The Power and the Glory

Power or being powerful is not something one would usually tend to associate with a 77-year-old man. That being said, neither is the concept of glory one that would be generally associated with the Jewish, during the holocaust. And yet, Sunday gave me glimpses — albeit possibly played up by my own mind in one case or completely fictitious, as in the other case.

Sunday was made of glimpses of these concepts demonstrated by the demographic or sociographic (I think it’s a word and if not, as usual, I’m making it one) in question. The second reference I’ve made above is pretty obvious, so I’ll start with the first. I’ve seen this guy on a number of occasions on television. In fact, innumerable times. I finally got to meet the man in the flesh just over 24 hours ago. But I digress. The point is he’s been called a “weak Prime Minister” and “soft on Pakistan” among other things and the old boy’s never raised his voice at even opposition parties, leave alone being rude to them (publicly).

On Sunday, all it took was one sentence from him, in his usual calm and composed tone and style of delivery to turn a “weak Prime Minister” to someone who in fact controls the power that is India. The exact statement follows, reproduced in its entirety as delivered by the man, when asked about Pakistan blaming India for terror on Pakistani soil.

He said, “We are not in the business of exporting terror and the government and people of Pakistan jolly well know that these are false accusations.” An unremarkable statement in itself, but it had to be seen to be believed. The expression turned stern, the teeth seemed to be almost gritted and the stress on the word “jolly” made it almost seem like what he was actually saying was “They know goddamn well that we aren’t the ones who are fucking spawning these sons of bitches and Rahman Malik (Pak Interior Minister) can shove his allegations where the sun don’t shine.”

Of course that sort of language isn’t something you’d hear from Dr Singh. Oh no. That’s the sort of talk that’s comfortable at home in what forms the second of these concepts I’ve been ranting about. The glory of the Jews in Inglourious Basterds.See, I told you the second reference was bleeding obvious. Naturally, I was always going to go and watch this film. It was Quentin after all.

CAUTION: HERE BE SPOILERS. STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN AND WANT TO SEE THE FILM. THERE ISN’T ANY POINT IN RUINING IT FOR YOURSELF

Now, before I went to watch this film, I’d heard numerous tales of how it was a very gory film and there were scalpings shown with all the lurid details Quentin is capable of conjuring onscreen. That’s alright. I figured it’d be an interesting enough setting to try out his idea of stylicised violence.

To hell with the violence though, the last time I saw/read anything that rewrote history about WWII was Philip. K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which told a tale about a time where the Germans, Italians (Eye-talians, according to that man Pitt) and Japanese won and took over the world.

But the way SS officials were depicted as intelligent and shrewd people (not insulting their intelligence in anyway) and the fact that they still end up losing (with Hitler getting his visage blown to shreds) at the hands of the Jewish uprising was... well, something I never actually envisioned watching an onscreen fictionalised depiction of. Never. This isn’t a film review so I want talk about the sublime nature of the reams and reams of dialogue in the film. I won’t talk about Samuel L. Jackson. I won’t talk about Harvey Keitel or Mike Myers either.

It’s always exciting to see someone break character. Like Metallica writing Mama Said or like Bangladesh beating India at cricket or to extend the metaphor, like Stephen Sommers making a chick-flick (The Mummy Returns was not by the way, a chick-flick: Ed) or like Franz Kafka writing a joke book. And these two incidents were some of the finest breaks of character I’ve seen in a while.