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.
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