Plasma Pool

This is the third entry in a four-part series covering Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Read the first part here and the second part here. The last installment will appear tomorrow.

13. The Truth About Brad Pitt

The dirty secret of Brad Pitt’s career is that he’s a boring leading man and an electric character actor. Mike D’Angelo has written the best piece on this subject, so read that, but all one has to do is watch him in True Romance (this one too), Burn After Reading (”I thought you might be worried … about the security … of your shit”), 12 Monkeys, Snatch, and to a lesser extent Fight Club, and you’ll know that he was born to play goofballs and pyschopaths.

Aldo the Apache is one of these characters, a larger-than-life fella with a cartoonish accent and a predilection for Nazi scalps. Pitt’s gets most of the best lines and is very funny in the role, but he’s unfortunately only funny. It always feels like another actor could have done more with this character, particularly because the man is clearly supposed to be very scary. But Pitt doesn’t embody every aspect of Aldo, and while I’m not sure who could have done a better job (maybe Nicolas Cage?), I think the potential was there. This is still one of Pitt’s best performance (and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment — I love him in everything listed above), but it’s missing something.

14. The Most Ambitious Scene Tarantino Has Ever Done

The centerpiece of Inglourious Basterds, the tavern meeting, has very little narrative function. The primary movers are Major Hellstrom, Bridget von Hammersmarck, and Lt. Hicox, only one of whom has had any screen time prior to this chapter, and that was just when he picked up Shoshanna to take her to the meeting with Goebbels. These three (along with Wicki, Stiglitz, and the German soldier Wilhelm) are asked to control the entire scene and hold our interest even though it’s not very clear why they’re important.

The only pieces of information that must be communicated by the scene are that the venue of the premiere has changed and that Hitler will be in attendance, and the audience already knows about the former from the preceding chapter. In the grander narrative scheme, something must happen that causes Aldo Raine to attend the premiere in place of Hicox or one of the Basterds, and von Hammersmarck needs to lose her shoe so Waltz can interrogate her later.

In a lesser movie, this scene would take five or ten minutes. There would be an ambush, von Hammersmarck would lose her shoe, and Raine would replace one of the dead Basterds. But Tarantino turns it into a thirty-minute digression that holds your attention the entire time. Throughout, you get the sense of just how quickly this plan can be foiled; Hicox’s use of his three middle fingers to signal “three” is the minor tell that eventually foils the operation, but it could have been any number of other errors that tipped off Hellstrom.

More than any other scene in the film, this one communicates what makes Tarantino such an exciting talent. He’s willing to take tons of chances, believes in his audience enough to assume that we will follow him throughout, and trusts his actors to make it all work. It’s ambitious precisely because he’s willing to let the momentum of the entire movie depend on what is functionally a very minor piece of the puzzle.

15. HUGO STIGLITZ!!!

Only one of the Basterds gets an origin story: Hugo Stiglitz, the Nazi soldier who turned on his own forces and was then busted out of prison by the Basterds. As played by Til Schweiger, a German actor previously best known to Americans for playing a humorless Formula One driver in the notoriously shitty Sylvester Stallone vehicle Driven, Stiglitz is a total loose cannon who’s always seems on the verge of pulling a knife on anyone. In short, he’s what Mr. Blonde would’ve been if he were less garrulous and German in the ’40s.

So it’s a bit odd that he’s the only one to get an origin story. We see him killing Nazis and being whipped for who knows what reason (by the Nazis? by someone earlier in his life?), but none of these flashbacks explain anything about Stiglitz — he’s still just an angry guy who likes to kill.

This has major implications for the morality of the Basterds. Yes, killing Nazis has some kind of moral force to it, but the decision to bring Stiglitz into the fold calls into question exactly why Lt. Raine decided to have his outfit consist of nothing but Jews in the first place. Tarantino has said that the Basterds are part of a “holy war” against the Nazis, but Stiglitz’s presence makes it seem like Aldo’s more concerned with finding people who will kill as many Nazis as possible; Jews were the choice merely because they’re more likely to really hate Nazis. This doesn’t mean the Basterds are entirely immoral, but it does make the entire mission seem less pure than it would otherwise.

16. Tarantino the Visual Stylist

Everyone lauds QT for his dialogue, but over his last few films he’s become a master visual stylist, too. (And props to Director of Photography Robert Richardson, of course.)

Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown have some great shots (the opening and end of Jackie Brown, both which feature Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” are my favorite examples), but these are primarily showcases for Tarantino’s skills as a writer.

Somewhere between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, Tarantino decided that he was the next John Woo and learned how to shoot violence like few others. The Crazy 88s sequence is primarily an example of someone saying “look at all the ways I can shoot a sword going into a body and blood spurting out of that body,” and then Tarantino goes and makes the fight between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii beautiful for entirely different reasons. The car crashes and chases in Death Proof are some of the best ever captured, but my favorite shot in the entire movie (and, in fact, one of my favorite shots of the entire decade) is the way Rosario Dawson’s face shifts from terror to absolute joy over the course of a few a seconds (go to 2:35 in this clip). It’s the kind of shot that communicates the excitement of movies in an incredibly simple way.

Inglourious Basterds is full of amazing shots, and I will just list a few of them without explanation so I don’t make myself sound too pretentious:

1. The Dreyfus children peering up through the floorboards of the LaPadite farmhouse.
2. Sawdust flying up towards the camera as the SS fires through the floorboards.
3. Hitler looking totally frazzled as a stately mural of him is painted in the background.
4. The Basterds coming out from the shadows to greet Stiglitz in his cell.
5. Holding the camera on Shoshanna when Landa enters the restaurant during the Goebbels meeting.
6. The frantic cuts from guns firing to bullets entering flesh in the tavern shootout.
7. Bridget von Hammersmarck announcing that she has survived the shootout.
8. The series of shots of Shoshanna by the window that open the “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)” sequence.
9. Any closeup of Shoshanna putting on makeup.
10. Blood bursting from Shoshanna’s body after Zoller shoots her.
11. Shoshanna’s image beginning to burst into flames.
12. Shoshanna’s face projected on the smoke as her theater burns.

If you can’t tell, Tarantino really liked filming Melanie Laurent. I can’t blame him.

17. How Tarantino Is Like David Lynch

There’s a moment at the end of David Foster Wallace’s essay on David Lynch in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again that I can’t quote directly because someone has my copy of the book right now, but it gets very close to this bit from the version of the essay that was actually printed in Premiere:

Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” … You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it.

Tarantino isn’t exactly like this, because his movies aren’t creepy in the same way as Lynch, but they share an ability to marry opposites in unsettling ways. The bit I really wanted to quote from the ASFTINDA version concerns a critic who considers Sheryl Lee’s performance in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me to be an expression of occasional good, occasional evil, or maybe both at the same time. DFW’s response to this comment is to exclaim “Of course both!” and it’s exactly that combination of contradictory elements that makes Tarantino’s films get in your head.

The best discussion of Inglourious Basterds I’ve seen on the web took place at the awesomely titled blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and site proprietor Dennis Cozzalio touched on this same point there, with the help of a commenter named Caustic Ignostic, who I will quote now:

It’s not that IB is a cerebral film masquerading as a visceral film, or a visceral film that critics are inappropriately reading as a cerebral film. It’s a cerebral *and* visceral film. I suspect QT would scoff at the notion that he had to choose, or that the audience wants to choose.

Exactly! Of course both! Tarantino has watched enough genre films in life to appreciate cheap thrills, but he also has legitimate opinions on Francois Truffaut and Wong Kar Wai and any number of other thoughtful directors from the history of the medium. He proved this recently when he listed his twenty favorite movies since 1992. This is a list that includes everything from retarded action like Blade and Speed to Brechtian drama Dogville to rambling high school hangout movie Dazed and Confused. The man’s tastes vary, and at his best he’s able to bring together all these sensibilities in the same film.

Many reviewers have tried to say that this is only a movie about the power of movies or a simple revenge fantasy or a disgusting piece of shit. But the truth is that it’s all these things, and that’s what makes it so damn good.