It is funny, so many people have mentioned the many anachronisms in Quentin Tarrantino's newest film, yet one of the greatest anachronisms has gone unmentioned. Perhaps it is because of our familiarity with the paranoid images of the Vietnam War, many of us have grown up thinking of war in terms of super-Clausewitzian terms, seeing anything as permissible and any act as thinkable (which is odd, given the obsession many have with following Geneva beyond the letter and reading into it kid glove treatment for terrorists), but the fact is, there is no way on Earth the US would have commissioned soldiers to commit atrocities on the Western Front.

I know many will think I am naive for saying this, but there is something we forget, you need to get soldiers who are willing to commit the acts you order, and what was requested of the men in this film was to commit a war crime. Now, I know we were willing to fire bomb cities, drop atomic bombs and otherwise do whatever was needed to win the war, but we also had a very different mindset in the 1940's.

Here is one for those who think I am naive to chew on. In the US military, it was considered for a long time, an ignoble profession to be a sniper. It was considered cowardly and almost deceitful to shoot from concealment at long distance. Now, if it was hard to convince men to become snipers, do you really think anyone was signing up for scalping duty?

For that matter, many of the atrocities of Vietnam were also delusions. Yes, the war, as it wore on, did inspire less and less respect for an enemy who fought out of uniform and using terrorist methods, and some atrocities did take place. But our popular impression of a war rife with torture and the murder and mutilation of women and children was largely created by men such as John Kerry, whose testimony is suspect to say the least. And Vietnam was quite a different war from World War II.

All of which makes the whole premise of the Tarrantino film about as plausible as, well, most Hollywood history, such as Gladiator (where Commodus was killed in the arena and the Republic restored, not a mention of Pertinax or the remaining 200 plus years of the western empire... ). Of course the rest of the film apparently is equally absurd, and I know Tarrantino has admitted he has no interest in being "a documentary". Still, I do prefer my history to be something close to plausible, and this much of a deviation form history simply makes it hard for me to enjoy a film.

POSTSCRIPT

Then again, I am hardly Tarrantino's audience. I found Reservoir Dogs amusing, though very derivative. I enjoyed the quick verbal games of Pulp Fiction, but then when he never moved beyond his "geek chic" film obsessed verbal antics and glorified violence, Tarrantino showed he truly was no innovator, just someone skilled at culling good bits from junk films, stringing them together with increasingly tired word play. So clearly I am not the best judge. Maybe not the best judge for historical films at all. After all, who else yelled at the screen during Gladiator "They didn't use stirrups! Or forks!"? So maybe I should not judge historical films.

POSTSCRIPT II

What does disturb me about the film is the retroactive demeaning of the military. No, the soldiers of World War II were not the clean cut types shown in the War Office films of the 1940's, but they were honorable men who did not have Tarrantino's post-modern brutality as part of their character. I doubt even today, with a generation much more used to graphic violence, you could find a dozen scalp happy special forces troops. Oh, Hollywood insists every special ops guy is happy to do whatever is required, no matter how brutal or evil, but I would beg to differ. Soldiers are still drawn from the population at large, or a specific, patriotic subset. And it seems to me there is a general aversion among our citizens to committing atrocities. Which makes me think even today you would not be able to form this bizarre fantasy unit of Tarrantino's. And how much more so with men who enlisted to fight what they saw as the embodiment of evil in the 1940's? Men who enlist out of high ideals, thinking they are fighting for right and democracy and justice are not likely candidates for brutally torturing anyone, even if it is the enemy. Yes, they might use some force to interrogate men with vital information, they may sometimes be rough with the enemy, but I just do not see them uniformly agreeing to scalp or mutilate the enemy, even if he is evil.

But, perhaps I am naive. Still, having grown up around many veterans of that era, who would drink and reminisce, often talking about things my young ears should not have heard, I can't picture those men even sharing a room with those of Tarrantino's gruesome fantasy. So, if I am a naif, so be it. I would have to say being a naif in this regard seems a much happier fate than sharing Tarrantino's "sophistication".

POSTSCRIPT III

To clarify, I only mention "on the western front" above because of the differences in perception of the war in Europe and in the Pacific. I knew someone was likely to bring up our perception of the Japanese, and I simply did not want to bother arguing that point. While I still think it unlikely we could find men willing to form a scalping party in the Pacific, racial attitudes were different, and the Japanese culture was alien enough, and Japanese behavior brutal enough, that they were perceived differently than the Germans. While I doubt we would have tried to scalp Japanese either, it would have been more likely in the Pacific than Europe, though I can't see it in either locale. But to avoid having to elaborate on this at great lengthy, I simply limited my argument to the topic of the film, the formation of such a unit in France, to keep the argument simple.