Considering Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
Note: It’s impossible to discuss this film in any meaningful fashion without a detail-saturated recapitulation of its shock ending. The more incredible aspects of the finale are likely common knowledge by now, given that they’re among the most important and intriguing facets of the film. Those who wish to remain innocent of Inglourious Basterds’ climax, however, should turn away from this essay altogether until they’ve seen the film.
Restraint, which has been largely absent from the Tarantino canon for the past decade, is graciously – though only partially – restored in the World War II adventure yarn, Inglourious Basterds, making this his most rewarding picture since 1997’s Jackie Brown. Finally, those fearing the prospect of QT having permanently marooned himself in the copious, cartoonish bloodletting of the two Kill Bill pictures or, worst yet, the aimless, jabbering menace of Death Proof can exhale a sigh of relief, even if those same connoisseurs of high-brow vulgarity like Jackie and Pulp Fiction won’t be able to ferret out much resembling “maturity” (the word that continues to dog the video store maestro more than any other) in his latest.
The restraint in question manifests itself as a renewed sense of dramatic balance and carefully construed tension; effortlessly juxtaposed (and commensurately thrilling) virtuoso dialogue sequences and action set pieces abound, servicing the story rather than diverting it. His focus restored, Tarantino proves himself again able to tell an engaging cinematic story, clearly and well, an ability he’d seemingly forsaken as he attempted to isolate his polar strengths (meandering conversation in Proof, comic violence in Bill) rather than organize coherence between them.
Basterds’ story is divided between two plot lines: The first focuses on French cinematheque owner Shosanna’s (Melanie Laurent) attempt to disrupt the premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda effort starring the “German Sergeant York” Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who happens to be courting the comely projectionist; the second arc details a Dirty Dozen-type band of Jewish American soldiers, “The Basterds” led by the “part-injun” gentile Lt. Aldo Raine (Hollywood’s favorite accented uber-ham, Brad Pitt), as they’re dropped behind enemy lines with the sole objective of each man collecting, as Pitt’s iron-jawed hick shouts, “One….Hunnert….Nazi….Scalps.” Graphically depicted, but not often and never garishly so, the scalping amounts to psychological warfare: It's not enough for the Basterds to hunt and kill Nazis, they aim instead to breed vulnerability into the Third Reich via brutal Native American war tactics.
That Shosanna is the sole survivor of her Jewish family’s massacre at the hands of the evil Nazi Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (the brilliant Christoph Waltz, in what may be the best Tarantino-directed performance since Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield) makes both strands revenge stories of a kind, perfectly keeping with QT’s post-Jackie obsession. The split between the plots effectively bisects the holocaust and our postwar outrage into the personal and historical: Shosanna’s tale personifies revenge in the particular, as she’s spurred to retribution as the result of personal tragedy, whereas the Basterds represent the necessity for Jewish revenge in the abstract. No single Basterd is given a personal history or motivation; their need to kill is based more on a post-WWII historical reckoning of Nazi atrocity, and audiences are expected to walk into the theater armed with a preconceived understanding of and appreciation for the mission’s urgency and righteousness.
Two-pronged Jewish vengeance against Nazi atrocity provides Tarantino with a doubly fortified podium for commemorating an alternate history in which the consummate bad guy gets a more thorough comeuppance administered by his victims directly. The picture culminates in the Fuhrer himself attending Goebbels’s premiere at Shosanna’s theater, and dying simultaneously at the hands of Shosanna (who locks her theater doors when the Nazi aristocracy has been seated and sets a pile of explosive silver nitrate film aflame), and the Basterds (who bombard his private booth with machine guns), presumably ending the war in the European theater months before the Battle of the Bulge. In the movies, in Tarantino’s movies, Hitler is deprived the privilege of poisoning himself in a dank bunker, thus affording justice (depicted as recoiled holocaust in the literal sense) a second chance at the ultimate prize in Inglourious Basterds.
Is this historical do-over problematic? Most definitely, primarily because Tarantino skirts all discussion of morality, historiography, justice and ethics, situating his film on the ostensible stability of Western culture’s staunchest Manichean division between good and evil. In an embarrassing comparison, the recent Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie (about a real-life plot by SS officers to assassinate Hitler) can certainly claim a more nuanced approach to Nazis culture, though it was hardly Tarantino’s approach to do so (1). This dichotomized morality has bred nothing but a pious laziness in film artists such as Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benini. Does Tarantino, like these saints of recent Serious Historical Cinema, here exploit Jewish suffering to legitimize his pre-fabricated compulsions? Yes, without a doubt, but it’s arguable, and surprising, that he does so to a much lesser extent than his contemporaries. In this sense he is (somewhat disingenuously) casting himself as Tarantino the Innocent, incapable of offense and operating under the belief that he’s providing the world a shattering catharsis it had never considered or was too embarrassed to propose or pursue with such grand scale (2). This is in tremendous contrast to the pale, grandiose suffering offered by Spielberg and co., who obnoxiously mine survivor’s guilt in the service of schmaltz. Tarantino’s taking up of arms against the 20th century’s bogeyman is, while often loathsome and never completely unimpeachable, certainly preferable to the feebleness (mistakenly defined as “stark realism”) of the aforementioned. But that's faint praise, indeed.
While Pitt’s redneck gunner and Laurent’s scarred vixen hack admirably at the Nazi regime, the cinema itself emerges as the 20th century’s true avenging angel. The institution of cinema is given the most complex treatment in the film: it is variably seen as propagandistic muscle (3); the key to an intellectual resistance (Clouzot's occupation-era, anti-fascist masterpiece Le Corbeau is showing at Shosanna’s cinema), a tactical maneuver (a double agent’s intelligence qualifications arise out of a knowledge of prewar German cinema), recorder of history, entertainment alternative to the killing (Lt. Raine claims that their ultra-violence is “the closest thing to movies” his men see), and finally rectifier of the historical record. Cinema prevails, Tarantino claims, by embodying our hopes and fears, offering a chance at both fact and fiction, each a branch of Great Truth in essence. It’s not insignificant that the Basterd played by filmmaker Eli Roth is the supplier of the Hitler killshot. The potency of the director is remarked upon several times, and Roth (in a hollering, grating performance) is, in his last scene, the most literal manifestation of that, next to Shoshanna’s auteurist interruption of Goebbels’s screening (shortly before blowing the place up, she projects a short film in which she addresses the audience, informing them of their forthcoming demise.)
Her brief, climactic moment as auteur occurs a few hours after Shosanna states, in a semi-cordial argument with a German private/film buff: “This is France, we respect our directors,” and fittingly the film contains more conversational references to the cinema and filmmakers (King Kong, G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, David O. Selznick, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Max Linder, and Weimar cinema among others, are all given significant mention) than any other in recent memory (4). Inglourious Basterds not only boasts the most film-centric storyline of recent memory, it also marks the most overt fawning directed at the movies in Tarantino’s oeuvre. Past references in his films have been obscure and tucked away into the corners of the frame, never confronting their target audience with any sense of history or theory. While there are certainly instances of the same in this picture, it’s refreshing to see the consummate cineaste profess his love of the cinema as strongly as he does his fondness for women’s feet. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino could potentially spark more of an interest in film history with this film than all of the previous century’s countless television documentaries extolling the virtues of classic cinema combined. Such is Tarantino’s popularity worldwide, and such is his feverish devotion to his craft, now finally at the forefront of his work.
From a technical standpoint, the most attentive of cinema’s students simply knows where to put the camera and what to do with it, just as he always has. His tracks, pans and beats are, as ever, completely without flaw. The entirety of the film is pure cinema, with nary an errant angle or cut, as if it were assembled effortlessly. If there is a director for whom a concept of “cinema” is itself a style of direction, an attainable ideal or hygienic distillation of the medium’s past masters and hacks, it is Tarantino, whose images often lack idiosyncrasy and sweat despite perfect, efficacious execution. Similarly, DP Robert Richardson’s colors and textures are characteristically brilliant; this ongoing collaboration (their third film together) is proving more even-handed and fruitful than the teaming between Richardson and Scorsese, which is tilted decidedly toward the genius of the former. It’s relieving to see an action film made with tripods and dollies, concentrating and focusing kinetic activity rather than spilling it across an unstable image as in the Jason Bourne pictures and that series’ disciples. The soundtrack is often annoyingly filled with Morricone trots and inexplicably anachronistic pop tunes, but it’s largely effective in mounting tension, and it’s not hard to say that music in general has a more relaxed presence than in either Kill Bill film. As a technician, there is no uncertainty to Tarantino’s master status. If only his thematic preoccupations could claim the advancement of his visual and narrative prowess.
As the film closes on Lt. Raine committing one last act of mayhem (carving, as he's been in the habit of doing with prisoners, a swastika into the forehead of Waltz' Nazi so he'll never assimilate to a postwar society) Pitt utters the film's final line, “this might just be my masterpiece” before the camera cuts to black with Tarantino’s writing and directing credit. It’s easy to interpret this as Tarantino’s message to his audience (the self-mythologizing actually begins at the outset, with the succession of quite identifiable fonts that had introduced his previous films used to present the cast and crew of his latest), but, unfortunately, it looks like his masterpieces – those first few works of unnerving intensity, bereft of too much generic specificity and posturing – are behind him.
Inglourious Basterds / USA / 2009 / Color / 153 min. / Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino / Starring: Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger, Daniel Bruhl and Jacky Ido.
Notes:
1 - If there ever was an actor who could benefit from a creative revivification at the hands of Tarantino, it would be Cruise, who sports more charisma and bravura than the previously Tarantino-resurrected John Travolta, Robert Forster or Pam Grier, and seems headed for a similar rock bottom in popularity that all three experienced before starring in QT pictures.
2 - I’m aware that “what-if” scenarios, commonly labeled “Uchronia” (though Wikipedia disputes this usage, preferring “alternate history”) involving the expedited demise (or victory) of the Third Reich have played out in popular culture since war’s end, but they’ve certainly never been so operatic in scope or widely seen and/or discussed, making this the most visible variation on the concept, and should thus be held to a higher standard. Also, the fact that most of such fiction is literary is worth considering, as the potency of the cinematic vis-a-vis our conception of history is far greater than literary fiction's influence, but that's a topic for another day. An interesting bibliography of uchronic fiction (most of it unrelated to Nazism) can be found at www.uchronia.net.
3 - The propaganda film-within-the-film was directed by Eli Roth, who claims Battleship Potemkin as its partial inspiration, apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s work, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with how this may register with audiences knowledgeable of political and film history. An interview with Roth concerning the sequence can be accessed at http://www.avclub.com/articles/eli-roth,31811/
4 - The website Scarecrow Video has attempted an itemized account of Tarantino’s references in the film. This has become a natural occurrence when a new Tarantino film is released, and such lists inevitably expand as audiences digest the film over time. The list (the best one I came across during a brief search) can be found at http://www.scarecrow.com/2009/08/27/before-they-were-basterds/
Note: It’s impossible to discuss this film in any meaningful fashion without a detail-saturated recapitulation of its shock ending. The more incredible aspects of the finale are likely common knowledge by now, given that they’re among the most important and intriguing facets of the film. Those who wish to remain innocent of Inglourious Basterds’ climax, however, should turn away from this essay altogether until they’ve seen the film.
Restraint, which has been largely absent from the Tarantino canon for the past decade, is graciously – though only partially – restored in the World War II adventure yarn, Inglourious Basterds, making this his most rewarding picture since 1997’s Jackie Brown. Finally, those fearing the prospect of QT having permanently marooned himself in the copious, cartoonish bloodletting of the two Kill Bill pictures or, worst yet, the aimless, jabbering menace of Death Proof can exhale a sigh of relief, even if those same connoisseurs of high-brow vulgarity like Jackie and Pulp Fiction won’t be able to ferret out much resembling “maturity” (the word that continues to dog the video store maestro more than any other) in his latest.
The restraint in question manifests itself as a renewed sense of dramatic balance and carefully construed tension; effortlessly juxtaposed (and commensurately thrilling) virtuoso dialogue sequences and action set pieces abound, servicing the story rather than diverting it. His focus restored, Tarantino proves himself again able to tell an engaging cinematic story, clearly and well, an ability he’d seemingly forsaken as he attempted to isolate his polar strengths (meandering conversation in Proof, comic violence in Bill) rather than organize coherence between them.
Basterds’ story is divided between two plot lines: The first focuses on French cinematheque owner Shosanna’s (Melanie Laurent) attempt to disrupt the premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda effort starring the “German Sergeant York” Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who happens to be courting the comely projectionist; the second arc details a Dirty Dozen-type band of Jewish American soldiers, “The Basterds” led by the “part-injun” gentile Lt. Aldo Raine (Hollywood’s favorite accented uber-ham, Brad Pitt), as they’re dropped behind enemy lines with the sole objective of each man collecting, as Pitt’s iron-jawed hick shouts, “One….Hunnert….Nazi….Scalps.” Graphically depicted, but not often and never garishly so, the scalping amounts to psychological warfare: It's not enough for the Basterds to hunt and kill Nazis, they aim instead to breed vulnerability into the Third Reich via brutal Native American war tactics.
That Shosanna is the sole survivor of her Jewish family’s massacre at the hands of the evil Nazi Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (the brilliant Christoph Waltz, in what may be the best Tarantino-directed performance since Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield) makes both strands revenge stories of a kind, perfectly keeping with QT’s post-Jackie obsession. The split between the plots effectively bisects the holocaust and our postwar outrage into the personal and historical: Shosanna’s tale personifies revenge in the particular, as she’s spurred to retribution as the result of personal tragedy, whereas the Basterds represent the necessity for Jewish revenge in the abstract. No single Basterd is given a personal history or motivation; their need to kill is based more on a post-WWII historical reckoning of Nazi atrocity, and audiences are expected to walk into the theater armed with a preconceived understanding of and appreciation for the mission’s urgency and righteousness.
Two-pronged Jewish vengeance against Nazi atrocity provides Tarantino with a doubly fortified podium for commemorating an alternate history in which the consummate bad guy gets a more thorough comeuppance administered by his victims directly. The picture culminates in the Fuhrer himself attending Goebbels’s premiere at Shosanna’s theater, and dying simultaneously at the hands of Shosanna (who locks her theater doors when the Nazi aristocracy has been seated and sets a pile of explosive silver nitrate film aflame), and the Basterds (who bombard his private booth with machine guns), presumably ending the war in the European theater months before the Battle of the Bulge. In the movies, in Tarantino’s movies, Hitler is deprived the privilege of poisoning himself in a dank bunker, thus affording justice (depicted as recoiled holocaust in the literal sense) a second chance at the ultimate prize in Inglourious Basterds.
Is this historical do-over problematic? Most definitely, primarily because Tarantino skirts all discussion of morality, historiography, justice and ethics, situating his film on the ostensible stability of Western culture’s staunchest Manichean division between good and evil. In an embarrassing comparison, the recent Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie (about a real-life plot by SS officers to assassinate Hitler) can certainly claim a more nuanced approach to Nazis culture, though it was hardly Tarantino’s approach to do so (1). This dichotomized morality has bred nothing but a pious laziness in film artists such as Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benini. Does Tarantino, like these saints of recent Serious Historical Cinema, here exploit Jewish suffering to legitimize his pre-fabricated compulsions? Yes, without a doubt, but it’s arguable, and surprising, that he does so to a much lesser extent than his contemporaries. In this sense he is (somewhat disingenuously) casting himself as Tarantino the Innocent, incapable of offense and operating under the belief that he’s providing the world a shattering catharsis it had never considered or was too embarrassed to propose or pursue with such grand scale (2). This is in tremendous contrast to the pale, grandiose suffering offered by Spielberg and co., who obnoxiously mine survivor’s guilt in the service of schmaltz. Tarantino’s taking up of arms against the 20th century’s bogeyman is, while often loathsome and never completely unimpeachable, certainly preferable to the feebleness (mistakenly defined as “stark realism”) of the aforementioned. But that's faint praise, indeed.
While Pitt’s redneck gunner and Laurent’s scarred vixen hack admirably at the Nazi regime, the cinema itself emerges as the 20th century’s true avenging angel. The institution of cinema is given the most complex treatment in the film: it is variably seen as propagandistic muscle (3); the key to an intellectual resistance (Clouzot's occupation-era, anti-fascist masterpiece Le Corbeau is showing at Shosanna’s cinema), a tactical maneuver (a double agent’s intelligence qualifications arise out of a knowledge of prewar German cinema), recorder of history, entertainment alternative to the killing (Lt. Raine claims that their ultra-violence is “the closest thing to movies” his men see), and finally rectifier of the historical record. Cinema prevails, Tarantino claims, by embodying our hopes and fears, offering a chance at both fact and fiction, each a branch of Great Truth in essence. It’s not insignificant that the Basterd played by filmmaker Eli Roth is the supplier of the Hitler killshot. The potency of the director is remarked upon several times, and Roth (in a hollering, grating performance) is, in his last scene, the most literal manifestation of that, next to Shoshanna’s auteurist interruption of Goebbels’s screening (shortly before blowing the place up, she projects a short film in which she addresses the audience, informing them of their forthcoming demise.)
Her brief, climactic moment as auteur occurs a few hours after Shosanna states, in a semi-cordial argument with a German private/film buff: “This is France, we respect our directors,” and fittingly the film contains more conversational references to the cinema and filmmakers (King Kong, G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, David O. Selznick, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Max Linder, and Weimar cinema among others, are all given significant mention) than any other in recent memory (4). Inglourious Basterds not only boasts the most film-centric storyline of recent memory, it also marks the most overt fawning directed at the movies in Tarantino’s oeuvre. Past references in his films have been obscure and tucked away into the corners of the frame, never confronting their target audience with any sense of history or theory. While there are certainly instances of the same in this picture, it’s refreshing to see the consummate cineaste profess his love of the cinema as strongly as he does his fondness for women’s feet. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino could potentially spark more of an interest in film history with this film than all of the previous century’s countless television documentaries extolling the virtues of classic cinema combined. Such is Tarantino’s popularity worldwide, and such is his feverish devotion to his craft, now finally at the forefront of his work.
From a technical standpoint, the most attentive of cinema’s students simply knows where to put the camera and what to do with it, just as he always has. His tracks, pans and beats are, as ever, completely without flaw. The entirety of the film is pure cinema, with nary an errant angle or cut, as if it were assembled effortlessly. If there is a director for whom a concept of “cinema” is itself a style of direction, an attainable ideal or hygienic distillation of the medium’s past masters and hacks, it is Tarantino, whose images often lack idiosyncrasy and sweat despite perfect, efficacious execution. Similarly, DP Robert Richardson’s colors and textures are characteristically brilliant; this ongoing collaboration (their third film together) is proving more even-handed and fruitful than the teaming between Richardson and Scorsese, which is tilted decidedly toward the genius of the former. It’s relieving to see an action film made with tripods and dollies, concentrating and focusing kinetic activity rather than spilling it across an unstable image as in the Jason Bourne pictures and that series’ disciples. The soundtrack is often annoyingly filled with Morricone trots and inexplicably anachronistic pop tunes, but it’s largely effective in mounting tension, and it’s not hard to say that music in general has a more relaxed presence than in either Kill Bill film. As a technician, there is no uncertainty to Tarantino’s master status. If only his thematic preoccupations could claim the advancement of his visual and narrative prowess.
As the film closes on Lt. Raine committing one last act of mayhem (carving, as he's been in the habit of doing with prisoners, a swastika into the forehead of Waltz' Nazi so he'll never assimilate to a postwar society) Pitt utters the film's final line, “this might just be my masterpiece” before the camera cuts to black with Tarantino’s writing and directing credit. It’s easy to interpret this as Tarantino’s message to his audience (the self-mythologizing actually begins at the outset, with the succession of quite identifiable fonts that had introduced his previous films used to present the cast and crew of his latest), but, unfortunately, it looks like his masterpieces – those first few works of unnerving intensity, bereft of too much generic specificity and posturing – are behind him.
Inglourious Basterds / USA / 2009 / Color / 153 min. / Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino / Starring: Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger, Daniel Bruhl and Jacky Ido.
Notes:
1 - If there ever was an actor who could benefit from a creative revivification at the hands of Tarantino, it would be Cruise, who sports more charisma and bravura than the previously Tarantino-resurrected John Travolta, Robert Forster or Pam Grier, and seems headed for a similar rock bottom in popularity that all three experienced before starring in QT pictures.
2 - I’m aware that “what-if” scenarios, commonly labeled “Uchronia” (though Wikipedia disputes this usage, preferring “alternate history”) involving the expedited demise (or victory) of the Third Reich have played out in popular culture since war’s end, but they’ve certainly never been so operatic in scope or widely seen and/or discussed, making this the most visible variation on the concept, and should thus be held to a higher standard. Also, the fact that most of such fiction is literary is worth considering, as the potency of the cinematic vis-a-vis our conception of history is far greater than literary fiction's influence, but that's a topic for another day. An interesting bibliography of uchronic fiction (most of it unrelated to Nazism) can be found at www.uchronia.net.
3 - The propaganda film-within-the-film was directed by Eli Roth, who claims Battleship Potemkin as its partial inspiration, apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s work, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with how this may register with audiences knowledgeable of political and film history. An interview with Roth concerning the sequence can be accessed at http://www.avclub.com/articles/eli-roth,31811/
4 - The website Scarecrow Video has attempted an itemized account of Tarantino’s references in the film. This has become a natural occurrence when a new Tarantino film is released, and such lists inevitably expand as audiences digest the film over time. The list (the best one I came across during a brief search) can be found at http://www.scarecrow.com/2009/08/27/before-they-were-basterds/
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