**Major Spoilers (for both films)**
Mélanie Laurent as icy French-Jewish victim Shosanna
Inglourious Basterds is a vibrant resurrection of old-fashioned filmmaking. It recalls the day when films could move slowly in repletion with full-blooded dialogue, as long as the exchanges were taut with drama and emotions. Of course, mixed into Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's surely Kill Bill-induced propensity for meta flourishes - in this case, the segmentation of the film into titled chapters, hyper-flashbacks (the tonally interruptive HUGO STIGLITZ interlude), and the inexplicable Samuel L. Jackson voice-over that accompanies these "hyper-flashes," those latter two which I feel deserve some delicate consideration in light of their ostensible ostentation, and which I'll begin by offering this consideration, before anyone inclined to dismisses them outright. In light of my own belief that narrative film really should be more uninhibited towards pedantry, as long as integrated in ways artful or sophisticated, I feel compelled to embrace the seemingly indulgent moment with the defense: what else to do with such a profusion of information you feel compelled to - the need to, as Tarantino admirably does - educate your audience with?
In this case, putting such particular locution in the mouth of Jackson is, really, the only way the film could have gotten away with it. Imagine a neutral voice giving the spiel on nitrate celluloid and we would have been witness to an ugly and meaningless Frankensteinian graft of narrative fiction film with documentary. With Jackson's recognizable, highly characteristic voice used in lieu, we instead are hearing the voice of cinema itself speak to us (I know, I know...), as if that is exactly what it is supposed to do, in its storytelling omniscience and oneness with history. Perfectly plush with this are Tarantino's choice visual accompaniment, driven by his finely pitched sense of pop semiotics: in the Stiglitz backstory, Stiglitz and a host of his unknown, slaughtered Nazi high commanders are first represented as pictures in a German newspaper; in the film's final narration regarding the nitrate, a disembodied hand is seen burning a test sample of nitrate cinema in what is clearly an act of pure practical demonstration... but it is also perfectly lit against a deep black background: stock footage made transcendental, the industrial truth, the divine fact of the material, now further evinced in a velvet black vacuum (like Godard's cosmic pebble held up into the nothingness by Emily Brontë in Weekend). Also in this final narration is, very appropriately, a clip from Hitchcock's Sabotage. These are documentary-isms, but of true cinematic cloth, where it is Hitchcock's film that seems to take on retroactive, premonitory wisdom - prophesying Tarantino's alternative history, where life and cinematic representation are equally integral and enlightening, as Tarantino's promise for true deconstruction (of both cinema and reality) finally comes to fruition in his two most recent pictures.
But aside from this, and the rather shameless apologist take I just offered on the Jackson cue, Inglourious Basterds often comes off as Tarantino's most traditional film, recreating classical Hollywood storytelling in all its theatrical and steadied beats. Scenes are not trivialized as pure sine qua non for a concision plot, but are instead stages being set for weighty dialogic interplay, in which leisurely time takes on the politics and psychology of its fraught wartime interaction; takes on the expounding of historical context; and allows the audience to absorb and deconstruct the thematic intricacies of his screenplay, as lithe with its scrutiny of history and war as Death Proof is thick with trauma and tragedy.
Despite this newfound traditionalism, Tarantino's highly stylized aesthetic remains, to great effect. Tarantino has shown himself very inclined to taking moviemaking to aesthetic extremities, very French in their hope to reveal film as tome of all storytelling concepts, strategies, and symptoms - this being done in order not to call out cinema, but to have cinema reach its fullest potential to provoke intent critical presence from viewers when watching films. The virtue in a filmmaker with the correct strategy to artifice in his arsenal is the implied desire that his or her work be looked at just as if a painting on a gallery wall - hand stroking the chin, one eyebrow haughtily raised in a preliminary skepticism that films must break through before it can be allowed to move us wholly. The whole shebang.
Tarantino revives a tradition of classical storytelling that will gladly, enthusiastically equate story-telling with the reality of historical minuteness and movie-making with the importance of historical awareness (if not accuracy, quite apparently...) - historical awareness being a rhetorical viewpoint and a liberated moral imperative of retrospection, that being something which even history books - those integral developmental tools of forcing neutral, strictly political history down already apathetic kids' crapholes in the schoolroom-politik - often neglect themselves. He has written his screenplay with such deliberate structure, so as to accommodate the glacial pace, that he is practically acknowledging and directly forsaking the shorthand, visually over-dependent ways of modern filmmaking, and his screenplay is practically brimming with this ulterior sense of purposefulness. Inglourious Basterds is a film that does not take it upon itself to circumvent context in order to cater to shortened attention spans, resistance to learning, and disinterest in engaging with the undeniable fact that the most compelling narratives, the most telling details, and the key to true understanding - in real life - do in fact unfold with the trickle of seconds and the duration of minutes, and the most efficient way to glean knowledge is time spent with the basic exchange of words.
Inglourious Basterds happily comes "very close enough" to giving me just
what I wanted from it - that being, a regard for history that is educated, that is engaged, and that deals seriously with war, its mechanics (seen in the Hans Landa character's mercenary playing of the field), and its repercussions (seen in the doomed opposition between Shosanna and Fredrick Zoller) - and it does so critically, with a sense of distance (as is pretty much a given with Tarantino's playful artificiality and methodical visual attention), and with a straightforward and clearheaded refusal to exploit, as we see egregiously done in NATION'S PRIDE - the fake real-life non-fictional fiction narrative propoganda film-within-the-film by fake Joseph Goebbel, which we see featured in
Inglourious Basterds.
In Inglourious Basterds, the titular Basterds and their dishing of Nazi comeuppance serves only peripherally, without a wish to provoke applause and cheers (even the big death of You-Who-Watched-the-Film-Know-Who is dark and burdened instead of the glorious ahistorical shenanigan we expect). The Basterds are ciphered swiftly in two short scenes. In the first of the Basterds' scenes, we see Brad Pitt's Lieutenant Aldo Raine presenting, practically for the viewer (since I'm sure the troop are already pretty clear what their M.O. is), the incantation needed to initiate the soldier into the group-think, in this case a group-think of abnormal sociopathy. In the second scene, we get to see them at work and we are given one brief look at a scalping to register the absurd commitment these men have put upon themselves. The men are presented as blithe, unquestioning, and with a strange combination of belief and ambivalence regarding their objective. No emotional connections are to be made with any of them. Their existence and their practices we see registered only in the fears and frustrations of the Nazi and the Nazi eminency, who at this point are mostly concerned with preserving the last breath of dignity and control the regime has left in it -- which is exactly what the Basterds threaten above all other opposing units, even over whole battalions. Their unusualness and vindictiveness serve as the most scathing reflection of Nazi power's own unusual and vindictive cruelty.
It's very important to point out that the Holocaust is respectfully left off the table in this film, so that it can focus on being a statement on a separate humane matter (of which the persecution of the Jews is certainly not entirely removed). This alternative statement is strongly anti-war, and in a most particular way. Instead of equating war with evil acts, it cuts to the banal locus of it all and equates war to insensate social politics. The film is a statement against categorizations; that is, those plural terms denoting nation and creed, which so effectively perpetuate the systematization (nationalist, geopolitical, jingoistic, etc.) that creates the philosophically illogical game of war. These terms end up being the logically insubstantial justification for our inhumanity. Terms such as "Nazi," even... and as pointedly as that particularly culpable indoctrinated group deserves such damnation to a label of their evil (in the film, justice is to literally carve it into their skin), the gesture of category itself is amorality personified. Humane commentary runs strong throughout Inglourious Basterds, and Tarantino's undeniably analytical, deconstructive methods reach for a higher, more sophisticated, more higher-minded instructiveness than the usual war film. Thus, the film reveals itself not a statement on Evil [German] People, but instead a very productive statement on inhumanity as it most often is: borne from mechanical politics. Waltz's initial monologue in the film's first scene practically contains the whole message of the film: we often irrationally categorize groups, i.e. the "verminous," "plague-spreading" rats vs. cute squirrels. But rats don't deserve it as there's hardly, truly a difference - just prejudices that last from stigmatized social histories and the unfortunateness of socialized divides.
The film generally knows that we know this Adolf Hitler is behind serious atrocities. The Basterds are fueled by a disrespect for German life that is spurred now by something more than personal vindication (which is probable, since the clear majority of the unit are Jews), more than innate militarism - it's a disregard for the Nazi commonwealth that is as irrational as it deserved, embedded only because of the fact sides have been chosen, dictators elected, and everyone's wartime roles have been codified, petrified, carved in stone, largely depending on what language one speaks and not who anyone is (I refrain from talking about "the individual" because the term is a loaded concept all on its own, and none of those connotations of those other ethical debates is apropos to what I'm getting at here). As history is want to do, the sides have been determined, the politics necessitated, and best they not be tampered with (you know, with various frivolous, apolitical things like philosophy, humanism, and transcendental understandings). Only a select few - those intelligent and cunning enough - are aware of the awful thing called politics... and their morals usually suffer due to this understanding. It is often they who can speak multiple languages (without giving themselves away, as Michael Fassbender's British lieutenant does due to not only a linguistic umbilical cord to his prided mother country, but also, one can say, in his irrepressible British properness). Hans Landa is one of those select few. The reason he is such a towering figure in the film is because his loyalties only lie with himself, having mastered multiple languages because even his native German he does not insist defines him.
Landa represents pure, cold politics - devoid of even Hitler's repugnant-but-all-too-pitiably-human neurotics. Landa is pure smarts, with what would be an almost transcendent rhetorical intelligence and perceptiveness of the world's pithy emotions and human vulnerability and foolishness, if he only weren't also so devoid of morals and humanity. It's rather impressive to get such a pure materialist character from Tarantino with Landa, one who he actually doesn't want us to empathize with on any level. Stuntman Mike was given the warmth of nostalgia for his stuntman days, and Ordell Robie a dumb pride in his life success, but all Landa has is his appealing but nevertheless materialist desire for a house on Nantucket Island.
Inglourious Basterds evokes a veritable playground for war to show itself as something not virtuous and true, but filled with snakes and snake pits, and where the sad few still able to feel things (Shosanna and Fredrick, by virtue of their respect for virtuous cinema) end up finishing themselves and each other off due to the scars on their humanity inflicted by war and the lords of war.
Tarantino's self-referential regard for cinema is the ideal prism with which to reveal the enforced "characters" that make up war, from the lowliest (Shosanna and her colored amor, Marcel) to the highest (Hitler and Winston Churchill), and how these numerous cinematically and jingoistically solidified and chic representations are a rejection (justified and unjustified, more justifiable in the case of Shosanna's personal loss) of true humanity and an absorption of these people into the self-destroying realm of pure politics - which, in the cinematic regard, is the very definition of propaganda... which this film clearly argues is an affront to cinema, and only to be cleansed by burning it all to the ground.
Again in cinematic and clearly not historical regard: how else can the likes of Shosanna change history, if not by divesting all her humanity to the depraved single-mindedness of a cinematic Avenging Angel? How else can the Basterds do the same, without giving themselves up to the senseless and practically-mythic grandstanding of their methods? If you think about it, they really make no sense: their behavior, their "collecting," seems more suited for a band of bounty hunters, if it wasn't that their only payment was a seeming giddy investment in the idea that the Nazis really really deserve it. Operating purely out of some mission to instill fear into the Third Reich and not necessarily to operate strategically (that is, until Operation Kino goes into effect), the Basterds are pure cinematic fantasy. Their lack of backstory, emotional stakes, any sensical context, and their raffish impassivity works to group their arbitrary, autopilot acts with all other characters working purely militarily and for no apparent personal, vulnerable impetus (and that includes the covert British military intrigue-mongers and Bridget Von Hammersmark, also passion-devoid and implied merely mercenary in her Allied siding). The only contrast provided is by Shosanna, and the impassioned, personal justice she looks for.
The brilliance of Inglourious Basterds is I don't feel Tarantino is so much indicting the Basterds' violence, as it is often read (nor, in conjuction, any enjoyment of their violence by audience members, at least audience members aware of the morality at play in his film). This is an acknowledgment of the completely symbolic function they serve in validating our deepest revulsion to the Nazi regime and what they did. After all, unlike Von Hammersmark and the prim and proper strategics of Operation Kino's British masterminds, they aren't murdering for the sake of comfort or victory... they do it because the Nazis have been doing the awful things they've been doing. It is on this separate, more fantastical level, which is ironically both the more dismaying and the most human, that we are asked to register their mercilessness. If indeed moral infection has clearly crept into their actions, considering their brutality and enjoyment of their brutality, the infection has originated from a fusion of circumstance: both the Nazi's unforgivable inhumanity as well as the way war and its politics (yes, while unavoidable in this world) is inherently, philosophically antithetical to reclaiming humanism, and seems logistically to actively undervalue personal lives (which is supposed to be what is most pressingly at stake in occurrence of war in the first place) in favor of the politik and its self-interested leaders. The Basterds serve as transgression of the Nazis (in their literal brutalities), but also as transgression of the depersonalized landscape of war-time: as a troupe so renegade, they seem free to act purely on the vindictiveness of a disgust that is very personal (but not, as has been mentioned, due to none of them being allowed real emotional character, to an extent that their existence seems pushed into the realm of the figurative).
Tarantino separates the Basterds in that sense, and it is for the better, so that the film does not come off as a puerile, shitty message film about "For shame... sinking to their level!" But, at some degree, it is his purpose nevertheless to highly demonstrate the meaninglessness of the Basterds' brutality, which he does by, as mentioned, never attaching to their acts any personal and genuine emotional agenda behind their obligation to Nazi terrorizing - the only attachments being the baggage of war: the self-given evil of Nazi Germany and their own default status as the Good Guys - a distinction that the film deliberately presents as pure politics, and thus entirely petty and "a-humane" (not "inhumane," since they do, ultimately, stand in for our, very human, desires for moral retribution against the Nazis and their obscene mindset).
But while the film maturely deems it not its place to avert and avow the common passions held against Nazism by its victims, the film's great message is that rhetorical, intellectual point about the meaninglessness of humankind's divisions. As the Captain Eli Roth's Bear Jew beats to death early in the film says: he did not win his medal for killing Jews, but for bravery - as all soldiers do, many of innocent mind, albeit accepting an honor philosophically skewed to its very marrow... something soldiers of all nations do, if at varying levels of obscenity. This man may be a Nazi now, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps psychologically he isn't an Amon Goeth (or a Hans Landa), the only difference between him and one of the Basterds is he was born in the wrong nation and was taught to not value the life of a people just as good as his own. That is, equal, or, the same (a pipe dream of a philosophy, but one surely most fulfilled by art and film: inorganic and so of course devoid of racial insecurities and identity inequalities; made and viewed by the enlightened...).
Forgive the digressions. Inglourious Basterds inhabits a point in history when the realities of victim and victimizer have evaporated from the scene, leaving only skeletal structures and frameworks, representations and symbols with which the only thing to do is analyze. "This is not a point in World War II, but a temporally current point, a now in which all narratives and storytelling based on WWII are in purview." I know how that may sound, but rest assured - take that last sentence and forget I said it. It would be counteractive to characterize this film as giving us some terribly didactic statement on "historicity," or a terribly misjudged statement on any absence of victims and victimizers, as if Tarantino's belittling the existence of war in order to make intellectual, peacenik-y ethical commentaries. Yet it is making its ethical commentaries. All I want to get at with the above is to somehow point out the film's skeletal illustration of WWII, stripped down to a cast of players thrust to us as representations of their given nations and sides, as well as the film's pared-down delineations of the structure to war and its intimidating inaccessibility - that is, the void between us and its great small-mindedness (which the film processes and discovers the ironic upside to: that it could all be boiled down to "Kill Hitler and end the war tonight"). The film as a key to unlocking the accessible in the crazy, terrible logistics of war is a good way of looking at it. This "accessibility" is its promotion of totalizing humanity, as well as Tarantino's indulgence in pro-cinema, anti-propoganda commentary. Since this is a film in which there is pretty much zero humanity on display, this message is rooted in its rhetoric and what is between its readily apparent lines.
Tarantino picking war apart down to its skeleton is seen in how each chapter very methodically introduces one new actor in its playing field. For instance, Chapter 1 gives us Landa as a special unit officer in the Nazi High Command. Chapter 2 is devoted to the Inglourious "terrorist group," Chapter 3 to the personal avenger Shosanna, and Chapter 4 shrewdly starts us off with the British ops, very covertly sneaking their way into our previously brazen war film and entering into a parternship with Chapter 2's previously renegade Basterds. Each with one short segment, we are told all we need to know about them with the economy of a story that has already gone where it's bound to go (as history is). But it's not so much victims and victimizers have "evaporated," as I had put it, but that, while they do, surely and sadly, exist, they are conceived as if film characters in an overly machinated and morally obtuse genre film - which this film (I argue) is not. The film is a brilliant dual look at and conflation of the moral obtuseness of war with the moral obtuseness of perceptions of war, such as those of the morally obtuse characters within the film and, yes, filmmakers and their war movies, so often rather morally obtuse.
The film's characters are not written so as to be superficial but as to be manifestations of the prejudicial role-playing that, essentially, is what makes up war. This is very much a poignant statement the film makes, and one not plagued by high-minded tactlessness. The film asks us to understand the victimizer, sure, but hardly is it a spineless defensive. It's acuteness is in the fact that it does not come off as a work of some contemporary moralizer or modern bleeding heart looking back at WWII and making his statement on its meaninglessness when millions of innocents died and the world was at the grip of a true tyrant. What Tarantino does is root it in its past, but a past that is already an allegory, a satire, and a farce itself. Millions die because of their contemporary farce. Tarantino doesn't have to let anyone off the hook with a post-modern jab at "historicity." One may take issue with Tarantino's exaggerated, simplified history, but I would take issue with confusing that with a belittlement of it, which I see is thoroughly opposed to Tarantino's story at its very philosophical core.
Again, the brilliance of IB is that it makes its point without giving us a "Nazi with a heart of Gold" or a "non-Nazi with a change of heart" (that is, a realization of inhumanity; for example, a Basterd taking pity on a Nazi). It knows that if it gave us a Nazi with a heart of Gold, it would be apologizing for the Nazis, which is again misguided, and if it gave us a non-Nazi with a change of heart, it would be showing us humanity does indeed exist... just as long as you're not an Evil Nazi, which would again be morally misguided.
While the Good/Bad distinction is muddied, Landa's final turn of the screw remains a horribly offensive breach in the Good/Bad distinction we do nevertheless cling dearly to. It also is a pointed illustration of how often human principle and personal belief is not always at the center of political persuasion. The evil of Landa is his playing under the rules of politics and bureaucracy and material gain, not principles (which are always preferable, as thoughtless as the Basterds' own principles are), and his one misstep is his belief that the rules of war are applied as fastidiously as he applied them by an enemy not interested in politics, only the allotment of just deserts.
Its eponymous group of soldiers rendered mere background players, the film's title thus taking on a nice sense of irony and metaphor, exemplified by the superb character posters taglined "[Actor] is a Basterd"). All the characters thusly labeled bastards, the film does show a motivated tendency to toy with the conventional placements of sympathies: the first scene has a sympathizer sell out, the film's heroes and heroines are a sizzling mixture of mercy and mercilessness, and the barroom scene is a tense standoff made of equal number sheep and wolves (and Tarantino very judiciously uses this scene to reveal Von Hammersmark's own baseless callousness - before having Landa himself call her out later with a line that burns with implications: "And when you purchase friends like Bridget von Hammersmark, you get what you paid for."). Landa, of course, has no qualms with "turning Good" and denying his nation and countrymen. The film's devotion to bold drama fleshes out Shosanna and Fredrick Zoller, both clearly standing as the film's emotional anchors and figures of innocence... of course, both quickly corrupted and disposed, Tarantino refusing to short-shrift the ugliness they have inhabited as pawns in wartime games of depravity.
While both are sullied by war, Shosanna, of course, is in the role of the victim, and her pitiable status allows her complete separation from matters of militarism and brutalism... at least in the interim, before she gets the Nazi High Command in her grasp. It also gives her the time to find a kindred soul in Marcel, their relationship being pretty much the film's only completely unsullied bright spot. She and Marcel are the only completely sympathetic character and her division from the rest of the characters is prominent.
Zoller, on the other hand, is the character that must - but unfortunately so - be laid susceptible to disdain and critique. The disadvantages are completely court-side, and the court's all his: he's a Nazi, he's politically climbing, and he's a man (as opposed to Shosanna as a female). But the film affects valiantly to give him all the benefits of a doubt, and he ultimately serves sympathetically, and as the film's statement on the deleterious effect of political favor (and, more digressively, the masculine empowerment that can be affected by military politics) - all the factors with which one can damn this man, but not in sacrifice of any innocence that may lie underneath all of that, which Tarantino shows embodied in his moral respect and value of cinema.
Much subjective stances have been taken on Zoller's culminate act of brutishness when spurned by Shosanna the penultimate time, and his intimation of an ensuing sexual assault. As I see it, there's is no way we can be sure of this, or that the moment aims to corroborate Zoller's potential to rape, or his overall "badness." I personally feel his moment of weakness, giving in to his understandable frustration with her and very quickly after the military aggrandizement of his self, strikes one of the film's biggest chords of tragedy, in seeing what war victories claimed and power felt can do to someone, particularly a man - that gender already so inclined to sexually dominate. But, even as both him and Shosanna lay on the projection room floor bleeding due to his final act of vindictiveness, I do not feel his ostensible threat, and her probable fear, is at all enough to certify that there is a push from the film telling us to condemn this character and re-evaluate his previous gentility as all a Nazi ruse.
I think there's much worth in saying, yes, we're not sure what he'd do, and that his threat and Shosanna's fears do exist on a fundamental ground. But saying that his action and a statement (and his excitation at the thought of projection booth sex) more than halfway certifies that he'd then rape her, and that the "evil Nazi" persona precludes the chance he'd pull back, feel sorry, apologize, etc., is counteractive to the film's statement on how politics (which is from where the two character's failed relationship are essentially borne from) are not to make up the individual; that beasts are not the individual, but nurtured largely through experience in socialization (even beasts in matters of sex, as in-built and tantamount it is, are much of the time exacerbated by socialization in patriarchal or masculine norms).
The corruptive socio-political forces that are shown to be at work on Zoller and his ugly side function like so: Zoller likes a Jewish girl this much, for reasons of deep kinship and not of superficial lust... but then Hitler and Goebbels inflate him to this much [and this is when I spread my arms to some arbitrary length with a matter-of-fact look on my face] of this (militaristic, political, and, to Zoller's sure pleasure, Movie-land salience)... and then her refusal to accept him as anything other than a uniform - THIS much! [again, arms out to an unspecified length] because she's so full of anger... can result, tragically, in making him this much of a monster, one who most definitely has the ugliness to lash out, break through a door, and intimidate a woman he lusts for and maybe (just maybe) may have also reached the point of ugliness to sexually attack. And alas, the sexual and political power he inhabits, mixed with the romantic hurt dealt from a girl he wants so hard to emotionally connect with on a level removed from power and vainglory, brings out the beast. And to what extent, I don't feel the film wants us to measure, and so condemn.
In conjunction with the innocence that we are made to see lay beneath this character, the film is making a clear argument that Zoller is - to some extent, for sympathy and understanding - blind and unwitting to his encasement within and susceptibility to the power he inhabits, triply and court-side, and that I'll list once again: a Nazi officer, a political influence, and a male (again, in relation to Shosanna, female).
Bring your attention to that one false scare where Tarantino psyches us out with the arrival of a car in front of Shosanna's movie theater as she changes the marquee. An anonymous officer uses an act of intimidation in order to get Shosanna into the automobile, in order to be taken to the luncheon with Zoller and Goebbels. The scene exists not just for a throwaway moment of tension, as it may seem at first, but really in order to suggest the chains of power, regimented and insensate, that results through military bureaucracy. Zoller would have not approved of such intimidation being used with Shosanna (and this is very clear when Zoller later greets her with surprise that she'd had at all accepted his "invitation"), but, in his now highly elevated position, the military has deployed a separate, lower arm of the military to fetch her, a lower officer whose abuse of coercive authority is squarely out of his control - or, in any case, is probably so typical, Zoller would hardly have any reason to fret over it. He does not commit the mistreatment of Shosanna, but he's blind or has turned a blind eye to the turmoil and fear he is in fact causing her. He feels he can in fact still win her over, wholly and purely, and his promotion of her theater is another misguided stab at connecting with her... because, yes, he's that dumb, that much of a simpleton - but not necessarily a monster (yet, at least).
Tarantino tempers all their meetings with the bustle of the world and environment around them - with the one exception being their first meeting. Inflected only with his lovestruck affectations, there is not a word from Zoller about his reputation: it's only movies. It is not until their next meeting at the cafe that, surrounded by adoring citizens and autograph seekers, that he succumb to playing the "celebrity" card and boasting in the blood from his hands.
Everyone's a basterd in Tarantino's WWII worldview.
So the big question is: despite all this, does Inglourious Basterds still really come off as so boorish that its preconceived reputation as a revenge fantasy for the Jewish sticks?
I suppose considering the unfortunate marketing (the self-aware luridness likely not enough to overcome their ostensible surface of war-fetishizing), its reputation preceded it:
But if it does to some extent serve as cathartic wish fulfillment, doused in the drowsing fumes of violent comeuppance, it is all treated with a sense of distance and informed totally by the petrification of a nation's shameful period in history by History (thus giving impetus to the film's fantasy-history elements), attributing almost complete blame on Hitler (and Goebbels even more so, since Tarantino's film seems mostly an outcry over cinema utilized abusively), or, most accurately, Hitler's diabolical perfecting of war's ability to create crystallized cruelty, avarice, and pettiness in all parties.
The film's not needing to throw at us that "Nazi with a heart" in order to make us understand its rhetorical vantage point is probably its strongest testament to its vantage point: that Nazi Germany's negative representation in history and media is, yes, something they must live with... but nevertheless, it is something that is contrived - a Nazi is not a Nazi, but an individual person who has been contrived into a Nazi, due to various external forces as well as weaknesses within. (And this is extra true for movie Nazis.) The film's insinuated analogy between the contrivances of politics and the contrivances of narratives (as in propaganda, and, as a side note, in many fiction war film) is, further, a direct parallel to how Hitler contrived his evil ideology, its irrational prejudices, and the mass serving it and moulded to all its contours. Nazism is not people. It is the ill of nationalism and desperation and insecurity, blown up and preyed upon in a grand political scale by Hitler.
As far as I see it, 10% of the film (at most) is Tarantino indulging stylistic excess and cheerful violence. 90% of Inglourious Basterds is an elaborate and learned, humanistic and surprising-in-detail recreation of the international playing field at wartime, whether that field is the realm of cinema & propoganda production, language games & ethnic identity, far-reaching political hands (see The Best Film Ever's Rod Taylor playing Winston Churchill), or the very battleground and a terrorist unit undermining the facade. If it's not as sensitive as I may see it as being, it's certainly respectful and smart and rich in perspective, playing against generalizations and effectively not falling into the facile, leaden simplicity of the "arhetorical" (to riff off the term "ahistorical," so commonly thrown at IB) war film such as last year's WWII opus and Nazi apologia Valkyrie.
Inglourious Basterds - 8.5/10
I had quite the experience watching Death Proof, for I believe my third time, with two friends, both who are female. Both are undergraduates studying feminist theory. Both were shocked and disturbed by the film's first half. Both were delighted by the film's second half. Both were undeniably enraptured by all the girl power, and one, being gay, was surely titillated.
But I was kind of taken aback when, by the end, both exhibited not a trace of sympathy left to give Stuntman Mike. But no, neither were they basking in the thrills and blood-thirst. The two companions in question are not film aficionados, adherents, or even much of casual filmgoers. Neither are at much a level of desensitization, nor have they watched films enough to have practiced the art of critical detachment or distancing. Thus, they were filled with an unbridled vehemence for Stuntman Mike, without any residual ironic head-banging or Kurt Russell accolades (I sort of doubt I can ever show them any Kurt Russell film, even that hockey one, and not expect them to feel revoltion towards him). They quickly analyzed the film as so much as it most typically is to be seen: as a quasi-feminist film, providing to the viewer a revenge fantasy posed against men who function on taking out their frustrations through the abuse of women.
What this most recent viewing showed me was how deep a wound it is, for those predisposed women, the fact of their physical vulnerability to violence and sexual violence... and far be it for me to tell them they had to see the awfulness that was Stuntman Mike's own victimization. But watching the film with them made me realize how potent the film is, because as they nervously bit their fingers (actually considering the possibility Stuntman Mike might escape the three women in the end, which goes to show their lack of initiation in the formula of exploitation film), I was allowed to perceive a sort of gut-wrenching sadness in the ending that I wouldn't feel if I was watching it alone, or with critically distanced cineastes (typically male ones): a sadness in seeing how large of an advantage males take over females, and how the endgame for expurgation of the trauma of this reality - for womenkind in humanity at large - can be so provoked by Tarantino's troubling illustration of the tables turning through the practiced exploitation of empowerment desires and vindication needs by a whole swathe of moviemaking, where such inner wants can be manifested (usually in fantastic plot elements, such as this film's - essentially - rape-made-vehicular).
It showed me what makes this film so profound. The film is not a feminist film. It's humanistic on an incredibly universal scale (a statement I make, pretty much verbatim, about my favorite film of all-time The Birds). We are given a tangled web of people feeding the all-too-common domination impulse found within ourselves, permanent in the human condition and a garish part of the primitive being. Humans are inclined to physically rule (men sexually prevail) and emotionally condescend over others, and Death Proof reveals the extents people will go to assert a place in the food chain that isn't the bottom.
In the first half:
We have men (the ringleader played by an extra smarmy Eli Roth) revealing very clearly to us the maliciousness behind their boorishness: their premeditated desire to sexually exploit, and their single-track minds to satisfying their libidos.
We become privy to a hothouse of schoolyard resentment between Jungle Julia and the Rose McGowan character, Pam, and are allowed to feel the sting and see just how insurmountably a relationship - years in the making, built off a dynamic of dominance-resentment - can thoughtlessly exist, borne from the strategic pinprick of all three facets of inequality combined: physical (Pam: "Sorry I'm built like a girl, not a black man"), emotional (reference: the psychologically alpha Julia, plus her strikingly defensive aversion to acknowledging any extent of Pam's worth and substance as a human being, surely due to a refusal to acknowledge any of her own faults and cruelty towards her), and material (see: Julia's burgeoning career as Jungle Julia and ability to climb the ladder, and leave all her peers in the dust of small-town Texas).
Jungle Julia is a swaggerer who we learn has propositioned her close friend Butterfly (or Arlene) - shown very carefully to harbor much less steely a disposition - for a very philosophically troubling, philosophically complicated game she's struck with her radio listeners, and, really, a whole world of men. That is not to say she will not realize her missteps and prove she can show real tenderness to her sacrificed friend. But seeing the understanding she shows to Butterfly in contrast to that which she does not to show to Pam is an incredibly real and accurate presentation of how people work: accept some people, persecute others, and just make sure, whichever you do, that you don't sacrifice yourself in the process.
In the second half of the film...
The conversation consists of funny, popping, honest, candid, refreshingly open, uninhibited, and, most importantly, perceptive banter about the nature of relationships: what we're called for to put out and put in when in a relationship, the necessity for shrewdness in relationships, and the thin line between romance and sexual exploitation (soon enough morphing into the film's general study of the thin line between victimizer and victim).
The Rosario Dawson character Abernathy wants to believe in the integrity of romance, but everyone else is telling her it doesn't exist - that she must work the politics and power shifts. In the end, we see her succumb to the non-integrity of victimization, in her reveling in the pain and murder of another - which is foreshadowed in the tangly moral and emotional games that are played when the women are at the redneck mechanic's cabin house. We see how hurt Abernathy is that she isn't one of the "cool kids," over how backhandedly her "tough chick" friends Zoë (Zoe Bell) and Kim (Tracie Thoms) try to put to her their superiority over her gently, and over how she is grouped with the girly actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who she, given, can talk about Vogue with. Rosario, though, in one of the film's most slyly fascinating and sophisticated plot touches, is shown to at least be more sophisticated than her actress friend, because she's the one whose dignified and apparently high-style-knowing air brings her the serendipitous acquirement of an Italian Vogue.
Intellectual superiority is not enough for her, though, and we see her practically whore out her friend, conveniently clad in a cute cheerleader outfit, to the leering mechanic, in order to fulfill her feeling of lack.
The thoughtless, out-for-blood mentality that finds the three women chasing after the injured Stuntman Mike - who has suffered mangled and broken limbs, but never ever the sting of being dominated by another human being, scared out of his wits at the pain and blood caused by another hellbent on power (serving as explicit manifestation of the bruises upon his manhood and fears of emasculation that must already unremittingly be occurring due to his aging and his retirement from his profession, and that he is now taking out through cold-blooded murder and ugly acts of male domination) - strikes a note of disconcertment and sadness, not jubilation, in its absurdity and the pointedness of Abernathy's joyous revelation to the thrill of power. The film's display of revenge and comeuppance is not at all necessarily a display of gender vindication. It's exaggerated statement on how the need to dominate can suck a world dry of compassion, and how in a world already so often fixed against compassion (represented by Stuntman Mike's free reign to stalk, which was itself unleashed by a taunt borne from Julia's on-radio bluster, emphasizing the viciousness of the cycle - not to mention the law enforcement who insist on not doing anything about Stuntman Mike due to their distaste for proving they are as impotent to convict him as they know they are), a complete embracement of merciless violence is perhaps the only way to go - and it's true, especially for women most of all, this sort of cruel entertainment is most closest to being deserved.
But as far as I am concerned, the sad truth is that the need to dominate is the greatest ill of this world. It is primitive and biologically inherent, manifested most often through men's sexual urges. It is roundabout and cyclical, often emerging from the deepest feelings of those who once suffered from their own victimization, who then are compelled by their right to "empowerment" (my apologies to all those fighting racial and gender inequalities out there, for as much as the word "empowerment" troubles me, it is a requirement to assert when those who have power so readily have it) by taking their part in the back-and-forth fist fights of environments characterized by power playing.
It occurred to me how similar the modus operandi of both Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds' are: taking very sensitive topics of victimhood, revealing the absurdities of violence and diffusing them with rich tableaus of the intricate circumstantial (for example, war) and societal conditions (politics, sexual compulsion) that color and calibrate people's worst tendencies.
Add to that, as I've before profusely claimed, Death Proof is just an amazingly beautiful film cinematographically. The whole scene in the bar is just directed to the utmost perfection with such fastidious care: its meditative selection of close-ups of the most glassy and reflective of objects (shot glasses, a dividing glass panel, bottles shimmering of neon and claret, the jukebox mechanisms, etc.); that breathtaking, "How exactly did they shoot that?" direct-overhead shot of the ground as infinite droplets of rain splash upon the dirt in a pristine reflection of blue; the flow of shots that finds Butterfly retreating outside for a cigarette; the steady hold on Pam as she asserts herself against Jungle Julia to Stuntman Mike, eyes shimmering of the inner metal she desperately clings to; the presentation of environment and depth, with the Julia posse seen out of focus as we're spending time at the bar with Mike and Pam, and vice versa, or the distance Pam's voice must traverse to query Tarantino's bartender character Warren the legitimacy of Stuntman Mike's "Stuntman" moniker and the way the distant Warren regards Stuntman Mike as just that - nothing less, nothing more. His terrible pastime is kept separate from his ultimate mundanity. The film's vivid capturing of barroom melancholia and drug-abetted dissatisfaction is really unheralded. The way the neon colors hue the twilight outdoors as the rain pours and smoke wafts. Its love of the female form is undiscriminating, and its love of their simultaneous vulnerability and power is likewise. The lap dance sequence, misguidedly removed in the Grindhouse release for a quick gag, is not just sexy fun, but a scene dripping with emotional gusto as we see sex at its most joyous and carefree (represented by the carefree, unburdened women who watch - and dance, as Robert Rodriguez's nieces do [with nepotistical abandon] - around her) can still be laced by vulnerability in whatever party.
The character of Butterfly is treated with such sensitivity and empathy, her highs and lows tracked with such intimate understanding, that her role strikes me just as potently as any other cinematic martyr, like Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ. Her image (as well as Pam's) being made to recur spliced in among the film's end credits montage of 50s era yearbook pictures of anonymous girls (played against the April March track "Chick Habit") strikes a chord of amazing symbolic and semiotic profundity - a mournful tribute to a whole slew of forgotten, woebegone womanhood. We see Butterfly (or the stunning actress herself, Vanessa Ferlito) seated in a car as she smiles gently, touchingly to the camera. We see Pam goofing off for the camera, a shot of her back to us as her platinum blonde wig dons a pair of shades and boogies to the music.
Their imagistic recurrence in the film's ending credits has them play warmly to the camera, as if having especially earned their remembrance: they were both representative of the weaker in the film, both giving up their lives without having really been given the opportunity to take advantage of others. So, they are given shrine to, among other immaculate meek, knowingly resurrected after having given themselves up as victims for our moral and emotional bettering. It is an allowance for them to be at the top after the painful passion of their fear, vulnerabilities, and ultimate deaths, in all the confidence given to them by grace of spiritual purity and their burden of being the gentler creatures in this world (not meaning that they are saints, but "pure" as pre-given contingent of their worldly weaknesses, and relative to those "endowed" who would find it so easy to take advantage of them - as Jungle Julia and Stuntman Mike do, to both, if at varying degrees). In the end credits, with that split second shot of Ferlito, Tarantino suggests: when all's said and done, and matters of power and dominance lie as ashes to ashes, dust to dust as the human beings who played into them, it is Butterfly sitting at the wheel. It resonates with tenfold poignance.
Death Proof - 9.5/10
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Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds
Death Proof, unlike Inglourious Basterds (although the reading is often read into both), is definitely about moralist cinematic deconstruction. It is definitely about voyeuristic violence and troubling movieland power, and on a personal scale (i.e. gender and female vulnerability).
I think the case people make for Inglourious Basterds, in this regards, is not that it wags its finger at us for being moviegoers propagating bloodlust and power due to an incontrovertible divison (as is the message in Death Proof, with the division being sex - its usually either sex or race when it comes exploitation flicks), but that we're put into this position in the first place when there is no division (we're all human, full of "human-ness," regardless of nationality or race).
I do not quite see Inglourious Basterds as similarly arguing against itself, in some sort of meta self-indictment over violence in cinema - which some people do choose to see in the film. As anti-Nazi as the film is, it never truly cares to implicate itself with a tone of propaganda or an excess of "pleasurable violence." IB puts us in the same position as Shosanna. While we're not being blamed for wanting to inflict brutal punishment on Nazis, we still are made to see how sad it is we have been justified to sacrifice part of our humanity. It is because of the film's grand antagonist, given flesh through the character of Landa: politics, which have contrived our divisions, and made violence somehow justifiable for some (to enact) and deserved by others (to bear), when in a perfect world, political divisions wouldn't exist.
Violence made justifiable and deserved is the definition of war. The film makes us feel that, that violence and war is petty - even though it is a fact of life, a fact that includes our lucky placement on the side of the "justified" and, under conditions of history already unraveled and art made ready for therapy, we can be given the chance to revel in Hitler's metaphorical death.
So, IB's intellectual points on politics and war I feel don't mesh very well with any moralizing on cinema spectatorship and the bloodthirstiness of the viewer. The commentary exists in the film, yes, but they can't really be looked at together. To further this argument, a point to be made about exploitation cinema (which is what Death Proof is, all the way through, but IB only partly) is (and should be) a somewhat different point than that to be made about propaganda film (which is more encompassing of IB's commentary). There's a straight-up moralizing clarity to pointing out the trouble in our revelry in Death Proof's violence, but there's more to it than that in our revelry in IB.
Stuntman Mike may have been vile, but he's human, at least in the very biological sense of the word - what Hitler did to humanity in WWII is very much not, and Tarantino wants our response to the violence in IB to more about that (as opposed to in response to seeing Evil Germans getting butchered as if in a torture porn flick). Tarantino realizes this is nothing to finger wag at. The dynamics of egoistic power and the enjoyment of dominance in Death Proof is a different matter - the girls at the end killing him had no profit but their personal empowerment.
The similarity of the film's strategies - in their taking of film genres often based around their concessions to our more cruel, if very human and very sympathetic, desires, and then deconstructing them - is incredibly rich, and almost uncanny. It makes me wonder what Tarantino must end up doing next, considering his taking another genre he has not yet worked in and building up a similar rhetoric would seem not in the odds.
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And while I am on the topic of domination urges, victimization, and how best to deal with these...
There's a network of internet blogs united under the banner name
HOLLA BACK, which exist for different regions of the country, and even other territories. Their mission statement on their
California incarnation is as follows:
Holla Back Cali empowers anyone, not only those from California, to stand up and resist all forms of street harassment. Street harassment humiliates many women each day. We encourage women to HOLLA BACK at street harassers!
It's a sound idea that strikes me as one of the best ways to deal with these things.
Here's links to some other Holla Back blogs, including Holla Back NYC, which seems to have been the main progenitor:
The mother shoos the girl further away.
