Glorious ‘Basterds’
WARNING: DO NOT read this blog post if you’ve yet to check out Inglourious Basterds, because it is fucking festooned with SPOILERS. (Note: There’s also one paragraph in particular where I discuss the endings of several classic movies you should’ve seen by now, so, beware.)
In a film course I took one summer at Auburn, my instructor spent almost an entire class period discussing the pointlessness and futility of attempting to replicate reality on film. It’s impossible, he said, and why would you want to, anyway? It ignores everything that makes the medium interesting and expressive in the first place.
No other filmmaker seems to recognize and revel in that idea more than Quentin Tarantino. Movies like Pulp Fiction and, to a greater extent, Kill Bill Vols. I and II, gleefully embrace their unreality. And with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has taken that penchant to the next logical level, creating an alternate-reality WWII where he can fill der Fuhrer full of lead and blow his ass up but good.
That brings me to what I love most about Basterds, and QT’s oeuvre in general: he knows the proper way to give an audience not just what they want, but what they’re dying to see, and without sacrificing an ounce of artistic merit to accomplish it. The way Shoshanna gets to strike utter terror into the hearts of a roomful of Nazis; the way Donny and Omar (who looks strangely like the love child of Paul Reubens and Johnny Depp, BTW) get to orgasmically machine gun an endless stream of them as they flee the theater; the way Aldo and Smithson leave their mark on Col. Landa. Every good guy gets what he wants, and (almost) every bad guy gets dead, including the most important one of all.
The idea of killing (and killing, and killing, and killing) Hitler on celluloid is so simple and cathartic and brilliant that I can’t believe no one has thought to do it before. If Dr. Strangelove and Watchmen can play the alternate reality game with the Cold War era, why couldn’t we — why shouldn’t we — do the same with WWII? It’s the ultimate in historical wish-fufillment, and it stands as one of the most thoroughly satisfying endings I’ve ever seen. Ever.
As American audiences, we’ve been conditioned by generations of auteurs — along with decades of lauded foreign imports — to believe that The Hollywood Ending is always and without exception a trite, Plebeian cop-out that panders to our basest cinematic impulses. Films of true greatness should always find their protagonists losing everything they love through their own bad decisions, or discovering something dark and sinister about themselves, or getting lobotomized, or just bleeding to death. A heinous villain might go completely unpunished, or our hero might get unceremoniously shot in the face because, don’t you get it? That’s the way things really are. The best a protagonist can possibly hope for in most great films is silent, bittersweet uncertainty. We believe that endings like this always make for better films, simply because most directors with talent tend to lean that way, while the majority “happy” endings can be found in big budget mainstream swill shat out by talentless hacks who probably have tiny penises.
Only a handful of directors have recently pulled off an unabashedly crowd-pleasing denouement without giving in to suck or schmaltz: Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Jon Faverau, Andrew Stanton (or anyone at Pixar, really), and Quentin Tarantino.
Ironically, it takes more balls these days to avoid the downbeat and melancholy. And — especially this time — I’m really fucking glad he did.
