By Jeffrey Overstreet
NOTE: The following article contains spoilers about scenes in the film Inglourious Basterds.
Inglourious Basterds is one of the year’s most talked-about films. And rightly so.
It takes chutzpah to tell stories of Jewish-American soldiers who hunt Nazis, capture them, then bash their heads in and scalp them. And an additional dose of ego to illustrate an alternate ending to World War II, in which various agents set a trap for the Nazi leaders.
Most viewers relish the sight of an enemy defeated. So Inglourious Basterds, offering audiences the chance to see history’s most notorious criminal suffer as his victims suffered, seems a shameless ploy for box office success. Sure enough—Basterds is a huge success. And you could feel the celebratory glee in the audience as Nazis were beaten to a bloody pulp onscreen.
But the movie is audacious in ways that impress me as well, ways that typically sentence a film to obscurity. I won’t argue with critics who praise Tarantino—or should we thank Brad Pitt?—for drawing American moviegoers to a lengthy, subtitled picture built primarily of long conversations across tables. That should broaden the horizons for many moviegoers—and, hopefully, the studios.
And while Brad Pitt gets the marquee credit, Basterds’ true star is a little-known German actor named Christoph Waltz. Waltz plays Col. Hans Landa, the Nazis’ own Sherlock Holmes, known as “the Jew Hunter” for reasons that become obvious. Many call it a “star-making” performance, but Landa’s performance is so complex that I wonder how many future scripts are worthy of his gifts. Landa is frightening, funny, unpredictable, and inspired—the most interesting villain I’ve seen since Hannibal Lecter.
Also compelling, Melanie Laurent plays the Jew that Got Away—a young woman who slipped through Landa’s fingers. Shosanna looks like the younger sister of Kill Bill’s The Bride, and carries the same capacity for long-term revenge. By comparison, the titular Nazi-killers are not much more than comic relief. Shosanna is the film’s beating heart, a rhythm that quickens as she finds opportunity for spectacular vengeance.
But in spite of the film’s marketing pitch—Come to the hyperviolent hootenanny!—Tarantino has something better than vengeance on his mind. The film subverts its much-anticipated finale so that viewers’ vengeful impulses are challenged. Tarantino has never told a story of white hats versus black hats; he knows that Nazis can have moments of nobility, just as righteous Allied warriors can exercise craven bloodlust. There’s a lot here worth discussing. I’ve come to appreciate that this really is a brilliant film. Read Ryan Holt’s review here, and a lengthy conversation at The House Next Door: Part One, Part Two.
Nevertheless, the movie's failure to captivate me has a cause: Quentin Tarantino. How was I to see the film’s strengths clearly? This is a guy who pumps up a crowd of fans before a screening, shouting, “YOU GUYS WANNA [EXPLETIVE] UP SOME NAZIS? LET'S BRING IT!" Does he enjoy this? Is he baiting them into a situation where their eagerness for revenge fantasies will be complicated?
Further, if I’m to appreciate any of his provocative questions about violence, he would do well to leave behind the gratuitous, graphic images that have become his trademark and inspired so many time-wasting imitators. Torture scenes, on-camera sodomy, eyeballs plucked out and squashed underfoot, an ear carved off with a pocketknife, and on-camera scalpings have not added any value to the movies in which they occurred, and they’ve disrupted my suspension of disbelief. His urge to affect his audience interferes with his capacity to inspire and enlighten them.
And if you want to encourage thoughtful reflections on violence, why glorify the notorious “torture porn” director Eli Roth with a major role in the movie—especially when he can’t act?
Some of Tarantino’s defenders have summoned the words of Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you have to shout.” But the shocks in O’Connor’s work came in a context that made them revelatory, and from conviction that the “hard-of-hearing” should be jolted out of complacency. Isn’t it also true that too much gratuitous shouting might be the cause of cultural deafness in the first place? Can’t too many unnecessary jolts make us numb?
Tarantino’s words in the second paragraph of this article—(caution: graphic sexual terms)—demonstrate his preoccupation with playing the puppeteer and making us jump when he pulls the strings. Such declarations make me reluctant to join his audience again. I don’t go to the movies to be manipulated, tortured, or violated in any way.
I’m interested in art that leads me to something larger than my desires and the artist’s ego.
Tarantino also disrupts my interest during the movie, interrupting my attention with “stunt casting” (like Mike Meyers in a distracting cameo) and references to his own past triumphs. In the opening scene, Landa gulps down a “tasty beverage” provided by his host—his target—in an obvious reference to Pulp Fiction’s Jules. Later, the voice on a telephone is obviously Harvey Keitel—a clever but distracting cameo included as a wink to his fans.
We’re also constantly informed, through allusion and dialogue, of his commentary on other films. Each scene seems to announce the scenes that inspired it. (Basterds’ climax revises the end of Cinema Paradiso.)
Tarantino is, at times, like one of those popular, flamboyant, egomaniacal orchestra conductors, gesticulating wildly and turning to the audience to make sure we know that the show’s about him.
It’s a shame, because the concert really is impressive.
Increasingly, I’m grateful to artists who refrain from speaking publicly in a way that disrupts the audience’s experience of their own work. Some have gone to almost preposterous extremes to remain invisible. The novelist Cormac McCarthy is reclusive, and the director Krzysztof Kieslowski was tight-lipped, downplaying any suggestion that his work might be meaningful and inspiring.
By contrast, Tarantino has boasted that some of cinema’s greatest masters are his “peers,” and he praises Paul Thomas Anderson’s powerful There Will Be Blood because it encourages him to “step up his game.” It’s a sport, you see, and the best director will win.
He concludes Basterds by declaring a personal victory. A smug, knife-wielding character smirks at the audience—yes, we’re given the perspective of the victim—boasting, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.” To seal the deal, the director sucker-punches us with the bold text: “Directed by Quentin Tarantino.”
As if anyone could have forgotten.
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It's a sad reflection on the state of film criticism that many poeple have ignored these many shortcomings and proclaimed IB as film of the year, which it clearly is not.
It's a pity also that Tarantino didn't watch 'Where Eagles Dare' beforehand, just to realise how poor his script was. After all, this was his homage to 'second world war films'.
However, there are a couple of points on which I would disagree with you, one of them being the idea that all of Tarantino's references to film are superfluous, and that all his "violent" shots serve no greater purpose than to "**** off" the viewer. I believe IB, in addition to being a rollicking, unique WWII epic, is also a commentary on violence in cinema itself and the nature of our response to it - what's healthy when watching a movie? I need to see the film a few more times before I can offer a really well-thought out commentary on this, but references to film and cinema itself are stuffed throughout the movie like a particularly chip-heavy batch of chocolate chip cookies. This is no coincidence, and I think that it's actually a really smart choice by Tarantino. He's well aware of how sensitive this subject matter could turn out to be, and since literally everyone going in knows what Nazis, Jews, and WWII are, we're all going with preconceptions about the situation. It's a movie that necessitates out-of-movie contemplation in order to appreciate it. You need to know that the Nazis really existed, and your response to violence against them in the movie is meaningless without this outside knowledge. Given this, it makes complete sense that there would be so much in IB that "draws you away" from the story or the film itself - because it's not meant to be a movie that completely absorbs you in - sure, there are riveting scenes of perfectly-crafted tension, characters that, it seems, we're meant to care about, but the very subject matter of the movie and the way he goes about it (the bold comparison of giggling cheering people in theatre audiences to the giggling cheering Nazis as they watch Zoller kill one American after another), leads me to believe that it's not necessarily a bad thing to draw you out of this movie in some ways, and there are specific purposes to when and how he does it.
Next, I think Tarantino gets waaay too much ribbing for his violence, especially in this movie. This is the most non-violent Tarantino movie I've ever seen - the goriest scene being the introductory scalping shot - one full on shot of a knife sliding across a skull. Nothing else really comes close, and when there is violence it serves a very specific purpose to the storyline and what the storyline means. Sure, not every single time. When Eli Roth and his pal murder the two guards outside Hitler's balcony in that quick two second flash of violence, I'm not saying it means something to do with cinema and our response to it, but in most cases the memorable violent scenes all have a purpose to them, and it seems a little easy to simply dismiss them because they're violent scenes. Hes really not all that violent of a filmmaker overall (Kill Bill was an exception, due to obvious reasons), but what makes people call him such a violent filmmaker is that he excels at picking and choosing which violent momens to give us. He knows how to make a violent moment hurt and make us cringe and make us remember. As for how this relates to Flannery O'Connor's quote, I guess I'd tend to side more with Tarantino defenders on this one. It's a testament to his talent that he's able to make not-all-that violent scenes memorable simply through his filmmaking (yes, he does make excruciatingly violent scenes memorable too but this doesn't negate other things he's done). But what struck me most when watching IB was this: people claim that Tarantino is so violent and sadistic and he shouts too much and all that, but take a look at the film itself. It's almost literally all talk, not much violence at all for a WWII epic, and when violence does explode, it has meaning and purpose beyond merely releasing the tension. I don't think Tarantino deserves to be accused of shouting too much - the guy has only made six movies (six!) and though he is more preoccupied with violence and the darker side of living than many other filmmakers, the fact that he's able to make violence so real and shocking to so many people despite our R-rated media being satured with torture porn and ridiculous action flicks like Law-Abiding Citizen, is something we should be cheering him for. It's really quite impressive that a film, more than half of which is in subtitles, with no more than 20 scenes, including one twenty minute scene and one forty minute scene, has done so well at the box office - it almost doesn't make sense. And with a generation that is making tripe like Transformers 2 box office gold, it's a breath of fresh air and should be welcomed in more ways than one, IMO.
As for Landa asking for a beverage at the beginning of the film, (this is something I didn't really think of both my first and second times seeing it, not until I read your thoughts on it on another blog or forum) not once does any character call it a tasty beverage (I believe the closest he comes is delicious milk), and the entire point of the scene is completely different from Pulp Fiction. In PF, Jules was using the drink to play with Brent (Brett?) and doing some mental torture as he just swigged away all the poor man's sprite. Landa, on the other hand, is specifically lulling this man into a false sense of security (and you'll notice he doesn't even touch the second glass of milk) so he merely asks a polite question that anyone might ask, while also asserting his authority (e.g. asking for milk instead of wine).
I'll agree with you on Harvey Keitel's cameo, and Samuel L. Jackson's in addition. I also didn't like when the title screen popped up over Joseph Goebbel's saying, "The number two man in Hitler's Third Reich." Such a Tarantino phrase and it instantly slapped my face with, "Haha see how clever that is! Take that, I'm Tarantino!" It's funny you should mention the Mike Meyers cameo, because at the midnight showing I saw it at, I had no clue who it was. Everyone in audience was giggling/laughing, but not until halfway through the scene did it even click for me, and I think it's because, for this scene, in this way, Meyers does a pretty good job - he was just a scarred olf British war general as far as I was concerned. For me the jury's still in on Eli Roth - his performance seems a bit schizophrenic, but I also really liked him, especially in the scene where he beats the German soldier to death. (Maybe his only truly good scene in the movie.)
That's about it for now. Excellent thoughts, do you think you'd see it again? Or are you and IB not on speaking terms anymore?
Regarding your and agh's comments about O'Connor's and Tarantino's us of violence, it's worth remembering that O'Connor's images are mediated through words on a page, and therefore dependent on the reader's experience, imagination and willingness to play along. Film images arrive at the visual cortex pretty much as Tarantino wishes us to receive them, though emotional assocations, prior exposure and receptivity play important roles in shaping the effect. With O'Connor, we read words that induce the wiling reader to imagine hearing gunshots. With Tarantino, once we are in the movie theater, we must vountarily shield our eyes from sodomy, garotting, and skull-crushing. There's a big difference.
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