Two Plot Flaws In Inglourious Basterds?

I thought Inglourious Basterds was a bit feeble. For me it had the vibe of a well meaning Valentine card from Quentin Tarantino to his surrogate father Harvey Weinstein - a goyish anti-Nazi revenge fantasy light years from the ironic, subtle revenge fantasies of, say, Mel Brooks or Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be. Unless you've drunk the Kool Aid in Tarantino Land (like most of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes) you've probably had your emperor/no clothes moment; but let's say you're one of those who liked IG, well then, I need your help understanding a couple of things:

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#1. I get the fact that IG is an alternative history, I see that, I've read a lot of counterfactuals and alternative histories, but one thing I know about that genre is that they all still have to obey their own internal logic. You need self consistency in an alternative history for the story to make sense - unless you're in a universe where the rules of formal logic are actually different and if so you need to explain that. So help me understand this then, please. Recruiting the Basterds Brad Pitt explains that he fought the Germans throughout Sicily and Italy as the Allies did in fact do in the real World War 2. In Josef Goebbels' propaganda film we actually see some of this campaign fictionalised. Germans fighting American troops as they push up the spine of the Apennines. So why is it when Hitler is interviewing the Wehrmacht Private about the Basterds campaign of terror in France that the enormous map behind Hitler's head shows the Reich as it was in roughly November 1942 before Rommel was driven out of the Africa and before the allies invaded either Sicily or Italy? The disposition of forces is at least two years out of date, which is a bit of a serious flaw in a battlefield map. This looks a lot to me like a plain old fashioned cock up rather like the moment in the film Atonement when they flash forward to 1939 and we're at the Dunkirk evacuation (which of course happened in 1940). Tarantino prides himself on his attention to detail and care with every element of a scene so perhaps someone could explain why this map is so wrong.

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#2. This problem is more to do with narrative structure. If you removed the Basterds completely from IG I think nothing in the story would actually have changed. The entire Nazi leadership (SPOILER ALERT) would all still die at the end and in a much more grisly fashion, burned to death by Shoshana (above) and her assistant. Do the Basterds turn any narrative wheels at all in this screenplay, or are they just one enormous sub-plot that doesn't actually go anywhere? Again QT prides himself on the tightness of his scripts, but this seems poorly thought through.

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I'm not trying to pick on Quentin Tarantino. The first 15 minutes of IG and Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, KBpt1 and Jackie Brown prove that he is a big talent, but I do wish someone would stage an intervention at this point. Everyone needs to listen to older and wiser counsel from time to time and Harvey isn't doing his boy any favours by letting him play off the leash film after film.

The Celtic History of England Suppressed Again

As everyone now knows a huge Anglo Saxon horde of gold was found in a field near Walsall in July by an unemployed chap out with his metal detector. I wish nothing but good luck to Terry Herbert who found the gold and stands to make a couple of million quid, but I do want to cast a skeptical eye on the experts the British government has put on this treasure trove. At the press conference on Thursday with tears in his eyes Dr Kevin Leahy started quoting from Beowulf as he described the dozens of gold and silver objects recovered from the field. What Beowulf has to do with anything is beyond me. Beowulf dates from the 10th century and these items come from the 6th or 7th. It would be like quoting from Cheers to explain something that happened at the Salem Witch Trials. I'm also suspicious that these objects have been definitively called Anglo-Saxon. Do they look Anglo Saxon to you? To me the artifacts are unmistakably Celtic in origin and design. And here's a few reasons why they might not be Anglo Saxon: Firstly, they were discovered in an area which was a boundary zone between the native Britons and the invading Germanic peoples. Secondly the Germans were pagan, the West Britons Christian and yet three crosses and a verse from the Bible in Latin were found in the horde. Let's unpack that a little. Who do you think is more likely to have a Latin Bible verse written on gold on them, an illiterate pagan Anglo Saxon warrior or a Celtic Romano-Christian Briton? Well, according to the experts the illiterate pagan of course. Thirdly the tentative attachment of this horde with Penda, King of Mercia is also odd because Penda claimed to be a direct descendant of Wotan and was certainly not a convert to Christianity (although some of his children may have converted if you believe Bede).
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So what's going on? This is what I think: The entire "Anglo Saxon" history of England is largely bogus. The Germanic peoples from Denmark and Saxony did certainly migrate to England in the fifth and sixth centuries but the native Celts were not slaughtered or driven from their land. Thanks to DNA research by Bryan Sykes (et al.) we now know that a relatively small number of Germanic invaders became an elite upper caste in the central and eastern parts of England some time in the fifth and sixth centuries. The great mass of the English people remained Celtic in language, culture and origin. These Germanic invaders did not penetrate Wales or Scotland or Ireland, but the idea that the English are different from the peoples of the "Celtic fringe" has been hard to shift. It was a largely Victorian notion and comes coupled with the idea that the English are Germanic, democratic, logical while the Celts are romantic, dreamy, talkative, illogical. This entire idea is - excuse my Anglo Saxon - total bollocks. A lot of English archaeologists haven't caught up with the DNA evidence yet because it shatters the paradigm of the history/propaganda they were taught in school and university.
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They need to get with the new science. England like Ireland, Scotland and Wales was a Celtic country (with Germanic overlords) until much much later than anyone realised. To me this treasure is a startling example of Celtic art and to my mind has nothing whatsoever to do with Anglo Saxons (a dodgy term in itself), King Penda, or, God save us, Beowulf.

St Kilda...FTW!

I may have some sort of magical power rather like the Rain God in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker books. Why do I say this? Well, unless you're a St Kilda footie team fan and you believe strongly in the Jinx, read on:

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Item#1 In 1986 after moving to England to attend Warwick University I started going to Coventry City games. Coventry were the local football team and you could always get tickets because Cov had never won anything in its 104 year history. Eight months after I started supporting Coventry they won the FA Cup, the most important trophy in English football and the only one they have ever taken.

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Item#2 In 1993 I moved to New York City and because I was living in Harlem and working in Washington Heights, naturally I became a Yankees fan for baseball and a Rangers fan for hockey. (I don't like basketball or American football). In 1994 the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in 54 years and in 1996 the New York Yankees won their first World Series in 19 years.

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Item #3 In 2001 we moved to Denver, Colorado and started going to Colorado Rockies games. In 2007 the Rockies got to the World Series for the first time in their history and although they lost, it was still quite an achievement for them to take the NL Pennant.

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Item #4 Last year we moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. I quickly discovered to my dismay that no one really cares about soccer or rugby in this town, but footie - Aussie Rules - is everything. I started watching Aussie Rules on telly and found that I liked the game. But which team to support? Well there was really no choice: we live in St Kilda, my daughter goes to St Kilda Primary School and every Monday the St Kilda FC boys come to the Sea Baths to ruin my swimming session (but we'll forgive them that) so it had to be The Saints. What has happened? What do you think? St Kilda are in the Grand Final with a chance of taking the whole thing for the first time since 1966. Are they actually going to win? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet against them.

Gadaffi, JFK, Ellroy and North By Northwest

For the last couple of days I've been eagerly awaiting Colonel Gadaffi's speech at the UN. Yesterday I stayed up late to watch it on Cspan and I wasn't disappointed. Gadaffi really brought the crazy, but he also brought together a number of themes that this blog has been rattling on about in recent months: Accusing the UN delegates of being nothing more than murderers he nicely summarised my posts about the Hitchcock classic North By Northwest. He then complained about how impossible it was to get a good night's sleep because of noisy neighbours, which I can empathise with. Seemingly losing his marbles completely at one point Gadaffi turned to the assembled ambassadors and heads of state and demanded to know if any of them "had information about who killed JFK" which dovetailed nicely into my posts about James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. The Libyan leader's speech was only the second longest in UN history; he was of course outlasted by Fidel Castro whose little brother Raul makes a cameo appearance in my novel Fifty Grand, which I've posted about here. (Nice plug, eh?) It was the speech of a true nutter and the only thing he forgot to talk about which I've covered was UFO's.

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Anyway, you can read an excellent piece of reportage on Gadaffi's UN speech in The Guardian here and if you're a fan of the whole Chavez-Castro school of rhetoric you can watch the whole barmy thing on Cspan.

Postcards From The Edge

My little brother Gareth emailed me back some pics from Afghanistan. He's the balding chap in the second one and that fuzzy one at the end is his charming accomodation. Every guest bed should come with an SA-80 assault rifle on the pillow, don't you think?

Top 20 Travel Books

The Times newspaper has published a list of the 20 best travel books of the last century. These lists are only a bit of fun and I've been guilty of a couple of them myself, but even so, this particular one is - shall we say - a wee bit parochial. Of the twenty travel writers on the their list, 17 are English (17!). There's one Irish woman on there and the two Americans are Paul Theroux who of course has a couple of English children and who lived in London for twenty years and Bill Bryson who has dual British/American citizenship and who lives in Yorkshire. There are no French, German, Spanish, Polish, or Italian travel writers on the Times list. No one from Latin America, Africa or Asia. The great VS Naipaul doesn't get a look in or Carlo Levi or Peter Mathiessen or William Least Heat Moon or Pico Iyer etc. etc.
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Still if you're looking for a list of the top 20 English travel books of the last century this is a good place to start, although why A Time of Gifts isn't #1 is a bit of a puzzle.

Surfing Bells With Swayze

Last December I was lucky enough to go surfing in several places along the coast west of Melbourne including Apollo Bay and Bells Beach. I'm an out of shape 40 year old Irish guy from Belfast so it wasn't anything spectacular: small wave surfing on a long board. But I was thinking about it today. At the end of Point Break, Patrick Swayze ends up in Australia and goes out to Bells Beach to die on the wave of a 100 year storm. Of course the scene at Bells was really filmed somewhere on the Oregon coast but that's not the issue. What I'm trying to say is that I really liked that goofy movie Point Break and I'm sorry that Patrick Swayze is no longer with us. One of journalism's rare voices of sanity Joe Queenan had a nice piece about Swayze in the Guardian today. You can read a couple of paragraphs he wrote about Point Break below and you can read the rest of the article here.
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"The 1991 Kathryn Bigelow film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a fabulously good-looking though not especially cerebral undercover cop, revolves around a gang of surfing bank robbers led by the disarmingly philosophical Swayze. The very idea of making a movie about surfing, philosophical gangsters led by Swayze, who Reeves vows to bring to justice, reaffirms why America is such a great country. Anyone can make movies about good love gone bad. Anyone can make movies about the lives of others. But we make movies about surfing bank robbers who spout Buddhist wisdom to undercover cops named Johnny Utah. And we have the good sense to cast Swayze in them.

Our favourite movies are never the ones that are shown out of competition at Cannes. They're the ones you can't wait until your kids are old enough to see. They're the ones you always recommend when a friend calls up and asks what film she should watch to cheer her up and you cannot, cannot believe that she has never crossed paths with Johnny Utah and Bodhi. They're the ones that if someone told you they didn't understand their appeal, you would terminate the friendship on the spot. They're the ones that make you feel that the stars on the screen will always be young ."

Stone The Bloody Crows, or, Rather, Don't

Call me an odd bod but I've always been fascinated by crows of the genus corvus and in particular ravens, who are the most sinister but also the cleverest of the wild birds we get in the British Isles (their brains are even bigger than those of parrots). Crows can recognise human faces, perhaps even letters of the alphabet and young crows have been known to indulge in play activities such sliding down snowbanks and jumping in and out of sprinklers. Crows are clever, curious and downright weird. When I used to cycle to school the same crow would follow me along the same bit of road every day for a year. It knew me and I knew it and we seemed to get along. This may be an Irish thing.

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But maybe not. Crows crop up everywhere in sociology, literature, music and folkways. In the GPO on O'Connell Street in Dublin you'll find the famous statue of the dying Cuchulain, but many people miss the fact that he's not alone. He's got a crow perched on his shoulder. This is supposedly Badb, the goddess of war, who takes the form of a crow, but I think it could be any old crow who just likes hanging out with humans.

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These reflections have been stirred up by a wonderful book I've just read called Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt which looks at the biology, behaviour and intelligence of crows. There's a nice review of the book in the NY Times here and if you click the above link it will take you to the Amazon listing. I enjoyed it thoroughly and although I'm not expert enough to comment on the science of her observations Ms Haupt makes a pretty convincing case for the smartness and ingenuity of our corvus pals.

How Derren Brown Did It

On Wednesday night much of Britain was enthralled by "mentalist" Derren Brown predicting the winning numbers in the National Lottery. If he had really done that it would have been amazing. I am a bit of an amateur magician and its been driving me crazy that this "prediction" seems to have baffled so many people in the UK. Derren Brown is not a member of the British magic circle and this trick was a cheat anyway so I don't mind revealing how he did it. However, if you don't want to know please don't read any more of this blog post.
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Still with me? Ok. What Derren Brown actually did on Wednesday night was tell us what the winning lottery numbers were 12 seconds after the numbers had been drawn. We all could have done that. Ah but what about the balls to the left of the screen which we saw while the live feed was coming through the TV, weren't they there the whole time? No, they weren't. What we were actually looking at was a split screen, running down the left hand third of the screen. While the draw was taking place one of Brown's assistants was placing the correct balls on the real stand while we watched the split screen. At 2:01 on the YouTube video you can see Brown look across to his assistant to check that the final ball has been placed, a camera wobble then occurs at 2:04 which covers the transition from the split image to the live image. Brown then walks over and uncovers the balls that his assistant placed on the stand.
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I'm sorry if this wrecks your belief in number theory, or mass hypnosis, the predictive power of crowds or a conspiracy with the lottery company; this wasn't any of those things. This illusion required almost no skill at all from Brown, it was patter mixed with a David Copperfield style camera trick, the kind of magic that I loathe. This was beneath DB who is very good at proper magic and doesn't need to cheat. Brown's explanation on Friday night that he used "deep maths" is what we amateur magicians call "misdirection" and what everyone else calls "total bollocks."

My Oh My - Vice!

Ok let me warn you straight away that I am a Thomas Pynchon fanboy. I've read all the novels, short stories, essays, and some books that most people haven't even heard of - Mortality and Mercy in Vienna for example, which I read and re-read happily in the Butler Stacks at Columbia University until someone stole it. I even struggled through Against the Day which is probably Pynchon's least accessible book but which had some memorable scenes set in my, then, manor - Denver, Colorado.
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Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1937, went to Cornell University, joined the navy, became pals with Richard Farina and published his debut novel V in 1963 to great acclaim. He followed up with the brilliant Crying of Lot 49 and cemented his reputation with the WW2 masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow in 1973.
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After a long period of silence he produced Vineland in 1990 which divided critics, Salman Rushdie raved about it but Harold Bloom thought it was so bad that it "had to be the work of an impostor." I was of the former school of thought - Vineland for me was dark and funny and uniformly terrific. In some ways Inherent Vice is a prequel to Vineland or possibly a sequel to Lot 49. It's Pynchon's surreal, intelligent, re-interpretation of detective fiction. Set in LA at the tail end of the 60's it reminded me a little of Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould playing Marlowe. The plot follows the adventures of private eye Doc Sportello, his girlfriend and what happened or didn't happen to the whole counter culture movement in America. The book does what it says on the tin - channeling all the tropes of crime fiction through TP's warped, encyclopedic and densely clever imagination. I'm not cool with spoiler reviews however I will say that the narrative is maybe a little too familiar to those of us who are The Big Lebowski obsessives, though Lebowski itself was an homage to Chandler and Hammett. Like TBL, Inherent Vice is hilarious, laugh out loud funny, but also a sort of antidote to Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the California that gave Nixon and Reagan their shove into the big time.
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As much as I admired Against The Day life's too short to re-read it and I really enjoyed this looser, more relaxed Pynchon; I hope there are many more books like Inherent Vice festering in his big brain.
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Sunday update: I found this YouTube Video apparently made and voiced by Thomas Pynchon himself inhabiting his main character who is revisiting his Manhattan (Gordita in the book) Beach manor of 1970.

The Screenplay Just Writes Itself - The True Story of a Chubby, Bald, Blind, Housebound, Teenage, Evil Genius

I was reading the Air-Freight current issue of Rolling Stone this morning in Borders when I came across a fantastic article by David Kushner about a blind, overweight Boston kid who used his extraordinary mimicking skills to get access to the phone numbers and credit card information of celebrities, politicians and even FBI agents. Matthew Weigman's power grew to such an extent that he attracted a devoted band of acolytes who would do his bidding and anyone considered to be an enemy would either have their phone cut off or would find a SWAT team at their door come to arrest them for imaginary crimes. You can read the entire article here and you should, it's fascinating. A little snippet:

By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information — like supervisor identification numbers and passwords — that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor's voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man's underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at "her" door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician's company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor — key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival's phone line.

There seemed to be no limit to what he could do: shut off your phone service, dig up your unlisted cellphone number, even listen in on your home phone — something only a handful of veteran phreaks can pull off. Celebrities were a favorite target. Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney's son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate's cellphone number — and then made a call of his own. "Mitt Romney!" he said. "What's going on, dude? Running for president?" Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.

Nobody's Going to Venus Mrs Hatoyama

Japan's new First Lady, Miyuki Hatoyama is a remarkable woman in many respects: she travels, she writes, she's an experimental cook. I like the cut of her jib but she said something a bit odd when she talked about her UFO experience. According to a slightly sensational account in The Huffington Post she claimed in a book last year that the aliens abducted her while she was asleep and then:

While my body was still in bed, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.

Now, a few years ago I had my own, er, close encounter, with a triangular shaped UFO over Colorado so that part of the story I might buy. But no one's going to Venus. This from Wikipedia:

The pressure at the planet's surface is about 92 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The density at the surface is 65 kg/m³ (6.5% that of water). The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F). This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's.

In the olden days before Russia began sending probes to Venus many people assumed that because the planet was covered with clouds naturally it was tropical, lush and green. There were many many science fiction novels about visits to this Venus and encounters with Venusians. But now we know better, there are no Venusians and never will be. So please, when the aliens come again Mrs Hatoyama, get them to take you to Europa, or Titan, or Mars or somewhere where life, at least, has a fighting chance. And bring a camera.
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BTW with remarkable prescience David Byrne wrote the theme music for this incident and this blog post twenty five years ago. (Sorry if its copyright restricted in your country, now you know how I feel everytime someone links to Hulu).

Shatner & Nimoy at Dragoncon

Two old, funny Jewish guys having a laugh with each other in Atlanta. Trust me, this is pretty good. (Look for Nimoy going for Shatner's wig near the start.) You can watch the whole hour on WhatJaneSays's channel on YouTube.

Kiwi Is Not The Only Fruit

I did a couple of radio interviews yesterday. One was for Radio New Zealand and the other was for Sydney ABC. Dont ask me what I talked about as these things are always a bit of a blur for me and I dont like listening to myself talk. But if you want to hear the silky tones of North Belfast filtered through Oxford, New York, Jersualem, Denver and Melbourne and possibly hear me waffle on about Fifty Grand, crime fiction, Cuba, rugby, sandwiches (?), JRR Tolkien and other stuff then you can listen to the Radio New Zealand Podcast here on the programme Nights With Bryan Crump. (Nice chap, Bryan). I dont think the ABC interview with the equally charming and fragrant Jon Casimir is up yet but this is the web site for when it does become available.

Crime Fiction and the N Word

I recently read a crime novel by a white American novelist that made frequent use of the N word for black people. The effect was disastrous and made me embarrassed for this well known writer. No one had told him in a while that white people probably should not use this word in crime fiction even if they think they're hip and they know all the lyrics to Jay Z's Black Album.

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There is however one notable exception to this rule. James Ellroy's novel The Cold 6000 (2002) begins with the line: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a Ni**** pimp called Wendell Durfee." The N word gets used another four or five hundred times throughout the course of the book. I consider The Cold 6000 to be the best American crime novel of the last decade so is it a problem that this modern classic uses racist language with such impunity? In the case of 6000, I think not, although Ellroy is writing in 3rd person, it's the persona of a 3rd person bigot, racist, fantasist and nutcase. 6000 is an over-the-top examination of the American nightmare which began with the Cuban revolution and ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King. James Ellroy is an ironist not a racist and I feel that his use of the N word is not offensive (at least to me).

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Much more troubling is the line in Farewell My Lovely (1941) when the civilized, pipe smoking Philip Marlowe says to Detective Nulty "When is the inquest on the ni**** coming up?" It's the casualness of Marlowe's remark that's so disturbing. Clearly he uses this language with his friends and confederates. He's not showing off. He doesn't need to. This is how Marlowe thinks of black people. It diminishes him immeasurably in my eyes. The line of course is not used in the 1970's film version (above).

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The corrosive effect of the N word was well known by the 1940's. In 1941 the N word had already been effectively banned in Hollywood movies and most northern newspapers. Indeed the N word's unpleasantness was apparent way back in 1885 when H Rider Haggard said in King Solomon's Mines that to call someone a ni**** was vulgar and rude.

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Very occasionally I get asked for advice by neophyte writers. I generally stick to the tried and true formula: write what you know. But I'll throw in a piece of advice here, gratis: if you're not African American you should be very careful with the N word even if you're, say, Elvis Costello; chances are that you are not the supreme ironist that James Ellroy is and your use of this word in your fiction or your songs or any other art is going to be a disaster.