Back broke and dancing because you're here beside me.
Oh hey, guys, aquidis has finally seen Inglourious Basterds, and just like I predicted, some of the first words out of her mouth were, "I don't know how you can ship it."
Why I Ship It: The Bear Jew/The Little Man
On an easy, basic level, I think the pairing, which as someone said a while back, has just appeared out of the ether is so popular is for the shallow reason that people find Eli Roth and B. J. Novak attractive. God knows that's the initial thing that interested me (look at my tags, for fuck's sake) but I think it's way too simple to reduce the ship to horny fangirls. And I don't know that it's because we watch it with "slash goggles," which seems to imply the fetishization of gay men in fandom. I think if my reason for really loving the pairing was purely sexual, I wouldn't still be writing it like crazy, scrawling stories and lines in the margins of my notes instead of discussing Kafka.
The reason why I'm obsessed with Donny/Smitty is because the pairing is all about the challenge their personalities pose to one another, and it goes back to why I love both characters on their own. It sounds so simple, like an advertisement for a bad romantic comedy: He's a maniacal murderer with a sweet side, he's a shy, outcast journalist.
The thing that defines Smitty as a character to me is the moment when he's crying in the back of the truck at the end of the film, and I don't think that makes him any less of a man, superficially-speaking. To me, it expresses him as a person who's managed to survive four years of killing men (his hands and knife are the first image of scalping we see, after all) and cheering on the deaths of his enemies, but who is not so completely out of touch with reality that he's not able to express himself emotionally when he thinks that their mission's been fucked up. It represents the culmination of those years of their lives, of the possibility that everything they've done has all been for naught, and even in that moment of worrying about the larger picture and his own failings (seriously, read his anxiety attack after Aldo tells him he's got to play chauffeur), instead of saying, "We're fucked" or "I screwed up," the first words out of his mouth are the names of his comrades. That moment when you can hear his crying through his voice, the sniffling way in which he asks about Donny and Omar's well-being, represents his ability to maintain some emotional ties to his actions and the people he commits said actions with, and that leads me to believe that, unlike some of the other Basterds- probably Donny and Gerold, the latter of which I tend to write as more easily broken than his trigger-happy persona implies- Smitty actually still gives a shit about himself and about the human elements of the conflict.
Donny is, I think, a little harder to define, because yes, he's so superficially violent and brash, but is alternately capable of tremendous restraint and control. The best example of both of these traits is the scene in the veterinarian's office, when he bursts in, threatening the old man with a gun and then shooting two of the dogs (which is a fucking psychotic thing to do), and then, he's able to maintain this incredible fucking calm while he watches Aldo work, his only real expression of distaste is his "fuck a duck!" exclamation. I think those traits are pretty obvious even in his batting scene. Look at the way he's enjoying himself there, bashing someone's head in and then railing off faux sports commentary to narrate his own violence, while still expressing some of that quiet calm in the vet scene. The moment when he approaches Werner, anticipating the bloody contact, his eyes are so deep and yet empty as he serenely asks the man, "You get that [medal] for killing Jews?" It's real calm, with the potential for anger and violence always simmering under the surface. Eli Roth talked about how he hoped the viewer would be able to see the inherent sorrow and anger of Donny in his performance, and I think that's come through quite well. I'm not sure where that rage comes from, but he's able to control it at least marginally well in the aforementioned scenes, and definitely in the cut scene featuring his conversation with Mrs. Himmelstein before the war. It's also pretty obvious in the calculated manner in which he tells Omar how their mission is going to go at the cinema. He says it so simplistically- basically: "I'm gonna kill that guy and then you've gotta kill that other guy. Can you do it?"- but with a real restraint, which I think is necessary for him to have made it to sergeant. He's not flying off the handle, but he talks about the violence in such a detached and easy manner, there's no question that he's not completely addicted to his own brute force.
The whole concept of their identity as Jews is another area that I think should be addressed, and I thought of it today while re-reading Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth:
The golem is a figure in Jewish myth- sort of a Jewish lie, sort of a Jewish truth. It appears to wreak havoc but, really, it'll do anything you say. You don't have to tell it twice. If it tries to speak for itself, the Word of God tumbles out and the golem turns back into clay.
I think that passage is incredibly fitting and, with the understanding that I know very little about the golem myth, I think it's incredibly characteristic of Donny. Yes, he's incredibly violent and psychotic, but is that violence and psychosis ever expressed in a way that wasn't directed by Aldo, who is, for all intents and purposes, the God figure of the story? I don't think so. Everything he does branches from his commitment to their mission, to the things Aldo's told him to do. Donny exists, at least within the boundaries of Handler's definition, as the golem, and it's very fitting that Tarantino invokes that myth in Donny's existence as something more than real.
Smitty's Jewish identity is harder to pin down, mostly because he comes from an unobservant family and was given the generic name Smithson as a means of further assimilation within American society. B. J. Novak has said that Smitty was recruited while working as a put-upon foreign correspondent in England, and that his reasoning for joining up was that he wanted to get in touch with his Jewish heritage.
So what do you do with these two characters, one the breathing personification of the Jewish myth, and another as basically a non-Jew attempting to reclaim his Jewish identity? How would these two people interact, what sort of things would they say to one another, and what's the relationship between them? So much has been read into Smitty's naming of Donny during the truck scene, which is a pretty simplistic way of interpreting it, I think, but I honestly don't think it's so crazy to want to explore the dynamic of a supposed relationship between them, precisely because they're so incredibly different.
I haven't even mentioned what's considered fanon on some level: Smitty's queer and aware of it more than Donny is of his own identity (indeed, in fanon, Donny never seems to identify as gay, straight or anything in-between, while Smitty appears to be gay from the get-go), Smitty's probably more sexually experienced though still naive about the ways of the world, Donny does have the desire to be close- at least physically- to other people and would have, in all likelihood, obliquely invited Smitty back to Boston after the war, Donny's less interested in defining or even publicly expressing his relationship with Smitty, not to mention FUCKING MORMON JOHNNY.
However, taking into account strictly what is canon- the film, the script, backstory direct from the performers' mouths- I think the real appeal of the Donny/Smitty pairing is the possibility for conflict in the way their distinct personalities might interact. It sounds so simple once you get down to it- the violent and brash one, the reserved and naive one- but the whole idea of conflicting personalities leading to sex and love is not just a Hollywood concept, but a universal one. It's been used in literature as far back as I remember. Beyond simply the clash of exterior personalities though, there's the possibility for transformation and depth within the characters, extrapolated through the relationship. Smitty is right there in the film, cheering and clapping when Donny kills Germans, but he's not so emotionally vacant that he can't cry over what he perceives to be their failings. Donny is a maniac who shouts and assaults people and things, but he also has a tremendous amount of restraint in high tension situations (and there's that lovely detail of his beauty school education and desire to open a salon). And both characters, however different, have the capacity for real emotion, whether that's expressed through tears in the heat of the moment, or the angry outburst of violence against people and animals.
So maybe that's why I ship it, because under the veneer of stoic and detached violence, they're both real people with real emotions and desires, probably the most realistic of the Basterds. Though I love Gerold, the secretly-angry son from the second-largest deli in Hartford, and I can appreciate Kagan (for his country bumpkin interest) and Omar (mainly for his ability to keep cool under pressure and the fluidity of his interaction with Donny), I don't think any of the other men are fleshed out quite so much. As a writer, Tarantino gives so much of these characters in so few words. To me- and to many other people, judging by the popularity of the pairing- Smitty and Donny are crackling and alive, and their existence as such makes it easy to understand why one might want to see them together within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship.
Fuck, that was way longer than I expected, but I've seen this thing eight times now- and read the screenplay at least three- so I'd like to believe I know what I'm talking about.
Why I Ship It: The Bear Jew/The Little Man
On an easy, basic level, I think the pairing, which as someone said a while back, has just appeared out of the ether is so popular is for the shallow reason that people find Eli Roth and B. J. Novak attractive. God knows that's the initial thing that interested me (look at my tags, for fuck's sake) but I think it's way too simple to reduce the ship to horny fangirls. And I don't know that it's because we watch it with "slash goggles," which seems to imply the fetishization of gay men in fandom. I think if my reason for really loving the pairing was purely sexual, I wouldn't still be writing it like crazy, scrawling stories and lines in the margins of my notes instead of discussing Kafka.
The reason why I'm obsessed with Donny/Smitty is because the pairing is all about the challenge their personalities pose to one another, and it goes back to why I love both characters on their own. It sounds so simple, like an advertisement for a bad romantic comedy: He's a maniacal murderer with a sweet side, he's a shy, outcast journalist.
The thing that defines Smitty as a character to me is the moment when he's crying in the back of the truck at the end of the film, and I don't think that makes him any less of a man, superficially-speaking. To me, it expresses him as a person who's managed to survive four years of killing men (his hands and knife are the first image of scalping we see, after all) and cheering on the deaths of his enemies, but who is not so completely out of touch with reality that he's not able to express himself emotionally when he thinks that their mission's been fucked up. It represents the culmination of those years of their lives, of the possibility that everything they've done has all been for naught, and even in that moment of worrying about the larger picture and his own failings (seriously, read his anxiety attack after Aldo tells him he's got to play chauffeur), instead of saying, "We're fucked" or "I screwed up," the first words out of his mouth are the names of his comrades. That moment when you can hear his crying through his voice, the sniffling way in which he asks about Donny and Omar's well-being, represents his ability to maintain some emotional ties to his actions and the people he commits said actions with, and that leads me to believe that, unlike some of the other Basterds- probably Donny and Gerold, the latter of which I tend to write as more easily broken than his trigger-happy persona implies- Smitty actually still gives a shit about himself and about the human elements of the conflict.
Donny is, I think, a little harder to define, because yes, he's so superficially violent and brash, but is alternately capable of tremendous restraint and control. The best example of both of these traits is the scene in the veterinarian's office, when he bursts in, threatening the old man with a gun and then shooting two of the dogs (which is a fucking psychotic thing to do), and then, he's able to maintain this incredible fucking calm while he watches Aldo work, his only real expression of distaste is his "fuck a duck!" exclamation. I think those traits are pretty obvious even in his batting scene. Look at the way he's enjoying himself there, bashing someone's head in and then railing off faux sports commentary to narrate his own violence, while still expressing some of that quiet calm in the vet scene. The moment when he approaches Werner, anticipating the bloody contact, his eyes are so deep and yet empty as he serenely asks the man, "You get that [medal] for killing Jews?" It's real calm, with the potential for anger and violence always simmering under the surface. Eli Roth talked about how he hoped the viewer would be able to see the inherent sorrow and anger of Donny in his performance, and I think that's come through quite well. I'm not sure where that rage comes from, but he's able to control it at least marginally well in the aforementioned scenes, and definitely in the cut scene featuring his conversation with Mrs. Himmelstein before the war. It's also pretty obvious in the calculated manner in which he tells Omar how their mission is going to go at the cinema. He says it so simplistically- basically: "I'm gonna kill that guy and then you've gotta kill that other guy. Can you do it?"- but with a real restraint, which I think is necessary for him to have made it to sergeant. He's not flying off the handle, but he talks about the violence in such a detached and easy manner, there's no question that he's not completely addicted to his own brute force.
The whole concept of their identity as Jews is another area that I think should be addressed, and I thought of it today while re-reading Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth:
The golem is a figure in Jewish myth- sort of a Jewish lie, sort of a Jewish truth. It appears to wreak havoc but, really, it'll do anything you say. You don't have to tell it twice. If it tries to speak for itself, the Word of God tumbles out and the golem turns back into clay.
I think that passage is incredibly fitting and, with the understanding that I know very little about the golem myth, I think it's incredibly characteristic of Donny. Yes, he's incredibly violent and psychotic, but is that violence and psychosis ever expressed in a way that wasn't directed by Aldo, who is, for all intents and purposes, the God figure of the story? I don't think so. Everything he does branches from his commitment to their mission, to the things Aldo's told him to do. Donny exists, at least within the boundaries of Handler's definition, as the golem, and it's very fitting that Tarantino invokes that myth in Donny's existence as something more than real.
Smitty's Jewish identity is harder to pin down, mostly because he comes from an unobservant family and was given the generic name Smithson as a means of further assimilation within American society. B. J. Novak has said that Smitty was recruited while working as a put-upon foreign correspondent in England, and that his reasoning for joining up was that he wanted to get in touch with his Jewish heritage.
So what do you do with these two characters, one the breathing personification of the Jewish myth, and another as basically a non-Jew attempting to reclaim his Jewish identity? How would these two people interact, what sort of things would they say to one another, and what's the relationship between them? So much has been read into Smitty's naming of Donny during the truck scene, which is a pretty simplistic way of interpreting it, I think, but I honestly don't think it's so crazy to want to explore the dynamic of a supposed relationship between them, precisely because they're so incredibly different.
I haven't even mentioned what's considered fanon on some level: Smitty's queer and aware of it more than Donny is of his own identity (indeed, in fanon, Donny never seems to identify as gay, straight or anything in-between, while Smitty appears to be gay from the get-go), Smitty's probably more sexually experienced though still naive about the ways of the world, Donny does have the desire to be close- at least physically- to other people and would have, in all likelihood, obliquely invited Smitty back to Boston after the war, Donny's less interested in defining or even publicly expressing his relationship with Smitty, not to mention FUCKING MORMON JOHNNY.
However, taking into account strictly what is canon- the film, the script, backstory direct from the performers' mouths- I think the real appeal of the Donny/Smitty pairing is the possibility for conflict in the way their distinct personalities might interact. It sounds so simple once you get down to it- the violent and brash one, the reserved and naive one- but the whole idea of conflicting personalities leading to sex and love is not just a Hollywood concept, but a universal one. It's been used in literature as far back as I remember. Beyond simply the clash of exterior personalities though, there's the possibility for transformation and depth within the characters, extrapolated through the relationship. Smitty is right there in the film, cheering and clapping when Donny kills Germans, but he's not so emotionally vacant that he can't cry over what he perceives to be their failings. Donny is a maniac who shouts and assaults people and things, but he also has a tremendous amount of restraint in high tension situations (and there's that lovely detail of his beauty school education and desire to open a salon). And both characters, however different, have the capacity for real emotion, whether that's expressed through tears in the heat of the moment, or the angry outburst of violence against people and animals.
So maybe that's why I ship it, because under the veneer of stoic and detached violence, they're both real people with real emotions and desires, probably the most realistic of the Basterds. Though I love Gerold, the secretly-angry son from the second-largest deli in Hartford, and I can appreciate Kagan (for his country bumpkin interest) and Omar (mainly for his ability to keep cool under pressure and the fluidity of his interaction with Donny), I don't think any of the other men are fleshed out quite so much. As a writer, Tarantino gives so much of these characters in so few words. To me- and to many other people, judging by the popularity of the pairing- Smitty and Donny are crackling and alive, and their existence as such makes it easy to understand why one might want to see them together within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship.
Fuck, that was way longer than I expected, but I've seen this thing eight times now- and read the screenplay at least three- so I'd like to believe I know what I'm talking about.