Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Here are two sort-of anecdotes to start this one off.
1. If you know me personally (I am now apparently speaking exclusively to my wife), you know that I’m a big fan of the so-called Sports Guy on ESPN.com. His blend of sports knowledge and pop culture references, many of which are common to us both, makes for pretty engaging reading. Case in point: his most recent mailbag column raised a very good question regarding fantasy drafts and movie directors. More specifically, if one were to draft directors based on their film credits the way one drafts for a fantasy football team, how would the draft go down?
Almost immediately, my number one draft pick sprang to mind: Quentin Tarantino.
2. A recent discussion about Inglorious Basterds with my friend Dan included the following exchange:
Dan: What’s it like?
Me: Well, it’s long, tense exchanges between characters punctuated by sudden outbursts of violence.
Dan: Soooooo, it’s like every other film Tarantino’s made.
Me: Um, yeah.
What can I tell you? I dig the cat. And I really dug Inglorious Basterds. Not without reservations, mind you, but it’s another big QT winner in my book.
Based on the title and trailer, you might imagine this to be the tale of a crack unit of Jewish American soldiers bent on bringing a war of terror to the Hun. Led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the group carves a bloody swath through rural France, clubbing, shooting, or scalping every German they come across. The occasional survivor receives a most memorable mark on their forehead, a sort of brand that they will never leave behind.
An early scene makes for a memorable moment of Grand Guignol: Raine offers to spare the life of a German commander in return for information on the position of snipers lying in wait, but the commander refuses. After laughing at the man’s proud refusal to divulge information, the infamous Basterd “The Bear Jew” steps forward to brain him with a baseball bat. It’s more than a little reminiscent of The Dirty Dozen, with Pitt as a sort of hammy Lee Marvin.
Curiously, the Basterds exploits make up maybe half of the film. The other half (and really the heart of the story) is concerned with a young Jewish girl named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent.) She is the sole survivor of a family slaughtered by the Nazis, and now hides as a French theater owner. Her path intersects with a famous German war hero, members of the High Command, and ultimately the man responsible for her family’s death. After meeting these men, Shosanna decides to seize the opportunity for revenge at all costs.
Shosanna’s arc calls to mind two of Tarantino’s other female protagonists: Pam Grier’s titular Jackie Brown and Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo The Bride from Kill Bill. Like those women, Shosanna has suffered greatly in her life, and takes a huge gamble to set things right. Her story is predictable but compelling, and also conjures some sort of motivation for the rather underdeveloped Basterds (although come on, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that Jews in the 1940s might’ve wanted a piece of the Nazis).
The key to the movie, however, comes via the dealings of Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the primary antagonist of the film (which is saying something considering that Adolph Hitler makes a few appearances). Landa represents everything that is repellent, dangerous, and compelling about Nazis in our cultural imagination. Inglorious Basterds opens with a lengthy discussion between Landa and a French dairy farmer, and Landa (nicknamed “The Jew Hunter”) comes across as erudite, suave, and monstrous. And so he is for the rest of the film, a murderous creature who is smarter than everyone around him and always two steps ahead of the game. Tarantino’s villains are a natural hook for me, one of my favorite parts of his work. As with characters like Ordell Robbie* and Bill, Tarantino has created a terrific bad guy, and Waltz brings Landa to life with a brilliant performance.
However, there’s something a little extra dreadfully special about this one. (SPOILER ALERT) Unlike most of those other antagonists, Landa survives- not unscathed, but nevertheless alive. He lives by becoming the architect of a radically different conclusion to World War II, one that blows off the head of the Nazi party and secures his own future prosperity in America. Raine carves a nasty scar, but essentially admits that he cannot kill Landa. In this way, Landa becomes a sort of fictional embodiment of the real-life persistence of neo-Nazism that exists in our world- it can be attacked, marginalized, and defaced, yet somehow persists. You might annihilate Hitler, but you cannot remove his mark from history. Here Tarantino is dealing with something far more insidious than greed or jealousy; it’s primal hate for its own sake.
After noting all that I like, here’s one caveat: it’s more than a little unsettling to watch a group of Jews gleefully slaughtering Nazis. While I enjoy watching Tarantino’s genre mash-ups, I acknowledge that he’s primarily a stylist rather than some post-modern ethicist (he’s the Barry Sanders of the fantasy draft- a breathtaking runner who often fails to score or even loses yards on his highlight clips). There’s been much critical consternation about IB, and while I don’t think that IB is trying to repudiate the Holocaust, I have to concede that I walked out of the theater with a funny taste in my mouth. I think that Tarantino’s love of the genres riffed on in this film leads him to create an alternate history that doesn’t wipe away the deaths of six million Jews. What it does is ask us if we can feel sympathy for a German soldier passively awaiting his own murder, or for a theater full of Germans locked into a massive death trap. When we watch that Nazi war hero become sickened by seeing a cinematic version of his exploits, what are we to make of that? Maybe this is the question that I find in IB which I don’t think Tarantino is asking: if cinema might act to passively revise and “undo” the Holocaust, does using Nazis as easy villains deny what we might all (regrettably) share with them?
Maybe I’m making too much of that. The reason I’d draft Tarantino number one overall is because Inglorious Basterds is everything I’ve always loved about his movies- the rambling conversations tinged with menace, explosive violence that is more big bang than ballet, and performances that linger with you long after first viewing. And if there are any serious thematic concerns, maybe I’m just reading a lot into a strudel.
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*Originally created by Elmore Leonard
Have you considered that the theater was an incinerator like the nazi’s used on the jews so in the reversals of all the roles it makes sense that the heroine died.