A very good Danish teacher of mine once told me that in order to analyze any piece of fiction, all you really had to look closer at were a) “what’s it called” and b) “how does it end?”.
The title “Inglourious Basterds” is a slightly mistyped retyping of the previous “Inglorious Bastards” of which Tarantino’s film is neither a remake nor a direct parody. On one hand this suggests a willing invoking of the generic, with the typos in there as nothing but “artistic license”.
Incidentally the danish translation names the Basterds something more akin to “The Sinister Hellhounds” or “Insidious Scumdogs”. I’m not sure why, but I almost like those titles more.
The ending is where the meat is however. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Herman Goering and the Führer himself are excecuted, shot to pieces, blown up and finally incinerated in a small movie theatre in Paris a few weeks after the landing of Allied troops in Normandy in 1944. In case you weren’t aware – this is not the generally accepted historical account.
In the aftermath of all this, Lt. Aldo Raine and the only other surviving member of the Basterds, Utivich, find themselves alone just across Allied lines with Colonel Hans Landa, who seems just about to get away with everything. That is until Raine shoots Landas radio operator, and presents his primary beef to Landa: Landa is a Nazi, and now he wants to run away from it.
Thus Raine and Utivich carve a swastika in Landas forehead. And one comments to the other, in the final shot of the film: “You know what Utivich, I think this may be my masterpiece.”
One possible interpretation, that I am surprised hasn’t been discussed more, is the fact that the line is Tarantino speaking. That is insofar as Raine acting as an author surrogate more than any other character in a Tarantino movie, I’m not forgetting that both Goebbels and Hitler speak more like Tarantino characters than historical figures.
“Basterds” was a project that was many years in the making. The first drafts of the script apparantly already existed somewhere around the time of “Jackie Brown” if not earlier. Though the plot was radically different back then.
I’m taking a wild educated guess here, but I suspect two events were really what finally got the project rolling: the first was the premiere of “There Will Be Blood” in 2007 (Tarantino evens admits as much – having an unofficial rivalry with Paul Thomas Anderson) and the second was the dissappointing reception of “Death Proof”.
Tarantino had been critizized for a substatial part of his career. The points of contention are usually the points that other people love his movie for: His dialogue and character-driven (non)-plots and his heavy homaging/stealing from other films that he likes.
When critique like this goes on a thing often happens: The director often becomes indistinguashable from his movies. Your mileage may vary on this, but I don’t think that this is always a fair point to make.
But apparantly Tarantino seems to own his criticism here. Taking all his personal trademarks and siphoning them into a movie that contains some of the more sacrosant points of cinema, and of human history in general: The persecution of Jews (Shoshanna’s backstory), the brutalities of war (The Basterds), living in fear and opression with censorship as a consequence (Shoshanna in Paris), and finally culminating them in a cathartic slaughter of perhaps the most demonized individuals in history.
And that is precisely the point. Where perhaps any other director with Tarantinos academic knowledge of, and deep-felt love for, cinema would have played more on subtlety or obvious symbolism. Tarantino is simply “obvious”.
His references and homages are there, but as always you can either choose to ignore them, appreciate them or make a game of picking them out. They don’t have to be understood to appreciate the movie, the movie is an achievement in itself. As it should be.
This is what leads me to compare this movie favorably to Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”. Where “Antichrist” split the waters. Either you loved it or hated it I allowed myself to use a simple reasoning in order to decide what I thought of it: Was the movie itself any good?
Short answer: No. It was too obsessed with its own subtext to care about making the text coherent. There was probably and excellent symbolism and research behind it, but no movie to hang it on. The movie was admittetly von Trier’s way of getting out of depression. If it helped him, I’m happy for him, but I very doubt that it had that effect on anyone else. In this case the director and the film really became inseperable.
In the same way Tarantino’s “Basterds” is a vanity project. But that really can’t be held against it, because Tarantino knows how to make a vanit project entertaining, and still make his point.
For furthing reading on what effect “Basterds” has had on Tarantino’s career. I can recommend this article from The Guardian’s Film Blog.
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