possible spoilers
These are the last words in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and they’re so gloriously cocky spilling from the lips of Brad Pitt as Tarantino’s doppelganger, Lt. Aldo Raine: brash, foul-mouthed, scarred and uglied up and from an unsexy part of the USA and constantly smirking, unruffled by anything that happens to or around him, that I think he might be right. Tarantino, that is, speaking through Aldo Raine.
Despite the early trailers that made much of cartoonish violence and Pitt’s cartoonish accent, it’s certainly Tarantino’s most mature movie–despite those easy gags, it’s a mile away from the diatribes that revelled in tossing around taboos and dropping n-bombs in his earlier movies.
Pitt, though he gets the last word, isn’t even the star of the movie–that would be Melanie Laurent as Shoshana, a Jewish cinema owner who saw her family killed at the orders of Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz’s Col. Hans Landa, after betrayal by the man who hid them. The garish revenge of Raine and the Basterds is nothing compared to her steely resolve, and she gives the movie emotional heft that sneaks up on you and only hits you when you realize how far she’s willing to go.
Really at its heart this isn’t a movie about revenge–Tarantino already did that, glorifying and personifying revenge in The Bride in Kill Bill–but about movies, about the power and the joy of movies, but mostly the power. The way cinema can destroy, can inspire, can write and rewrite history. It’s not enough to kill Nazis–Shoshana must make a movie and splice it into one of Goebbels’ propaganda pieces, asserting her self, her freedom through cinema.
Tarantino’s greatest strength as a filmmaker has always been that he’s a film junkie: he can reference layer upon layer of high and low art. But the strongest references here are to his own movies–a closeup on Shoshana’s lips nearly identical to one from Pulp Fiction but with stakes much higher, and a drop-in grindhouse title on top of a German Basterd (who despite his cartoonish intro also lends weight–Til Schweiger is dangerously, broodingly dominant onscreen, emanating as palpable hatred as Shoshana’s every time he’s onscreen with the Nazis).
Even the Basterds, who start off as Jewish revenge porn (a crew of Jewish soldiers from the USA dropped in behind enemy lines to destroy as many Nazis as possible?), remind you where the film is really going. Eli Roth, nicknamed “The Bear Jew” and lovingly shot (never thought I’d find the man responsible for Hostel sexy) evokes a remark from Raine that watching him beat Nazis to death “is the closest we get to going to the movies.”
They strike back through spectacle, if not explicitly through cinema. They don’t just kill Nazis; they scalp them (how American-cinematic!) and leave mutilated bodies to be found, and carve swastikas onto the foreheads of those they let live–in a way, a nod toward what he owes to real victims of the Holocaust–a reminder that all this happened and no one should forget, and a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words gesture both of mercy (and the word “merci” is never translated in the subtitles, a move that I can’t help but think was intentional, particularly in the intro scene between Landa and LaPadite) and of continuing revenge. The story of the Basterds is their real strength, making them outsize cinema-villains. Storytelling is power.
The film cartoonizes Hitler, defanging him not just through violence but by making you laugh at him. It humanizes other Nazis, though, while not forgiving them–Daniel Bruhl as the young soldier who crosses over into cinema and stars in his own life story is almost likable in his flirtation with Shoshana and his need to flee the larger-than-life sight of himself on the movie screen, the dramatized version of his real-life exploits.
Bruhl’s character isn’t the only one that crosses the borders there–Diane Kruger also does as an actress turned double agent: film into politics into film again. The lines of reality and cinema, for Tarantino, are suddenly more porous, while the rest of his work has always been hyperconscious that it is film. Basterds rockets from the improbable–Mike Myers in heavy makeup recruiting a plummy-accented film critic to go behind enemy lines to meet the Basterds–to the poignantly real, but here it’s not just celebrating the fun that movies are, it’s making a stronger point about them.
Tarantino’s political statement here is that cinema is political. Indeed, the movie wouldn’t have to be about Nazis at all but for the fact that no other regime in history so successfully embraced and used film to create and tell its own story.
I had sworn off Nazi movies before this one hit, but I am also a sworn Tarantino fan. So I may say instead that I hope this is the Nazi movie to end all Nazi movies. After all, it’s so conclusively rewritten history–something perhaps only safe to do with history both as well-known and as disputed as that of Hitler’s Germany. Just the fact that he can make this movie leaves you wondering what kind of movies we’d have had the Nazis won. You get the feeling that for Tarantino, one of the most poignant scenes in the film is Shoshana’s statement that she has no choice but to play German films.
There are a million tiny perfect moments here–a montage set to David Bowie’s “Cat People/Putting Out Fire” with Shoshana putting on her makeup-as-war-paint, a cigarette flying in slow motion through the air to set a pile of film on fire, a request by Landa for a house on Nantucket that I can’t help but interpret as a dig at the Bush family’s own connections to the Reich, Roth’s exuberant outburst after bashing in a Nazi skull complete with Ted Williams references.
I did long for a comeback moment, a la Kill Bill or True Romance, a gesture of personal physical violence from one of the film’s female characters. But perhaps the lack of it is an odd gesture for some sort of peace, at least for Shoshana.
Peace. It’s not really a theme here, but neither is war. Violence certainly is, but for all the vicarious thrills (and heck, I’m Jewish, I enjoy them as much as anyone) the feeling given is less that violence is good and more that those thrills SHOULD be vicarious. Bashing people’s heads in with a baseball bat isn’t actually a solution to a problem, and if you want to burn down the theater to take your enemies out, you may well go out with it.
Still, I haven’t left a movie theater with a wicked grin like I did tonight in a while, and that’s the pleasure Tarantino has always given–lines to quote, laughs to remember later, visuals that stick with you, and stories, always stories.
It’s just that here, his story actually says something.
“no other regime in history so successfully embraced and used film to create and tell its own story.”
Is that you John Wayne?
Is this me?
Yea I liked it too
@William:
The difference being, Hollywood isn’t a creation of the US government, nor has film ever been funded and supported by the government in this country.
Hell, you could read this entire film as an epic battle between propaganda films and independent film–we certainly know which side Quentin is on.
(Shit, now I’ve got another 1000 words I could write.)
Wouldn’t that make it worse? Just “natural” forces of offer and demand fulfilling much better the well-oiled functionality of patriarchal racism, exploitation, oppression, imperialist xenophobia, genocide etc etc etc? We just found where the nazis went wrong and tweaked a bit to perfection (never too blunt, leaving to its own mechanisms and so on)?
But I’m afraid that’s not the case. Wasn’t recently that we saw that the Pentagon had a mild hand in shaping some of the films (or really, it’s not as if the U.S. was a haven of some hands-off State, specially in the past)? Or how the military always has its advisors (correcting little bits of script - I’m sure rarely on technical flaws, as we’ve seen so much of them in things like Hurt Locker) in exchange of equipment, extras, technical advisory and so on? And isn’t the case that the most perfect case of propaganda isn’t so much about a government telling you what to do and what not to do, but you yourself being the perfect censor from the get go (pretty sure nazis didn’t have much trouble when it came to finding patriotic and loyal German-serving homophobic anti-commie Roma-hating anti-Semites)?
Isn’t that sort of the case Tarantino makes when he mentions King Kong and “Winnetou, chief of the Apaches” in the game (yeah, it’s no Full Metal Jacket, even though it was coopted and loved and quoted again and again by the military, but it still mentioned the human capacity of that absorption in its critique - “Hardcore, man!” says the grunt after seeing the little girl getting shot at the end)? Or even the fact that the IB are using an “injun” method (it’s not, we know - it’s another case of white oppression projecting its barbarism so the dehumanized Other can be finished off more justly) to kill off a force that would be us, shamelessly going about, if they hadn’t failed (imagine a offensive caricature of a Jewish man on a European TV ad two hundred years from now releasing a single tear to the camera at us when he sees an oven dropped on the road or some awful exploitative shit like that).
It’s Tarantino, the PoMo ironic blood-gush guy, the dude that finishes off a Wilhelm scream by having it transcend its original propaganda screen, mirroring our theater (and perhaps linking it to the nazi newly-father at the bar - and maybe Wilhelm Reich as well); that links the carving of a swastika in the film and the film-inside-the-film (and set as if it’s onto our foreheads as the character comments on the film itself); the guy who, besides Shosanna, had its few fully-developed characters as the nazis (the Holmes figure in Landa, the war-hero propaganda boy mirroring the american version and the newly-father); the guy who juxtaposes the iconic centralizing speechifying hero-worship vessel of today (the swaggering cowboy, but Pitt today - with little mustache and angular covering of the forehead) with Hitler two times. The guy who can make us root for the incineration of hundreds of people (nazis, yeah, but nevertheless: “Looks like the shoe is on the other foot”); the guy who has the very first scalping of a dead Nazi to be of his own dummy; the arguments about how stories and history are made and so on (”What shall the history books read?”).
I’m not sure I like it (again, the nazis being humanized in contrast with the remaining characters - the Jewish american characters portrayed as mindless savages while the beaten nazi officer proves his worth to his bravery medal etc - and other elements seem so careless that even stormfront people could like it, i.e. “what shall the history books read?”) since there’s very little articulation made with these elements - it might be just little bits sprinkled on something with just a mildly self-conscious raging hard-on for movie violence.