Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Thursday!

* I'll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.

* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.

* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson's review of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.

* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.

* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you're two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.

* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can't find them. Meanwhile, this year's Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.

* So you've invented a board game. (via)

* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.

* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.

Thursday morning.

* Tarantino on Tarantino on Charlie Rose. It gets better once Tarantino gets going on IB-related subjects like Goebbels's theory of film or the origins of Col. Hans Landa and the Bride. Watch out for spoilers.

* 61 literary euphemisms for masturbation.

* More Snow Leopard reviews.

* Reading Rainbow to end its 26-year run. You don't have to take my word for it.

The film is run through with the sense that only an American film can do this, can master narrative causality by becoming the first among its slaves: though no onscreen American character really drives the action in any significant sense until the very end, no event in IB is allowed to pass that isn’t authorized by the U.S.A. Therefore only America, as the sovereign of cinema’s narrative logic, can exceed it, and deliver the audience its greatest possible pleasures. Cinematic pleasure is defined as American. Again, not because America is good, but because good is American. When other countries make a ‘fun’ or ‘pleasing’ film they can only do so within conditions determined by us. With IB, the ‘meaning’ of the Tarantinoverse is finally clear: the U.S. rules cinema, and the U.S. cannot die until cinema dies a second death.

Traxus has now put up his own review of Inglourious Basterds.

Traxus considers survival horror:

There are ‘left’ and ‘right’ versions of the zombie myth, but the message is always the same: the horrors wrought by humanity in extremis are always worse than the zombies.The absolute manichean split between human and zombie is insisted on only to be ’shockingly’ deconstructed, with all other differences either elided or made to look ridiculous by comparison. Like them, we must kill to live, even if there is no reason to go on (civilization is destroyed, etc.). We are them, they are us.

while Alex Greenberg considers Tarantino:

Tarantino does not critique violence. He loves it. The parodies of violence in Kill Bill are not criticisms aimed at violence but criticisms aimed at film. He wants filmmakers to understand that they can make violence fun and to revel in this fact. Of course, for him, film is film and real life is real life, and I agree that one cannot draw a connection between violent acts in film and violent acts in "the real world." But I would add that the relationship between ideology and action is always an ideological one: it shapes opinions and attitudes, forming how people look at the world, in this case, one starkly divided between good and evil, as Eli Roth said in an interview with The Onion AV Club: "[My character is] not taking pleasure in killing. He’s fighting evil on behalf of those who can’t fight. He knows he’s the biggest and strongest one in the bunch, and he wants to terrorize them. But he’s doing it to stop evil." This would sit very well with my "Bible and the Holocaust" professor, who viewed human history as a gigantic contest between David and Hitler. But for those of us who are stuck in the realm of the human, this film adds nothing to the conversation.

It's a bit hard for me to understand the person who has heard of both Quentin Tarantino and the Holocaust, who then willingly goes to see a Quentin Tarantino movie about the Holocaust, and yet leaves the theater afterwards claiming to feel "offended." Putting aside the highly fraught question of what exactly it is we mean when we say we are "offended," do you really expect us to believe you didn't know in advance what you were walking into? (See TNR for an example of this sort of strange reaction. Writing as if his meaning were clear beyond all possible clarification, Isaac Chotiner proclaims: "[T]he film is one of the most morally repulsive movies of the past decade." In what respect, Charlie?)

Traxus and I spent some time after the film trying to puzzle all this out, but our discussion bounced around the question of whether Inglourious Basterds was completely without moral content (my initial inclination) or else the morally weightiest of Tarantino's films (Traxus's take and the one I eventually came around to, though it's not exactly incompatible with the first).

Spoilers about the end of the film follow.

What we were specifically trying to work out was the way the film-within-a-film works as an (obvious) metacommentary on the whole, with a shot-reverse-shot logic that repeats itself almost exactly inside and outside Nation's Pride. This, Traxus was arguing, suggests a kind of formal moral equivalence between the Nazi enjoyment of their propaganda film and our enjoyment of ours, on at least two levels. First there is the level of content, which we both agree is the weaker of the two. (Nazis constitute a threat that is now so vanquished as to seem completely impossible and even cartoonish, and the impossibly excessive fantasy of a alternate history in which Hitler is machine-gunned to death by Jewish-American GIs breaks whatever remaining hold the catharsis of the moment might have held on us.) But on the level of subject position Traxus has, I think, a much better point—the can't-miss-it repetition of shot-reverse-shot, over and over, really does suggest the audience's willing construction of this violence in a way that approaches actual moral weight.

But for my money it's the scene that follows the cinema massacre that finally implicates the audience in this fantasy of brutal violence. Faced with the unhappy choice between letting Nazi Hans Landa walk away from the war a false hero or else executing him against orders, Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine squares the circle by carving a swastika into Landa's head (but otherwise letting him live). It's an act he's done earlier in the movie, but the callback is (first) a moment of genuinely pleasurable narrative cleverness that (second) turns rapidly disturbing as the actual scarring is performed on-screen. Several bloody shot-reverse-shots later, Aldo says something like "I think this is my masterpiece" directly into the camera, followed by an immediate cut to the credits: WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO, with Tarantino thereby claiming his guilt/authorship over all these events and, by implication, once again accusing us of our participation in them.

Only here do I feel as though Tarantino has drawn out my dark side. Everywhere else, the violence in Inglourious Basterds is not pleasurable, at least not for me. (There's also not all that much of it, hyperbolic reviews aside; most of the film is calm dialogue.) I don't revel in violence, even against Nazis, and I'm no more glad to see an actor playing Hitler pretend to be shot than I would be to see him pretend to get away. The cinema fantasy scene and the film's other violent set pieces have, I think, no real vibrancy to them; it's only Hans Landa who gets under my skin and exposes my inner possibilities of hate to light. (And I don't think it's exactly fair to blame Tarantino for something that was inside me all along.)

While not exactly parodic, the rest of the violence does take on (for me) a cover-charge quality, a price that must be exacted to get to the good stuff. And there's quite a bit of good stuff here; this is a great and enjoyable film, with good acting, typically skilled directing, and a better-than-expected script. If it's not exactly a perfect film, it may well be a perfect Tarantino film. And I would humbly suggest that anyone who likes Tarantino's other films, but hates this one, isn't evaluating this one on the merits but is instead letting the fear of irreverence towards the Holocaust cloud their aesthetic judgment. It is, to butcher Adorno, still possible to make an exploitation flick after Auschwitz.

The standard defense of Quentin Tarantino’s films is to wearily dismiss the standard criticisms—i.e., they’re movies about movies; the violence is hyped up and out of context; the atmosphere is juvenile—as if they were outdated and banal. But don’t fall for it.

Because such a tactic is like a lawyer defending his client by wearily deriding a “guilty” verdict as uncool: “I know what you’re going to say, members of the jury, that killing a candy-store owner is wrong, heinous, morally repugnant, blah blah blah. Could we just get over it and talk about the defendant’s technically impressive approach to crime, and about his phenomenal knowledge of the history of murder?”

Lee Siegel pans Inglourious Basterds (and Tarantino in general) at the Daily Beast.

As promised, some Sunday links.

* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn't have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.

* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon's defense of Betty Draper.

* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.

* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives' loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that "appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum" and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.

* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.

* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore's next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.

"In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left."

* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.

* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.

* Game of the night: Max Damage.

* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring ("Writing the Future") begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg profiles Quentin Tarantino and his latest film, Inglourious Basterds.