Review: Inglourious Basterds

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Quentin Tarantino’s newest movie, Inglourious Basterds, is the best picture I’ve ever seen at a multiplex. This is no hyperbole, it easily tops anything else he has directed (disclaimer: I haven’t seen Jackie Brown) and it makes the rest of the “best picture” nominees from 2009 look like amateur trash. It earned some fairly strong reviews, but unfortunately Inglourious Basterds happens to be an incredibly dangerous piece of cinema, and most mainstream critics happen to be cowards. I’m going to pause here for a second and say that this review is going to spoil the shit out of the movie if you haven’t seen it already, in which case you should stop reading right now and go buy it on DVD – and regret missing it in theaters for the rest of your life.

Those of you who are still here might be wondering exactly why the film is so dangerous, or perhaps thinking it must have something to do with the gratuitous on-screen murder of hundreds of Top Nazis. That certainly drew attention and criticism from the press, but the far more subversive details have been all but ignored. To fully appreciate these details, we need to look not only at the characters on the screen, but also at what each character represents. This will be mostly speculation on my part, but I am convinced that the interpretation is correct.

First things first: the movie is dangerous specifically because the Nazis represent the Hollywood film industry. This is most obvious during the premiere of Goebbels’ film, a transparent subversion of American war movies (curiously containing all of the most traditional “war action” in Basterds). Moviegoers who were expecting epic Tarantino-styled battles got a bit of what they wanted, but the Nazi was the protagonist and the segment was directed by Eli Roth. Tarantino has often used movie symbolism within his work, and in Basterds the place of the producer is undeniably occupied by the Nazi Party: the fact that the final acts revolve around a cinema premiere is no coincidence. The very clear message contained in the framework of a French cinema “hijacked” by racist murderers isn’t a coincidence either.

Now if the Nazis represent the Hollywood establishment, the good guys obviously represent Tarantino (and company). This is very interesting, because I think we can pin specific character traits that he sees in himself on each character. Aldo the Apache represents Tarantino the Guerrilla, working “behind enemy lines” or within the film industry. The Bear Jew represents Tarantino the Exploiter, and Eli Roth absolutely is the perfect person for the role – say what you will about his acting. The rest of the Basterds could represent other sides of Tarantino the Director, or they could be homages to others in the community.

Shosanna is a bit of an anomaly: she doesn’t meet up with the rest of the good guys until the very end. While the Basterds’ story is violent, suspenseful and funny, hers is tragic and touching. Her character is probably a very profound statement of what Tarantino aspires to be, rather than a narcissistic idea of who he already is. Where the Basterds are savage men at war, Shosanna is classy and intelligent. Her motive is pure, born from a determination to see justice for her family. Theirs is a desire to kill the enemy, plain and simple. In the end, her mission tragically fails, but theirs succeeds, and this is certainly not without significance.

Which brings us to the target of Shosanna’s mission: Colonel Hans Landa. I’m fairly certain that Landa represents Harvey Weinstein: as a power player in the film industry, he obviously evokes a ruthlessly effective Nazi. The deal at the end between Col. Landa and Lt. Raine represents the deal Tarantino made with Weinstein, to produce Inglourious Basterds itself. By making such a deal, Aldo forfeits any hope of fulfilling the dead Shosanna’s mission (eliminating Weinstein) for the sake of the war effort (making Basterds). However, he does get away with brutally carving a swastika into Landa’s forehead – Shosanna the Virtuous is replaced by Tarantino the Narcissist, who declares Basterds to be his “masterpiece.”

The funny thing is, he’s right.

Piracy: The New Sleepover

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The moral questions regarding piracy (or file-sharing, as its practitioners like to call it) don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Hardly a day passes without some new article surfacing, written from the perspective of a struggling artist, an industry insider, a “scene group” (nerds who rip movies), or countless others. The arguments are usually rather predictable – depending on which side is being argued, pirates are either swashbuckling Robin-Hoods or sneaky communists.

I’m not interested in adding to this cacophony of opinions, so I’ll instead propose a simple thought experiment, which seems to render the whole debate obsolete:

Let’s imagine we’re in the future. The date isn’t important, let’s just assume that we’re in whatever year fully-immersive virtual reality goes mainstream. This future world is basically the Matrix, without evil scheming robots. People can leave the virtual “world” whenever they want to, but judging by how much time we already spend online this might not happen too often. In any case, the point is that we’re suddenly free to experience life without spatial limitations (up to the speed of light, of course). Optimistic folks might assume that this would also mean freedom from poverty, war, and unhappiness, but we don’t even need to go that far. In a world where virtual interaction is simply a social norm, we’d all have hundreds of online “digital” friends, along with whoever we still hang out with in the fleshy world. Because the virtual world would be totally immersive, the distinction between the two “kinds” of friends would start to become meaningless.

If, at this point, it is still legal for our daughters to stay up all night, watching John Hughes movies at their friends’ houses, a reasonable court could easily decide that this same activity should be perfectly fine in the virtual space; those “digital” friends should not be treated differently in the eyes of the law.

Now, the trouble is obvious: how can a court even qualitatively separate “normal” piracy from typical and legal interactions between friends? We’d need either a new “Jim Crow” law segregating real and virtual friendships, or a sweeping ban on consumption of other peoples’ media. In America, both of these situations seem laughably impossible.

This thought experiment uses the idea of “immersive” cyberspace to highlight the absurdity of the situation, but the exact same phenomenon is already happening in a cruder form. All over the world, digital communities are popping up, full of usually anonymous but often genuine friends who share media amongst themselves. Who is going to stop them?

Where are the aliens?

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Today, let’s look at the Drake Equation, probably the most useless formula in all of science. Essentially, through some sort of hocus-pocus bullshit, scientists “estimate” the likelihood of all the different criteria for intelligent life to evolve, and by multiplying this all together they can “calculate” the number of intelligent alien species we “should” be able to see. Typical answers range from about 10 to 1,000,000 civilizations. If I haven’t made it clear yet, I believe the whole thing is a thoroughly un-scientific exercise in futility. Without any observations to confirm these predictions, this equation will remain in the realm of religion forever. Using math doesn’t automatically make you a scientist.

This hasn’t stopped folks from trying to draw conclusions from these results, however. The “Fermi Paradox” goes something like this: if there “should” be at least 10 and possibly many more intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy, why haven’t we picked up any extra-terrestrial signals yet?

Well, there are several things wrong with this “paradox.” In the first place, this is a bit like a slug wondering why it hasn’t ever picked up any extra-terrestrial slime trails. Our solar system is absolutely bathed in electromagnetic radiation, and there could easily be signals from thousands of different alien planets among that radiation that we simply don’t recognize as such. If aliens are at least as advanced as we are, they could easily be ten thousand times more so, and the window in which a civilization broadcasts decipherable messages (or messages that can be understood by humans) into space could easily be very short indeed, for any number of reasons.

Furthermore, there is no evidence indicating that life “should” evolve in other regions of the galaxy, as we’ve only seen it happen on one planet so far. This is partly why astrobiologists are so eager to identify life on Mars or the moons of Jupiter – without that evidence, their jobs technically don’t exist. As of right now, the idea that intelligent life has to be a “typical” case is an egregious example of anthropic bias, and until we actually make contact with an alien species there is absolutely no reason to assume something like this. It may not be a foolish belief, but it isn’t anything but a belief.

This kind of “contaminated” science bothers me a lot, and so I’ve been working on a little story that explores these issues and provides a hypothetical resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Hopefully it doesn’t take longer than a year or so to write, and it’ll be published here in full whenever it’s ready. Spoiler alert: the aliens actually do exist.

Introduction

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Hey Internet, welcome to my blog without readers. I hope you’re all having a good vacation, or at least making enough money to be happy with things. I’m having a decent vacation but not making any money, so I figure it’s about time to get this thing going.

First, I guess I should say up front that this blog won’t really be “about” any specific discipline or project, so your interest in it might turn out to be a tad inconsistent. I’ll talk about current events and politics, sure, but I’ll also be discussing some serious science problems and sharing artistic projects as I see fit. I’m not a journalist and frankly I don’t care whether you get confused or discouraged, so let the reader beware.

Second, I’m not going to be talking about “typical” issues you might find on other news blogs, and what you read here might sound a bit crazy and radical more often than not. I assure you that I’m not some evangelical nutjob – my political opinions align more with “South Park” than really any other TV show (or political party). I’d just rather not spend time rehashing the same old libertarian perspective on the same old popular issues, day after day. That’s a fate reserved for employed writers.

Anyway, I hope you’ll check in soon. Upcoming topics include: neuroscience and memory, Wikileaks, aliens, education vs. learning, imaginary numbers, digital business, war, music and emotions, and more.