Inglourious Basterds
Nov. 9th, 2009 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mlrI saw Inglourious Basterds again last night. I think it is my favorite Tarantino film (thus far). I read several reviews after seeing it again where I found quite a few statements like the following from David Mendelsohn:
If you strip away the amusing, self-referential gamesmanship that makes up Tarantino's style, Inglourious Basterds, like many of his other films, is in fact about something real and deeply felt: the visceral pleasure of revenge.
Tarantino's movie may be the latest, if the most extreme, example of a trend that shows just how fragile memory can be—a series of popular World War II films that disproportionately emphasize armed Jewish heroism (Defiance) and German resistance (Valkyrie, White Rose), or elicit sympathy for German moral confusion (The Reader).
I think most seventh graders could tell you it was a revenge fantasy, and ipso facto couldn't possibly resemble actual history. Although I was never really interested in WWII, the interpretation of it through (mainly) film has been unavoidable. Recalling the dozens of WWII movies, I don't think there has ever been a subject quite so exploited by the movie industry. Any pretense that Audie Murphy and the Dirty Dozen are closer to history is laughable. The war remains simply a bottomless well for storytellers and moralists of every stripe.
The scene in Inglourious Basterds where Christoph Waltz shares strudel with a reluctant and terrified Mélanie Laurent is as vivid to me as anything in Saving Private Ryan. And that the scene finds itself in an unwieldy black comedy, makes it more appealing, not less.
If you strip away the amusing, self-referential gamesmanship that makes up Tarantino's style, Inglourious Basterds, like many of his other films, is in fact about something real and deeply felt: the visceral pleasure of revenge.
Tarantino's movie may be the latest, if the most extreme, example of a trend that shows just how fragile memory can be—a series of popular World War II films that disproportionately emphasize armed Jewish heroism (Defiance) and German resistance (Valkyrie, White Rose), or elicit sympathy for German moral confusion (The Reader).
I think most seventh graders could tell you it was a revenge fantasy, and ipso facto couldn't possibly resemble actual history. Although I was never really interested in WWII, the interpretation of it through (mainly) film has been unavoidable. Recalling the dozens of WWII movies, I don't think there has ever been a subject quite so exploited by the movie industry. Any pretense that Audie Murphy and the Dirty Dozen are closer to history is laughable. The war remains simply a bottomless well for storytellers and moralists of every stripe.
The scene in Inglourious Basterds where Christoph Waltz shares strudel with a reluctant and terrified Mélanie Laurent is as vivid to me as anything in Saving Private Ryan. And that the scene finds itself in an unwieldy black comedy, makes it more appealing, not less.
