Inglorious Basterds

As can be guessed, I just watched the film. Somehow the publicity material lead me to believe that the film would be something campy, funny, witty and violent – but in the quintessential Tarantino way – and I am a big fan – so I was looking forward to a lot of wry smiles and chuckles.

I must have lost my sense of humour.

I didn’t find the film funny. Not in the least. Except for a few seconds here and there where I managed a smile, it was dead serious, heart stoppingly tense and unbelievably disturbing. And I don’t mean just the very realistic graphic violence – I think it is good for audience to see real stomach churning graphic violence and learn that it is very different from the stylized video game kitsch that youth have grown de-sensitised to – but the more disturbing larger issues it brought up.

Is the kind of mutilating violence that Lt. Aldo Raine demands his Jewish brigade inflict upon the Wermacht justified, or even justifiable – even considering the execrable horrors visited upon the Jews by the SS? The “take no prisoners” situation is understandable in a fierce engagement – perhaps the emotion at losing your own men is so overwhelming that one loses control and murders the surviving enemy in a fit of passion. But as a calculated strategy from the outset it is very hard to justify. It is a film, of course, and set in an alternate reality – but I think the questions are real. Violence for the sake of violence…? Not exactly a kosher message in todays world, and it’s not very tasteful to pass it off as justifiable because the victims were Germans. Several officers and soldiers in the Wermacht were normal men – even good men who happened to be in the armed forces of a country taken over by a madman. Soldiers like Karl Donitz, and Hanz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel – decorated warriors and decent, even noble, men who Allied commanders spoke up for (Donitz was saved from the Soviet insistence he be hanged as a war criminal by Allied commanders who refused to see such a miscarriage of justice) . Soldiers like Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld (shown in the Pianist) and Claus Von Stuffenberg (shown in Valkyrie) – both actual figures who clearly did not go along with the Nazi dogma – and both who suffered and died in the real world for their pains. The caricature that every German soldier deserved to be scalped is worryingly simplistic. Reality is so much more complicated than that and pre-meditated mindless violence that Aldo Raine intends reminds me in fact, more than anything, of the Taliban with their credo that every infidel is their enemy.

One scene that sears my mind is the one where Sgt. Werner Rachtman (played with haunting brilliance by Richard Sammel), unarmed and surrounded by the basterds, is threatened and taunted by Raine. Knowing that he faces a brutal death he still looks Raine right in the eye and betraying not a shred of fear refuses to give away the position of his compatriots. Raine asks him what he got his medal for – and with utter calm he replies, “For Bravery”. The fact that the soldier before him is clearly is a man of dignity and courage seems to make not one iota of difference to Raine. The shot where Rachtman, completely composed, looks up at the loutish Sgt Donny Donnovitz as he lines the baseball bat up with his head made me cringe. And what followed was a horrifyingly graphic murder of an unarmed kneeling man by victor wielding a baseball bat, who ends it chanting baseball cheer over his victims body and is, revoltingly, applauded by his comrades.

And many in the audience laughed.

Is that the message that we’re sending out in such films then? That its not just ok, but entertaining, to bash in the head of a kneeling prisoner? That a brave and dignified man deserves to be butchered just because he was wearing the wrong uniform? I sure hope Tarantino did not intend that message. I hope he was asking the question not answering it. As far as I am concerned, Sgt. Rachtman was the hero of that encounter and the basterds looked no better than cowardly back alley gangsters.

The film is, undoubtedly, brilliantly written (for the most part). The tension was electric almost throughout, explosively broken in places by the furious mayhem of sudden, bewilderingly realistic armed violence – most vividly in the basement bar scene. Christolph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa was a virtuoso performance and I can understand Tarantino worrying about the role – the part was indeed almost unplayable and it is almost unbelievable how real Woltz makes Landa. The story of the luckless yet earnest Frederick Zoller and tragic Soshanna within the larger plot was both heartwarming and heartwrenching, and the way the film moved inexorably to its climax had me on tenterhooks.

The end, though was a bit of a let down in its simplicity and brought back the disturbing question of mindless violence as a solution. What had heightened the tension for me of course was the fact that in reality Hitler did not die in Paris, and I thought the more interesting challenge would have been to how to meld the fiction back into the fact – how to have the plot fail realistically. Creating a fantasy ending where all the bad guys get blown up even though the plan has gone completely haywire (well at least the basterds’ plan) seemed a little weak to me. And then there’s the same question that lynching of Sgt. Rachtman raised earlier – in an already de-sensitised world are we saying the ideal solution to our problems is to simply pack in all the bad guys into a room and blow it up? It is a film, no doubt, but subliminal messages are still potent, and it disturbs me to see that such simplistic, and in some places distasteful messages are masquerading as “fun” entertainment.

I just hope the film brought the same discomfort and questions to more people, and those who have seen it did not just find it “good clean fun”.

I didn’t think it was funny at all.