Hollywood should stop exploiting the Holocaust
by Dvir Abramovich
In a 2005 guest appearance on the sitcom Extras, Kate Winslet, playing herself as nun on a Holocaust film is asked “You doing this, it's so commendable, using your profile to keep the message alive about the Holocaust.”
Winslet responds: “God, I'm not doing it for that. We definitely don't need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It's like, how many have there been? You know, we get it. It was grim. Move on. I'm doing it because I noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar. I've been nominated four times. Never won. The whole world is going, 'Why hasn't Winslet won one?' ... That's why I'm doing it. Schindler's bloody List. The Pianist. Oscars coming outta their ass ...”
Winslet was right, winning the Oscar for best actress this year for The Reader.
The commodification of the Holocaust into a profitable, Oscar-reaping enterprise has reached such a nadir that commentators are saying, “There's no business like Shoah Business.” Though I find this epigram distasteful, it does reflect a disturbing trend in which the Holocaust is being packaged and sold by filmmakers who are using this dark chapter as a ticket for advancing their own fame and artistic agenda.
These films conveniently skip over the mass shootings, the gas chambers, the ovens, the mounds of naked bodies — filling up the screen with harmful falsifications. The damage Hollywood, with its huge marketing machine is doing to the memory of the Holocaust is enormous. Think of Hollywood's cowboy and Indian movies and how they shaped our understanding of that episode.
Inglourious Basterds insensitively uses the Holocaust as entertainment. In Tarantino's film which actor Eli Roth called, “Kosher porn” it's the bloodthirsty Jewish GIs who are the bastards, torturing and scalping Nazi soldiers. In one scene, the band interrogates a German soldier who comes across as a man of honour refusing to divulge where his troops are stationed. The soldier is then sadistically beaten to death.
Tarantino has offensively stated that this film is the “ultimate fantasy of every Jew”. Really? Maybe yours Quentin, not mine.
Besides, what does it say about Jews if all they want is to become carbon copies of the Nazis? Jews have taken revenge on the Nazis through the commemoration and memorialisation of the Holocaust, by saying “Never Again” and by campaigning to ensure such genocide never re-occurs. Tarantino works against that aim — glorifying and deliriously celebrating humanity's most animalistic and darkest impulses which in a perverse way, identifies with Nazi, not Jewish, behaviour.
This is inexcusable and shock-art at its worst.
I agree with author Daniel Mendelsohn who writes that Tarantino turns the Jews into Nazis, into “sickening perpetrators” who elicit very little sympathy. Consider this: The Jews in Ing-lourious Basterds assume the callous characteristics of the Nazis-they take pleasure in their abhorrent violence; they crack skulls with baseball bats just like the Nazis who crushed the skulls of Jewish infants before their parents' eyes; they engrave swastikas onto their victims foreheads just like the Nazis who carved Swastikas into the chests of Rabbis before slaughtering them.
The end of the film is also an exercise in atrocity distortion. Unsuspecting people are lured into a building, the doors are shut and the building is set alight. But this time the yelling, banging on the doors, the confusion, the despair, the incinerated bodies belong to the Nazis. In Tarantino's nihilist, grotesque alternate universe, it's the Jews who are the villains who commit the vicious act so familiar from Holocaust history. Would most teenagers who watch Inglorious Basterds know that it was actually the Nazis who forced Jews into building and burned them alive?
By erasing the Nazi monstrousness, Tarantino, with his WWII spaghetti western has not only rewritten Holocaust history, but has contributed to its forgetting.
And it does seem our culture has hit rock-bottom when film-makers such as Tarantino are using the Holocaust as a comic- book bloodfest and audiences help him inflate his bank account.
Read the full story: The Age