Did Anyone Get Inglourious Basterds?
Hollywood Kills the Nazi's...Again.
When I first read about Tarantino’s latest film last year I thought, fuck me, not another Jewish Revenge on the Nazi’s, America saves the world, Second World War genre film. For godsake, we get it ok. The Nazi’s were really evil. The Jews copped it really bad. The Americans were really cool and saved the universe from a Fascist hell on Earth. Message received and understood. Enough. And then just the idea of glamourising an American guerilla unit slaughtering Nazi’s, oh yeah thats so cool, like would it be cool to portray Taliban skinnin’ scalps of US forces in Afghanistan and muttering hip Arabic musings as they do it, would that be really wild man? The Enemy is a concept that’s, as they say, in the eye of the beholder. Or so my righteous little inner moralist philosophised. And after the Kill Bills and Death Proof one just felt let down by Tarantino, whom we knew had such an awesome talent as a film maker, a real artist of the cinema, a true auteur. It was like a master chef serving us up a rushed hamburger and fries. C’mon son, we know you can do better. So I went to see it last year expecting to be pissed off and disappointed. But I loved it. And last week I watched it on the plane and loved it two times. It is an absolute masterpiece of cinema. Easily Tarantino’s best movie, better even that Pulp Fiction.
Why it’s so good is that it takes all those World War Two genre films and parodies them, animates them, extrapolates them to absurdity, and brilliantly strings together the whole ‘Jews get revenge on the Nazi’s through post-War film making, America portrays itself as the saviour of the free world’ cinematic paradigm so prevalent in films, especially American ones. And in the end, as the most charastmatically evil Nazi gets the Swastika carved into his forehead with a big Bowie knife, it becomes the Masterpiece of that genre. (Incidently its a widely disreputed historical theory that it was the US that defeated Germany, it was actually the snow-deep battles fought by Soviet Union on the Eastern Front that bought the Nazi’s to their knees, yes the Communists defeated Nazi Germany, and the fowl atomic US terrorism on Japan was just an egoist show of strength. Google it, do the research).
The film fanatic Tarantino has made a film about WW2 films rather than WW2 itself. So much of Inglourious Basterds is familiar because the scenes, colours, landscapes, and characters echo from so many War films we have seen.
As a revenge movie it is divided into two parts, as cinema itself, embodied in the female Jewish theatre owner, and the American film makers, characterised as the Basterds guerrilla gang, and culminates in a bloodbath of slaughtered Nazi elites trapped inside a movie theatre. The ‘film makers’ unload an endless and absurdly exaggerated amount of firepower on the Nazi’s, including Hitler himself, locked in the cinema, while the big screen explodes in flames with the Giant Face of Jewish revenge reciting (in English, thats very important, representing Hollywood film) a proclamation of death-to-the-Nazi’s. It’s all there in that firery bloody smoke-filled extermination chamber. The whole metaphor. The Nazi’s are trapped. Caged in time, trapped in history. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Post-war revenge films are like that. Past the fact. Flaming hate-filled revenge unloading over and over again on a long dead corpse. Tarantino has masterfully bought it all to a wicked climax. After this there can be no more Jewish revenge films.
I don’t know much about the Academy Awards and all that. I know the actor portraying the Nazi, Christoph Waltz, has deservedly won a few awards around the traps already. But it will be interesting to see if Inglourious Basterds rates a mention in the big categories of Best Director, Best Film etc. There would be some strange irony in that. I’ve searched around a bit to find similar readings on it like I have theorised and haven’t come up with anything. And interviews with Tarantino are mostly bland and devoid of his deeper directorial intents. Don’t these journalist think and research a bit before talking to their subjects? Surely there is something out there. Apparently when the film opened in America the Jewish community was lined up around the block, and were somewhat disappointed. But The Australian Jewish News loved it, though seemingly missing the whole point – “This revenge fantasy is historic revisionism, but for the good guys”. and “a film you can take you Holocaust survivor grandparents to see”. Ah, Revenge is sweet.
