Inglorious Fantasies

Parashat Ki Tetze 5769

Fantasies like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds are cathartic, but in real life we have to deal with the unfulfilled desires in our lives by finding their underlying causes.

Rabbis these days like to refer to movies in their sermons. We think it makes us cool (when, really, we’re not). But, having three children under the age of 5, Melanie and I rarely get to see a movie, especially at the theater. That’s why I’m so excited to tell you that we went to the movies this week. So, I get to pretend I’m cool by referring to a movie in my sermon.

This week we saw Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds. By all accounts, the film is a fantasy. The movie opens with “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France…” Tarantino, who wrote and directed the film, tells an alternate history of WWII in which a secret undercover unit made up of Jewish American soldiers drops into France in 1944, just ahead of the D-Day invasion. These soldiers roam the French countryside brutally killing every Nazi they can find; striking terror in the entire Nazi regime – all the way to the top. But, the film is more than an alternative history. It is a revenge fantasy. More than a few commentators have called the film “kosher porn.” And it is… there isn’t a flash of nudity in the entire movie, but it is, without a doubt, pornographic – that is to say, it is an imaginary wish-fulfillment that unleashes in the viewer – especially the Jewish viewer – the most primal emotions. Tarantino deliberately set out to make a movie that was diametrically different from the typical Holocaust film depicting Jews as victims or survivors. Tarantino’s Jews are ruthless commandos. And as brutal as the revenge is in the film, it is also very cathartic to watch. There is no Jewish angst in this movie, no Woody Allen-esque ruminations over moral ambiguities, and not once does a Jewish soldier stop to use his inhaler. You can’t help feel a triumphal exhilaration seeing Nazi’s getting wacked Apache-style!

The articles that have been written about the movie all deal with the theme of revenge – some people love it and some people hate it. I think the reviews miss the point by a little. To my mind, the question isn’t whether you like revenge or not. What I find interesting about the movie is the question of how we as human beings deal with these fantasies we all have. The theme of the movie is revenge, but the overarching motif is the act of fantasizing about and planning revenge.

Like every Tarantino film, this movie has multiple plotlines that converge. The second major plotline involves a Jewish woman named Shoshanna Dreyfus. As a teenage, Shoshanna escaped Nazi capture and is now living under an assumed identity as the owner of a small movie theater in Paris. Tarantino’s story takes a turn when the Nazis chose Shoshanna’s theater to premiere Goebbels’ latest propaganda film about a young sniper who singlehandedly kills 300 Allied troops from a bell tower in Italy. When Shoshanna (now Emmanuelle) learns that all the top Nazi brass, including Adolf Hitler himself, will be at the premiere, she hatches an elaborate plan to take her revenge. She spends a lot of time imagining what her revenge will look like. I think the movie is really about the fantasizing that precedes the revenge… and it’s about seeing it.

Tarantino cleverly holds a mirror up to the audience. When you go see this film, you’ll be sitting in a dark theater enjoying a violent movie in which Hitler is sitting in a dark theater enjoying a violent movie. Whether he meant to or not, I think Tarantino is playing with us and getting us not only to contemplate revenge but to think about the act of fantasizing about revenge. I won’t give any more away, but suffice it to say that I think Shoshanna is really the most interesting character in the film because she represents the limits of our fantasies.

We all have fantasies. We imagine having things we want, changing the things we find difficult to change, rewriting our lives. For example, 10 years ago I was robbed at gunpoint… it’s a long story, but its enough to say that I had a gun pointed at my face. I stood there absolutely paralyzed, barely able to hand over my wallet. For years afterwards, I fantasized about a how it could have gone down. In my fantasy version, I’m like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. With a few skilled moves, I disarm the thieves and take them out. In my fantasy I’m strong, quick, in control, and always cool. But at some point I stopped conjuring up that fantasy. Perhaps the whole affair had faded from my consciousness, or perhaps the fantasy was no longer satisfying. That’s the thing about fantasy and unattainable desires: they have a way of haunting us, and yet we are compelled by them. They provide some relief from an unresolved gap in our lives, but ultimately they can’t deliver. The irony is that if we try to repress our fantasies, they just take root in pathological ways. On the other hand, if we pursue every one of our fantasies, we risk doing damage to ourselves and those around us.

I walked out of Inglourious Basterds with some amount of exhilaration. It was cathartic… but the feeling didn’t last. By the time I got back in my car I remembered that the war didn’t end the way Tarantino would have us imagine. Aside from a handful of midlevel Nazis we tried after the war, we Jews never had the satisfaction of revenge (if there really is such a thing). The reality remains that we were victimized and traumatized in the Holocaust – and no fantasy can change that. The same goes for most of our other more banal and crude fantasies. The fantasy provides some relief, but it usually isn’t satisfying in the long run. The real challenge of real life is how we deal with the gaps between what we lust after and what we have… between who we would like to imagine ourselves to be and who we are… between the things that provide us with easy pleasure and the challenges that stand in the way of abiding happiness. Tarantino only alludes to this problem in the character of Shoshanna, but he offers no solution.

As it happens, this week’s Torah portion also depicts a brutal and terrible aspect of war. It was not uncommon in the time of the Bible –and sadly remains true today – that when an army goes to war, ugly aspects of the human psyche get unleashed. The will to power and the lust for conquest are too often visited upon women in wartime. These soldiers are also playing out a fantasy – granted, it is a fantasy of power and lust that is pathological and evil. It is qualitatively different, perhaps, than the little day-to-day fantasies you and I entertain, but a fantasy none the less. The Torah, however, does not outlaw the soldiers’ desires, but instead seeks to regulate them. In this way, the Torah’s approach to this problem has a lot to say even to our relatively petty fantasies and unfulfilled desires.

Parashat Ki Tetsei says: “When you take to the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and wish to have her, you shall bring her into your house; and she shall shave her head and trim her nails, and discard the clothes in which she was captured. She shall spend a month’s time in your home mourning her father and her mother; after that you may come to her and make her your wife. But if you should no longer want her, you must release her outright. You may not sell her for money; you must not enslave her, since you have humbled her.” (Deut. 21:10-14)

Rabbi Alan Lew (of blessed memory) offers an interpretation of this passage that applies the lessons of the Torah to all of our desires and unfulfilled fantasies. The first thing to note is that the Torah does not outlaw the soldiers’ desires – the Torah recognizes perhaps that we cannot simply repress or kill our fantasies. So instead, the Torah asks us to live with them for a while. Like the soldier who brings the woman into his home, we have to bring those fantasies into our consciousness. And then, Rabbi Lew says, we have to strip our fantasies of those aspects that make them appear so enticing. Without her hair and pretty cloths, the soldier is forced to see his captive for who she is – a human being in mourning. Similarly, when we examine our fantasies and desires, we often discover they are a projection of our own losses and traumas that we are seeking to resolve. So, if after some time of looking unromantically at our fantasies we still want them – well, then we clearly have something to deal with. If, however, we discover that we no longer find them satisfying and they no longer serve us, we have to let them go.

In his film, Tarantino provides us with an entertaining romp through the dark fantasy of revenge. For the most part, the film glorifies the fantasy but I think it also serves to undress it and reveal its limited usefulness. During this month of Elul, I want to recommend Rabbi Lew’s advice. As we approach the reckoning of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it is a good time to meditate on our impulses, to spend some time with the unresolved desires that contribute to our unhappiness, to examine unromantically the fantasies and illusions that keep us captive. Tarantino proves we can do it without beating ourselves up. There is a time and a place for fantasies like Inglourious Basterds. But when the lights come back on and the credits roll, we have to remember: it was only fun while it lasted.

Shabbat Shalom

{I also recommend this review by Rabbi Irwin Kula}