Triumph of the shill

My first, visceral reaction to watching Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was: this is awful. My second, more intellectualized but still fairly visceral reaction was: This is The Marriage of Maria Braun without any of the psychological subtlety. Tarantino, never one to hide his influences, steals with gusto from the visual and cinematographic aspects of Fassbinder -- he, too, features a pretty, predatory blond protagonist (Shoshanna) fond of indulging in spectacular acts of cruelty, wearing red, and taking a black lover for scandalous social effect (sadly, it still feels "scandalous" to include an interracial relationship in a major motion picture, simply by virtue of the fact that, outside of Tarantino films, it never happens). Exhibit A:

Maria Braun


Shoshanna Dreyfus


This much of Tarantino's borrowing is fairly obvious. What's less obvious to me is why he chooses to take this particular character from German postwar cinema and refashion her in his favorite geeky comic-book-nerd revenge fantasy role. I mean, it's clear why he needed the strong female lead. As a story, the whole "Basterds" shtick is the epitome of one-dimensional, something even the one-dimensional story king himself could never pull off. It's one thing to pitch "band of Nazi-killing Jews who win the war!!" to a well-lubricated Hollywood party crowd, and another thing entirely to translate this into a film that doesn't come off as grossly distasteful and/or totally ridiculous. True story: I once read a children's book about a little American girl who hears about all the terrible things happening in Germany during World War Two, flies to Berlin, and shares a sandwich with Hitler on a park bench, thereby convincing him that he should stop being mean to the Jews. I'm pretty sure Q.T. read this book, too.

So, obviously, to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of indecency and infantilism, there needed to be a truly human face in this film, a likable, sympathetic face -- and not zany character-actor/incomprehensible accented Brad Pitt or "The Bear Jew." But why Maria Braun, an archetype of ruthless femininity and an allegory for the ambivalent nature of German industriousness? To me, there are two possible reasons. First, ruthless femininity is clearly what gets Tarantino off -- and not just the traditional plucky resolve of the Hollywood "tough girl," but the downright sexualized sadism of a Shoshanna or a Beatrix Kiddo. In the strongly polarized-by-gender world of the film, not all revenge fantasies are created equal. The men indulge in more traditional skirmishes and espionage, while the women (both Shoshanna and Bridget von Hammersmark) use their bodies to penetrate into the heart of the enemy lines and destroy them from within. What Tarantino seems to have missed from Fassbinder, though, is that the body is not like a gun or a sword; it tends to carry the imprint of violence on itself much more corrosively. Maria Braun is brought down by the very same venomous hatred that propels her throughout the film. Over the course of Fassbinder's film, she transforms from an admirably courageous survivor to a soulless monster, willing to devour or destroy everything in her path. Of course, for Shoshanna, this is moot -- she goes down in a convenient blaze of glory, probably because Tarantino was uninterested in exploring the more complex dimensions of his own project. And therein lies the trouble with revenge fantasies, and especially historically motivated ones. What, in the end, distinguishes the gleeful killing spree of The Basterds' death-squad from that of the Nazis? Where does one draw the line between romanticized freedom fighter and guerrilla insurgent? Between fantasized/sexual and real, historical violence? In the opening scene of the film, we are shown the devious methods by which a Nazi commander finds and machine-guns a group of Jews hiding in a French farm house -- after watching this gut-wrenchingly real slaughter, it's impossible not to see the stylized slaughter of the Nazis at the hands of the fictional Basterds as a chilling reminder of how actually capable we are to commit unspeakable acts against fellow human beings, and how that's not necessarily something that needs to be cheered for.

And, speaking of history, I think this explains the second connection between Maria Braun and Shoshanna -- the national allegory. In one climactic scene, Shoshanna is shown painting streaks of red on her cheeks, which highlights both The Basterds' self-proclaimed "Apache" fighting tactics and the brief mention of Karl May, the German writer of tremendously popular schlocky novels set in the Wild West. Contrasting this with the Socialist Realism representation of nationality in the film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride, Tarantino makes an interesting analogy between the two kinds of national imagining -- the official political dimension, which emphasizes heroicism, and the unofficial, popular dimension, which revels in rooting for the scrappy underdog. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the former version of the nation is obviously suspect from the start, with all the heroic men in society reduced to cripples or ghosts. But the latter version, the one Tarantino suggests is so quintessentially American (or, more precisely, Hollywood, which for Q.T. is pretty much the same thing), is shown to be just as potentially damaging and false. Maria is the scrappy underdog, but there's no way a viewer can call her ruthless social climbing a good or heroic thing, not even in the anti-hero sense. In fact, what Maria shows is the dark underbelly of the German national myth -- the fabled ability of the German people to work with efficiency and zeal to achieve a goal, be it the rebuilding of a nation after catastrophic war losses, or the eradication of an entire ethnic minority in the name of "progress."

Unfortunately, instead of deconstructing his own national myth with the same level of sophistication, Tarantino blunders right into the most egregiously distasteful stereotype of national self-imagining, the very stuff that Fox News is made of: the great American savior complex. Instead of going beyond the hackneyed cowboy aesthetic of a Karl May, Tarantino celebrates it with the same blaring fanfare that led George Bush to hang that unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" poster -- another act of imagined national triumph, equally flawed and, in the end, downright laughable.

Sinema

Now that it's officially winter break, I've dusted off my painfully neglected Netflix account and restarted my love affair with foreign cinema. It's on!

The other night, I ate gruyere on ciabatta baguette as I watched this:



First of all, can I just say that almost everything I see written about this movie is dead wrong? Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage... Um, did we watch the same movie? Sexual rampage? Suzanne, the main character, has two or three on-camera relationships (no sex shown) with boys, meant to imply that she's a goddamn teenager with a head full of hormones and a troubled relationship with monogamy. She's hardly banging hobos for kicks, y'all. The Netflix blurb is even worse, and makes it sound like a movie about child abuse. Again, what? Of all the themes to focus on -- growing up, being sexually precocious, dealing with your parents' divorce, dealing with puberty -- who decides that the reason the sweet little girl suddenly becomes a turboslut is because she gets smacked by her dad?

At any rate, French cinema is kind of ridiculous. All the reviewers also laud this film as being super edgy and original ("Pialat is the French Cassavetes!"), except it's sort of a self-conscious retelling of 200 Blows and every Francois Sagan novel ever (especially Bonjour Tristesse). Also, the Freudianism is overwhelming and painfully heavy-handed ("Ha ha ha, when he says 'moment,' it sounds just like 'mommy!'"). Everyone is in love with Suzanne -- her dad, her brother, her brother's friends -- but Suzanne only really loves her dad, who's selectively protective and ultimately a bombastic, self-important turd (played by the director, of course, ho hum). Her mom is the menopausal, hysterical wicked witch of the west. I'd be more upset by this schematic treatment of familial relationships (again, all the reviews I've read are really into the "painfully real" family dynamics) -- except this is essentially exactly how my aunt's family functioned. She married young, had two adorable blond daughters, had a terrible relationship with her husband, went totally hysterical nutzoid, husband left for another woman, daughters who were already painfully damaged by years of bad family mojo proceeded to go off the deep end. I've seen that exact look of hollow trauma in their faces, and I can't help link their desperate and predatory relationships with men to the missing father figure in their lives. So, I spent the entire movie-watching experience wavering between "this is stupid, no family really works like this" and "well, shit, maybe Pialat really is onto something." I'm still trying to work that out.

Anyway! Do you know Sandrine Bonnaire?



Because you should. She's sort of the Lindsay Lohan of the 80s French cinema scene, except instead of starring in some terrible stripper movie and then dipping back down into the cocaine spiral as her "comeback," Bonnaire did one of the best, most gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing movies of all time:



She's fantastic in both, of course, but I love her in this film. Her honest, sensual, but slightly haunted face works so well as a canvas for all those familiar teenage-girl emotions to which we of the fairer sex can, I'm sure, all relate -- wanting sex, feeling dirty for wanting sex, wanting sex even more for feeling dirty for wanting sex... At one point, the line "I'm not 15 anymore" is uttered, and it just hits home. So. Hard. God, that incredible dilation of time between the ages of 13 and 21, when a year can seem like an eternity of hard-fought experience. Which, I guess, is ultimately the biggest problem with this film, because in true French fashion, it tries to allegorize this localized temporal experience in a really dumb way. Pialat makes "I'm bored, I'm fed up, I want to kill myself" sound like an existential statement, rather than the typically tempestuous psyche of a prematurely jaded teenager. But for those of us who have been there, it's both a delicious vindication (I wasn't the only teenage turboslut!) and a confrontation with the little monster we once were (only once...?). If only for that (and Sandrine Bonnaire!), definitely worth a watch.

Girls, games, grenades

Naturally, just minutes after I bare my geeky girl-gamer^* soul to the resonant echo chamber of the Internet, I read this. Synopsis for the tl;dr crowd: old TED talk video from the ringleader of the Purple Moon game series, marketer of "horizontal" rather than "hierarchical" games for girls, inspires Jezebel contributor and avid girl-gamer to rehash all the problematic talking points of the Purple Moon "games for girls" project.

Now, there are a lot of obvious things that irk me about this video -- most glaringly, the idea of "giving girls what they want!" that totally ignores the by-now practically sacrosanct Judith Butler et al. literature on gender as a social construct. Or, in layman's terms: exactly what is it about pink, unicorns, and tiaras -- or, for that matter, "horizontal social bonds" -- that's "naturally" feminine, and how do we know it's not just the "natural" product of a century of Disneyian social conditioning, from cradle to grave? O hai, obvious feminist social theory is obvious!

No, but what really gets to me about "games for girls" is something else. It's an argument that's seeped into the well of our collective conscious even more insidiously, so much so that nobody seems to notice when they're drinking the Kool-aid. It's the idea that girls need didactic games, because girls are special, delicate creatures that need to be nurtured and protected. They need to be taught how to navigate those tricky social bonds (despite the fact that they're naturally good at it...?), to be guided to make the right choices and be happy, friendly, and popular. I can see how this is a more delicate matter to discuss; in spite of the many leaps and bounds our civilization has taken in the past century-long race to gender equality, girls are still limping behind boys, getting tangled up and drowning in the swamps of body dismorphia, beauty magazines, and the Industrial Wedding Complex. Nobody wants another generation of starvers, purgers, cutters, hysterics, and bridezillas. But to suggest that video games are the proper media for conveying a healthy social message is to overlook the decades of actual reality: most people play video games to transgress boundaries (to kill, steal, speed, fly), not to reinforce them. And to suggest that girls need this kind of nurturing more than boys, who obviously seem to do alright in our society despite hours of mind-numbing, gore-splattering shooting and fighting games -- well, ma'am, tha's just plain sexist!

It is my humble and, I think, empirically-justified opinion as a girl gamer that this is all the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what video games actually are. To me, video games are the epitome of a medium that actively challenges any kind of essentialist assumptions about reality, showing that our morality is (ba-ba-BAH!) a construct that we're happy to set aside in order to frag the hell of our best friend and get that sweet 10-person kill streak. They're an escape, a fantasy, a gleeful descent into the depths of the Jungian abyss. Everything else is just well-marketed educational software. And as great as Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego were, I certainly hope no child of mine, girl or boy, will ever be satisfied with that kind of light didactic fare.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off "horizontally" bonding with some zombies. Via chainsaw.

^*With all the propers going to this lady and her aggressive deconstruction of the term... but I'll still use it, because goddamn do I love me some alliteration.

Top tens (cont.)

Top ten gaming moments of the decade (in chronological order):

1. My earliest young adult memory of obsessive gaming was being glued to my high school boyfriend's computer, surviving on a diet of honey-roasted peanuts and playing Warcraft 3 into the wee hours of the morning. The undead campaign was my hands-down favorite. A love was born.

2. By now, it's a dude-bro cliche, but when Halo first came out, it was a revelation. My senior year of high school, I spent my entire spring break playing through a cooperative campaign with a bunch of college boys in their communal living room, where the occasional Mississippi cockroach the size of a dollar bill would blunder across the carpet and cause a three-minute stomping frenzy. But even that didn't stop us from playing.

3. During a short hiatus between killing aliens and killing demons, I got really into The Longest Journey, a quirky adventure/puzzle game. The fantasy element was okay, but I was really in it for the proto-cyberpunk. Also, I will forever be a sucker for games with hot, spunky female protagonists.

4. Two words: Diablo 2. I started in high school, and in college I got my own Battlenet account. Ever faithful to the unwritten rule that girl gamers play girl characters, I played a sorceress with a badass frost skill tree. My favorite was the jungle level -- probably because this was the year I was taking my first lit theory courses, and I liked that the cute baddies in tribal masks were called fetishes.

5. Quake 3 was just a recreational hobby until my boyfriend downloaded a Tank Girl skin for me. After that, the hours between classes were mainly spent annihilating things with a rocket launcher. It's a wonder I ever got any homework done.

6. Morrowind returned me to immersive role-playing games. I've probably wasted a solid week of my life jumping around Vivec to get my acrobatics up to 100. Again, when in god's name did I find time to read all those Russian novels?

7. If ever anyone has cause to doubt that I am a tremendous dork, I'd like to state for the record that, in college, I was an active member of a Dance Dance Revolution club. To this day, whenever I hear a J-pop song, I still have the urge to perform a combo.

8. Naaaaa na na na na nuh-nuh-nuh Katamari Damacyyyyy!

9. During the inauguration of Barack Obama, I was flipping between televised footage of downtown D.C. and the city's deserted post-apocalyptic doppleganger in Fallout 3, where my character, a pink-haired gunslinger named Precious, was busy blowing the heads off slavers. Truly, an historic occasion.

10. Tie game! I currently love everything about Borderlands, aka Diablo with Guns -- the spunky girl character with the elemental-heavy skill tree, the slash-and-burn looting game concept, the comic-y Mad Max aesthetic. But last night, as I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, I realized that I'd been to that exact plantation. Neato. Also, what a mind-blowingly perfect FEMA allegory. Also also, I still love the undead.

Top tens

Top ten meals of the decade (in chronological order):

1.  Making truffles and egg nog on New Year's with my high school boyfriend -- my first true gourmet culinary experience.  The ganache stained my favorite pair of jeans, which I continued to wear well into college and only recently threw away.  Every time I saw the stain, I thought about that night: licking chocolate off my fingers, offering sips of spiked nog to my boyfriend's tee-totaling Southern Baptist parents, then staying in his room until three in the morning.  Too, too sweet.

2.  I was meeting my college boyfriend's parents -- American diplomats working in China -- for the first time.  We went to Martinique on Magazine for lunch, and it was there that I was introduced to the glories of the warm duck confit salad.  It almost made me forget my desperate attempt to hide my eyebrow piercing and sound friendly and intelligent.   It was also the first time I ever saw anyone take a sip of the wine that had just been brought to the table... and refuse the bottle.  I didn't even know you could do that.

3.  The defunct Gaia in Ithaca, NY, where, for the first time in my life, I had a three-course, fifty-dollar meal.  I remember the dessert wine the most fondly.  It tasted like the thick, heady mysteries of adulthood.

4.  The first time I had Sonny's, a one-room barbecue shack in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, run by a four-fingered black man named Roosevelt Nichols (RIP).  I can still smell the smoke under my fingernails and in my hair.  Every subsequent time, I ordered the half chicken, and every time, I gave up using a fork.

5.  My first crawfish boil, in a tiny trailer-park town on the Louisiana/Mississippi border.  I wore a short red miniskirt and ravenously took down a whole miniature civilization of boiled spicy crustaceans; later, some of the members of my boyfriend's family privately expressed concern that I might "break his heart."  After drinking five Bud Lites and still being sober, we went out for birthday-cake-flavored sno-balls.  Sadly, I never did get to go fishing.

6.  Senior year, oysters on the half shell at Cooter Brown's, after a day of playing hookey and wandering around the French Quarter on the arm of my beloved Southern gentleman.  I bit into one -- salty, cold, delicious -- and spit out a pearl.  The coda to my checkered college experience.

7.  Homemade Thanksgiving dinner with the lady who took me to Gaia.  I'd traveled eleven hours by bus to visit, but everything melted away after the first bite of truffled cheese and the first sip of wine.  I can still rattle off the menu from memory: sausage puffs, taleggio flatbreads, the most amazing sage stuffing, roasted root veggies (that I helped peel, in true soldierly fashion), celery root puree (godly), and goose.  It was then that I started to rethink my disdain for the bourgeois lifestyle.

8.  After being dazzled by Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, we stumbled upon an alley dive that served skewers of things boiled in a cauldron of miso broth and then seared on an open grill.  The oyster mushrooms were my favorite -- lacy, earthy, salty, and, true to Tokyo fashion, slightly alien but incredibly delicious.

9.  On Valentine's Day, we had reservations for two at Helmand.  Unfortunately, on Valentine's Day, there was an ice storm, so I had to wait while he trudged through the wall of sleet to hail a cab.  By the time we made it to the restaurant, the roasted pumpkin was the warmest, most comforting appetizer I'd ever tasted.  I still wonder if the rumor about the place being owned by Hamid Karzai's cousin is true.

10.  Instead of buying engagement rings, we went out to a 400-dollar meal at Abacus in Dallas.  The scallops were the best main course I've ever tasted -- like biting into the culinary version of a French kiss.  We ordered dessert wine... a whole bottle.  The waiter was visibly shaken.

Open source

By nature, I'm a very nervous person.  Since early childhood, my brain has been a veritable cerebral nightmare factory, breeding hundreds of irrational fears, from the mundane (monsters under the bed, terrors that go bump in the night) to the somewhat more esoteric (robbers and rapists at every corner), to the downright peculiar (leaning back too far in reclining chairs, porch beams splintering and collapsing under a misplaced heavy step).

But by nature, I'm also a person who, as an abstract rational position, hates nature and feels a great deal more satisfaction fighting it than succumbing to it.  Case in point: when I was younger, I had terrible lung capacity.  I'd get winded after a brisk walk, which made my first forays into vigorous exercise a nightmare of wheezing, gasping, and pulmonary incineration.  Now, after five years of teeth-gritting, face-numbing, vision-blurring runs, I'm a member of an elite coterie of individuals who can manually inflate a balloon animal.  This kind of dedicated self-antagonism doesn't come easy, and it can often degenerate into full-blown obsessive compulsion.  See: years 19 and 20 of my life (actually, don't, ugh).  But when done right, and healthily, there's no better feeling in the world.

Case in point: motorcycles.  Exactly one year ago, I hopped on the back of my brother-in-law's bike and clung desperately to his broad firefighter shoulders as he executed a cheeky weaving maneuver.  I was petrified -- with absolutely no control over the situation and vivid mental images, in slow-mo crash-test dummy fashion, of my bones hitting concrete at 60 miles per hour and exploding in a fireworks of  splinters and gore, this had all the markings of a deep-seated phobia.  Today, I hopped on a bike -- my own -- and pulled the same weave on a straightaway of dappled sunlit highway.  My fingers were raw and half-numb under a pair of ratty gardening gloves (naturally, in a house with half a dozen motorcycles and thousands of dollars worth of paraphernalia, no gloves are small enough to fit my girlie hands).  But I could've stayed out there for hours, for days, for weeks on end.  In the most cliched of ways, I felt myself fuse to the bike in a way I'd never experienced before, and every fluid movement rippled through my flesh, infusing the soft vital tissue with an injection of indestructible rubber and chrome.

I'd like to be better at applying this philosophy to other, less adrenaline driven, facets of my life.  It isn't just fear that I resent as something that comes naturally to me; there are a myriad of other dark complexes I'd love to flush out.  Unfortunately, outside of the Star Wars universe -- Spike was showing episodes 3-6 last night, and you better believe I was glued to that TV -- they're harder to confront head-on.  I'm going to try, anyway, though.  Worth it.  So worth it.