Plasma Pool

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

18. Melanie Laurent

I have a major thing for French actresses. It seems like there’s a factory in the country that produces nothing but exquisitely beautiful, worldly women who are the most natural actresses you’ll ever see. I will name just a few from recent history to prove my point (with the caveat that they have to speak French for the full effect): Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Beart, Julie Delpy, Ludivine Sagnier, Marion Cotillard, Virginie Ledoyen, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Isabelle Huppert, and Jeanne Balibar.

Add Melanie Laurent to that list. As Shoshanna, she mixes just the right amount of vulnerability, fear, and soulfulness to gain our sympathies, but she also can be pretty damn scary and is clearly someone you do not want to fuck with. Her emotional release after Landa finally leaves the restaurant is the best single moment of acting in the entire film, and if she does not get an Oscar nomination I will be very upset.

19. Everyone Dies

Well, almost everyone: by my count, only Utivich, Raine, and Landa live among the major characters, and I suppose Churchill, General Fenech, and a few of the Basterds presumably live since they don’t die onscreen. But basically everyone else of any importance dies.

This choice is rather curious given that the film seems so preoccupied with the power of cinema. It’s a bit of a cliche to say that a film is great because you can imagine the characters’ lives continuing beyond the end of the movie, but Tarantino challenges the audience to find these characters powerful even though they only live on the screen. This is at times an explicit statement in the film — Shoshanna is most powerful after she dies and exists only as a projected image — but it’s an argument that can extend to every character in the film, as well.

20. The Movie Within a Movie

Nation’s Pride, the film starring Fredrick Zoller that premieres at Shoshanna’s theater, is a pretty ridiculous-sounding movie. Professing to tell the true story of Zoller’s heroism during the war, it’s really just an opportunity for the Nazis to get their rocks off and feel some pride in seeing a German kill a bunch of enemies. Oh, and the poster suggests that they threw in a love story for good measure. Something for everyone, and all that. The audience eats it up, of course; especially Hitler, who guffaws after every Allied death.

We only see parts of the big battle scene, but it looks like most Nazi propaganda films: technically impressive, but also morally repugnant. Nation’s Pride clearly revels in its violence — every death is an aesthetic event devoid of regard for the lives lost. The enemy only exists to be shot in the most impressive way possible.

If that description sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the same as the Crazy 88s fight in Kill Bill. In that scene, Tarantino sets up a revolving door of Kato-masked Japanese for Uma Thurman to dispatch with her Hanzo blade. The gravity of the situation is felt in only one instance, when The Bride battles Go-Go, and that’s only really notable because Go-Go is a particularly awesome creation, a cute girl in a schoolgirl outfit whose weapon of choice is some kind of mace-like spiked ball contraption. The entire scene is one long opportunity to see how many ways someone can be killed with a sword, and Nation’s Pride even mimics some of its deaths (in particular, one where someone is killed and then falls into a fountain/pool). The entire thing is awesome, and I laugh at almost every death.

I’m not sure Tarantino is flat-out comparing the Kill Bill audience to Nazis, but the parallels should at least be unsettling. The context of Nation’s Pride is much different from that of Tarantino’s film — it depicts “real” events, for one thing — yet it’s difficult to escape the fact that both parties are laughing at violence lacking any of the real-world implications of death. I haven’t watched Kill Bill since seeing Inglourious Basterds, so I can’t say if my viewing experience has been changed forever, but I know I’ll pay close attention to my reaction the next time I do.

Regardless, I don’t expect to suddenly find the Crazy 88s scene morally repugnant. Tarantino understands the thrill of watching violence and doesn’t seek to deny it. Instead, he expects his viewers to enjoy the violence and question that enjoyment simultaneously. It’s a sign of great respect and a vaguely sadistic challenge.

21. Shoshanna and Zoller

Shoshanna and Zoller have a really bizarre relationship throughout the movie. She seems to be using him at all times, yet after shooting him she walks over to his body to see if he’s okay (which turns out to be a mistake, of course, because he shoots her). None of this really makes sense: she has no interest in him at any point during the film, and while he is somewhat charming (although also the kind of tool who uses his military reputation as evidence that he is totally spongeworthy), he just tried to force himself on her in the projection booth. So why the hell would Shoshanna care about him at all, especially since she loves Marcel the Projectionist?

The answer, I think, lies more in a quirk of Tarantino than in anything specific to the characters. The Shoshanna/Zoller romance is entirely superficial, but it plays on the classic romantic comedy plot of the charming young man breaking down the defenses of a tough woman. Everyone knows Tarantino loves basically every kind of movie, so it’s likely that he enjoys old romantic comedies and wanted to pay some level of respect to the genre, even if in a single moment. And it’s a wonderful moment, even if it makes no sense.

But seriously, Zoller is a total dick with a massive sense of entitlement, and I hope no one sympathizes with him or thinks of him and Shoshanna as some kind of doomed lovers. Because they’re only that in a superficial sense, and Tarantino sometimes just happens to believe in superficiality more than in what lies beneath.

22. British People

No British characters show up until the beginning of the fourth chapter in the film, but their first scene is potentially the most British scene in the history of cinema and the most blatant parody in the entire film. General Ed Fenech and Winston Churchill brief Lieutenant Archie Hicox on the particulars of Operation Kino, and each actor plays a caricature of a British person: Mike Myers basically does the Austin Powers voice for Fenech, Rod Taylor does the world’s greatest Churchill impression, and Michael Fassbender seems to have walked off the set of a production of the Archers. The dialogue is similarly goofy — everyone says things like “be a good chap” and “that a boy” and overpronounces the last syllable in “cinema.” It’s a ridiculous scene and I laughed the whole time.

Fenech and Churchill never show up again, but Hicox is one of the main players in the long tavern scene. In the hands of a lesser actor, Hicox would remain a caricature, but Fassbender, like Diane Kruger with Bridget von Hammersmarck, goes beyond the goofy exterior and infuses Hicox with a degree of complexity. It’s an absolutely masterful performance.

But it’s important to note that Hicox is quite clearly a caricature when he enters the film. This makes him quite different from von Hammersmarck, whose first appearance comes after we learn that she’s a spy — we always know that her interactions with the Germans in the tavern are just one aspect of her character. Fassbender turns the caricature into something more complex, which is indicative of a common Tarantino philosophy: the most artificial aspect becomes a useful avenue to finding something more complete.

23. The Moral of the Story

Many complaints about Inglourious Basterds focus on its unwillingness to make a coherent statement about the violence inflicted by the film’s avenging Jews. For a particularly well-articulated example, check out this quote from an excellent post on the film at Jog — The Blog:

Tarantino’s depictions of violence are especially confused, playing graphic Nazi scalpin’ for gross-out comedy then drawing back just minutes later to nag at the horror of a man being beaten to death. The screenwriter assures us that yes, all the characters are somehow awful, yet there’s a glee applied inconsistently to their actions that suggests a filmmaker not entirely ready to dismiss the notion of just having a lot of silly fun, but also somehow aware that there’s a point to be made by means other than leering at squibs and make-up effects.

This is a mostly accurate description of the depiction of violence in the film, with the exception that both audiences I’ve seen the movie with didn’t find any of the scalping shots funny in the least. Regardless, I majorly disagree with the idea that this confusion is a bad thing.

Tarantino is enough of a movie fan to realize that violence is an exciting thing to watch, particularly when it’s done in inventive ways. Scalping is gross, but it also provides the viewer with a visceral kick. And while I don’t agree with the particulars of exactly which violent moments are or aren’t played for comedy, I also don’t think it’s out of line to say that some are acceptable and some go to far.

The larger question here, though, is about the validity of contradiction in a work of art. Many viewers prefer a coherent statement about a film’s subject, and that’s certainly fine — I like Michael Haneke, but a Michael Haneke movie wouldn’t be a Michael Haneke movie if he weren’t horribly didactic throughout. On the other hand, it’s also acceptable for Terence Malick to make The New World, a film that approaches the relationship of humanity to the natural world with a story that can be read in many different ways — it’s effectively raising questions instead of answering them.

It strikes me that Inglourious Basterds is raising questions about violence rather than answering them, but for some reason this is being met with hostility or being explained away by many of the film’s biggest fans. What sets this movie apart from one like The New World (which is incidentally one of the beautiful movies I’ve ever seen) is that Tarantino approaches his material with the personality of an excited fan rather than that of a serious artist. One gets the sensation that he’s not taking everything entirely seriously, if only because he’s more willing than most to soak in the more immediate pleasures of his movies. But this is a rather goofy opinion; no matter which approach Tarantino takes, the end result is still a thought-provoking film that’s also a whole lot of fun to watch.

That last part shouldn’t be sold short. Because if Tarantino’s movies do have a moral, it’s that passion, enthusiasm, and love are pretty damn effective starting points for anything worthwhile. Above all, his work is characterized by joy. If that sounds terribly hokey and old-fashioned, then it’s only because his films plug into the same pleasure centers that made us love movies in the first place.