Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly of the Chicago Reader<\/em>, offers a critical takedown of the movie\u2019s new ending: \u201cInglourious Basterds<\/em>\u00a0makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp\u00a0as a historical reality<\/em>,\u201d (italics his). That is, by ignoring some of the horrors of reality, Basterds<\/em>\u2019 fantasy encourages historical amnesia. However, this seems challenging to reconcile with the opening scene\u2019s portrayal of the coldblooded murder of Jews to the delight of an SS officer. An officer who responds to being called the Jew Hunter with relish, for he \u201clove[s] the title.\u201d The movie contains depictions of the day-to-day horror of the bureaucratic work that supported the Holocaust, and takes the time to capture Shoshanna\u2019s fear in response to it. Her gulps of air, after Hans Landa stops questioning her, sound like she has been choked by fear. Ignoring the Holocaust would be problematic, but Basterds <\/em>doesn\u2019t deny its existence, or even its horror. Additionally, this probably isn\u2019t the right line of inquiry. Rosenbaum-and critics like him- seem occupied with representation of history. But with Tarantino\u2019s construction of a new history, the larger concern should be with the implications of the new ending. What does it show about the stories we want to be true, as compared to the ones that are?<\/p>\n One path to an answer is through the movie\u2019s recasting of the victors, specifically how the alternate conquerors defy Nazi categories of racial purity. The US army fighting on the European front was ethnically diverse; black Americans discriminated against at home fought for the country at war. But Basterds<\/em> replaces an ethnically mixed group of soldiers with a group of Jews, led by a Native American man. Lt. Aldo Raine \u201cgot a little Indian in,\u201d him, and the script suggests his noticeable but never mentioned neck scar comes from a noose. While Raine looks white (he\u2019s played by Brad Pitt!), his backstory grants him the mantle of the racially impure. The other Basterds backstories are easier; they are Jews fighting the Third Reich, two from Austria and Germany, the rest from the States. This shift in history offers the chance for the World War II Jew to be more than a victim. Not only do they escape a pitying victimhood, but the movie invests time and energy into the creation of what Christian Thorne calls the \u201cimage of the tough-guy Jew,\u201d so it can celebrate Jews pumping Hitler full of lead, castrating a Nazi via bullets, or lunging in slow-motion to kill Hitler\u2019s bodyguard. But the movie\u2019s character creation doesn\u2019t stop there. The other revenge plot features two conspirators: a Jewish woman and her black lover. She escapes the Nazis before plotting their death. While she does not represent the same vein of Jewish machismo as the Basterds, Shoshanna still offers Jewish resistance. Fredrick Zoller, the Nazi sniper and boy wonder, chases after the Frenchwoman\u2019s love, and expresses an entitlement to her body during the fateful scene in the projection room. The Nazis view her as inferior for her identities as both a woman and a Jew. Her black lover\u2019s inferiority gets taken as fact by Goebbels, who won\u2019t even let Marcel perform his job as projectionist because of his race. Contrast their success with the film\u2019s two white heroes, Bridget von Hammersmark and Archie Hicox, who die before they can come close to defeating the Nazis. \u00a0The movie\u2019s resistance comes from the very people the Nazis made a national project of oppressing.<\/p>\n The alternate history\u2019s alternate heroes offer a direct repudiation of Nazi ideology. America\u2019s victory clearly indicated that racially integrated troops could defeat the Aryan army. But the Allies real-life win is complicated by America\u2019s ugly racial past, a point made clear by an SS officer\u2019s pointed jab at \u201cthe history of the Negro in America.\u201d Where the US can\u2019t be a perfect hero, the victims of Nazi violence can be. The new world constructed by this alternate fiction places power in the hands of those the Nazis hate, and allows them to defeat their enemies. Basterds<\/em>\u2019s victory shows us what a world looks like where Nazi ideology doesn\u2019t just lose, but loses to those it hates the most.<\/p>\n Tarantino\u2019s alternate history offers a new path to salvation through ethnic and religious minorities, but also via culture. The conflagration in the theater positions the \u201cmovie as WMD, destroying the Third Reich, ending the war,\u201d Ben Walters claims, which is \u201can alluring idea, indeed, but a flagrantly fantastical one.\u201d (20) A combination of homemade and classic culture destroys both propaganda and Nazis as the whole. Old reels offer the kindling to destroy Nazi culture and society. Two amateurs film offer a narration of the destruction. Movie culture saturates Basterds<\/em>; Operation Kino is German for cine, as in cinema; Hicox and Hammersmark are a critic and a star respectively; German directors of the period get namedropped; Aldo Raine comes from Aldo Ray; and so on, the movie\u2019s accoutrements forming a veritable mountain of referential winks and nods. The movie indicates a desire to care about movies, and to show <\/em>that it cares. Movies matter, Tarantino says, and says, and says. The climax comes from movies offering a response to propaganda, with the antidote to poisonous culture coming from its genuinely good variants. The better ending to World War II comes with a cultural solution. Good movies save us from the bad.<\/p>\n This reading of the movie sees it as genuinely transformative. For two and a half hours, the path to a new-and-improved world gets put on display. In this world, the victimized strike back decisively against their oppressors, and movies aid in their fight. But Tarantino doesn\u2019t make this an easy escape to a better world. What critics describe as a fantasy is more complicated than escapism. There are two problems with it. The first comes from the realm of the Basterds.<\/p>\n The Basterds\u2019 obsession with marking their enemies doesn\u2019t indicate a desire to create a new world, but to solidify the hierarchy of the old. The second-to-last shot of the movie is Aldo\u2019s knife carving a swastika into Landa\u2019s forehead, with blood gushing, the victim screaming, and the camera lingering on the butchered skin. Then, the camera flips perspective to a smiling Aldo and Utivich, admiring their \u201cmasterpiece.\u201d The stated rationale is that, post-war, Landa will remove his uniform and become anonymous, just another rich man on Nantucket. The scars keep the recognition of Landa\u2019s evil. Preserving the moral hierarchy of the past seems unnecessary-after the real war, Nazis get sent to jail, and even a colonel with immunity likely wouldn\u2019t escape notice as a German who fought on behalf of the Nazis. Beyond redundancy, the markers indicate a desire for a moral hierarchy for the future derived from the status quo. Rather than offer a solution to the conflicts of the old world, the new creation apparently should maintain the old\u2019s battles. Not only is Raine\u2019s practice cruel and bloody, but it passes up transcendence for preservation.<\/p>\n The Basterds’ scars<\/p><\/div>\n The second issue with Inglourious Basterds<\/em> as a solution comes from Tarantino\u2019s treatment of film. The movies-as-savior narrative doesn\u2019t align with the film\u2019s actual stance. Rather, Tarantino forces both film and its creators to die a fiery death. Zoller and Shoshanna die; Marcel and Goebbels die; Nation\u2019s Pride <\/em>and the unnamed revenge flick both burn. Shoshanna responds to Zoller\u2019s film question \u201cWho has a message for Germany?\u201d by saying she does, for she is the \u201cface of Jewish vengeance.\u201d Then everything bursts into flames. Jewish vengeance answers Nazi patriotism, and the consequence is it all dies. At best, vibrant movie culture serves as a rejoinder to overzealous propaganda. At worst, it cancels it out. Either way, movie culture fails to offer enduring salvation.<\/p>\n Face of Jewish vengeance? Sure. Film representation of a path to utopia? Less clear<\/p><\/div>\n Even in Tarantino\u2019s references to movie history, movies create tragedy. One of the weirdest little injections of outside culture comes from the scene where nitrate film\u2019s explosiveness gets explained to the moviegoer. A split screen effect allows for the left side to pan over spools of film while the right contains a clip from Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s 1936 film Sabotage<\/em>. After the part excerpted for Inglourious Basterds<\/em>, the boy shown with nitrate film from the sample makes it onto a bus. The package under his arm turns out to be a bomb, which explodes, and the nitrate film amplifies the explosion. The innocent boy dies. Movies can\u2019t be relied on to defend us; we shouldn\u2019t even rely on them to avoid killing us.<\/p>\n Sabotage (1936) on the right, as inserted by Tarantino<\/p><\/div>\n Even as Tarantino \u201cboth salutes and problematizes the power of film,\u201d as Walters describ es it, he draws comparisons between the actions of the Nazis and their Allied counterparts. (22) Thorne shows this through in a series of paired images; the carving of the swastika in the forehead and Nation\u2019s Hero<\/em> carving a swastika into wood; Eli Roth and Zoller taking the same angle down the barrel of their guns; the Apache comments from Aldo Raine and the drunken German. Look at the only two times the camera zooms in on a cigarette. First, Hans Landa stabs it into a delectable strudel, ruining the dessert. Next, it rotates in slow-motion after Marcel\u2019s throw before lighting the pile of film. The seemingly unnecessary shot of strudel protruding from cigarette can\u2019t pass without an equally extraneous shot of a cigarette preparing to hit the nitrate. Walters describes a parallel between Landa and Tarantino\u2019s pacing. \u201cThe multilingual, dialogue-heavy longueurs that precede each chapter\u2019s concluding ecstasy of violence map onto Landa\u2019s taking his time with his victims, stringing out the small talk, having another glass of milk, not eating the strudel before the cream arrives,\u201d with both the director and the SS officer relishing that suspense. (22) That parallel phrasing produces the uncomfortable comparison of the audience, of us<\/em>, to the victims. The power of film certainly is \u201cproblematized,\u201d for it ties together all-too-tightly the fascists and their opponents.<\/p>\n But then the film reaches off-screen to make sure its critique hits home, too. Both Walters and Thorne point out the callous laughter of Hitler as echoing the cackles within the theater during the exact same show. \u201cOnly a thoughtless viewer will not see him or herself reflected in shots of Hitler cackling,\u201d Walters proclaims, with the implication that there are lots of thoughtless viewers. (22) The audience can\u2019t be inoculated from viral ill-will just because it\u2019s separated by a screen. Watching the movie and celebrating its deaths makes you resemble Hitler, which would merely be like the baser elements of internet name calling if Tarantino didn\u2019t lodge this critique through an elaborate visual schema of similarities.<\/p>\n Looking at the film\u2019s alternate history seems misguided as an exercise in finding political messages. Though it creates a new history, that history is subsumed to a larger message. The movie takes on the Third Reich not to prove a point about resistance to fascism, though it comments on it along the way. Rather, the moral logic of Nazism, and our abhorrence for its associations, lulls an audience into cheering for the reversal of Nazi evil as justice. Rosenbaum\u2019s concern- \u201cBasterds<\/em>\u00a0makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp\u00a0as a historical reality<\/em>,\u201d- gets it perfectly wrong. Basterds<\/em> makes it possible to grasp the Holocaust as a modern possibility.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino.” Blog post.\u00a027 Aug. 2009. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. <www.jonathanrosenbaum.net\/2009\/08\/16606\/>.<\/p>\n Thorne, Christian. “Tarantino, Nazis and Movies That Can Kill You-Part 1.” Blog post.\u00a0Commonplace Book<\/em>. Williams College, 9 June 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. <http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/tarantino-nazis-and-movies-that-can-kill-you-part-1\/>.<\/p>\n Thorne, Christian. “Tarantino, Nazis and Movies That Can Kill You-Part 2.” Blog post.\u00a0Commonplace Book<\/em>. Williams College, 17 June 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. <http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/tarantino-nazis-and-movies-that-can-kill-you-part-2\/>.<\/p>\n Walters, Ben. \u201cDebating\u00a0Inglourious Basterds<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0Film Quarterly<\/em>, vol. 63, no. 2, 2009, pp. 19\u201322. www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.1525\/fq.2009.63.2.19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"The](\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-117-fall16\/files\/2016\/11\/Butz-Swastika-300x183.jpg\")
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