Inglourious Basterds
2009
Quentin Tarantino
I cower at the scope of the question "what do you think about this director?" because... I dunno, I'm just not confident yet. But I'm getting there, at least with the big ones from late 20th and early 21st century. Like, I feel like I might have a handle on Scorsese, on Spielberg, on Kubrick (maybe). Do I have any sense on what makes Quentin Tarantino's movies special, or am I still working on it? Eh, a little bit of both.
Let's take stock. Before this, I've seen Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight, and Once upon a Time... in Hollywood. After this, Film Club will cover Kill Bill (it says Vol. 1 on the list, but I'll probably have to watch both volumes), Django Unchained, and Jackie Brown. That just leaves Death Proof (also technically half of a two-parter, though Tarantino didn't direct the other half), which I guess I'll add if the list ever needs a refresher. So this makes it exactly half! Sorry, this is boring; honestly, taking stock like this is more for my own benefit.
And the thing about Tarantino's films is that, if you google something like "tarantino tropes," there are dozens of low-rate ScreenRant-style listicles about it, because some of them are kinda obvious. There are chapter titles! There is a gunfight! Tarantino cameos! Characters are motivated by revenge! While I appreciate the fact that a director is so dedicated to keeping certain aspects of his films consistent (especially moving through so many different genres), I'm less interested in this kind of thing. I wanna get deeper than ScreenRant, ya feel me?
I don't have definitive proof listed out to back up this claim, it's more of a gut-reaction thing, but I want to say that the feeling I get when I watch Quentin Tarantino's films are that it feels like this dude is just so good at breaking the rules. Or, better put, the way he makes movies makes it feel like there are no rules. Which is really cool. Maybe not everything works! But it's thrilling from the audience's viewpoint, because you can't really predict what's going to happen next. That's so fucking cliché, but it's true in this case. There are so many left turns in these movies.
Inglourious Basterds is a WWII movie, and yet it is nothing like any WWII movie that's ever existed. Are there are battle sequences? Maybe in the movie-within-a-movie, but that's it. It's ostensibly about a group of Jewish American soldiers who are tasked with killing as many nazis as they can, but even that plot feels small, since half the film is taken up by the equally thrilling story of the runaway Jewish woman who enacts a revenge plot in her movie theater. And then there's an infamous 25-minute opener that involves the main villain basically monologuing at some poor guy, and also a lengthy detour in a basement bar that ends the exact opposite way that you think it's going to end. One charge against Inglourious Basterds that I've seen is that it's "not a coherent film, but rather a collection of scenes." My reaction is, oh, is there a rule against a movie consisting of a narrative that goes from scene to scene and set piece to set piece without worry about it being coherent? Because the movie I'm watching makes it seem like there's not. And that's okay. More than okay, actually.
This is tested a few times. For me personally, I thought about "rules" when a narrator briefly pops up out of nowhere to explain why film is flammable. This was almost an hour into the film, and I was like, wait, was there a narrator before? I'm pretty sure there wasn't. But it's so fucking cool, to me anyway, that Tarantino can be like, "you know, this scene would work a lot better with a narrator," and then dare to briefly add one in, who gives a shit, ya know? (Having the three-minute narrator be Samuel L. Jackson makes it even funnier.)
I know there were some issues with "historical inaccuracies," which is a hilariously light way to describe "a fantastical reimagining of the end of WWII." Yeah, Hitler died by suicide in a bunker. He wasn't lit up by a couple of Brooklyn Jews with machine guns in a movie theater while another the owner of the film blew the entire theater up. And then, of course, "were there actually Jewish soldiers scalping nazis in occupied France" and all those other questions. Who knows! Who cares! Problems like this are problems for the rule-followers. That's not what kind of movie this is. There are no rules.
The only rule is that the nazis are the bad guys. As fascinating and charismatic Christoph Waltz's Oscar-winning performance was, at no point do you empathize with the guy. When he meets his ultimate demise, when the Americans get their comeuppance, you cheer. That's the rule. It's made clear at the beginning and is followed through every brutal step of the process. Lots of nazis are gonna be killed and maimed and you're gonna like it. This is probably a good movie to watch right now, since our president is a nazi, and thinks that some nazis are very nice people, and all U.S. citizens are asking themselves, am I a nazi or should I punch a nazi in the face? (Someone's Inglourious Basterds Letterboxd review was taken down because they implied that the Basterds would be helpful in 2025, ya know, to kill nazis, and Letterboxd, before doing about seven 180s in a row, tried pulling the "good people on both sides" shit.)
It's not a new question, "is it okay to enact violence against nazis," and it's a good question to occasionally revisit. Inglourious Basterds takes a hard stance on it, and I would understand if it might rub people the wrong way, especially if you're a pacificist. I consider myself somewhat of a pacificist but maybe not a hard-line pacificist, in that 1) I believe that the only people who should be shown intolerance are the intolerant, and nazis are the most intolerant race of creature on earth, and 2) there's a big difference between enacting the violence myself and shrugging my shoulders when violence is enacted toward the intolerant. If I'm squeamish, it's at the idea of me doing the scalping. But if I were to learn that parts of this story were true and that there were actual American soldiers killing and scalping as many nazis as possible, well then, I'd most be like, "hmm, interesting stuff." I mean, it was the same with Luigi's killing of the murderin' CEO, right? I'm not the moral arbiter here, but if a known killer is himself killed, then I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I might even sleep a little better.
Does all of this have anything to do with the thesis statement of "no rules"? I think so. Think about the other wartime movies that we've seen, both through the blog and elsewhere. Think about how many times that death has been given this much attention, at least in the individual sense. Rarely, right? Mass casualties during large-scale battles are horrifying, but it's horrifying because the deaths stack up so high so quickly. Here, we are given time to examine each death as it comes. Should this nazi be killed? Why do you feel that way? Why is this movie making you feel the way you feel? What I'm saying is that this is not how a movie of this genre typically operates, and this is what makes Tarantino's movies so special.
At least as far as I've seen. We'll check back in next time we watch one of his films, at some point in the next four years or so.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Before we get to the group movie, Pam is gonna set up the tee for John Tucker Must Die, and I'm gonna see how far I can hit it.
No comments:
Post a Comment