by Louis Williams

Created on: September 04, 2009   Last Updated: March 18, 2011

The Boomerang War: Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

In this picture the entire leadership of the Third Reich is destroyed by burning movie film while seeing a movie. A lot of burning movie film, you understand. But, then, courtesy the work of Leni Riefenstahl, you could argue that the Third Reich –- at least its public manifestations - was the product of film. Courtesy, too, the visual element so powerful in the twentieth century, which the Reich adopted and used. There was so much Art Deco in their imagery, and the Nazis, conservative though they may haved claimed themselves, were clearly admirers of modernist metallic surfaces if only the barrels of guns or the sweep of a bomber’s wings. In some respects, they themselves were like, modeled themselves on, the movies shown all over the world, so much so that death by nitrate film is entirely fitting.

Never mind that the Second World War ended quite differently; this is fiction, after all, where the artist can make sure that the villains get theirs in the right way.

Since this is Quentin Tarantino’s movie, we’re given a movie about movies here, with Brad Pitt (Lieutenant Aldo Raine)—Aldo Ray, anyone?—in charge of a squad of Jews whose job is to kill Nazis, sort of a counter-SS. Of course, in the European theater, everyone’s job was to kill Nazis, but Raine’s group goes above and beyond the ordinary. When they don’t beat their victims to death with baseball bats, they carve swastikas into their foreheads with a Bowie knife.

Reminiscent of The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, and how many other squad-of-specialists-blow-up-the-Big-Target pictures, Basterds contains a world of wry humor that most of those pictures lack. Besides, its concluding apocalypse is much more thorough and none of those pictures were so full of absurdity. And none of them, as I recall, show us the tax paid for unintended consequences, something that seems central to the movie. Toss a boomerang and, unless you keep track of it, it will come back to you and break your neck.

For instance: make persecuting and killing Jews part of your national adgenda and you wind up having swastikas hacked into your skulls. Let the running girl go unshot—the amiable colonel Landa does this early in the picture while presiding over the massacre of her family—and, in the fullness of time, she will grow into the owner of the Paris theater where the great German patriotic film will

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