Bastardized History: How <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> Breaks through American Screen Memory

Abstract

I think America is one of only countries that has not been forced . . . to look [its] own past sins in face. And it's only by looking them in face that you can possibly work past them.1-Quentin TarantinoDespite fact that Holocaust took place on another continent and directly involved few Americans, this event has become integrated into fabric of American story. The trauma of Holocaust entered American mainstream consciousness with publication in English of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, which met with wild success when it was adapted for silver screen in 1959 as The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, USA). American awareness of Final Solution was reinforced for later generations with premiere of television miniseries Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky, USA, NBC) in 1978 and again with release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (USA) and opening of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. With proliferation of Holocaust memorials and representations in American arts since landmark date of 1993, Holocaust has been transformed in United States from a specifically Jewish trauma into a broadly defined mainstream American experience.2 America's adoption of European Jewish history is part of a process by which story of Holocaust-and America's presumed role in ending it-is incorporated into the fundamental tale of pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and human rights that America tells about itself.3 Peter Novick confirms this trend in his study The Holocaust in American Life, observing that the Holocaust has come to be presented-come to be thought of-as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory.4In its use of postmodern parody, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (USA, 2009) calls attention to American culture's appropriation of Holocaust memory through its conflation of Jewish and American identities in elite fighting unit that gives film its title. The film's self-conscious Americaniza-tion of Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture's tendency to adopt Holocaust trauma as a screen memory, a means of displacing or repressing its own historical guilt-traumas. Rather than participating in this phenomenon, however, Inglourious Basterds uses parody to lay bare ways in which American film representations of Holocaust have shaped, and in some cases have distorted, public cultural memory of event. Unlike earlier Holocaust films that endeavored to seamlessly integrate a specifically Jewish history into broader fabric of American story, Inglourious Basterds calls attention to its Americanization of Holocaust through its ironic revision of history. Tarantino confirms this reading, explaining that film broadly examines the tragedy of genocide. I'm dealing with Jewish genocide in Europe, but my Jews are going native and taking roles of American Indians-another genocide. Then there's a King Kong metaphor about slave trade, that's another genocide.5 Through this revision film challenges primacy of Holocaust as an American memory and consequently draws attention to America's reluctance to confront its own legacy of racial prejudice.Moreover, film unsettles received representations of America as liberator of Europe's Jews from their Nazi oppressors, and in this way acts in a manner similar to what Linda Hutcheon has called metafiction-what I term historiographic metacinema-which locates in popular film representations of Holocaust a complicated intertextual relationship between history and fiction.6 As metacinema-the film clearly situate[s] itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction7-Inglourious Basterds prompts us to question reliability of films as instruments of public memory by calling attention to cinematic strategies by which they represent Holocaust. …