Inglourious Basterds: A review

Spoiler warning.

There is something highly significant about the 20th century that has been often alluded to, but seldom characterized appropriately.  It saw two world wars, the atom bomb, the cold war, and a variety of counterculture movements.  Most discussions of culture tend to begin with the second item.  I propose a different interpretation.  It begins with recognition of the culture and ideology of statism and war.

Let there be no doubt here that Tarantino has presented a masterpiece.  I do not intend to discuss cinematography, although despite being untrained in the subject I found myself noting the clean, obssessively ordered nature of the film.  Nor will I go to any great lengths to dissect the historical plausibility of the movie.  Instead I will start with the characters and work from there.

This film is not really a WWII film.  The setting is borrowed from history, but everything else runs its own course.  This is good.  In fact, it leads to a treatment of the subject matter that not many other films can claim to approach.  Historical films carry a sort of taint.  Roger Ebert described this by stating that the audience knows what’s going to happen even when the characters don’t.  In truth it is worse.  Destiny makes human beings one-dimensional.  It becomes much more transparent that we are watching a representation.  More importantly, it is a representation of something final.  By representing things in this way, they become a caricature; they obfuscate the situation as it actually was, by diminishing the sense of agency on the part of the characters.  Every moral dilemma gains a lifeless, platonic nature; it no longer really belongs to the people we are watching.  Instead it is hypostasized as an external, definite article.

Despite the tendency of Tarantino to make his characters larger than life, the one thing they are not in this movie is lifeless.  He accomplishes this not just by giving history an “alternate ending”, but also through a variety of subtle and extremely effective lines and conversations throughout the course of the film.  This movie is brilliant enough that even the antagonists are humanized.  In fact I would characterize this as its greatest strength, and the true touch of greatness which makes the film.  I will give every example that comes to mind.

Consider the very beginning of the film, when we are acquainted with Col. Hans Landa.  He engages in a variety of pleasantries of a very plainly fascistic nature, to be sure.  What truly establishes him, however, is when he starts into a discussion of the unofficial title he has been given by the french.  “Why should the hangman be ashamed of his title?” he ponders.  “I do not mind mine.  I have earned it”.  This makes the audience aware that there is someone behind the wheel.  The villain does not exist simply to fulfill the requirement of the plot.  He is an actual man, responsible for his own actions.

Consider as well Pvt Fredrick Zoller, who we are first introduced to when he propositions Shosanna Dreyfus.  Here is a character who declares quite boldly “There is more to me than just the uniform”.  Of course he is correct.  Even if one has no familiarity with philosophy, they ought to recognize the statement as correct.  The film establishes it.  Not of course by having him pursue Shosanna.  Without the uniform this would be trite; with the uniform it is somewhat jarring, to be sure.  Nor should this dissonance be understood to imply his humanity strictly by showing his similarity to other young boys in their attempts to romance women.  What makes it significant is that through the course of his actions, we come to recognize that he needn’t be in the uniform.  The whole of his character would fit just as easily in any other walk of life.  He is a human being and as such has the potential to live differently, to be something other than a Nazi, which for reasons both unknown and tragic he has simply failed to make use of.

This is the great strength of the film.  Most representations of evil are trite and play out with a kind of rigid and linear predictability.  Characters are evil.  In their totality they are subsumed by the requirements of the plot.  Here we have something astounding.  Characters are human, and they do evil.  It is this fundamental revelation of humanity which gives the film its impact.  However given the subject matter, we can analyze even further what sort of impact it is.

There must have been something in the air during the time period.  The pursuit of personal meaning through war and statist ideology is as old as man, but they reached an apex during WWII.  It is of course a ridiculous phenomenon, but then what is bad faith if not dishonest?  Anyways, here we had millions of people in uniform, ready to die for their country, their race, and whatever other psychoses could be sold to them.  Given the subject matter it is impossible to avoid a reduction of the antagonists in the film.  However when Tarantino makes the Nazi’s into the required sort of collective, faceless evil he does it with a level of finess I have never seen before.  Again I will use examples to explain.

Sgt. Wilhelm is celebrating the birth of his son when a shootout in a tavern leaves only him and a hostage alive.

Or more tellingly, there are the antics of Lt. Aldo Raine.  When he leaves survivors from his massacres, he asks them a question.  “What are you going to do with that uniform?”  Invariably they answer as they believe they should.  “I will take it off.  I will burn it.”  At this point Raine expresses disappointment.  If there’s one thing he doesn’t like, he explains, it’s a Nazi that can escape from the burden of what he was as a Nazi.  So Raine brands them, so that they may always be reminded of their pasts.  This sentiment touches at the heart of a lust for catharsis that has gone unsatisfied for over a half century.  At the end of the war, several million murderers, thieves, rapists, accomplices to genocide, took off their uniforms and went home.  For officers there was at least in some measure something that might be called recompense.  Holding every criminal responsible was simply unfeasible, however.

That’s really what Inglourious Basterds is about.  Responsibility.  It might even be called an exploitation film, to the degree it runs with the concept.  Just the same, as it fleshes out the pretenses for this catharsis in a fictionalized, uniquely cinematic capacity, it humanizes both the evil commited and the men who commited it.  It has to, otherwise responsibility would be a non-sequitor and the film would be merely pornographic.

The film ends with Raine and Landa.  Being the cunningly devious man that he is, Landa played the opportunist and made a deal to end the war in exchange for some property and the complete forgiveness of his sins.  He even goes so far as to include military commendations in his list of demands; he wants to escape the taint of his actions as a Nazi.  Raine cannot allow this, so he presents the same speech he has to all previous Nazi survivors.  Then he brands the man.  The last words of the movie are “I think this is your best work yet”.  Touche.

Some critics have complained that the ending feels incomplete.  Of course it does.  This goes hand in hand with being responsible for yourself.  No matter what you make of your life, merely having the ability to make it means facing the void.  We are all responsible for the past, just as we are responsible for our present and future.  Sometimes because appearences are deceptive, we forget that it’s all part of the same thing.

~ by Kilroy del Dancefighter Estallion the First on September 2, 2009.