I’m sorry, Rick, but I’m not sure which of the three films I mentioned in that post you are talking about.
Assuming it’s IB, yeah, the ahistorical nature of the film was a nuisance, but I was prepared to suspend disbelief and watch the story unfold, as if it were just a fictional tale in the setting of WW2, which is what it was, after all. And yes, the complete fantasy nature of the ending was, and I’ll borrow a phrase from Meatwad here, “dumb as hell”.
But nothing in the film was as jarring for me as when that Bowie tune kicked in. The rest of it was quibbles with the story, like when I wish a character hadn’t died or something similar. The song thing is a quibble with his craftsmanship, like if I saw someone making sandals with a nail sticking up thru the bottom.
It will probably be entertaining but likely will have some just stupidly obvious character flaw. In Quentin’s earlier work, it was Quentin himself appearing in his own movies with just horrible acting. I didn’t watch kill bill or some of the others, but jesus h Christ for Django, how could the German guy be such a putz at the end and stand there to be slaughtered by shotgun boy? And the final shootout scene(s) with Django was entertaining but even less convincing that a Chow Yun-fat honky bloodfest. Just my 2 cents
But yeah, if it pulled you out, it pulled you out. I can’t really argue the merits of using it in the film because despite seeing it at least twice, the Bowie song never really registered with me. I don’t remember it in the movie at all.
hehe I chuckled. I didn’t go down to the quarry, but I did chuckle.
Aye, tho, there’s being dated contemporaneously with the story and there’s being dated noncontemporaneously. I think you get that but maybe I wasn’t clear to others.
Wow, really? It’s front and center for like a minute-and-a-half, like he was making a music video, then he subsumes it into the background during dialogue, which just made me grind my teeth even harder. I mean, the song includes brief, backwards sounding record-scratch or tape loop hiss samples right at the start… nothing like that in 1942 unless it was a mistake or a malfunction. Like I said, it took me right out of the film.
Here’s a clip I found on Youtube; clearly some people loved this scene, as the guy who posted it starts his description with “One of the greatest scenes of this brilliant movie”, a sentence with many needless adjectives, in my view.
Reading this discussion is a bit amusing, because I found the use of Bowie’s “Cat People” was an absolutely fantastic choice. I think it was perfect for the scene where Shosanna is getting read to light some Nazis on fire.
Pulling someone out of the story isn’t a bug, btw. It’s a feature in postmodern filmmaking.
It matched the scene perfectly. That’s a good reason. And pulling people out of a story to showcase that it is merely a story is another reason (its kind of the point of some postmodern filmmaking - lots of movies/shows/books in that line deliberately attempt to pull people “out” of the story).
In addition a good deal of the soundtrack was Ennio Morricone - now granted that sort of music that Morricone does came about prior to the 1940s, but it matches the tone of that era just as well as something from the 80s (the western-ish music does signal some western elements in the tale, however).
The other thing I don’t understand is how did Bowie’s Cat People elicit such a take-you-out-of-the-story reaction when an hour earlier the introduction of Hugo Stigliz (one of my favorite parts of the movie) is obviously done in a 1970s montage style, from the music to the intro text:
Of course, anachronism doesn’t have to pull you out of the story. Here’s Shakespeare’s Richard III set in a fantasy version of 1930’s Britain. Nothing about that suspends your disbelief.
Although maybe Shakespeare is a bad example, since he always operates a bit out of time and place anyway.
Anyway, take opera. How whacky is that? Here’s the Roman Emperor Nero and his lady friend Poppea communicating by way of Renaissance operatic duet. But I don’t see anyone complaining about that. You think that would make it you go “WTF”. But it just doesn’t.
I guess it’s not about anachronism per se, but rather internal consistency. Set up the rules, and then either follow them or break them.
In the case of IB, though, I agree that the demilitarization effect is the whole point, or at least part of the point. I mean, yeah, that ending. So, Bo, if you’re feeling uncomfortable: Good. You’re supposed to.
First, I disagree that it matched the scene perfectly. In fact, I don’t think it matched the scene at all. “Pulling people out of the story to showcase that it is merely a story” sounds like, and I beg your pardon here, a lazy-ass way of trying to justify an unintentional deleterious effect of the director’s decisions.
You can stop telling me that it’s feature of postmodern films; I know what the term means and what the tenets & trappings of postmodernism are. Jokes are a feature of comedy films, but a bad joke is a bad joke, and I think this was a bad decision on Mr. Tarantino’s part.
Your last paragraph seems to support my position, since Bowie’s song does not match the tone of the film at all; it is a jarring and unnecessary anachronism deliberately brought to the fore (sound levels) without any artistic or narrative enhancement. It brought no new meaning, no insight, no resolution, no subtext at all to the scene; it was just something Mr. Tarantino thought was cool, so he did it. Well, I think it was not cool and a stupid decision. YMMV.
You know what the song “Cat People” is about, right?
I still remember seeing IB in the theater and my friend pumping her fist up in the air and yelling “YEAHHH!” when it came on during that scene. I had the same emotional reaction as she did.
YMMV, of course, but I thought it was brilliant and if took you out of things, that’s fine too, and likely a desired result, as was the Stiglitz 70’s style clip.
The other thing I don’t understand is how did Bowie’s Cat People elicit such a take-you-out-of-the-story reaction when an hour earlier the introduction of Hugo Stigliz (one of my favorite parts of the movie) is obviously done in a 1970s montage style, from the music to the intro text:
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Well, Mr. Tarantino must have done a better job with that sequence. Also, movies about WW2 don’t only have to use film techniques used during WW2; that’s a ridiculous notion and nothing I’ve written here even suggests that I think anything like that. Now, if the montage had used “Who Let The Dogs Out?” as background music, it would have taken me out of the film and served as indicator that this was going to be a comedy, albeit a dark one perhaps. The use of Bowie’s song indicated nothing.
Yes, I know what the song is about. I own the film and have watched it at least 4 dozen times (Nastasia Kinski was amazing looking and I was 16, after all). Also, I’m a huge Giorgio Moroder fan (he actually wrote the song).
I doubt that taking me out of the film in a way that makes me hate the film was his “desired result”. If it was, that just bolsters my decision to stop giving Mr. Tarantino my money.
The thing you have to understand about Tarantino to appreciate his work is the real subject of his movies is other movies. Inglourious Basterds isn’t about World War II; it’s about World War II movies. Django Unchained isn’t about the west; it’s about spaghetti westerns.
So if you’re making a movie about the French resistance and special operations set in the nineteen forties, then a David Bowie song is wrong. But if you’re making a movie about Inglorious Bastards, The Dirty Dozen, The Train, The Eagle Has Landed, The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone, Von Ryan’s Express, Where Eagles Dare, The Secret War of Harry Frigg, and Kelly’s Heroes, then your movie is actually set in the sixties and seventies when these movies were being made and you can use a pop song from that era.
I hear this all the time, but I don’t see it. For me, what his stories evoke more than anything are bad 1970s DC comic books. Which would be OK if I were 12.
At some point you just have to acknowledge that his work is juvenile, and stop making excuses for that.
I think ISiddiqui makes an interesting point there, though: why do we accept visual storytelling techniques that are very clearly tied to a particular era, but not audio storytelling techniques? What’s the qualitative difference that makes one okay, and the other not? I agree that the anachronistic song feels like a much bigger deal than the anachronistic editing techniques, but why should that be so?
I’m not sure I have an answer to that, but having watched the clip, I have some other observations about why that song works in that scene, despite being four decades out of step with the story. For starters, the full title of the song is “Cat People (Putting out Fire),” and includes the refrain “Putting out fire with gasoline.” Considering what’s about to happen at that premiere, that’s remarkably on-the-nose. And there’s a bunch of meta-textual strange loops going on there, as well, that I’m not sure I can completely untangle. The song was recorded as the theme for the movie of the same name - which was itself a remake of a movie made in 1942. Bowie himself always stood out for his colorful stage personas, even when working in genres that were largely defined by colorful stage personas. '82 was his New Wave phase - this was his look at the time, which is very much channeling a Swing-era vibe. At the same time, he was still just a few years removed from his Thin White Duke persona, which would not be out of place in an inter-war Berlin cabaret. And then, of course, there are the controversies Bowie courted with this persona, where he gave interviews in which he spoke admiringly of fascism as a system of government, and threw the Hitler salute at crowds of fans. So, there’s almost a feedback loop of influence, going from Weimar Berlin, to David Bowie, to Tarantino, and then back into this movie.
There is also, I feel, a certain connotation to the Glam and New Wave movements that are thematically appropriate here. Glam, in particular, was very much an outsider movement, which often embraced an androgynous, sexually ambiguous aesthetic that, despite being a popular genre, was still very much counter-cultural and outsider. There was a strong queer subtext to the music, in a time period where non-normative sexuality was very much taboo. This is, certainly, not nearly the equivalent of being a Jew in occupied France, and I don’t intend an overt comparison there, but there’s a thematic resonance there between Bowie’s position both inside the mainstream culture (as a popular and highly successful artist) and outside of it (as a sexual transgressor and drug addict) and Shoshanna hosting a party for the highest echelon of the Nazi elite while concealing her Jewish heritage.
Could a period appropriate pop song have conveyed a similar disconnect? Certainly - jazz occupied a similar position between popular acceptance and popular discrimination at the time. But would that disconnect be as obvious to a modern audience? I don’t think so. The period where jazz was seen as dangerous and subversive is sufficiently distant from us that, even if one understands it intellectually, it’s difficult to really feel it, in the way that we can still feel the subversiveness of Bowie’s music.
I dunno. I think I may be getting out in the weeds a little bit here. But I don’t feel the choice of that song is as arbitrary or meaningless as you found it.
And this paragraph reminded me of the controversial decision of Baz Luhrman to use hip hop and rap music in his version of The Great Gatsby (which, as a movie, was pretty crap, but I found the music choice to be inspired). The reason he indicated that he wanted to use that music instead of jazz was because at the time jazz was considered to be controversial and it isn’t seen nearly the same way today. However, hip hop is considered still to be controversial, even when it becomes more mainstream. And therefore the same sort of controversy feeling would apply, even if the music was not at all era appropriate. These days we kind of smile at those old farts in shows like Downton Abbey who get a bit appalled by jazz clubs.
