Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Universal Pictures / A Band Apart
d. Quentin Tarantino; pr. Lawrence Bender; scr. Quentin Tarantino; ph. Robert Richardson; ed. Sally Menke; prod d. David Wasco; cast. Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, Mike Myers, voice. Harvey Keitel (153 mins)
Hollywood’s Essential Law of Inglourious Basterdry
He is perhaps the most influential director to emerge from Hollywood in the 1990s. His works have been amongst both box-office hits and International Film Festival winners. His work has influenced a generation of aspiring filmmakers to turn to trash art and pop culture as much as the classics of world cinema, his work combining both with an effortless command of cinema as a post-modern medium, as “construct”.
He has single-handedly transformed Hollywood cinema and effaced any distinction between high and low art but in the process has revealed himself as an entirely superficial stylist. In his cinema is the epitome of the post-modern pop-culture amalgam: referential, devoid of meaning, aesthetics for their own sake, an elevating pleasure in the forms of populist junk culture. His name is Quentin Tarantino and his latest work, now showing in cinemas worldwide after a premiere earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, is Inglourious Basterds.
Taking its title from the 1980s Italian war movie by hack exploitation auteur Enzo G. Castellari (best known for such violent trash as 1990: the Bronx Warriors), Tarantino here turns his attention to the World War Two mission-movie as exemplified by such as The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and The Devil’s Brigade though, as the director once admitted was his avowed intention with this film, a spaghetti western with World War Two iconography.
Genre forms have always been important to Tarantino and he kept his personal favourite wartime adventure movie under wraps for some ten years before finally getting the chance to realize it on the big screen, with cast headliner Brad Pitt claiming it a film he was born to make. It’s clear that Tarantino enjoys this genre but his contribution to it is essentially a pastiche, a playfully referential wartime adventure movie which alludes to the form without adding to it in any way: it’s cleverly put together, entertaining while it lasts but wholly disposable dross an even insidious in its political implications.
In Inglourious Basterds, Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, who recruits a squad of barely-characterized Jewish-American soldiers to drop behind enemy line into Nazi-occupied Europe with one intention – to kill Nazis. Indeed, Pitt (known as Aldo the Apache) insists that his team members owe him 100 Nazi scalps each. Soon, their exploits are well known amongst the Nazi high command and a new mission seems destined to bring the adversaries into collision. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels has a new film he intends to premiere in a small cinema in occupied Paris. Exemplary of German pride, the film is to be shown to a select guest list of top Nazi brass, including Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler himself. If Pitt and his team can successfully infiltrate the guest list and destroy the theatre, they can end the war in one action. But, a Jewish escapee posing as a cinema owner has a plan of her own to wreak revenge on the Nazi high command who claimed her family in the film’s protracted opening scene.
As Tarantino plays hard and loose with historical fact (to the point of a comical historical revisionism), he once again uses a populist genre to allude to a variety of sources. Indeed, he begins the film by appropriating the mystique of the spaghetti western classic Once Upon a Time in the West and grafting its opening scene recreation onto a chapter headed “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France”, reminiscent of his friend Robert Rodriguez’s homage to the spaghetti western genre in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
In subsequent titled chapters, Tarantino leisurely charts “operation Kino”, a self-reflexive amalgam of inter-textuality and jokey stylization masquerading as a World War Two adventure. On its level, its hip, cool and comedic – as Tarantino can usually be counted on to be (excepting his odd slip into pretension in the disastrous Four Rooms) despite the relative box-office disappointment of his previous film, Death Proof, a homage to classic “grindhouse” exploitation cinema which critics accused of being shallow. Tarantino may have wanted to restore some substance to his work in Inglourious Basterds but it’s also shallow, superficial and empty – indeed, Inglourious Basterds is self-indulgent nonsense: although entertaining it is in comparison to such pioneering Tarantino works as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, resolutely trivial, a mannered inconsequence of a movie. It’s ho-hum morally relativistic fun.
And its political and moral implications are repugnant although also arguably relativist. As pointed out by the World Socialist website, Inglourious Basterds presents as heroes Americans who are no different to the Nazis they are up against.
They torture, maim and mutilate to obtain information in a series of scenes which bring to mind the American torture atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guanatamo Bay and are excused simply because the perpetrators are American and / or Jewish. The elevation of revenge to operatic mass-murdering grandeur in Inglourious Basterds essentially envisions a post 9-11 American consciousness in which fascism, murder and arguable war criminality are all justified. Tarantino never questions American authority and presents an essentially inverted piece of fascistic propaganda – here, it’s the Jews who murder, kill and maim Nazis: as is that inversion – justified by the higher demands of vengeance as Tarantino sees them – provides some sort of validation for the showing of acts of moral repugnance – but then war is hell as we all know from the movies and Tarantino is completely unconcerned by the intellectual implications of his work, content to revel in what is cinematic junk.
In that, Inglorious Basterds stands in direct opposition to the humanist revisionism of Holocaust drama in such recent works as diverse as Valkyrie, Good, The Reader, Defiance and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. These films introduced a human complexity into their depictions of inter-personal humanity within a Third Reich context to cumulatively pioneer a revisionist trend in World War Two cinema that can best be described as “Nazi humanism”. Here, religion (Judaism and Christianity) were denounced as ineffective and meaningless and the full, terrible breadth of human complexity embraced and examined, often with a behaviourist intent and a lack of moral judgment. Tarantino’s work in Inglorious Basterds has the human complexity of a banal comicbook, favours stylized, protracted scenes of boring dialogue which makes the film run almost twice as long as it should and reduces human complexity to the all-consuming cause and effect of vengeance-driven human rights atrocity. It's cartoonish misanthropy made by a former video store clerk with the pretences of being a revisionist film theorist.
There is always a tension in Tarantino movies between style and substance. Indeed, part of the attraction to his work is that he can apply a cinematic technique honed on the study of such cinema masters as Jean-Luc Godard to the most vacuous of pop-culture entertainments.
In that, Inglourious Basterds is quintessential Tarantino: knowing, cinematically rich and resolutely trivial at the same time – in a word, pointless. For those aware of the cinematic legacy of the World War Two movie – who can recognize the spoken line by guest star Mike Myers “all our rotten eggs in one basket” as originally spoken by the German POW camp commandant in The Great Escape – there is a tremendous amount of fun in Inglourious Basterds’ free and loose toying with historical fact and cinematic fiction. And, in an era of such revisionist Nazi humanist cinema – such contemporaneous works as the afore-mentioned Valkyrie, Defiance, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – it could be argued that Tarantino refuses to make any comment about human nature, morality or humanist responsibility and in so doing offers a smack in the face to art-house pretension.
In that, the purpose of Inglourious Basterds is to return to the cinema of Nazi atrocity the guilty pleasure of B-grade trash cinema and disavow the solemnity that has been accorded recent screen treatments of World War Two, from Schindler’s List to The Pianist. But Tarantino is not alone in this intent and his tone here owes to Dutchman Paul Verhoeven’s astonishing Black Books a thriller of a Nazi adventure story with a crackling pace, intellectual veracity and moral complexity which in comparison exposes Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as nothing more than an entertaining piece of sluggish, protracted, banal triviality. That’s the problem with recent Tarantino: his work has a viscerally captivating feel but is conceptually bankrupt except at the level of cinematic allusion – Tarantino’s work is all “construct”. His method of assembly is fresh, but his content is achingly familiar to the point of negating his admitted creativity. But that’s Tarantino’s game – he combines masterful technique with virtually meaningless commentary: the celebration of junk. The result is clever to be sure, but empty – one can spot the references, appreciate the construction but there is no point to it: it’s masturbatory fantasy.
Inglourious Basterds Publicity Still
Where once Tarantino defied Hollywood and introduced a bold, radically revisionist style that epitomized post-modernism’s embrace of both high and low art, he has with Inglorious Basterds revealed himself a capable and cunning craftsman whose work, no matter how “hip”, is ultimately little different to either Hollywood dross or the insignificant trash culture he alludes to. He is an auteur only in that his style is recognizable, but beyond the style there is simply nothing else to be found.
Inglourious Basterds proves without a doubt that Tarantino, talented filmmaker though he may be, is incapable of originality – content to borrow from exploitation pioneers and pretend the result is of some cinematic consequence: he has buried his intelligence in endless reference to the point where, beyond the acknowledgement of such reference, his films have no point, no life beyond themselves. Tarantino’s cinema is an absolute dead-end. Although exemplary of post-modern aesthetics it reduces filmmaking to pointless triviality – in that no matter how entertaining his films may be and how allusive he is to cinema history, his work as demonstrated by Inglorious Basterds is as insignificant and meaningless as the worst Hollywood dross he once turned to genre cinema and trash culture to rebel against.
With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino furthers the intent to apply his directorial personality to disreputable genres that once made his work fresh and dynamic. However, his tricks are known by now and all he can do is repeat himself within differing generic tropes: that in itself is not diversity. Granted, his works are entertaining and accomplished but the effect of watching them is transitory – fun while they last, they ultimately add up to very little. In short, Inglourious Basterds is merely yet another repetition of the junk culture aesthetic Tarantino perfected a decade ago with Pulp Fiction. Being junk culture’s foremost auteur may be all Tarantino aspires to (and indeed achieves) but one is left confronting an ultimately futile display of talent in service of triviality – though naturally the director’s defenders would retort that “meaning” in cinema is unnecessary (such, ultimately is the means to the ends of post-modernism).
There is to be sure an entertaining novelty in seeing Tarantino re-work yet another genre but the sheer pointlessness of the enterprise consequently makes his work ultimately no different from any Hollywood hack working his way through screen genres. He’s just a little more knowing, playful and vainly self-important about it. Tarantino has always praised such trash auteurs as Jack Hill (ripped off for Jackie Brown) and in tackling Castellari’s legacy with Inglourious Basterds merely finds a new level of superficial entertainment, so buried in allusion as to be indecipherable and empty pastiche. Sadly, Inglourious Basterds only proves that this once innovative talent is now floundering in unrepentant triviality.
While that may offer entertainment value, it ultimately adds up to very little – Inglourious Basterds is thus, to quote Shakespeare, much ado about nothing. Only its historical revisionism in contrast to the solemnity of current World War Two fiction provides novelty to Inglourious Basterds, and even then only in comparison to other films.
