Plasma Pool

This is the second entry in a four-part series covering Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Read the first one here. The last two will appear later this week.

8. Representations and Interrogations

Most of the major scenes in Inglourious Basterds are interrogations: Landa and LaPadite in the farmhouse, Raine and Sgt. Rachtman in the woods (mirrored by Hitler and Pvt. Butz in the same chapter), Goebbels/Landa and Shoshanna in the restaurant, Major Hellstrom and the Basterds/von Hammersmarck in the tavern, Landa and von Hammersmarck and later Raine in the final chapter. (Jim Emerson has written about this topic a bit, although he goes in other directions in that piece, too.) In all but one of these interrogations, survival depends upon upholding a reputation or a false identity, which is interesting for a movie so concerned with the power of movies, i.e. fictions that ultimately depend on largely superficial representations of life.

Whenever a character drops their front, they either die or at the very least lose our respect. This is true even of Landa, who is no longer quite so awesome (in both the biblical and more modern definitions of the word) a character once he admits he kinda dislikes his nickname and doesn’t much feel like being a Nazi anymore. The idea here is that superficiality is in many ways the lifeblood of the characters (and the movie, of course) — it’s what allows them to make an impression both on the plot and in our minds. That’s quite different from the case in most films, where gruff exteriors and such are what characters have to drop before they can find their True Selves. (Okay, the obvious exception here is Shoshanna, who achieves some kind of immortality once she reveals her true face to everyone, but even then we are only seeing a projected image in a movie theater, so maybe this is not The True Shoshanna.)

9. Nazis Are People

Unlike some critics (Jeffrey Wells being one who’s gotten a lot of attention), I don’t think QT is asking us to sympathize with the Nazis more than with the Jews. They are Nazis, after all, so they like to kill Jews and other minorities and invade countries and all that fun stuff; the Nazi in Culture is established enough that we should know these are the bad guys. Plus, does anyone actually sympathize with real-life characters such as Goebbels and Hitler? Tarantino is talented and very arrogant, but even he couldn’t expect us to do that.

Part of what critics like Wells are having trouble with, I think, is the idea that Nazis should be presented as people with genuinely admirable traits. There is some tradition to this character type in the form of the Good Nazi, a type that’s shown up in all manner of films from Schindler’s List to Black Book to The Pianist to Valkyrie, but these characters are all admirable precisely because they reject their cold Nazi hearts and do something that helps the other side. Tarantino’s doing something very different: he asks us to admire qualities in Nazis while they are 100%-committed to the Nazi cause. Yes, Sgt. Rachtman holds strong before The Bear Jew brains him, and we should probably feel like he would have acted in the same way were he American and had been captured by the Germans. He is committed to his cause, and that makes him at least somewhat noble and brave, even if he’s also prone to condescension and truly repellent moral rationalizations.

If this feels weird, it’s probably because Nazis are usually depicted as the aforementioned good outliers or as incarnations of unspeakable evil. Ray Fiennes’s Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List is the best portrayal of a Nazi on film up until Christoph Waltz’s Landa, but what’s so amazing about Goeth is his capacity for evil — he’s a fundamentally different creation from Landa. To use another example from a Spielberg movie, the Nazis in the Indiana Jones trilogy are just guys who we’re expected to identify as evil because they wear swastika armbands and try to shoot our heroes — I can only think of one Nazi in the entire series, the sweaty Major Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark, who engages in anything above garden-variety villainy.

But Tarantino’s Nazis are capable of much more than these characters, and the result is that they feel like real people even though they’re in a movie less Realistic than Schindler’s List or The Pianist. These depictions suggest that Tarantino’s actually attempting some form of mature engagement with the Nazi crimes of World War II, or at least something that could eventually become mature engagement. Because while the Nazis undoubtedly committed terrible crimes, it’s something of a copout to claim that what they did was unknowable evil. (For more on this concept, read Jay Michaelson on his visit to Auschwitz.) Genocides happen more often than we’d like to admit, and it’s best we start thinking of them as the result of characteristics that are all too human.

10. The Basterds Are Bastards

There’s a lot of Holocaust imagery in Inglourious Basterds, and all of it is perpetrated on Germans. To name just a few instances: the Basterds remove the shoes from their Nazi victims in the woods; the exposed skulls of scalped heads look very much like yarmulkes, especially when out of focus in the background of a shot; Nazis used to lock Jews in buildings and set them on fire; the Basterds carve swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis just like Nazis used to carve Stars of David into rabbis’ chests before killing them; Nazis used to burn books just like Shoshanna burns films (although it’s not clear they are all German films).

At face value, this is kinda disgusting on the part of Tarantino, and I can’t really get mad at anyone who thinks this is a dealbreaker. But once you get past your own capacity to be shocked, there are some very interesting arguments going on here about revenge and Nazi atrocities.

Let’s start with the latter. If you know about these specific crimes committed by Nazis against Jews, then these terrible things done to Germans appear terrible for several reasons beyond the fact that Jews are doing them. For one thing, they should at least appear commensurate to similar things done by Nazis in movies like Schindler’s List, if only because what makes the Nazis’ crimes so bad is that we all agree they are things that should never be done by one person to another person (i.e. they are bad as isolated acts before they are bad because the Nazis do them). There is certainly a different kind of moral force to them because the Jews operate under a largely agreed upon moral imperative, but that doesn’t suddenly make the acts not disgusting. And if we know that the Nazis did these things, we also acknowledge that the Nazis did awful things.

The arguments about revenge are quite different, because they go well beyond the actual events of the Holocaust, and this is what seems to be angering the movie’s harshest critics. Most audience members will root for this revenge to be carried out — we want the Basterds and Shoshanna to succeed because Nazis (and especially Hitler) are terrible and it’s a good thing if they’re removed from Earth. But our sympathies don’t change the fact that these are terrible acts, and even an acknowledgment that sometimes these things have to be done doesn’t change the fact that these scenes are really unpleasant to watch. Not only that, but the Basterds in particular kill Nazis with glee; in the words of Aldo, watching Donnie hit Germans with his bat is the closest they get to the movies during wartime. Plus, when Donnie and Omar shoot at Nazis in the theater, they do so even though these people are already locked in a burning theater. It’s all a little excessive. (It should also be noted that these are not particularly shocking acts for a World War II movie — in Saving Private Ryan, Jeremy Davies’s Corporal Upham is presented as incredibly weak because he doesn’t want to execute a prisoner of war.)

So here’s the argument: Revenge can be justified and is often necessary, but reveling in it is pretty disgusting. Violence is serious business, and taken in tandem with the portrayal of Nazis as something approaching real people, it’s hard to watch the theater fire without feeling like something terrible is happening onscreen. To quote QT: “At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that’s part of the thing that fucks with the catharsis. And that’s a good thing.”

11. Tarantino’s Previous Violent Escapades

Tarantino has always put hefty doses of violence into his movies, but his depictions have been getting more and more sophisticated with every movie. Some people find his use of violence immoral at worst and juvenile at best — check out Matt Seitz’s opinions in this discussion with Keith Uhlich for a taste of that opinion (incidentally, that piece is still the best thing on all aspects of Tarantino that you’ll ever read). But in Kill Bill, Death Proof, and now Inglourious Basterds, he interrogates the use of violence in film with a lot of intelligence.

The most famous scene in Reservoir Dogs invovles Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde cutting off a hostage cop’s ear and then dousing him in gasoline. The violence in this scene is pretty disgusting (though the ear-chopping happens off-screen), but the best adjective to describe this sequence is “awesome,” in no small part because Michael Madsen is absolutely electric throughout it. It’s just damn exciting, and though these things would ideally not happen to the cop, he’s a minor character and it’s not like we really care if he gets it. Again, this is all about excitement. A similarly flippant scene takes place in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta’s Vincent Vega (who is Mr. Blonde’s brother, oddly enough) accidentally shoots Marvin in the face. This is the funniest bit of violence I’ve ever seen, and the aftermath of the shooting is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a horrible event. Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnfield has a change of heart later in the film and decides to get out of the crime game, but he doesn’t talk about Marvin at all, instead referencing a series of murders from earlier in the day. So while one character shows some degree of contrition, it’s not as if certain acts of violence can’t be treated in an entirely humorous manner.

I’m not going to talk about Jackie Brown at length because I haven’t seen it in years and would be talking out of my ass, but I remember Chris Tucker’s death being played for laughs.

Kill Bill has a more complicated relationship to violence. The Crazy 88s centerpiece of Volume 1 is fucking incredible, and that’s really nothing more than murder after murder after murder. But while both volumes have their fair share of totally cool violence, there are also moments that have to make you reflect. The opening of the film finds Uma Thurman’s Bride dispatching Vivica A. Fox in her home, a scene that Fox’s young daughter witnesses. The Bride understands that this is a revenge-worthy offense, if only because she is carrying out her revenge in the first place because her fiance and unborn daughter have been taken from her. So while we still view Fox’s death as a necessary event in the movie’s revenge narrative, it’s also such an unforgivable act of violence that The Bride tells the young girl she’ll understand if she wants revenge later in life. (Tarantino has also discussed the possibility of Kill Bill sequels that deal with this plotline.) And Bill’s death is very sad, to the point where The Bride cries when he finally goes. So while every act of violence in Kill Bill is necessary to the narrative, the attendant catharsis is compromised.

Death Proof (an extremely underrated movie that will eventually get its due) is basically a test run for Inglourious Basterds. The audience anticipates Stuntman Mike’s vehicular homicide of the film’s first batch of women right up until it happens, but the event itself is really gruesome, and the long dialogue scenes that precede it give us a strong sense of just what has been lost. When Mike goes after the second group of women, we feel the same sense of anticipation, but when the women turn from the pursued to the pursuers, their fight against Mike starts to feel incredibly gross — essentially, they appear to be no better than a serial killer. And when Rosario Dawson lowers the final boom onto Mike, it’s quite clearly overkill, but they take great joy in it. As in Basterds, you have to ask yourself how anyone could find so much joy in violence.

12. Crime vs. Revenge

QT’s first three movies are generally in the crime genre, but his last three are about revenge. And if the moral universes of those three feel a little more complicated, it’s likely because heroes and villains are very different in the two genres. In a crime movie, the audience tends to identify with the most clever characters, so an act of violence isn’t necessarily something that makes us not like someone, whereas stupidity usually sends us running in the other direction. Tarantino plays with this idea a bit by introducing concepts of honor among thieves, but these moral questions are much less immediate than anything involving violence.

In a revenge movie, though, good guys need violence to defeat typically 100% evil or faceless villains. Asking the audience to see the humanity in villains or the sadism of violent heroes throws the genre’s standard moral affinities into flux. Those standard associations don’t die completely, but they become much less stable.