CAST A GIANT SHADOW: as metaphor, as movie

CAST A GIANT SHADOW:  

A picture says a thousand words, and a movie says hundreds of thousand words (at least). A photo that references a movie potentially says exponentially more.

That is surely the case for the photo of Rahm Emanuel, taken by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Michelle V. Agins and published in the New York Times on February 24, 2011.

Two days earlier, on Tuesday, Rahm won Chicago’s mayoral election. Before he stepped to the plate and fought for the right to run for mayor of Chicago, Rahm was already well-known for his role as President Obama’s chief of staff. Photographer Michelle Agins had also made her mark, as a Times staff photographer and as an award-winning author and photojournalist.

So what, you say. This blog does not cover politics. It does not endorse (or undermine) political candidates. This is blog about movies and mind. So why should this particular photo peek the author’s interest?

Besides being a beautiful photo, one that recollects German Expressionism and Nosferatu posters (which are held in high regard on his site), the caption that lies beneath the photo adds a few extra words, words that may jar our memories.

The caption reads: “Rahm Emanuel was already casting a large shadow in his first news conference as Chicago's mayor-elect.”

Now, we know that some Times’ reporters (or caption writers) tend to compare politicos to shadows (or shades or shinning lights). Only a month earlier, on January 5th, 2011, we find a line that says “Kennedy Casts Large Shadow over Senate Hopefuls.” The article elaborates on the punch packed by the Kennedy name, and how that impacts his political competitors.

We could say that the more recent mention of Rahm’s “casting large shadows” is nothing more than an allusion to that earlier article. This may be a figure of speech, one with visual appeal that was added after-the-fact to this Agins’ artful photo. (I don’t really know for sure what their intentions were, given that the Times did not answer my previous letters to the editor that comment on their photos that recollect films.)

Whatever the motivation, I suspect that many film buffs reading this blog remember Melville Shavelson’s 1966 film, Cast a Giant Shadow. Some readers may recall Ted Berkman’s 1962 book, Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (Doubleday, 1962). Berkman’s book inspired the part-fact, part-fiction film by the same name. The film admittedly overplayed the romantic subplots, but not at the expense of the major political and personal themes.

Cast a Giant Shadow entered the news again in early 2011, when a handout distributed at YIVO program on Yiddish film made mention of (David) Mickey Marcus. In the film, Marcus is played by actor Kirk Douglas.

Col. Mickey Marcus was a remarkable man. He was a Jew, a native New Yorker, a lawyer, a West Point graduate and a WWII hero. He was one of the rare Jews to attend West Point. He became a military advisor to FDR and was eventually buried at Arlington National Cemetery, with a grave marker that hails him as a “soldier for all nations.”

Marcus was both a conformist and a non-conformist. At one point, the colonel ignored official orders and parachuted into Europe in advance of D-Day. Unexpectedly, he witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps first hand. These sights forced him to confront his Jewish identity, his heritage, and his stifled kinship with his co-religionists. The film begins with haunting flashbacks of those scenes.

Soon thereafter, Marcus is confronted by yet another force: he is tracked down by a representative of the Haganah, as Israel’s still embryonic fighting force was known. By then, Marcus has returned to civilian life. He works as an attorney by day. By night, he is embroiled in day-to-day bickering with his wife (Angie Dickenson), who is more concerned with materialism and motherhood than with life’s greater meanings.

The year is 1947, the year before Israel’s statehood. It is late in the year, and time is of the essence. The British withdrawal from Palestine has been planned, and is approaching, but the Arabs have openly ignored the United Nations’ announcement of plans to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The fledging Jewish state is surrounded by hostile forces that threaten to destroy it before it is born. The disorganized Jewish defense forces know that they are outnumbered sixty to one.

In a clandestine encounter, Marcus is urged to use his West Point-won strategic skills to reorganize the leaderless foot soldiers that lack uniforms, weapons, aircraft, officers, and what not. The only thing that they possess for sure is spirit and still-fresh memories of the murder of six million of their brethren at Nazi hands. Marcus is reluctant to travel to Palestine, but he agrees nonetheless, in spite of his wife’s repeated objections.

The film revolves around the heroic--but ultimately tragic—figure of Mickey Marcus. The movie includes offensive depictions of women’s weaknesses (in spite of the fact that women and men fought side by side in the 1948 War for Independence). The renditions of women are so offensive that it is remarkable that this film was not cited by the feminists who sprang into action two years later, in 1968, as they organized the first annual women’s march, and lampooned books and movies that stereotyped women’s "innate" behavior and their preset roles in society.

But, no matter, for this film’s all-star cast (Kirk Douglas, Yul Brenner, Chaim Topol, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, as well as Angie Dickenson) may have compensated for this indiscretion. Maybe it was John Wayne’s charming toast, where he lifts a glass and says “L’chayyim,” that overshadowed indignities that were typical of their time. Cast a Giant Shadow never entered the annals of feminist critiques—even though it should have--but Wayne’s charming scene made its way into a Coors beer commercial some years later.  

Amidst all the stars who were recruited for the film, one role was played by an unsung actor named Stathis Giallelis. That was the role of “Ram Oren.” In the film, Ram is an intense young commandant who is poised to take charge of the unorganized troops. He attends plenary sessions with Mickey Marcus and other bigwigs, but his relative youth invites criticism. Throughout the film, Ram exists in Mickey’s shadow. He is dwarfed by the austere older commander (Yul Brenner). Yet the young man remains a palpable presence. His dark eyes burn. His heroism in battle is highlighted. Spectators somehow sense that his youth and energy and daringness will push him forward in the future.

What a strange synchronicity we have here. Rahm Emanuel, whose extended family has Israeli roots, is now casting a “large shadow” in real life, rather than in reel life. Like the filmic Ram, this particular Rahm once played second fiddle to a much more important man (the President). Yet he managed to make himself seen and remembered, and is now claiming center stage, at least in Chicago. Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

Did the photographer, or the Times writer, intentionally reference this film and play upon the name correspondences? Did they even know that Rahm Israel Emanuel’s Jerusalem-born father, who is now a pediatrician, was once a member of the Irgun, a militant Jewish paramilitary organization that operated in British-controlled Palestine? Maybe this is nothing more than a strange synchronicity, but it seems that there is another story behind the story, and maybe even another film lurking in the wings, waiting to be made.

I am not qualified to make political predictions, but I can say a few things with certainty: Michelle V. Agins’ photo deserves kudos, and Cast a Giant Shadow deserves a second (or a first) viewing. Mickey Marcus, of course, deserves reflection. Thanks, Michelle, for reminding me of that giant film and legacy.

REPO MEN (spoiler alert)

REPO MEN is a futuristic fantasy film whose reality may not be so far off.

Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker star as “repo men.” They work for a company headed by a slimy salesman played by Liev Schreiber. Having seen Liev Schreiber play Wolverine’s mean-streaked brother Sabertooth in X-Men Origins makes it easy to imagine him as a heartless company man who sells (and then reclaims) life-saving organs via impossibly high-interest loans.

What was less easy to predict was the film’s end. We spend two hours watching Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker dig deeper into flesh and fascia, to pull out body parts that were not properly paid for, and then we get a treat in the final few minutes. We learn that a dramatic fist fight between Whittaker and Law left Law lying helpless on a metal grating, his skull smashed, his brain damaged beyond repair.

We spent the latter half of the film watching him engage in improbable knife fights with company deputies. We saw him scale security, and successfully stop the computer that scans the bar codes of the leased-out organs.

We see him lounging leisurely on a beach, seated beside a female cohort (whom he rescued after he was abandoned by his own wife, who was repulsed by his “repo” work). The two drink colorful cocktails, watch the waves wash up on the sand, as the sun shines, and as Forest Whittaker sits beside them, toasting their great escape from the clutches of the “company.”

And then, in the end, we learn that this scene is but a dream or delusion. It is a false memory that has been implanted through electrodes attached to Law’s head. His brain stopped functioning the moment it hit the metal grating.

For a generation that faces a looming epidemic of Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia that has little response to the few pharmaceuticals on the market, this film makes an important point. Is this what awaits us? Are these implanted memories preferable to dying of dementia? A good question.

Pl turn to http://www.neurospotlight.com for more discussion of this subject.

Kim Peek, the "real" RAIN MAN, rests in peace

It's hard to forget the film, Rain Man, even though it premiered in 1988. Besides offering consummate acting by Dustin Hoffman, as well as an endearing representation of brotherly love by Tom Cruise's character, this film is one of the few films to offer a sympathetic, yet realistic, depiction of the day-to-day ordeals of caring for a seriously psychiatrically-imparied relative.

The psychiatrist who heads the hospital that houses "Rain Man," aka Raymond, is both concerned and compassionate yet straightforward and a bit stern. He possesses a rare combination of realistic traits, so rarely depicted on screen. We have become accustomed to seeing polarized views of screen psychiatrists, and especially hostile renditions of hospital heads. There is the controlling and all-consuming Caligari-esque charicature that dates to 1919, yet always ages well in screen scenes.

Polar opposite is the David and Lisa-type doctor from the sixties, which was based on a book written by a real psychiatrist named Dr. Rubin. David and Lisa live in a hostel-like hospital that Betty Davis might have inhabited two decades earlier in Now Voyager. The aura is affluence; the cure is love.This film was made in the Beatles' days, when people came to believe that "all you need is love," just as John, Paul, George and Ringo sang. David and Lisa cure one another by learning to love one another. The hospital head simply looks on, sympathetically.

In contrast, Rain Man's residence makes no pretences. It is upscale, for sure, and it is worlds away from the hideous adult home that David Cronenberg Spider inhabits in the turn-of-the-21st century UK.  But Rain Man's psychiatrist promises no pie-in-the sky cures. He lets Raymond's brother discover just how difficult it is to care for someone as seriously impaired as Raymond.

Raymond is depicted as autistic, even though the real life character who inspired Rain Man was not actually autistic--although he was once diagnosed as autistic. Kim was simply a savant with serious limitations as well as amazing abilities.

Current  information suggests that he had the very rare "FG syndrome" that results from a genetic error. Kim had other features of the syndrome, including the characteristic facial features, the muscle weakness, the balance difficulties that result from cerebellar defects, and, of course, the complete lack of the corpus callosum that apparently allowed for his remarkable memory and word-scanning skills and that perhaps contributed to his lack of social skills and his inability to interpret metaphors and abstract ideas.

One wonders if the pessimistic portrayal of treatments available for people like Rain Man influenced Tom Cruise's anti-psychiatry stance--or if his crusades against psychiatric treatment owe everything to his Scientology affiliation. Either way, Rain Man was made before Cruise's committment to his crusade, and so shows a more neutral stance towards a highly provacative setting and situation.

Rain Man was regaled. The film won four Oscars: one for best acting (Dustin Hoffman), two more for best original screenplay (Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass) and one for best picture. Tom Cruise's performance was well-remembered, but not so well-regarded (perhaps adding to his anti-psychiatry attitude).

However, the most important behind-the-scenes person was Kim Peek, who died the other day at age 58.

Kim's father deserves some kudos also, both for sticking by Kim throughout the years and rearing him (withouth his mother's help), and also for crusading on behalf of the mentally retarded. Were it not for Kim's father's social activism, Kim's awe-inspiring story might never have come to light. For Barry Morrow would not have met Kim and his father, and would not have become to be inspired enough to write a history-making screenplay. Still, it should be noted that Mr. Morrow had already made two television shows about the mentally retarded. He was researching his subject further when he encountered Kim and his father at the Association of Retarded Citizen. Kim's father chaired the organization's communications committee.

Kim was born without a corpus callosum. The corpus callosum connects the right brain to the left, and vice versa. Today, we are more likely to hear about theories about the advantages of a larger corpus callosum. But Kim's deficit apparently enabled him to read two side of a book simultaneously. He could also remember all the details. Exactly how that occurred is still a bit of a mystery, and may be eluciated better on other sites, such as http://www.neurospotlight.com/.

Kim's abilities were remarkable, even for a savant. His wide-ranging interests put him in a class of his own. He memorized all of Shakespeare's plays, to the point that he and his father could no longer attend either theater or concerts, for fear that Kim would arise and correct the performers for their imperfections. For Kim lacked social skills and other types of awareness. He could not feed or dress himself. He was not the same as Rain Man, the character who was modeled after him. He was even more remarkable than Rain Man.

Mr. Peek was deemed to be mentally retarded when he was a child and then was later misdiagnosed as autistic. After he inspired Rain Man, he led a different kind of life, and came to enjoy the limelight. A documentary about his life was made in 2006. Even after his untimely death from cardiac causes, his life will, no doubt, continue to inspire many. May Kim Peek rest in peace. His memory will live forever in Rain Man. 

Adam Resurrected (2008)

It’s impossible to write about Inglorious Basterds without thinking about an even more powerful Holocaust-themed film: Adam Resurrected (2008).

Adam Resurrected played at the Quad Cinema, near Union Square, for one paltry week. (http://www.quadcinema.com) It played to a crowd that was decidedly different from the patrons of small town Saugerties’ Orpheum. Unfortunately, it played to only a small crowd for a short, short time, in spite of the fact that the film stars renowned actors Jeff Goldblum and Willem Defoe.

To hear Jeff Goldblum discuss his role as Adam Stein, a one-time circus clown and cabaret clairvoyant who was forced to live as a dog (literally) for nearly two years, and who became the personal pet of a Nazi officer, click on the link to Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9h5B0v6MFk

In book form, Adam Resurrected was hailed as “one of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written” and as “the crowning achievement of one of Israel's literary masters.” In film form, most of this tale takes place in an Israeli psychiatric asylum, but the backstory is retold through grueling flashbacks that haunt Adam until the film’s end.

The film is masterfully done, but it is anything but escapist entertainment. In Saugerties, I saw campers run in from the rain and into the theater, to escape a brewing storm by buying tickets to Inglorious Basterds. One surely cannot hide from a thunderstorm, either in nature or in the imagination, by seeking refuge at the Quad’s screening of Adam Resurrected.

In the film, Adam (Jeff Goldblum) was spared the gas chamber so that he could entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths. A Nazi commander, played by Defoe, spots Adam as he is dropped off with other human cargo, before they are pushed into showers and gas chambers and sent to their demise. Defoe’s Nazi character remembers Adam as the man who both saved his life—but who also publicly humiliated him--when Adam performed his cabaret act. He reminds the hapless Adam that he was once "the funniest man in Berlin."

Defoe sat in the audience, contemplating suicide, until Adam made him laugh and abated his depression. But first, Adam shared his perceptions about Defoe’s imminent mental instability with everyone else in attendance. Adam provokes a round of laughter from impressed onlookers, as well as a round of applause—all at Defoe’s expense.

Now it is Defoe’s turn to save and humiliate Adam simultaneously. He plucks Adam from the crowd, and makes him play his violin in public. Then he throws him a bone, and tells him to roll over and bark and perform as if he were a dog. In one of Adam’s flashbacks, we see dancing bears from the Berlin circus. These performing bears foreshadow the fate that awaits Adam in his attempt to survive the Nazi onslaught.

Adam’s life in the Israeli mental hospital for Holocaust survivors revolves around these recollections. When he seduces the head nurse, he includes canine scenes as part of the foreplay. When he learns that a feral child who barks and bites like a dog had been admitted to the same institution, he initially protests, because he has been promised that no dogs are allowed on premises, lest he be reminded of his worst recollections. Then he befriends the speechless young boy, and painstakingly turns him into a functioning human being once again—even after the trained professionals and psychiatrists of the institutions have failed at this same task.

In this film (and in the world that it depicts), the boundaries between sanity and madness are irrevocably blurred. Other films about world war also play upon the theme of what it means to be “sane in an insane society.” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and King of Hearts (1966) concern themselves with The Great War (WWI) rather than with WWII. Caligari only alludes to the madness of war, and reminds us that authorities (such as Dr. Caligari) turned mindless beings like Cesar into killing machines, all for their own glory. (See Movies & the Modern Psyche at http://www.greenwood.com for more details.)

King of Hearts is far more literal than Caligari, and far, far, far lighter-spirited. Alan Bates plays a French army private who is sent to a small French town to defuse a bomb planted by Germans. Chased by Germans before completing his mission, he seeks refuge in a local insane asylum. Not knowing that everyone else has fled the town, he sees only asylum inmates and so he assumes that they are typical townspeople. It turns out that the psychiatric patients did not panic like ordinary citizens and have remained in town and have now taken it over. The inmates, in turn, believe Alan Bates to be the King of Hearts. They welcome him warmly. This allusion to the Queen of Hearts of Alice in Wonderland is striking.

When given the opportunity to evacuate, Bates decides that the world of the mentally unwell is better than the real world of war. He sheds his clothes, and knocks on the door, and gains admission to the same hospital that he was expected to evacuate. In a war-torn world, who can decide between sanity and insanity? Surely not the war-mongers themselves. King of Hearts expressed the Laingian anti-psychiatry sentiment and counterculture spirit of the sixties, in a humorous and emotionally-acceptable form.

Adam Resurrected, on the other hand, reminds us of the literal perversity that took place during the Shoah, when the Third Reich twisted every human ideal to its nth degree. It is a disturbing film, one with a completely different intent than the comedic King of Hearts. Even though its star, Adam, was a clown and comedian who was once the toast of the Berlin cabaret scene, this film is one of the most unfunny films yet produced. To day that it is darkly disturbing is an understatement.

The tongue-in-cheek irony used by Tarantino has no place in Adam Resurrected. This film should be seen by many people. However, as of today, there is little chance that it will be the box office success that Basterds became. It is much easier to fantasize that the Basterds actually won the war, and stopped Hitler in his tracks, than to contemplate the depth of despair that shrouded even the survivors of the same era.

Adam Resurrected (2009), King of Hearts (1966), Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

1. Why did Inglorious Basterds become a box office success when Adam Resurrected (2009), a film with equally renowed stars, fade into grey so fast, and play just one week at an art house cinema?
2. How does cinema chronicle an individual's life struggles as a way of commenting on society at large?
3. How do the blurred boundaries between sanity and insanity, and the breakdown of behavioral mores during wartime, present themselves in Adam Resurrected (2009),  King of Hearts (1966), Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)?
4. Does the fact that King of Hearts (1966) and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) focus on, or were  influenced by, the generic insanity of World War I--rather than on WWII and the specifics of the Holocaust--change their impact on audiences? 
5. Why is the fantasy/parody/tongue-in-check theme of Ingloureous Basterds buddy film more tolerable to the public than the twisted (but possibly slightly true) individual tale told in Adam Resurrected? 

WHY ARE WE HERE? HOW IS THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER SITES?

Psychoanalysis and cinema are kindred cousins. They were born of the same century. Each emerged within a year of one another. Perceptual psychology and cinema are also linked, for how could we perceive separate celluloid images as if they were a single stream, were it not for the fact that our brains misconstrue motion, because of the "flicker effect"?

Dream and film also share many similarities. Both are visual. Both are viewed in the dark. Both are unreal but seem real. Some people call their dreams "mind movies." Some movie makers turn to dreams for inspiration, and for good reason.

In early cinema, dream scenes showcased newly-discovered special effects, editing, and camera skills. German Expressionist films (and the films noirs that followed in their wake) showed signs of Freudian influence (and also reflected German Romanticism’s intrigue with the dream state).
Filmmakers found that dream scenes enriched the drama and also exploited their ever-expanding cinematic skills, proving that "moving pictures" offered more than living theater or still photography.

Today, we tend to be more concerned with restful sleep than with meaningful dreams. After all, more than a century has passed since Freud published his century-changing book about Interpretation of Dreams (1900). For better or worse, sleep studies are more common than dream interpretation, at least in the medical world. So it's not surprising that today's films often show strange somnambulistic states or odd events that occur in insomniacs.

As contemporary as that sounds, that concept is not new. Charcot, one of Freud's mentors, and a neurologist himself, was also interested in somnambulism, as were many Frenchmen and women of his era, scientists and spiritualists alike. Symbolist artists of the late 19th century often depicted sleepwalkers. They, /too, attended Charcot's lectures at the Salpetriere in fin-de-siecle Paris. Artists and actors were as interested in the antics of Charcot's hysterics as doctors, and people of different professions sat in the audience together.

Fortunately for us, we need not decide which films we favor--for we have more than a century's worth at our disposal. Unfortunately, many older films are no longer available, and only their memories remain. But we can use our own imaginations to fill in the blanks--and some current filmmakers do exactly that when they use stills remaining from old films to influence their recent creations.

Before I say too much too soon, let me stop, and simply restate why we're here on this site, In this site, we will discuss films that pertain to the mind, be it asleep or awake, conscious or unconscious, under the influence or without any outside influences. Because films are a form of art (the 7th art), there are times that we will also discuss art and its intersection with film.

Our purpose is NOT to promote psychoanalysis (or any other variant of psychiatry). If anything, we will shed light on the ways that cinema itself promoted psychoanalysis, simply because the "couch cure" makes for such interesting movie scenes and themes. This made many viewers believe that psychoanalysis was all that psychiatry had to offer--or at least that it was better than Bedlam (with Boris Karloff) or those old asylum-based treatments seen on screen from back in the days of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

We will try to “take the pulse” of society by examining its cinema—but we promise no cures, and we cannot guarantee an accurate diagnosis (or, I should say, a lasting diagnosis). For we know for a fact that society constantly changes, and that culture evolves, cinema included. Today’s “diagnosis” will undoubtedly need revision tomorrow, but that’s what makes this endeavor so interesting.

To be truthful, our purpose here is to have fun as we focus on films that concern themselves with mind, memory, brain, behavior, trance, truth, psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, or neurology. If we happen to learn something factual about the brain or behavior in the process, all the better. But this site is intended to be a fun site, nothing more, nothing less. For more fact-based information about clinical concerns, please consult http://www.neurospotlight.com/ or any of the academic or government-sponsored websites that will soon be listed in the index.

BTW, you don’t need to turn off your cell phones for this site!

Inglourious Basterds (2009) SPOILER ALERT Dir: QuentinTarantino

Inglourious Basterds (2009): Dir.: Quentin Tarantino
When I finally sat down at the Orpheum Theater in small town Saugerties, I had a panicked moment of regret. The Times had trashed the film and said it ran way too long—but that wasn’t the issue. It was Sunday night, and it was storming, and suddenly dozens of drenched campers stormed into the tiny theatre, eager to escape the pouring rain and biting mosquitoes outside. What might have been a Hopper-esque evening of silence and solitude instantly transformed itself into the chaos of candy bits tossed across the aisles. Imagine, being caught between the cross-fire of Milk Duds and Jujubes in real life, all because I couldn’t wait another day to see this film on the big screen in the city. I thought that I’d never hear the soundtrack of the cinema over the squealing of those unhappy campers and the crashing sounds of candy bar commandos.

How wrong I was. Once the reels rolled, not a peep was heard. Hours passed as if they were seconds. When the film finally ended, I was ready to watch another hour or two of this “once upon a time” fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to see more of an avenging Jewish platoon headed by a Tennessee-born lieutenant nicknamed “Aldo the Apache?” Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo with the same panache and the same irony that he displayed in Fight Club (1999). There, he was the alter ego/avenging angel who wreaked destruction on skyscrapers for no good reason, other than to express existential angst or unrepressed anger or a sense of purposeless in an Ikea-laden world that was stripped of purpose.

In this film, Pitt’s character has the most profound purpose. He intends to stop

Hitler and his henchmen before they claim more Jewish lives. Secondarily, he plans to wreak revenge for deeds already done. He intends to inspire fear in true Old Testament style, just as Samson the Strongman might have done in the Hebrew Bible, had Samson been a joiner rather than a one-man operation.

To accomplish this, the lieutenant enlists eight intrepid Jewish-American soldiers, and demands that they each deliver 100 scalps before their mission ends. He insists that they mimic his own American-Indian ways: they must scalp their conquests and bring their booty to him. Aldo does not deliver a speech about multi-culturalism or inclusiveness or diversity (all terms that had yet to be invented in Nazi-era 1940s and that turn Nazi ideology upside down). His men understand intuitively, and sound off the strongest and most sincere round of “yes sirs” in response to his proposal.

Brad Pitt, who was just a doppelganger-like presence in Fight Club, emerges full-force in this film. He is no longer an obscure shadow that trails the no-name star, Ed Norton. He is all-present. He reminds us of the reflection that steps out of the mirror in any of the many versions of Student of Prague (1914; 1926). That once-unreal reflection becomes more powerful than the flesh and blood human that cast its shadow and gave it life. Such doppelgangers were popular in German Romantic literature—and German Romantic literature was popular among Nazis (in theory, at least), and in psychoanalysis.

Brad Pitt’s character has indeed stepped out of time, in more ways than one. For this film begins in the early 40s. The U.S. first entered the Second World War in late 1941 (but not because of atrocities inflicted against Jews). The U.S. first officially condemned the atrocities against Jews by Nazis in November, 1941. Mass murders of Jews via gas chambers began in 1941 (although the Holocaust officially started in 1938, with Kristallnacht). Before then, incurable mental patients and the physically handicapped had been gassed, until the clergy intervened.

This is a gory film and Aldo makes a gruesome demand—but this is a film about Nazis who murdered six million Jews, and millions of others. The movie begins as Jewish dairy farmers are gunned down while they hide beneath floor boards in a thread-bare French farm. One young woman escapes. Her name is Shosanna, which means “Rose” in Hebrew. Shosanna runs through the pastures and hides in the woods, and eventually makes her way to Paris. How, we don’t know. All we know is that she inherits a movie theater that was once owned by her now-deceased aunt and uncle. We know that the rest of her dairy farmer family has died, for we witnessed the shooting scene near the film’s start.

It is Shosanna who literally “brings the house down.” She orchestrates a plan to burn down her theater, using flammable nitrate film. Hitler, Goering, Bormann, Goebbles, and other high ranking Nazis have gathered at her movie house, to celebrate the opening of a film about the war exploits of a young Nazi officer. This same young Nazi has the bad sense to grow infatuated with Shosanna after he sees her fixing her movie marquee. The film is entitled A Nation’s Pride. It is a film within a film, and adds to the distorted sense of reality/unreality that Tarantino employs. We are not sure if this film was actually produced during the Nazi era, or if it was invented anew—so adept is Quentin Tarantino at distorting our sense of time and place as we watch his creation.

As it turns out, Pride was produced for this film by Eli Roth. Roth is a lead actor in Basterds, but he also makes low-budget horror films in real life. In Tarantino’s film, Roth has the honor of playing “the Bear Jew.” As “the Bear Jew,” he is the Samson-like avenger who wields a bat instead of the “jawbone of an ass” that Samson used to slay 1000 Philistines (Judges 15:16).

Eli Roth performed in other Tarantino films, but he played less prestigious parts. He typically portrayed a thug. Perhaps he was cast in this role as a way of reminding us that thugs and scoundrels and those with unsavory pasts were needed for this unique platoon. Standard-brand bookkeepers and shopkeepers and school teachers would not do. (Similarly, the Bielski brothers partisans who gained fame from Defiance (2008) were tough guys rather than Talmudic scholars even before the war’s start.)

As the legendary “Bear Jew,” Roth became the Semitic Abominable Snowman. He left tracks, inspired stories, and instilled fear in survivors forever after. In many movie posters, it is Eli Roth’s bat that takes center stage, for the bat that he used to beat down Nazis is inscribed with names of Jews who died at Nazi hands.

Shosanna Dreyfus, played by Melanie Laurent, is the self-effacing young Jewess who hides her past identity once in Paris. We saw her “run for her life” in an early scene, and now we learn much more of her, and make even more inferences. Her true surname “Dreyfus” recollects the French Jewish colonel who stood accused of treason in late 19th century France. Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, until author Emil Zola called attention to the anti-Semitism that led to the colonel’s arrest and conviction. The Dreyfus Affair split France long before the Nazis arrived and revealed the depth of anti-Semitism that pre-existed the Third Reich’s Vichy government in France. The very word “Dreyfus” signifies French anti-Semitism.

In the film, Shosanna’s simplicity contrasts with the vain attention-grabbing film star who wittingly or unwittingly causes the death of half the Basterds’ platoon. The film star might have been Marlene Dietrich—a German born actress who did in fact betray Germany and spy for the Allies—but the film specifically states that she is not Dietrich.

One might be tempted to describe this actress—the other female lead—as a femme fatale, but that is too generous. For the fictional femme fatale of post-war American film noir is competent, albeit cruel. This woman is completely incompetent. She flubs whatever she endeavors. She arranges a rendezvous in a basement, where escape is impossible. She dresses the Basterds as white-suited Italian cameramen who accompany her to the film debut. She forgets that other film aficionados in attendance might speak Italian, and recognize that the Basterds cannot. This woman is simply inept, a vain, shallow, attention-grabbing woman. Her heart may be in the right place (but maybe it’s not), but her head is never screwed on straight. She may just as well have been played by Doris Day. When she is strangled by a Nazi “Jew hunter” as the film comes to a close, no tears are shed. No one in the audience hisses.

Shosanna is neither famous nor glamorous. In fact, she is plain and hides her real name, since the Nazis forced her to conceal her Jewish origins lest she meet the same fate as her family. Only in the last scene, she dons a red dress, appears on screen, and steals the scene, as she burns the house down, and literally brings the house down. She plans to martyr herself in memory of her martyred parents and to avert more mass destruction by the Nazis. Instead, she is shot dead by the young Nazi soldier who pursued her, but not until after she has successfully set her scheme into motion. She completes “Operation Kino” (which literally means “Operation Movie”) without knowing the Basterds’ intent.

In her final scene, her face appears on the burning cinema screen, informing her captive audience that they will die as the theater burns. She vaguely reminds viewers of Hannah Senesh, a young Hungarian-Jewish poet-paratrooper who wrote “Blessed is the Match.” Senesh had already immigrated to Israel, but she returned to Europe, hoping to save Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary. She volunteered to be dropped into dangerous terrain, but was turned over to Nazis by the Partisans she planned to join, once they learned that she was Jewish. She was executed by the Nazis in 1944 at the age of 23. Her poem “Blessed is the Match, consumed in kindling flame” survives her, along with innumerable memories of her true tragic fate, and a recent film about her life http://www.blessedisthematch.com/.

One wonders if Tarantino knew of this poem or of Senesh’s history when he devised this strange and twisted plot, and when he showed his own heroine similarly “consumed in kindling flame,” just as Hannah Senesh wrote. Or perhaps Tarantino was telling us that Shosanna’s hopes “went up in flames,” because we realize, once the film ends, that it was just a fairy tale, after all, and that this fantasy to stop Hitler never occurred. Either way, he succeeds. His director’s cut is direly awaited.

One thing is for sure: by naming this mission, “Operation Kino” (Operation Film), Tarantino is reminding us, tongue-in-cheek, that the mission takes place in the movies. It occurs in his movie, even more than in Shosanna’s movie house, and in our own “mind movies” that remain with us after watching this haunting parody of the Holocaust era. Operation Kino and the film-within-the-film taunt us with the fact that this film is nothing more than an after-the fact fantasy attack, and that our “mind movies” do not undo the past.

If it seems strange to hear a psychiatrist sing the praises of a film that glorifies violence and revenge, then I must conclude with a reference to an unusual book by forensic psychiatrist, Robert Simon. Simon wrote Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream (APPI, 2008), implying that the best of men fantasize about acts that that would never act out. Simon writes in gender-specific terms, and mainly discusses men. Director Quentin Tarantino makes his film gender-neutral, and provides both male and female avengers.

But the question remains, after the film ends, and it extends beyond gender: given the opportunity to act in the way that Shosanna or the Basterds or Aldo the Apache acted, who would seize it? Perhaps the more correct question is: “how many would seize it?”