Inglorious Spell Check – Nitpicking and Overthinking a Tarantino Movie

By now, pretty much everyone who is interested in seeing Inglourious Basterds has done so. As such, I will keep my thoughts on the film’s technical merits to a minimum while attempting to discuss the movie in a larger context (i.e. being complete killjoy). Anyway, Inglourious Basterds, despite its extra-retarded spelling, is skillfully made. The individual sequences are entertaining and it features the best dialogue Quentin Tarantino has written since Pulp Fiction. However, I think it does run long, as twenty minute scene after twenty minute scene can get irritating. I really like Michael Fassbender doing an impersonation of Lawrence Oliver while playing a British spy who resembled Lawrence Olivier and was disappointed that he (a spy personally appointed by Churchill), along with Sgt. Stiglitz (an expert is violence and savagery), just up and die in a bar after talking a lot. Needs more epic deaths for supposedly epic characters. Also, it is kind of illogical how only half of the Basterds have speaking parts or are even seen apart from their introduction. Why even have them in the film? I also found it bothersome that Shoshanna, the main non-Basterd protagonist, never interacts with the Basterds at all, so her burning down of the theater at the end kind of makes the whole mission pointless. The Basterds’ presence at the end only serves to get shots of Eli Roth and the other guy blasting old (unarmed) Nazi dickheads with machine guns. The movie does, however, have an excellent villain in Hans “Jew Hunter” Landa, and all the praise Christoph Waltz has gained from the performance is well-deserved.

The movie does, unfortunately, stir up certain… problems for me; one example being how the Americans are used as the force for righteous vengeance. As if, by virtue of American morality, we have the right to torture, mutilate, and suicide bomb our enemies just because we are better than they. More specifically, that if we were only as brutal as the Nazis, which I guess we have the right to do because we are Americans, the war in Europe could have ended a year earlier, thereby saving millions of lives. As Americans, we have our own history of ethnic cleansing, a history we have mostly denied or chosen to forget (as an example of said denial, Andrew Jackson, the man who instituted many Indian Removal policies and is responsible for the Trail of Tears, graces/disgraces the $20 bill). True, the Indian Wars never achieved the kind of organized butchery that the Nazis, or even the Spanish in their American colonial territories, did, but we were far more “successful” in the long run in eliminating Native Americans and their culture from the face of the Earth than the Nazis were at eliminating the Jews. How much difference is there between an 18 year old soldier in the German Army and an 18 year old soldier at the Sand Creek Massacre (or, for that matter, in the Confederate Army)? The armies and governments those boys served (and they were boys) were responsible for furthering policies of murder, slavery, brutality, etc., whether individual soldiers personally supported those policies or not, so I don’t see why it becomes hilarious when a German boy is killed by an American. Of course, I believe we were on the side of the right during World War II, but even then we were not without our own sins, such as the bombing of Dresden, our refusal to admit Jewish refugees into the country, or the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent.

What most acutely annoyed me while watching the film is not the film itself, as I consider it as more of an indicator of how America views World War II and the Nazis in general. Like in the movie, Nazis have become kind of our go-to bogeymen, just an inhuman villain that serves as a stand-in for what might otherwise be an actual person. It’s ok to kill a Nazi; in fact, it’s hilarious. QT uses the deaths of Germans as comedy or as a means to establish character traits, but rarely makes them actual people. When he does, as in the bar sequence, he uses them as narrative sacrifices to illustrate the ruthlessness of actress/spy Bridget von Hammersmark. I don’t think Inglourious Basterds is the problem, just a symptom of our propensity to re-imagine and re-mold the Nazis to suit our own needs. Other symptoms include Godwin’s Law or any inappropriate comparing of unrelated topics to Hitler and the Nazis (watch any 24 hour news network for about five minutes and you’re likely to see a talking head exhibit an example of this). Hitler was a man, the people that followed him were men, not faceless hordes of disposable Huns. It was humans that executed the Holocaust, not monsters, and I think that such a thing can happen again if we forget that. I believe that we must remember the “how” and the “why” of history, not just the “what,” in order to prevent it from happening again.

These claims perhaps seem to be an outlandish, so I will endeavor to utilize the example of another historical figure turned to a monster. Vlad III (also known as Vlad Tepes/the Impaler and Vlad Dracula) was the Prince of Wallachia once in 1448, again from 1456-1462, and lastly in 1476. As a child, he was held captive with his brother by his enemies and grew to hate them both. As a ruler, he was surrounded by hostile nations, both Christian and Muslim. He resisted the expansionism of the Ottoman Empire, one of the most powerful empires of the time, all while his own territory consisted only of a third of modern-day Romania. He has deservingly earned a reputation for brutality in dealing with his own people and his enemies, yet much of what we know (or think we know) about him comes from pieces of propaganda distributed by his adversaries in Germany and Russia. It seems to me that the life of someone so capable as to fend off invasion from several hosts of foes, yet simultaneously so brutal and undeniably evil that he was willing to impale thousands of his own people, has many lessons to teach us about history and about human nature. However, Vlad has become a literal monster in our collective consciousness: as the vampire Dracula of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Even the historical Vlad has been distorted, achieving little recognition outside of Romania beyond exaggerated or falsified claims of him enjoying the taste of human blood as he dined amongst his impaled victims. In Romania, he’s sometimes regarded as a national hero and defender of Christendom, which is an equally tragic distortion of truth. I believe it is a great loss of historical perspective that we only think of Vlad only as the bloodthirsty sadist who originated the modern vampire mythos, rather than a cautionary lesson from our past.

While I do not think the same historical alterations that happened in the case of Vlad Dracula will happen to Hitler, especially during our lifetime, I think that a diminishing of the shared tragedy humanity suffered during the Second World War has already occurred. The cliché that history is written by the victors is true and we have cast the war as a great modern crusade for freedom against embodied symbols of tyranny. It is obvious that the threat the Axis posed to the world was both undeniable and terrible, but I believe it has become easy for us to ignore the complex causes and the human cost the war played on the victors and the vanquished, the heroes, the villains, and even the victims. Many people were not confined to any of these categories, while others embodied them all. It lessens the heroism of the people who serve in war to conceive of them as invincible, or to conceive their enemies as faceless hordes of evil. If one is invincible and one’s opponent is undeniably malevolent, then what is heroic about fighting in such a conflict? Veterans are heroic because they encountered their fear and an equally human enemy and overcame them both. War is a dirty business; the dirtiest. I’ve never served in one, but I feel that the vision of war as bloodthirsty fun presented in Inglourious Basterds is as detrimental an illusion as one can have about armed conflict. There is no heroism in carving swastikas into German foreheads for laughs. I’m not suggesting that Tarantino’s film is socially damaging the way something like Birth of a Nation was, just that it is indicative of the way we choose to remember things as more convenient then they may have occurred, which is where the real damage actually takes place.

Why does this movie concern me so much? Why not gripe about the glorified violence in Pulp Fiction or, for a 2009 film, in Zombieland? Wouldn’t that be equally as ridiculous? Isn’t it dangerous to require fiction to be “socially responsible”? All fair questions (and in the case of the latter one, I feel the answer is “yes”), but all I can say is that Inglourious Basterds irritated an idiosyncratic nerve in a purely subjective way. Perhaps it is a testament to the skill of the filmmakers that it inspired me to write a 1,500 word editorial on the way it reflects societal trends. In any case, it would be foolish to hold it against anyone who might disagree with me.