Inglourious Basterds

I'm going to talk extensively about the movie, so be warned, there are spoilers aplenty.

It's long been my contention that Quentin Tarantino's movies work so well because they are self aware genre pieces, each one seemingly more so it's predecessor. Inglourious Basterds is no exception. Like Kill Bill and Death Proof before, Tarantino is going for a deliberate "genre mash up" style, done in such a way as only he can do. Also similarly to Death Proof, Tarantino is making a movie about movies. But where Death Proof was primarily about the portrayal of women and men in horror movies, Inglourious Basterds reaches for a bigger goal, that of racism in America, and it's manipulation through Hollywood.

The film opens, appropriately enough, with "The Green Leaves of Summer", a song originally used as the opening to John Wayne's own War/Western film, The Alamo. Aside from being a good song that sets a wonderful mood, this connection to John Wayne provides a direct link to the old American Western Films that Tarantino will be will be commenting on in Inglourious Basterds.

The first chapter introduces us to Landa, the ruthless Nazi officer known as the "Jew Hunter". Landa is charged with hunting down all the Jews hiding in France, the new territory that the Nazi's have taken by force. Landa himself is intelligent, charming, and poetic in nature, but beneath that lies a horribly racist, murderous, madman. He is despicable, but also frightening. Tarantino does a fantastic job of giving us a great villain that would be at home in any classic War film, which becomes a little unsettling when you remember that it's not just a War film, but also a Western film. Yes, this is a Western, and the Nazis are representations of the Manifest Destiny Americans.

The Nazi's are our "cowboys" and in the second chapter we are introduced to our "Indians", the American Jewish soldiers known as the Basterds. Tarantino draws a lot of parallels between the American Indian and the Basterds. The Basterds' only mission is to terrorize the Nazis. They do this through guerrilla warfare, which includes scalping dead Nazis, brutally beating prisoners to death, and carving swastikas on the foreheads of the survivors. The scalping plays a significant part in the movie. It's important to remember that scalping was not a widespread practice among Native Americans, quite the contrary, European colonists paid Native American's bounties for the scalps of their enemies. The savagery of scalping was something that was grafted onto Native American's and portrayed as natural through Hollywood Westerns. In the same fashion, Tarantino's Jews learn from the Nazi's. Just as the Nazi's branded Jews with the Star of David, the Basterds brand the Nazi's by carving the swastika into their foreheads.

In the fourth chapter, Tarantino drives home the metaphorical point even further when the undercover Basterds have a confrontation with a Gestapo officer. The group play a bar game that involves trying to guess(through a series of questions) the name of a famous person(real or fictional) written down by the person next to you. The Gestapo officer's card reads King Kong. After a series of guesses he learns that he was "born in the jungle, came to America on a boat, was not benefited by his arrival, and imprisoned(or something along those lines)" and unsuccessfully concludes that he is "the story of the black man in America". When he's told that he is wrong, he matter of factly states, "Oh, then I must be King Kong." Tarantino speaks the universal language of film. Everybody knows King Kong, and if you didn't think about it being an allegory for racism, he expects that you do now, and if you're willing to accept that, then you may be ready to look for the same allegories in his film.

Inglourious Basterds has a fairly straightforward Western plot, but told with Nazi's and Jews in place of cowboys and Indians, and in doing so, gives us a movie where we effectively root against John Wayne, the Hollywood Cowboy icon.

But as I said earlier, this is also a War film, but Tarantino isn't as interested in looking at the effects of War as he is in looking at the effects of War Films(it's a movie about movies remember). The rest of the movie focuses of the War Film as propaganda. The Nazi's made many propaganda films portraying the superiority of the Aryan and the inferiority of the Jew(similarly, Western Films champion the superiority of the White Man over the savagery of the Red Man).

The other story that runs concurrent with the Basterds story is the story of Shosanna, the young Jewish girl who survived Landa's brutal assault in the first chapter. She is now living under an assumed identity and owns a movie theater. After meeting Frederick Zoller, a Nazi parody of Audie Murphey, her identity becomes endangered when he falls in love with her and wants to screen his latest film in her theater. This leads to the climax of the movie where the top members of the Nazi party, including Hitler himself, attend the movie.

The Basterds infiltrate the theater, with the intention of blowing it up. Shosanna intends to burn it all down. As the plans unfold, we being seeing the Nazi propaganda film, a film in which the young Nazi star does nothing but shoot down American soldiers in a violent fashion, all the while the Nazi movie patrons cheer as the Americans are shot down. But then Shosanna's secret plan is put into action. She has recorded her own message over the ending of the Nazi propaganda film in which she proclaims that she's going to burn the building down with everyone trapped inside and they should know that "the Nazi's will die by the hand of a Jew". A fire is started using the theater's film cache, which burns three times faster than paper. As the message plays, the theater is engulfed in flames. The Basterds, their plan having completely fallen apart, improvise by grabbing machine guns and repeatedly mowing down Nazis. Ironically, we are now cheering at a scene in which the Americans do nothing but shoot down the Nazis in a violent fashion. This all culminates in the big scene where Hitler is riddled with bullets. Even after he is dead, and they've moved on to shooting the movie patrons, one of the Basterds makes it a point to go back and continue shooting Hitler until he is no longer recognizable.

So, what we have here is Hitler, in a movie theater, being butchered beyond recognition by films, while a movie announces his death at the hands of Jews. With the understanding that many power players in Hollywood are Jewish, and the fact that for the last sixty years Hitler(and Nazis in general) have been torn down so completely by Hollywood to the point of being cartoonish villains, I'd say it's a fairly accurate portrayal of what happened to Hitler.

Inglourious Basterds raises a lot of points about Hollywood's control over our perceptions, and plays our expectations of genre against us to give us a movie that might be deeper than it initially wants you to believe. I immensely enjoyed it, even if it didn't feel as tight as Pulp Fiction or as superficially awesome as Kill Bill.