'Inglourious Basterds' - When Tarantino Discovered Subext

If not the best Hollywood film of 2009, for me 'Inglourious Basterds' was the most fascinating. Not only because it was the first decent Tarantino movie since 'Jackie Brown' (1997) - sorry 'Kill Bill' fans but that story did not require two films and if treated as one then it's only half-decent - it was fascinating for several of its surface features too, such as the oddly perfect illiterate title, the use of languages other than English for long stretches of its running time, the rewriting of history and the complete disregard for narrative and dramatic convention (nothing new for Big T, of course, but especially interesting when set up against the restraints of a partly-historical, generic "men-on-a-mission" picture.) But what makes it truly fascinating for me is that, for the first time in Tarantino's career as a writer and director, it is possible to appreciate the film on at least two separate levels - there are things happening under the surface of the narrative which are at odds with the "Fairy Tale of Jewish Revenge" synopsis that is seemingly so central to its appeal.

Whenever I've casually discussed this film with anyone it seems that they have taken it as an enjoyable, easily-digested romp in which we cheer for the Jewish-American soldiers and Shosanna as they give the most despicable regime in European history a well-deserved thrashing. In other words, as per usual in Tarantinoland, the surface is where all the fun lies.

True, the rewriting of history throws a small twig in the spokes of this simplistic reading but, perhaps surprisingly, no one seems to have any issue with this; it is simply "what should have happened!" A large part of the enormous worldwide audience for this film feels that they are being encouraged to lap up the wit and bravado of Tarantino's wild imagination and laugh at the righteous silliness of it all. It's just big dumb fun, right? Well, I have been slightly obsessed by the film since I saw it in October and, after seeing it for a second time (in a cinema, naturally - this is a film above all about love and respect for CINEMA and if you've only seen it on download, shame on you!) I feel justified in making the following assertion: this is Tarantino's most mischievous and subversive film by far, exploring the dangers of fantasy and historical revisionism even while giving the audience exactly what they apparently want. In short, it is a film which explores the power of propaganda. It is an extremely intelligent movie masquerading as an exceedingly dumb one. It has a subtext that goes against the grain of its surface narrative.

The attempted genocide of the Jewish race by Hitler's Nazi party is such a well-known horror of recent history that absolutely no context is provided, or needs to be provided, by the film, other than to have a caption stating 'Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...' at the beginning. We know who to root for, we know who the (really) bad guys will be and that initial caption allows us to relieve ourselves of any need to feel serious guilt or deep emotional pain. It's a fairy-tale! It might even turn out OK! So, sit back and enjoy a two-and-a-half-hour righteous revenge story in which we can temporarily forget about the harsh realities of history and collectively imagine how things could have turned out for the better!

Except that this reading is constantly undercut by Tarantino's characterisation and dramatic devices (or in both cases, lack of them.) Here are five reasons why the film is ultimately unsuccessful as a joyous Jewish revenge fantasy, as many have taken it to be:

1) The Jewish characters (other than the heroine, Shosanna) are the least developed in the film. The male soldiers are one-dimensional brutes, their only distinguishing characteristics being the methods they use to murder. Very few have any opportunity to say or display anything at all, other than laughing mercilessly and mirthlessly at imminent murder/torture of 'Jew-Killers'. Interestingly, there is nothing specific linking any of these Americans to any victims of the Nazi's persecution, ie having relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe. Now, as previously mentioned, there is no real need to set up their motivation and purpose, given the context, but surely there was nothing stopping Tarantino giving them actual personalities? He managed to do this for hitmen in his previous movies. The most awe-inspiring trait of so many Holocaust survivors was their retention, and subsequent promotion of, an essential humanity that could help reshape the civilisations of the world (and nothing can sting the Israeli people more than accusations of "behaving like Nazis" in recent conflicts.) So it must have been deliberate, this facet of the writing that portrays the male Jewish characters as little more than killing machines who appear, even for hardened soldiers, to be lacking even the most basic likeness to human beings (some of this may be down to to the terrible, plank-like performance of Eli Roth, who plays the most prominent Basterd, the 'Bear Jew'. And perhaps there were more scenes fleshing out the Basterds in an earlier cut/screenplay, but I don't think this was ever the writer's priority. And, finally, credit to B.J. Novak for imbuing his Basterd with a glimmer of personality in his one principal scene.)

2) Conversely, the characters in the film closest to having a element of humanity about them (again, excepting Shosanna and the principal (Austrian) villain, Hans Landa; more on both later) are the German soldiers. Not the high command, who are caricatures, or the two S.S. villains, but the front-liners, none of whom are shown to be involved in anything but the service of their country during wartime.

In the first scene, and only, scene depicting the Basterds' reign of terror in Europe, we are introduced to the captain of a small German platoon in a forest setting. He, and two of his soldiers, have been captured, and are being pressed to impart information on the whereabouts of another German platoon in the region, so that they too can be killed and scalped. He, admirably, refuses. Before the 'Bear Jew' beats him to death with a baseball bat he asks the German if he received his Iron Cross "for killing Jews." It is clear from his expression that he has already decided this to be the case. The captain refutes this by holding his murderer's gaze and replying: "bravery." It is hard not to concur. Yet the audience smiles and, in one screening I was at, whoops with glee as the man has his brains bashed in by a madman. Notwithstanding a defiant, almost throwaway comment he makes about "Jew Dogs" - of course he would hate Jews, he's had years of Nazi propaganda to shape and distort his thinking - there is nothing to suggest that the captain was anything but a regular soldier, loyal to his men and unafraid to look death in the face when he knows it is inevitable. There are a variety of possible reactions to this crucial scene, but laughter for me was not on the table as an option; neither when, seconds after the beating, another German soldier hurriedly points out exactly where the other platoon is located. This had most of the audience, schooled in Tarantino's brand of ironic, cartoonish violence, in stitches! Nothing works better than brutality, eh?

A later scene in a basement bar shows a group of loud, raucous German soldiers getting drunk and merry in celebration of one of their number, Wally, just having had his first son. After they are all shot, along with two Basterds and their British collaborator (I would love to say more about Michael Fassbender here but his character, a model of cliched, stiff-upper-lip, British decency, is not immediately relevant to my core argument), Wally is left standing with a gun and a hostage, the German film star and double-agent Brigit Von Hammersmark. He is understandably nervous when dealing with the remaining Basterds and Brigit, appealing to them to let him go for the sake of his new-born son. He seems, in his post-massacre clarity, honest; ready and willing to keep his end of the deal for everyone to leave the scene alive. But, after appealing to his fatherly duties, Brigit shoots him dead. There can be no witnesses, naturally. But Wally's death is especially galling given Brigit's stupidity in leaving a signed handkerchief at the scene, making the survival or otherwise of witnesses an irrelevance.

3) The chief Nazis in the movie - Hitler and Goebbels chiefly - are such caricatures that it is hard to get excited over their comeuppance. The exception is the invented Colonel Hans Landa, who at least boldly represents the infamous sadism, pride, arrogance, intelligence and ruthlessness we associate with the Nazi elite. Few viewers would argue that he is the most watchable and perversely enjoyable character in the film (and Christoph Waltz richly deserves the awards that have and will inevitably come his way) but he is also clearly the main target for the Jewish characters' - and our - revenge fantasy to focus on. But wait! He not only remains alive (if in some serious pain) at the end, but also turns on his own party in the final scenes and thus becomes key to the success of the Basterds' "extermination of Hitler" plot. And Shosanna never meets him again after their Viennese pastry-and-cream encounter, which ended in her tearful humiliation at the hands of the man who had her family murdered. Hmm....

4) Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds and apparent 'hero', is not Jewish at all. But like his squad he is barely recognisable as human. He adds stupidity to the all-pervasive trait of gleeful brutality. An American , he neverthelesss aligns himself principally with the persecuted Native Americans he is partially descended from, giving him a sense of solidarity with the Jewish soldiers and therefore aligning the American settlers, forefathers of the US military-industrial complex, with the Nazis. His demand for scalps is significant. Scalping was an atrocity practiced by both Natives and Settlers, provoking wave after wave of vengeful attacks until the Natives were "righteously" put down by the stronger force.

Aldo is just as likely to use sadism to achieve his ends, and for personal enjoyment, as his 'nemesis', Landa. Witness his torture of the wounded Brigit to gain information; would he not have killed her just as easily as Landa eventually does, possibly with as much relish? His branding of the last Nazi standing with a swastika on the forehead echoes the obligatory wearing of the Star of David for Jews under the Nazi regime. And in his casual equation of valueless torture with art ("This might just be my masterpiece!") Aldo puts himself right up there with the Nazi elite in the sadism stakes. And he's the guy we're supposed to identify with! It seems that, in this context of historical atrocity, Tarantino may be addressing what value the recent successful sub-genre of 'torture porn' (which he had a hand in creating and Roth in popularising) actually has. Or maybe not. The guys clearly still get a kick out of simulated violence and know most of their audience does too.

5) The final 'chapter' of the film, 'Revenge of the Giant Face', acts as a nexus for all these contradictions of character and narrative to pass through before they swirl down the postmodern plughole that is the film's finish.

Any conventional dramatic conclusion to this film's story would involve two things: firstly, Shosanna getting personal revenge on Landa, as in 'Kill Bill', and, secondly, given the existence of two separate, disparate revenge plots to destroy the cinema and take out the Nazi High Command, for one to fail and the other to succeed - preferably Shosanna's as it is personal rather than military-industrial. History would still be rewritten, but narrative tension and drama could be heightened. Tarantino eschews both these possibilities.

Shosanna's final dramatic confrontation - at least while alive - is with the 'heroic' German soldier, Frederick Zoller, who is to the German audience at the propaganda film screening what Aldo is to the modern audience watching in the cinema. They watch his unending brutality and applaud, cackle and grin with culturally spoon-fed satisfaction. However, although he is horribly arrogant and rather unpleasant, he is a more-rounded, more human person than Aldo. He is shown at first to be boyishly smitten with the beautiful and Jewish Shosanna (Tarantino presumably trying to show that there was no instinctive German dislike of Jews, that it was, yet again, merely propaganda that caused the distaste.) His death at her hands is definitely not a cheering moment for the audience (at least not at the screenings I was at); in fact it is tinged with sadness even before his prostate shooting of her brings her story to a blunt, unfortunate end.

Except, of course, it doesn't. Everything has already been set in place for Shosanna's personal revenge story - never once interlacing with the Basterds' until this moment - to end with her giant face interrupting the propaganda screening and demanding the German audience witness the face of the Jew that has killed them. But even this righteous revenge is undercut by the blundering, blustering behaviour of the Basterds and their 'nemesis'.

Dramatic cogency is not the issue here. BOTH plots succeed despite huge hindrances (Shosanna's death; the Basterds' uncovering), but the success of the Basterds' plot, hinging as it does on Landa's smug betrayal of his own party, is surely tainted? The villain we love to hate, Shosanna's nemesis, the embodiment of all the worst Nazi characteristics, has allowed this fairy-tale reversal of history to take place! And in fact Shosanna is not the agent of most of the Nazi deaths - who knows whether her plan would have definitely worked or not? - as she wanted, but it is the two Basterds, with their machine guns and explosives, that unleash the most carnage at the cinema. And how are we supposed to react to this spectacle of pure propaganda, this mythical massacre? With laughs and cheers, thus aligning us with the Nazi audience, or with distance, even numb shock, thus undercutting the drive of the film's surface narrative?

And then we have the final scene. We the audience would like to see Hans Landa get some kind of comeuppance, right? But we have a pickle. He's just won the war for 'us', so he can't really be killed - he made a deal with the top brass. Not to worry. We're in the safe, capable hands of Aldo Raine, whose chief allegiance is not to his country, or even to his band of Jewish soldiers, but to the infliction of pain for the sake of it. So we are able to witness the edifying spectacle of Aldo, oblivious to what his commanders have requested of him, to world events, to the end of the war, carving his brand with pride upon the agonised face of his nemesis. Revenge only for the purpose of continued brutality. Soldiers so used to abuse they have ceased to represent humanity. Is this really the version of history we want? Do we respond to this type of semi-propaganda with our full consciousness or are we merely being played like pipes by master manipulators? There is a marvelous, and I believe deliberate, discord at the heart of this film. And despite the jaw-dropping arrogance, Tarantino may have earned the right to allow himself, speaking through Aldo, to utter that final, self-aggrandising summation.

DISCLAIMER: I have still not seen the film with English subtitles, only Portuguese, a language I have a limited understanding of. As the film contains three principal languages, there may be some subtleties in the dialogue - which there is a lot of - I have missed. Please feel free to fill me in I've come to any erroneous conclusions...