HEY, YOU GUYS, LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH THIS YEAR'S OSCAR NOMS SUCK!

[bookshop]

*Best Picture 2010 nominations list*
- Avatar <-- racist, imperialist white liberal guilt fantasy (everyone, native peoples, mountains, animals, trees and tree-nerve-endings, get exploited by white people, awesome!!)

- The Blind Side <-- i haven't seen this, but true story notwithstanding the trailer just me cringe. It really, really seemed

Comments

[radiobroadcast]

ohhhh Aja I so totally do not agree with you on some of these points, especially regarding Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air.

As said above in someone else's comment, IB is, in large part, about the frankly awesome Shoshanna. The Basterds are secondary. In addition to that, I object (perhaps controversially so?) to your calling it "another smug pretentious violent white-guy "the enemy is us" [...] war movie you've seen 80000 times before." I'm sorry, maybe it's just the Jew in me talking, but I'm offended at your description. To me, this movie was a revenge fantasy that was deeply satisfying in a way I don't know if I can explain or justify. It wasn't at all just about a bunch of white guys killing each other. AT ALL. It was about a bunch of Jews killing the fuck out of Nazis. And maybe you're not familiar with Jewish history, I don't want to assume either way, but it's really only been pretty recently that most Jewish Americans have been identified by the general public as white (see also: Italians, Irish, etc), and there is still a pretty large population of said Jewish Americans who identify as Jewish RATHER than white. So please do not go lumping Inglourious Basterds in with District 9 or The Hurt Locker.

Heh, now I'm too drained from above rant to talk about Up in the Air too much, except to say that it was probably my favorite movie this year, and no offense but maybe you should actually finish watching the entire movie before throwing a fit about the characterization. The women in that movie are phenomenal. The end.

[bookshop]

Haha, your icon looks so unimpressed. :D

Thank you, thank you for making this point. Linking to your comment if that's okay.

[radiobroadcast]

Bobby is pretty much always unimpressed!

And of course it's fine! I'm glad you're receptive to it.

[bookshop]

I've actually gotten confused and turned around in recent years because I used to consider Jewish culture non-white culture, but over the years kept seeing the reverse in discussions. I think these are actually separate problems, but it honestly never even occurred to me to read IB as revenge fantasy, and now I'm wondering why that is.

[radiobroadcast]

That's certainly something to think about...it's very bizarre to me that it can be read as anything but!

[radiobroadcast]

Also, in terms of whether Jewish culture is "white" or not...I think it really depends on the person and maybe also the specific locale/culture in which they grew up. I don't think it's something that can be assumed either way. Personally, I do consider myself white racially, but I simultaneously identify as an ethnoreligious minority. If that makes sense.

[bentley]

Did you see the movie through to the end? I'm not asking that in an incredulous tone, I promise, I genuinely don't know. Because I feel Shoshanna's line "This is the face of Jewish vengeance!" was a telling one.

To be honest, all Quentin Tarantino films are problematic; objectively, he is an amazing cinematographic director, but his scripts and casting can be mysoginistic and racist. But this is the first Tarantino film I've seen since Pulp Fiction that has more redeeming qualities than it does flaws.

[anatsuno]

wow, that is so interesting to me. I feel like Jackie Brown had a lot more (redeeming or not) qualities than flaws, and it's gone downhill from there. I would never say that about IB. :)

[jlh]

I think a huge part of it is timing. I'll just elaborate on the above, not only about Jews but others-

The "ethnic" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe that came to America during the late 1800s-what we think of as a stereotypical immigrant, the ones that went through Ellis Island and lived on the lower east side in New York or worked in factories in the rust belt-were primarily Jewish, Catholic or Russian/Greek/other Orthodox, and were not coded as "white" mostly because of their religion. (Although, they were sometimes referred to as "swarthy.") There is still a lot of anti-Catholic bias in some areas of the country, but nothing like it was before the 1930s-Al Smith tried to run for president in 1928 as an Irish Catholic (and the Irish had been here since the 1840s) and you don't even want to know; it was a disaster.

There were two major mechanisms that happened one right after the other that moved them more into the "white" column:

1. As part of the New Deal, the government validation of the union movement through the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. Now not only were unions legal, but businesses had to negotiate in good faith with them. This legitimized unions but also the factory workers themselves. In most of the time periods before this the government had sided against them. (I say most; as always there were exceptions.)
But also as part of the New Deal, nearly all New Deal programs were segregated black/white, because FDR needed the votes of the southern Democrats to get the New Deal passed in Congress. Remember, the white power structure of the south was still in the Democratic party until the 1960s. So that entire alphabet soup of civil works programs and get back to work programs were locally administrated and strictly racially segregated but only against blacks.

2. WWII. You know that stereotypical squadron in a WWII movie that has a farm boy and a southerner and an ethnic city boy? Well, that was broadly true. During WWII the only group that was segregated was African Americans; everyone else was shoved into the regular army. This includes the Native Americans that signed up, the Hispanics that signed up, the Asians (though, yes, interment camps, so I'm not saying they became white, but that the ones who did serve were not segregated) and of course all those ethnic groups we now think of as white. WWII was a huge force in solidifying the racial divisions that we think of now, because it was such a national, strong-federal government-led war. You didn't have nearly as many regiments made up of everyone from one home town as you had in previous wars.

This is new stuff-there's a LOT of history being written right now about the process of various ethnic groups becoming white. But yes, at that moment in WWII both Jews and QT's own forefathers would have been going through the process of becoming white. They wouldn't have wandered into the war being thought of as white. It's obviously hugely complicated if someone can write an entire book called How the Irish Became White and start an entire trend in American historiography, but that's the boiled down survey lecture version.

[ali_wildgoose]

Hooray for context! <3

[tangledtale]

I'm not jewish so I can only speak about this from a theoretical perspective and I apologise if that's not the type of conversation you want to engage in re. this movie but your comment kind of stood out to me because I felt like the film manages the revenge fantasy element of its story really well. Like, the catharsis of the whole final act, from the movie theatre to the branding of Landa, is done with this weird mix of violent euphoria and measured distance by the virtue of this being a movie about movies. As if it's mixing the immediate audience response to this revenge with the knowledge that vengeance itself is necessitated by hindsight and an official, objective sort of 'history' that, as Tarantino kind of points out with this movie, is peppered by 'fictionalisations' of movies, or secondhand information, of our own imaginations and the distance of time etc. IDK but it also kind of made me think about the effects and sometime value of movie 'violence' - Hitler and the Nazi high command died watching a movie where the underlying nationalism encapsulated in Zoller's 'hero' narrative is disturbingly reminiscent of Allied-centric war movies /me pointing out the obvious

I kind of only saw it recently though so my thoughts are still a bit muddled and unformed blah.

[radiobroadcast]

I COMPLETELY agree with every one of your points! The whole meta aspect, movies making comments about movies, is very Tarantino, and I think especially so in IB, where it's kind of...movies making comments on movies making comments on movies, haha.