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Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
But the power of the image, including that of individual ethnic appearance, is often undermined by the slipperiness of language, and over and over again the spoken word — Tarantino’s forte — also acts as the agent of duplicity. Landa conceals his discovery of Shosanna’s family by interrogating the farmer in English; Hilcox must prove his Germanness by claiming to have been in the Pabst-Riefenstahl film after he is questioned about his unusual accent; in the film’s funniest bit, Aldo and two Basterd comrades must pretend to be Italians though they understand barely five words of Italian (“Can you Americans speak any other language?” von Hammersmark complains). The warring functions of image and language come together at the climax when Shosanna asserts control over The Nation’s Pride (that this Riefenstahl homage within Basterds was directed by the Jewish-American Roth adds yet another level of irony). Interrupting Zoller’s heroism by editing in footage of her cackling, Wizard of Oz–large face announcing to the crowd their imminent deaths, Shosanna asserts control over official propaganda through direct address — it’s only regretful that Tarantino decided to have Shosanna speak in English when German would have been so much more appropriately vengeful. Still, the suspense leading up to this moment is bizarrely unique. Anticipation builds not so much over whether the unwitting allies — Shosanna and the Basterds — will bring their plan to fruition, but over whether Tarantino will actually go so far as to pole vault the historical record and sail into the sublime and sensational firmament of revisionist fantasy. That he does so and succeeds is Basterds’ miraculous coup.
The emotions it arouses are also immensely difficult to unpack. Traveling through time to slaughter the Nazi high command has long been a daydream dreamt by many a reasonable person, but also and especially many a haunted, anguished Jew. And the trauma of the Holocaust is so profound for Jews that even one like me, born 35 years after the end of WWII and not immediately related to any survivors of the Shoah, found myself — I swear to you — practically tearing up at the glorious and ludicrous sight of a theater packed with Nazis dying at the hands of “Jewish vengeance,” the peak moment of bliss arriving with Der Führer’s face machine-gunned into gory mush. Such a scene’s dark glory stems from the fact that, had it actually happened, it would have been one of the great moments of justice in human history, even as alternative history the scene can never replace the truth. And never, for Jews, can the disempowerment and shame of having been atrociously victimized be simply or definitively channeled into vengeful fury, if for no other reason than because the disempowerment and shame that fueled Germany in its destruction serves as the ultimate lesson in the perniciousness of misdirected, exploited anger.
Perhaps then, strangely, only a Gentile could have created Inglourious Basterds, someone unafraid of violating the self-censoring dictate to “not sink to the same level” of the Jews’ worst enemies among a literally biblical litany of brutal exterminators. (Even in infamous Israeli-penned “Stalag” pornographic literature, the humiliated heroes who sadistically turn the tables on the Reich are typically British and American prisoners of war.) That Tarantino understands single-minded payback far better than Jewish identity — the only expressions of ethnic pride from his Jewish characters are determined promises of retribution — doesn’t matter so much because he also understands movies and violence better than skeptics like myself have previously given him credit for, and the fact that his knowledge of violence has forever been mediated by the movies is what makes Basterds’ meta-commentary so fascinating and poignant. To watch Nazis dying is wish fulfillment; to watch a Nazi-infested cinema burn to the ground (overtones of the Reichstag fire and the ovens of Auschwitz are unavoidable) just after a Jew hijacks a Goebbels-approved film is a metaphor that works underneath the pure rocks-off catharsis Tarantino deceivingly offers, an inversion of the more literal deliberations on the price of Jewish revenge in something like Spielberg’s Munich. Tarantino’s always struck me as a “movie guy’s movie guy” in the most stunted sense, a director for whom movies trump and supplant life so that the latter will never intrude his self-protected womb of cool. But with Inglourious Basterds Tarantino proclaims his willingness to let cinema — a cinema inseparable from its political and ideological use — go up in flames for the sake of something important. More profoundly, he admits that the illusory image of victorious defiance (Aldo calls the Bear Jew’s Nazi beatings “the closest we ever get to going to the movies”) must destroy itself — not because it fails to make up for what truly was, but because it’s so seductive for remaining nothing more than an illusion.