I’ve been told more than once now that because the Scriptures contain stories of violent revenge and conquest, and since Christ is going to come again to unleash bloody justice upon unbelievers, that perhaps I should question my objections to a movie that invites us to find pleasure in the onscreen disfigurement, dismemberment, and destruction of Nazis.
So, here’s my pitch for Tarantino’s next movie:
Jesus comes back.
He raises his original apostles from the dead.
They’re the Shekinah Glourious Basterds.
He arms his apostles.
Then he raises the Jews and Romans who were there on Calvary as he died.
He and the Glourious Basterds then capture and crucify every one of those responsible for putting him on the cross in the first place. He pardons Judas, in his mercy, but carves a 666 into his forehead so everyone will know what he did.
Why not? It’s *catharsis*! It’s great cinema! And it’s only a movie! And if he does it right, I’m sure it will be a fine critique of the culture of violence.
And since there’s Old Testament precedent for the Almighty assigning men and women to carry out bloody atrocities in the name of revenge, I really don’t see a problem here. I mean, Jesus is gonna come back with a big sword and splash the guts of his enemies all over creation, right?
I like the “Father, Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” idea better.
You just became my film critic of the year forever.
This is the idea I’ve been trying to get across to other people but they just call me a Nazi sympathizer. What would it take for people to realize those are depictions of human beings being tortured and maimed that they are laughing at? The killing of Nazi babies?
Brilliant! Actually, this might be pretty funny as some over-the-top animated short on Adult Swim or something like that.
That picture totally slays me. It needs a caption (said in full high-decibel Al Pacino yelling):
“I’m waitin’ for ya! What, you ain’t comin’ out? Okay, I’m comin’ in! You think you’re big time? You gonna f—-n’ die big time! You ready? HERE COMES THE PAIN!”
Shekinah Glourious Basterds!
Once upon a time in Roman occupied Palestine…
What’s your opinion of No Country for Old Men, then? And McCarthy in general.
First of all, love the picture. 🙂 Made my day.
Second of all, I don’t think it’s fair to criticize IB for indulging in fantasy when so many other movies do it so much, and we just let it slide. Why did everyone all of a sudden just sit up and say, “Hey, wait a second! Zombies and stormtroopers and the Joker and every bad guy ever who got what’s coming to him is okay, but heaven forbid we demonize and torture Nazis!”
And for the record, there’s only one scene of torture in the whole film, and it’s when the Basterds are inflicting it on one of the good guys. (You can bet this was a deliberate choice by Tarantino to make us question what type of good guys the Basterds really were.) There’s a huge difference between torture and murder.
And finally, QT understands how movies work, intimately, and he understands that IB, if it’s as good as his massive ego believes it is, will survive years down the road and be talked about and looked at apart from his hype around it – just because he jazzed up some fans one night doesn’t mean that he endorses everything the Basterds do in this movie. Take the Bear Jew bat-killing scene. Knowing Tarantino, I expect slo mo cuts and close-ups of the bat smashing into the Nazi. A focus on the violence and the Nazi’s face as it was smashed in. That’s nowhere to be found. Instead, we get slow mo cuts and epic music on the Nazi’s face as he bravely faces forward and takes death honorably. When the bat is actually swung, Tarantino cuts away to show the rest of the Basterds cheering the Bear Jew on. Not once do we get an extreme close-up of the Nazi’s mutilated skull. (Plus, the script goes out of the way to show that this is no innocent Nazi – he’s killed Jews and ordered men to kill Jews – he’s guilty.)
Contrast this with one of your favorite movies, Jeffrey – A History of Violence, where Viggo smashing that coffee pot into the bad guy’s face is dwelled on in horrifying Cronenberg flapping-jaw detail for a few seconds (and coincidentally, who doesn’t feel some satisfaction when Viggo kills both the men who have been threatening him? why is feeling satisfaction at the Nazis being done in by the people they’ve been trying to put down any worse than this?).
What would it take for people to realize those are depictions of human beings being tortured and maimed that they are laughing at? The killing of Nazi babies?
Again, I can understand where you guys are coming from. These Nazis are portrayed as human (and even perhaps noble) and it’s horrifying to see they die to the geers of the basterds. But do you think the Nazi officer being killed seeming noble was an accident? Or did he seem brave and even self-sacrificing for his men on purpose? Did the young guy who gave up the information seem human? Yes. Was the Nazi new father celebrating with his buddies in the tavern portrayed sympathetically and human? Yes, he was.
Was it a coincidence that anyone in the real movie theater who had happened to cheer during the baseball bat scene then get to see the Nazis cheering while watching their “war movie”? No – not that that isn’t going to fly over the heads of some, but just from talking to others, it’s noticed by anyone who bothers to think. And it’s meant to be noticed.
I don’t understand why everyone keeps saying the Basterds are fighting for revenge, they are fighting in a war (and doing a little myth making to terrorize the Nazis as a strategy – using the same tactics used by American Apache/Cherokee Indians) – Mel Gibson in The Patriot anyone? The revenge theme is there, but that part of the film belongs to Shosanna – and while it’s revenge, she’s still risking her life to make an effort to put an end to the Third Reich. I just don’t think you have to agree with the motives of every character in order to say that there is a depth to the film that can’t be ignored.
I would say Jewish catharsis isn’t the point, as much as the point being just a story by someone who asked himself (a) what he would have try to do in the same situation, and (b) why anyone else didn’t seem to get a chance? Same sort of film could be (might be) made about some group of heroes fighting back against the KKK.
““Violence in the movies can be cool,” [Tarantino] says. “It’s just another colour to work with. When Fred Astaire dances, it doesn’t mean anything. Violence is the same. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a colour.”
[…]
Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilising instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts). Any work of art that denies this sense – that is based on subverting it – will ultimately be sullying. No, I’m not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture – and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino’s later films – leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-tragedy-of-tarantino-he-has-proved-his-critics-right-1777147.html
Let me respond to something Tickletext said/quoted.
“Any work of art that denies this sense – that is based on subverting it – will ultimately be sullying.”
I can’t remember if it was mentioned in this post or another on Jeffrey’s blog, but who didn’t cheer when the Death Star blew up, killing millions of innocent women and children and workers who were just doing their job and not part of any sadistict plot to destroy all Jedi? Does that mean that Star Wars is “sullying” as you put it? Die Hard had the bad guy dying and us cheering. Is this film sullying? Sauraon was destroyed, along with hundreds of thousands of orcs and other races, in Return of the King, and we cheered because our heroes were saved. Is Lord of the Rings “sullying”? In any given zombie film we’re never encouraged to cheer for the zombies – no, rather we’re encouraged to cheer when their heads are cut off. But what’s interestin about zombies is that they used to be people, and, as far as the characters in the movie now, could still potentially be saved by some unknown medical advancement. Is every zombie film of all time “sullying”? In “a Bug’s Life” – Hopper needs to be destroyed in order so that the ants may live, and a bird does him in – Flick and Atta lead Hopper to the bird deceitfully and it grabs him and feeds him to their babies. We’re encouraged to feel happy and relieved that his reign of terror is over. Is this film “sullying?” What about “Sleeping Beauty” – with Maleficent? What about Khan in Star Trek? What about the Joker in the first Batman, where he plummets to his doom?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems hugely over-simplistic to call a film sullying that, in some way, insinuates that the demise of bad people can sometimes be a good thing. If anything, I would think this would argue the opposite. Movies are mirrors to our lives, and when bad people die and good people live, it is reinforcing some very basic values that, in a morally ambiguous world where many claim that there is no such thing as “right” or “wrong,” is strengthening and points to a basic truth about life: there is good, and there is bad, and we should be good when we can and do what we can to prevent bad. Gandhi said that if you see a man walking down the street shooting everyone in sight, the least violent thing to do is kill that man. If you do nothing, you are complicit in his act BECAUSE you did nothing. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In IB, Tarantino hypothesizes what would have happened if a few good men had stepped up to eradicate an evil. I (and I think I’m not alone in saying this) resent the implication that our moral muscles are a tiny bit more atrophied because we saw/enjoyed IB. If anything, QT’s excellent film has caused me to think more deeply about the controversial subjects that surrounds it, and it is igniting discussions just like these all over the country.
How its detractors can sometimes simplify this movie into a mere piece of work that morally corrodes you is beyond me. The evidence against this is massive.
Just to clarify, those were not my words but Johann Hari’s (and Tarantino’s, quoted by Hari). As I have not seen IB it would be pretty audacious of me to say that it is sullying or edifying or anything else.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550604574360451237742752.html
This article was posted over at the CT Movies blog and I thought it was worth posting here. In the article, the comments from those at the screening who enjoyed the movie are a bit troubling and seem to reinforce Jeffrey’s arguments against the film. I still haven’t seen it yet, but I really want to just to because, at the very least, the film raises some very important questions about the role of violence and revenge in fantasy/action films. If the film does have an inherent critique of violent revenge (either intended or unintended by its maker) it seems to be lost on a lot of people. That doesn’t necessarily make it a failure. Films like Taxi Driver, for instance, explore the consequences of violence, but I think a lot of people simply enjoy it for its vivid depiction of the retribution Travis Bickle brings on the pimps.
I just saw it and loved it.
When I see a film, I enter into the film’s world, and in this world, everything takes place in wartime. In war, things are permissible that aren’t permissible elsewhere. This is precisely why war should be avoided.
But once you’re in a war, it’s time for the good guys to win. Get in, do the job, get out. Inglorious Basterds is about this very thing.
Of course, if one acts like it’s peacetime when one is in a war, one will quickly get killed. If one acts like it’s wartime when it’s peacetime, one should be caught by the authorities and punished. There are boundaries.
IB takes place in wartime. The rules are different there. War is hell.