Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Steve Rhodes.
I have no particular desire to see Inglourious Basterds when I didn't get to see District 9 on opening weekend and I still haven't seen Funny People, (500) Days of Summer, Cold Souls or Thirst (and, if I'm honest, I don't particularly feel like helping to make anything Eli Roth is in a success). But, by all accounts, it's a movie that posits a history-alerting role for the movies, and that idea is bumping up against several others I have about the importance of movies in particular and popular culture in general. I think Quentin Tarantino thinks about movies, and their importance, in a different way than I do, but not entirely.
In her introduction to her essay collection Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron wrote:
I should say that almost everything in this book was written in 1968 and 1969, and almost everything in it is about what I like to think of as frivolous things. Fashion, trashy books, show business, food. I would call these subjects Popular Culture, but I like writing about them so much that I hate to think they have to be justified in this way--or at least I'm sorry if they do. One night not too long ago I was on a radio show talking about an article I had written for Esquire on Helen Gurley Brown and I was interrupted by another guest, a folk singer, who has just finished a twenty-five-minute lecture on the need for peace. "I can't believe we're talking about Helen Gurley Brown," he said, "when there's a war going on in Vietnam." Well, I care that there's a war going on in Indochina, and I demonstrate against it; and I care that there's a women's liberation movement, and I demonstrate for that. But I also go to the movies incessantly, and have my hair done once a week, and cook dinner every night, and spend hours in front of the mirror trying to make my eyes look symmetrical, and I care about those things, too. Much of my life goes irrelevantly on, in spite of larger events.
I love this passage, because of the way Ephron places pop culture in the context of people's lives, asserts the right to treat it as important, even in a world where there are terrible and momentous events underway. But I'd take her argument a step further. In the middle of those terrible and momentous events, amidst the opinion polls that seek to interpret how people feel about those events, pop culture can be a strong barometer of what people seek out, what they shy away from, what interests them. Of course movies, books, music, etc., also become popular because of marketing campaigns, not simply as a pure measurement of what Americans are attracted to or repelled from. But our susceptibility to advertising also measures what we are influenced by. And ultimately, even more than polls, even more than votes, the pop culture we choose to experience shows what we care about, because we spend money on it.
Quentin Tarantino has made a movie in which movies become a fulcrum for world events: movies are literally a catalyst for an explosion. I don't know that I think popular art has that power. Some movies can become part of a public conversation about an issue, like Schindler's List did, to a certain extent, with the Holocaust, when it was incorporated into public school curricula, etc. But I don't think it even has to do that, much less provoke riots or provide a means to kill Nazis. I think maybe it's enough for pop culture to hold up a warped glass up to society, to provide us with infinite grounds for divination as we try to understand who we are and what we think.