Karina on SpoutBlog

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.

The plot is the same. The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s noose-scarred hillbilly Aldo Raine, is only on screen for about half the film. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by  Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk-talk, bang-bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that Hitler and Goebbels will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star (Diane Kruger) and British film critic-turned-military officer (Michael Fassbender), separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

The film’s guiding spirit is encapsulated in an exclamation by Landa in the first scene: “I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading.” Tarantino has made a movie about World War II filtered through rumor — verbally-transmitted urban legends, to be precise. There is no casual conversation in Inglourious Basterds; virtually every scene involves an interrogation and a chance for someone to brag about and/or live up to their reputation. Concsious of the world they live in — ie, not Hitlers, not ours, but Tarantino’s — characters on both sides of the divide take an active role in their own myth-making, to make sure that word gets out as to who they are and why they are to be feared, and everyone takes great pride in knowing that word is getting around. The film’s most oft repeated phrase is “What have you heard?”

This myth-making provides both Basterds’ most fascinating subtext, and its most bloated primary text. Take for instance, our substantive introduction to the Basterds themselves, in which multiple reputations are discussed before three acts of Basterd-on-Nazi violence occur. One Basterd gets his own awkward origin story flashback, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, before we get to the point of the scene, which is defining which rumor will carry the day. The story of what happened that day will be told in three different forms. There’s what the Basterds tell the sole Nazi survivor of their massacre to tell Hitler; there’s what Hitler tells the sole survivor to tell everyone else, and then there’s what really happened.

Stories are propaganda, and propaganda is a weapon. This is not a film about how the war was fought on the ground (or in concentration/death camps, which are never mentioned), but a film about how both sides fought the battle on screen. In the single Basterds scene that I think is nowhere near long enough, Fassbender’s film critic-turned-British spy describes Goebbels as a warrior in the guise of a studio mogul, fighting for the dominance of the German film industry as a strike against both Weimar silent film and the Hollywood, both the provinces of successful Jews. Shoshanna uses celluloid as a weapon in a more literal sense. Her two-part revenge gambit involves film as an expolosive, and an explosive film in which she proclaims to be “the face of Jewish vengeance” (“in English,” Marcel insists when directing the scene — the language of the passive Jewish vengeance coming from Hollywood). Marcel’s goodbye to Shoshanna, delivered to her face on a movie screen after her actual body has already expired, is the closest thing to moment of genuine romance that Tarantino has ever filmed.

Ironically, though the film relies on the audience’s knowledge Nazi atrocities for its effects, it has little interest in actually depicting them. Tarantino reduces the Nazi high command to Hitler, chief propagandist Goebbels, and Martin Bormann (essentially Hitler’s press secretary). The public face and architect of Nazi supremacy and his right-hand men in its promotion are represented, but not Mengele or Höss, none of the real-life figures involved in the nitty gritty of designing and implementing genocide. Inglouirous Basterds not only avoids the depiction of the real figures responsible for the Final Solution, but it only presents the Nazi mass killing techniques as they’re appropriated as punishment onto Nazis by the Basterds.  If you don’t walk in knowing that Nazis branded Jews, shot them en masse, locked them in buildings which they then burnt to the ground, Tarantino isn’t going to tell you, but the Basterds would lose all justification for their brutality if such events hadn’t happened.

What does this all mean? It depends, I think, on how much credit you’re willing to give Quentin Tarantino as a political provocateur. Is he really talking about the world we live in today? If so, what are we to make of a film that plays like apolitical fantasy, but nevertheless devotes its final images to broadcasting the idea that even when we win, Jews will remain an angry people who will neither forgive nor forget the wrongs done to us? If you want to see Inglorious Basterds as a contemporary allegory, you don’t have to strain — in fact, Tarantino makes it easy by presenting American soldiers who treat torture as entertainment (“watching Germans getting beat to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” says Pitt), in a setting 60 years removed from Abu Ghraib, within a fight that, like our current excursions in the Middle East, is in part about the right of Jews to simply exist. And then, by giving us multiple (if ambiguously intentional) Jewish suicide bombers, Tarantino makes sure that the heroes of Basterds not only do onto their 20th century oppressors what has been done to them, but they also give their key 21st century foes a taste of their own medicine. You could make the argument that Inglourious Basterds is a palpably anti-Semitic film as easily as you could argue that it’s a rah-rah work of pro-Imperialism, propaganda for US/Israeli collaborative war against those who threaten either’s global interests.

Either reading, I think, probably gives Tarantino too much credit — when has he ever been a filmmaker who ached to make a statement about contemporary events? Plus, the film’s best source cue tempers either extreme. A key, glorious sequence is set to David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting out Fire)” — borrowed, fittingly, from the soundtrack of the Paul Schrader remake of a Val Lewton horror number that allegorized the struggle of European immigrants in WWII America. It’s one of those musical-montage-as-mission-statement moments: you can’t put out a fire with gasoline without adding to the flames. Every act of war has fallout, and extreme acts burn for decades. Maybe this, too, is giving Tarantino too much credit, to assume that he’d take an active step to undercut his promotion of revenge, particularly when he’s talked at length about wanting to overturn the typical Holocaust film power dynamics to show “Germans that are scared of Jews.” But let’s just say he has a pretty strong track record of speaking through his soundtracks.

I’m still struggling with Basterds, as a statement of ideology (or lack thereof), and as a work of art. There are still things that bother me in terms of the way it flows, and I still think Tarantino sometimes over-exerts himself with the telling at the expense of the showing. But still  — mea culpa. My initial assessment of the film was wrong. Maybe what I saw this week in New York really is a complete revitalization, so completely different from what I saw in Cannes as to excuse me from blame for not fully engaging with it in the couple of hours I had to form a correct opinion before the film was rendered old news by the maw of the festival cycle. But probably not. Probably, it is a couple of things. The film is now unquestionably a little bit tighter than the first version I saw; my complaints about the flow and movement of the action sequences is no longer valid, and as far as my complaint about the lack of “rock n’ roll efficiency”, well, that is idiotic now and probably was then, as well. But I honestly don’t know what has changed more since May: the cut of Inglouirous Basterds, or me.

Maybe this is unfair to you, the reader — maybe film critics shouldn’t change. Maybe we should go out of our way to lead extraordinarily stabile lives, to avoid financial stress and familial trauma, to not get depressed or even date for fear of swinging too far towards any emotional extreme in the hopes of maintaining absolute objectivity. If that’s the case, I didn’t do what I should’ve done — I’ve been sent through the wringer by all the above over the last three months, and come out a different person. But the world changes, whether or not I stay the same, and at the rate this one is changing, it’s unrealistic to expect something as trifling as a movie opinion to stay fixed indefinitely. In May, I was visiting France from a country just barely emerged from the glowing spell of Obama’s first hundred days. Today, I am currently living in an America where — apparently — it’s okay to compare the President to Hitler because he is trying to make it easier for poor people to go to hospitals and for old people to draw up living wills, and the only person doing anything substantial to combat that theory is a gay Jew who uses “dining room table” as an epithet. The question of what it means to act like a Nazi is suddenly relevant to our everyday lives. It’s possible that we need Inglourious Basterds now more than ever.