REAL LIFE/REAL DEATH Chapter Twelve

“IN THOSE EYES”

The phone rang interminably.

“Hello?”

“Detective Ross?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Ross, it’s Frank, Frank Calico.”

“Frank! What are you calling me for? You know the whole precinct is looking for you?”

“Yeah, I figured. Look, something big has gone down. I don’t know, I just…It’s big, okay. I want to talk to you. I thought I could handle this, but…I just don’t know. Things keep happening. I don’t even know what I’m trying to do anymore. I’m too paranoid, I guess. I need help. But, I need someone I can trust, okay?”

“Okay. Right. Well listen, I’m on my way home, why don’t you meet me there, okay?”

“I don’t have my car.”

“Well, alright, I’ll have somebody pick you up. Where are you?

“At Sandy’s.”

“Jesus, Frank. We just got a 911 call about some shootings over there. You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

“No, well, yeah, look I can’t…I can’t talk about it right now! Fuck.”

“Okay, okay, okay, calm down. There’s already some officers on their way over there. Just stay put. I’m on my way over, too.”

“Ross, I called you for a reason. I don’t trust cops right now.”

“Frank, now c’mon…”

“Don’t bullshit me and try to tell me there’s no such thing as corrupt cops, Ross. You of all people should fucking know that!

“You’re right, Frank. I’m sorry. Okay look, I’ll be there shortly. Just stay out of sight, and for the love of God don’t do anything stupid.”

“Fine.”

“Look, Frank…just relax okay. You’re going to be fine.”

I took a deep breath, couldn’t think of anything to say, and hung up the phone. I liked Ross, but I never knew how to talk to him. He was a good man. He was a responsible man. He was also responsible for me losing my job, but it’s hard to be mad at him. He was doing the right thing. I was in a bad place at the time. I don’t like to dwell on that time of my life.

I did feel a little relieved after getting off the phone with Ross. Everything got really fucked up over the last few days, and it was nice to know that everything would go back to normal. Well, as normal as it could, I guess. I made my way back to Jennifer, she was still sitting on the curb. She was looking up, staring at the stars, I guess. When she noticed me approaching, she buried her head between her knees and arms.

She was crying.

She did her best to cover it up, but it was still pretty obvious. Fuck. I didn’t know what was going on with this girl, but I was beginning to think it was too big for me. I was almost ready to just turn her over to Ross and be done with her.

“Jennifer,” I said, “I got a friend to come pick us up. He’s…he’s a cop, but he’s a good man. We can trust him. “

She didn’t look up, she just kept quietly crying. I stood there, trying to think of something to say. I was beginning to feel anxious about standing out here. I didn’t know how long it would take Detective Ross to get here, but I didn’t really want to talk to anyone else if I didn’t have to. I didn’t like to interrupt a crying woman, and couldn’t really think of how I would approach doing so. It didn’t matter, though. I never got the chance.

I felt the squad car pull into the parking lot before I ever saw it. Cops give off an aura; you can just feel whenever they are around. The cruiser pulled up in front of us, blinding us with its headlights and drenching everything else in alternating shades of red and blue.

An officer stepped out of the driver side door, followed by his partner on the passenger side. Even though the cruiser’s headlights were pointed right at us, he still drew his flashlight and shined it directly in my eyes. I squinted, unable to see.

“Hands where I can see them,” he said.

I already had my hands up trying to shield my eyes, but Jennifer didn’t move. I tried to keep their attention on me.

“Look, officers, I just spoke with Detective Ross and he’s on his way over…”

“Well, well, well,” he interrupted, “Frank Calico. I thought we’d find you here.”

My stomach turned upon hearing the way he spat out my name. It was that son of a bitch Koslowski. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

“So you talked to Ross, huh? Well, we’re responding to a 9-1-1 call. Seems somebody’s been shooting off some guns in the area. You know anything about that?”

“I’m only going to talk to Ross.”

“That a fact? Who’s your friend there; maybe she doesn’t have a problem talking to me.”

Jennifer finally looked up. I guess she was off in her own little world for a while there, because once she realized what was going on, she stood up as tense as possible.

“We’re both only going to talk to Ross,” I said resolutely. I hated this fucking asshole and had no problem giving him as much shit as possible, but I still had to watch my tongue. Ross already agreed to help me out and I didn’t want to fuck things up more than they already were. I was going to have deal with Koslowski as nicely as possible until Ross got here.

“Well then you can wait for him in the squad car, for your safety,” he said.

“Fine,” I said between gritted teeth.

“Hey Mike, what’s this?”

Koslowski’s partner picked up something small and thin off the ground. It wasn’t until he brought it over to Koslowski that I realized what it was.

“My mask!” Jennifer screamed. She shot up off the curb and snatched it out of their hands.

“Whoa, girl! What do you think you’re doing?” yelled Koslowski. Things were getting tense.

She clutched the mask to her chest, ignoring the irate cops.

“A mask? What the hell you need a mask for?” Koslowski’s partner asked.

“Shut up, Jerry,” Koslowski snapped, “Alright ma’am, I need you to cooperate with me and get into the car.”

Jennifer stood there, not even acknowledging the cops. I was starting to get a sickening feeling in my stomach.

“Ma’am, I will not ask you again.” Koslowski approached Jennifer and unhooked his handcuffs from his belt.

“Wait a minute, Koslowski,” I started, but was interrupted when he shinned his flashlight in my face.

“Shut your god damned mouth. I’m through fucking around here. Get in the fucking car!” he barked. Normally, I’d never let this little shit talk to me like that, but I was determined to keep myself from fucking this up for Ross. Koslowski put his flashlight away, but his partner, Jerry, kept his trained on the girl. Koslowski grabbed Jennifer’s wrist, forcing her to look up.

There was a single quiet moment when the whole city seemed to pause, waiting for a reaction. Now, verbal and physical abuse I could take, but I could not abide this piece of shit laying his hands on that poor girl. I felt a volcano build up inside of me. All my sickness and anger was boiling out of me and all I had to do was give it a target.

But I didn’t.

Before I could react, for that brief second when the world stopped and Jennifer and Koslowski were caught in the flashlight beam like actors on a stage, I saw Jennifer’s eyes. They were fixed directly on the hand gripped around her wrist. And in those eyes I saw a torrent of emotion that smothered all my rage and sickness.

Inglourious Basterds

I'm going to talk extensively about the movie, so be warned, there are spoilers aplenty.

It's long been my contention that Quentin Tarantino's movies work so well because they are self aware genre pieces, each one seemingly more so it's predecessor. Inglourious Basterds is no exception. Like Kill Bill and Death Proof before, Tarantino is going for a deliberate "genre mash up" style, done in such a way as only he can do. Also similarly to Death Proof, Tarantino is making a movie about movies. But where Death Proof was primarily about the portrayal of women and men in horror movies, Inglourious Basterds reaches for a bigger goal, that of racism in America, and it's manipulation through Hollywood.

The film opens, appropriately enough, with "The Green Leaves of Summer", a song originally used as the opening to John Wayne's own War/Western film, The Alamo. Aside from being a good song that sets a wonderful mood, this connection to John Wayne provides a direct link to the old American Western Films that Tarantino will be will be commenting on in Inglourious Basterds.

The first chapter introduces us to Landa, the ruthless Nazi officer known as the "Jew Hunter". Landa is charged with hunting down all the Jews hiding in France, the new territory that the Nazi's have taken by force. Landa himself is intelligent, charming, and poetic in nature, but beneath that lies a horribly racist, murderous, madman. He is despicable, but also frightening. Tarantino does a fantastic job of giving us a great villain that would be at home in any classic War film, which becomes a little unsettling when you remember that it's not just a War film, but also a Western film. Yes, this is a Western, and the Nazis are representations of the Manifest Destiny Americans.

The Nazi's are our "cowboys" and in the second chapter we are introduced to our "Indians", the American Jewish soldiers known as the Basterds. Tarantino draws a lot of parallels between the American Indian and the Basterds. The Basterds' only mission is to terrorize the Nazis. They do this through guerrilla warfare, which includes scalping dead Nazis, brutally beating prisoners to death, and carving swastikas on the foreheads of the survivors. The scalping plays a significant part in the movie. It's important to remember that scalping was not a widespread practice among Native Americans, quite the contrary, European colonists paid Native American's bounties for the scalps of their enemies. The savagery of scalping was something that was grafted onto Native American's and portrayed as natural through Hollywood Westerns. In the same fashion, Tarantino's Jews learn from the Nazi's. Just as the Nazi's branded Jews with the Star of David, the Basterds brand the Nazi's by carving the swastika into their foreheads.

In the fourth chapter, Tarantino drives home the metaphorical point even further when the undercover Basterds have a confrontation with a Gestapo officer. The group play a bar game that involves trying to guess(through a series of questions) the name of a famous person(real or fictional) written down by the person next to you. The Gestapo officer's card reads King Kong. After a series of guesses he learns that he was "born in the jungle, came to America on a boat, was not benefited by his arrival, and imprisoned(or something along those lines)" and unsuccessfully concludes that he is "the story of the black man in America". When he's told that he is wrong, he matter of factly states, "Oh, then I must be King Kong." Tarantino speaks the universal language of film. Everybody knows King Kong, and if you didn't think about it being an allegory for racism, he expects that you do now, and if you're willing to accept that, then you may be ready to look for the same allegories in his film.

Inglourious Basterds has a fairly straightforward Western plot, but told with Nazi's and Jews in place of cowboys and Indians, and in doing so, gives us a movie where we effectively root against John Wayne, the Hollywood Cowboy icon.

But as I said earlier, this is also a War film, but Tarantino isn't as interested in looking at the effects of War as he is in looking at the effects of War Films(it's a movie about movies remember). The rest of the movie focuses of the War Film as propaganda. The Nazi's made many propaganda films portraying the superiority of the Aryan and the inferiority of the Jew(similarly, Western Films champion the superiority of the White Man over the savagery of the Red Man).

The other story that runs concurrent with the Basterds story is the story of Shosanna, the young Jewish girl who survived Landa's brutal assault in the first chapter. She is now living under an assumed identity and owns a movie theater. After meeting Frederick Zoller, a Nazi parody of Audie Murphey, her identity becomes endangered when he falls in love with her and wants to screen his latest film in her theater. This leads to the climax of the movie where the top members of the Nazi party, including Hitler himself, attend the movie.

The Basterds infiltrate the theater, with the intention of blowing it up. Shosanna intends to burn it all down. As the plans unfold, we being seeing the Nazi propaganda film, a film in which the young Nazi star does nothing but shoot down American soldiers in a violent fashion, all the while the Nazi movie patrons cheer as the Americans are shot down. But then Shosanna's secret plan is put into action. She has recorded her own message over the ending of the Nazi propaganda film in which she proclaims that she's going to burn the building down with everyone trapped inside and they should know that "the Nazi's will die by the hand of a Jew". A fire is started using the theater's film cache, which burns three times faster than paper. As the message plays, the theater is engulfed in flames. The Basterds, their plan having completely fallen apart, improvise by grabbing machine guns and repeatedly mowing down Nazis. Ironically, we are now cheering at a scene in which the Americans do nothing but shoot down the Nazis in a violent fashion. This all culminates in the big scene where Hitler is riddled with bullets. Even after he is dead, and they've moved on to shooting the movie patrons, one of the Basterds makes it a point to go back and continue shooting Hitler until he is no longer recognizable.

So, what we have here is Hitler, in a movie theater, being butchered beyond recognition by films, while a movie announces his death at the hands of Jews. With the understanding that many power players in Hollywood are Jewish, and the fact that for the last sixty years Hitler(and Nazis in general) have been torn down so completely by Hollywood to the point of being cartoonish villains, I'd say it's a fairly accurate portrayal of what happened to Hitler.

Inglourious Basterds raises a lot of points about Hollywood's control over our perceptions, and plays our expectations of genre against us to give us a movie that might be deeper than it initially wants you to believe. I immensely enjoyed it, even if it didn't feel as tight as Pulp Fiction or as superficially awesome as Kill Bill.