Scalping Nazis and Shooting Slavers: The Violence of Historical Revenge Fantasies
Is violent historical fantasy entertainment justified?
**This piece was originally written for a First Year Writing Seminar college course Graphic Violence
“Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why any and every sumbitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die.”
These words introduce Lieutenant Aldo Raine, commander of the Basterds, a Jewish-American guerilla unit sent to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, spread fear into Nazi ranks, and kill as many of them as possible. Raine’s words encapsulate the violent spirit of Quentin Tarantino’s alternate-history WWII epic Inglourious Basterds (2009). His next film, Django Unchained (2012), is another equally violent and self-indulgent tale of retribution that sees former slave Django unleash vengeance on racist white slave-masters in a blaze of bloodshed. As prominent examples of historical revenge fantasies, these two Tarantino films epitomize both the popularity and controversy surrounding the genre. The commercialized appeal of seeing justice delivered through highly sensationalized violence offers entertainment, but at the same time, critics often call into question the ethical implications behind such portrayals of historical events into fantastical bloodbaths. However, representations of violence in historical revenge fantasy media can also provide thought-provoking commentary about morality and the psychology of revenge to the audience. Using Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained as the principal examples in which to analyze the genre, I draw from history, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the unique stylistic choices of media as an art form to argue that historical revenge fantasies are not only justified but can advance the discussion surrounding violence and its implications. Though often derided for rewriting the past, the dramatized violence depicted in historical revenge fantasies can offer depth and meaning by offering a way of mastering past trauma and challenging the moral compass of its audiences.
The rewriting and dramatization of history in entertainment media can be justified and ethical when conducted as an earnest art form instead of gory schlock entertainment. The genre certainly isn’t perfect, but it still offers potential as an art form that can promote discussion around history. Alternate histories, especially those depicted within revenge fantasy contexts, often face the criticism of being unethical falsifications of the past that belittle the real tragedies and atrocities suffered by real victims. Much of the academic discussion surrounding the ethical depiction of history has centered around the debate over preserving the traumatic memory of violence inflicted upon people as accurately as possible as opposed to allowing a greater degree of narrative freedom. In response to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, film critic John Mendelsohn argues that “an alternative, morally superior, form of ‘revenge’ for Jews would be to do precisely what the Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them” (Mendelsohn 2009). This line of thinking rejects the artistic potential of revenge fantasy works such as Tarantino’s and suggests that films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist should be championed as the “moral” and righteous way of depicting the Holocaust because of their brutally candid portrayal of the historical violence visited upon a persecuted people. Similarly, prominent feminist writer Roxane Gay criticizes the prolific use of racial slurs in Django Unchained, which she believes to be an unethical and disingenuous effort on Tarantino’s part to adhere to historical accuracy (even though when one considers the rest of his filmography, it seems far more likely that it is simply a rather controversial stylistic hallmark of his works rather than an earnest effort at historical faithfulness specific to this film). She states that like in Inglourious Basterds, “Tarantino once again managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position” (Gay 222). Historical revenge fantasies are often criticized for the appropriation of real victims’ suffering — it is true that Tarantino does not share the cultural background of Jews or African-Americans. Yet they do not necessarily delegitimize this suffering. Creator and viewer alike do not have to be part of a persecuted minority to recognize and identify with cruelty and inflicted pain. While historical revenge fantasies can certainly fall prey to brainless gorefests of typical exploitation films, they also hold the potential for meaningful social commentary on the nature of violence, revenge, and justice, especially because they are set within the context of actual events and actions that humans have carried out in the past.
Tarantino’s works illustrate that through the alteration of history, revenge fantasies can further the discussion around representations of violence and justice in ways in which media that adhere to strict historical accuracy may not be able to do. Alternate history stories such as the video game franchise Wolfenstein and the novel The Man in the High Castle both envision a bleak world in which the Axis powers won World War II. Instead of belittling the past, they remind us of what was at stake if the bravery and sacrifices of Allied forces had not prevailed. The unique position between entertainment and art of media such as films and video games lends them the ability to twist perceptions and challenge thinking in unconventional ways because it is not real and thus does not have to conform to realism. This can be dangerous, but the freedom of art enables new conversations about the past to occur. Violence in history is inherently immoral, and conflicts can never be truly defined in black and white — even in situations where there is clearly a side that has committed mass atrocities and is ‘in the wrong,’ such as in the case of WWII and slavery. Film critic Charles Taylor asserts that there is a “willed naivete that still exists about the virtuousness of the Second World War,” and that criticisms against historical revenge fantasies like Inglourious Basterds are a “reminder of the moral squeamishness that when it comes to culture, passes for refined discernment and that when it comes to history, passes for humanitarianism” (Taylor 103). Revenge violence, even when deployed against forces of evil by what are ostensibly the “good guys,” is always bound to be dirty. After all, protagonists cannot defeat the “bad guys” in war without bloodying their hands too.
Effective historical revenge fantasies transcend the simple and bloody satisfaction of seeing “bad guys get what they deserve” through the visual inversion of symbols of oppression into the iconography of resistance. Lt. Raine’s bloody carving of the swastika onto the foreheads of captured Nazis is a central and recurring motif in the film. He tells them, “I’m gonna give you a little somethin’ you can’t take off.” This violence has a moral point beyond the shock value; the film implicitly acknowledges the reality that many Nazis had avoided postwar punishment by escaping to South America or by joining US intelligence programs. Though fictional, the carving of the swastika scar has a deprives these guilty Nazis of this ‘escape’ and brands them with a physical and permanent mark of their sins, setting right a historical wrong albeit in a revenge fantasy context: “it’s an implicit belief that not all sins will be expiated, that history will not be denied; it’s the mark of Cain visited upon the entire Third Reich” (Taylor 106).
Django Unchained reverses the visual language of systemic oppression into symbols of defiant rebellion. Though on the surface the film appears to be a straightforward tale of an escaped slave rescuing his lover, deliberate visual additions eschew the conventions of the Western genre and make the film’s message of destroying white supremacy instantly more recognizable and relevant to the contemporary civil rights and racial equality movement. Tarantino’s Western revenge fantasy also highlights the economic marginalization of oppressed colored peoples and the continued struggle against the structural violence of embedded white supremacy. In accordance with Galtung’s theory of structural violence, whites kept black slaves at the bottom of the societal hierarchy by limiting their social and personal opportunities, such as by restricting access to skills and luxuries attributed to superior white intelligence and nobility. In Django Unchained, a visual resistance to this structural violence is seen through montage scenes depicting Django learning how to read and use the weapons of whites, both of which are privileges forbidden to him in the antebellum South. He kills a slaver using a whip, a clear symbol of oppression that is now turned into a tool for retribution. However, Roxane Gay knocks the film for its depiction of blacks as “simple,” stating that “when [Django] gets to choose his own outfit, he picks a bright blue fop of a suit that makes the audience laugh at the simple negro rather than with him” (Gay 224). Yet even if it was unintentional on the character’s part, Django’s choice of garish clothing is another example of the director’s deliberate appropriation of symbols of white supremacy and oppression as tools of resistance. By merely donning this attire and riding on horseback, this cinematic portrayal of Django poses a clear visual image of rebellion and abuses the notion of the white Southern gentleman through disidentification. Beyond the sensationalized violence, both of these films right past wrongs by using their narrative freedom to create a visual iconography of vengeance.
Like its inversion of visual icons, historical revenge fantasies offer a way of mastering the past trauma of collective society through the reversal of power dynamics. The field of psychoanalysis reveals that the psychological motivations behind the desire for revenge and the creation of internal revenge fantasies provide a useful framework for understanding the appeal and effectiveness of alternate history revisionism based on retribution. According to Lucy Lafarge, a clinical professor of psychiatry, revenge fantasies serve to manage rage and restore a disrupted sense of self that has resulted from injury or trauma (Lafarge 447). When broadened to a larger collective group, the revenge desire stems from restoring a sense of community identity that has been disrupted — disruptions such as the brutal persecution of Jews during the Holocaust and the dehumanization of slaves in antebellum America. Historical revenge fantasies appeal to such a wide audience because these disruptions extend beyond the persecuted minority; society as a whole can identify with the pain, suffering, and sometimes even the guilt in mass disruptions such as genocide and slavery. The allure of revenge fantasies lies in being a space where violent and vengeful desires can be played out without direct real-world repercussions. A critical dimension of revenge fantasies is that “the wish for revenge reflects the avenger’s efforts to construct a story from this experience of felt disruption and anger, and linked to this, to reestablish the sense of an audience to whom this story can be made known” (Lafarge 449). The desire for an audience, coupled with a performative nature, makes consumable media such as films and video games the ideal medium for revenge fantasies. Freud argues that this enjoyment “stems from art’s ability to offer — perhaps to viewer and creator alike — retroactive mastery of traumatic experiences” (qtd. in Nelson 11). Films and video games offer the ability to cope with and master historical trauma through the power of narrative control and agency that is crucial to the construction of revenge fantasies. Hyper-violence is the principal way in which the reversal of power dynamics is manifested within revenge fantasies.
The brutality of historical revenge fantasies appeals to violent cravings by fulfilling the revenge desire. A key aspect behind the motive of revenge is that it “often comes in the form of mirroring the deprivations and indignities that the victim has suffered onto the perpetrator” (Lafarge 463). Freud’s conception of catharsis plays an important role in the allure of violent revenge fantasies — he argues that “art is a place where spectators can come to experience pain as both enjoyable and purgative” (qtd. in Nelson 11). Here, sensationalized violence in the form of mirroring the violence and hurt onto the perpetrators can be seen as a form of justified, if crude, catharsis. Tarantino’s films satisfy the revenge desire by upending the conventional imagery of historical persecution and mirroring it onto the perpetrators: bullets riddle Nazi uniforms instead of striped Jewish concentration camp clothing, and blood is spilled on the white bodies of slavers instead of the black bodies of slaves. Watching Nazis get blown up and racist slave owners shot dead is satisfying because justice is physically and very visually carried out. Perhaps this gratification is magnified in the interactive nature of video games like Wolfenstein and Call of Duty, where the player is placed in a power fantasy, free to mow down waves and waves of Nazis in all manner of gory ways.
As Taylor notes, “the catharsis of [historical revenge fantasies] depends exactly on the knowledge that things turned out very differently”(106). For the persecuted group, this revenge is deeply personal, while for the larger majority group, the enjoyment of violent revenge fantasies can be seen as a manifestation and release of the guilt that they feel for being implicit in or having allowed such historical wrongs to occur. All of this plays to the psychological appeal of violent fantasy and illustrates the proclivity of the contemporary audience’s taste for brutality.
Yet good revenge fantasies do not simply satiate the lust for vengeance, they complicate things by showing that retribution is not clean and by questioning the satisfaction gained from vengeful violence. Tarantino challenges the viewer on the deeply troubling enjoyment that they are deriving from watching such depictions of cinematic bloodletting. He “throws down the gauntlet to our overly aestheticized complacent moral economy” and “suggests not only a repolarisation of the viewer’s moral compass but to ask the question of what exactly is at stake when we experience or perceive injustice” (Shields 42). In Inglourious Basterds, the protagonists dramatically ambush Nazi high command as they sit in a theatre, enraptured by a screening of a propaganda film in which Private Zoller, a German sniper, shoots dozens of Allied soldiers dead. By mirroring the real audience of the film with the fictional Nazi audience, Tarantino implicates the viewer of their appreciation of such violent fantasies: “We are that audience, deriving a frightening satisfaction from a crude, all-too-easy, and, like Zoller’s, fascistic revenge fantasy. What we take to be an alien, radical Evil that we want to see expunged, is ultimately, an Evil that is far closer to us than we could have possibly imagined” (Shields 43). What elicits horror and rage when carried out by evil men brings out cheers and applause when done by the heroes. Django Unchained relishes in the gratuitous gore and bloody spectacle of its shootouts. Its violence is over-the-top, glorified, and cruel, yet the audience cannot help but cheer on the hero as he carries out these acts of carnage against those behind the institution of slavery — the same acts of carnage that the perpetrators of historical injustice have brought upon victims to brutal effect. In a tense and horrifying scene at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds, Nazi SS Colonel Hans Landa sniffs out a family of Jews in hiding and orders his men to gun them down. In contrast, the Basterds’ massacre of Nazi moviegoers in which they fire the same German machine guns into the crowd is glorified and celebrated. Django Unchained features several disturbing scenes of slaves being brutally tortured and whipped, yet when Django whips a slaver to death it is depicted as poetic justice and a gratifying comeuppance. Justice, it seems, is inherently violent, whether carried out by the ‘good guys’ or not, and depictions of bloodlust are something we take troubling pleasure in, whether we like it or not.
The sort of dramatized hyper-violence depicted in revenge fantasies draws condemnation and uneasiness — but perhaps this is the point. In both of these Tarantino movies, the protagonists recreate the violent acts and tactics of their foes to destroy them. Opponents of historical revenge fantasies view this symmetric imagery of violence to be problematic. Professor Christian Thorne asserts that “everything in this film starts bleeding into fascism” and implies that “[Tarantino] hates you for how easily you can be pushed into the Nazi position, as long as the people getting killed are themselves Nazis” (Thorne 2011), while Mendelsohn claims that this violent and vengeful acts depicted “turns Jews into carbon copies of Nazis” and “sickening perpetrators” (Mendelsohn 2009). Yet this reductionism is far too simplistic and discounts the real cases of armed resistance and revolt against the Nazis and slave-owners that occurred in history. Rather than transforming the protagonists into the very antagonists that they fight, the use of such dramatic violence to right historical wrongs portrays the protagonists appropriating these tools of fascist/racist violence as authentic sites of resistance instead of succumbing to the temptations of evil. These debates demonstrate the value of historical revenge fantasies’ ability to generate new discussions around the nature of morality, ethics, and retribution, even if they do so in troubling and controversial ways. Gay maintains that “art can and should take liberties and interpret human experiences in different ways, even if those interpretations make us uncomfortable” (220). The violence depicted is certainly cruel and perhaps disturbing, but violence is rarely, if ever, moral. Matthew Shields, an expert in Jewish philosophy, asserts that in revenge fantasies, the violence depicted in works such as Tarantino’s show that “justice is, in and of itself, at its very core, violent” (Shields 44). It is precisely the dramatic narrative freedom of alternate history and the exaggerated brutality that lends the genre much of its artistic appeal and potential for commentary.
Despite the controversy surrounding historical revenge fantasies, they can offer depth by advancing the discussion around violence, morality, and justice in ways that are unique to this form of media due to its high degree of artistic and narrative freedom. Historical revenge fantasies bring up the age-old question of whether the ends justify the means and ask what is exactly at stake when revenge is exacted. Each viewer may leave with a different answer. But by eliciting these responses, historical revenge fantasies have accomplished the task of testing the audience’s morality. Far from being simple violence porn, historical revenge fantasies provide a way of mastering collective trauma whilst simultaneously challenging the morality behind justice and depictions of violence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gay, Roxane. “Surviving Django .” Bad Feminist: Essays, Harper Perennial, S.l., 2017, pp. 218–226.
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Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust.” Newsweek, Newsweek, 13 Aug. 2009, https://www.newsweek.com/tarantino-rewrites-holocaust-79003.
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Shields, Matthew. “On Tarantino and Justice: Inglourious Basterds’ Bloody Revenge Challenges Our Complacent Morality.” Jewish Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 1, 2013, p. 40–46. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0449010X.2013.787289.
Taylor, Charles. “Violence as the Best Revenge: Fantasies of Dead Nazis.” Dissent, vol. 57 no. 1, 2010, p. 103–106. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/dss.0.0115.
Thorne, Christian. “Tarantino, Nazis, and Movies That Can Kill You — Part 2.” Christian Thorne Commonplace Book, 17 June 2011, https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/tag/inglourious-basterds/.[SMA1]
Tarantino, Quentin, director. Inglourious Basterds. The Weinstein Company, 2009.
— — — . Django Unchained. The Weinstein Company, 2012.