to us: that the Jews didn’t escape, because they couldn’t. They didn’t fight back (at least not to the extremes Tarantino imagined), because they couldn’t.
For those that look at the Jews’ passivity in the face of annihilation with disdain and disbelief, failing to sympathize with Night‘s helpless Jews, Tarantino and Mihaileanu ask us: what else could they do?
