Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Inglourious Basterds

by Bob Clark

Prologue: FUBAR

Fritz Lang’s wartime propaganda-thriller Man Hunt begins with a most bewitching sight, as a British gamesman lines up his prey in the scope of his hunting rifle, after sneaking his way through German woodlands to reach the heavily guarded hideaway of his target—Adolf Hitler. Of course, he doesn’t actually pull the trigger, as he later explains to the Gestapo interrogator (the gentlemanly George Saunders) who will soon spend the rest of the film chasing him across occupied Europe and spy-happy England. Though the hunter (drowsily played by Walter Pidgeon) insists he was only testing his abilities as a “sporting stalk”, after his escape to London he will find himself wishing that he indeed had pulled the trigger, and prevented the death of the streetwalking Cockney girl (Joan Bennet) caught in espionage’s hazy crossfire. By the story’s end, Lang closes on an image almost as arresting as the one which began it, as Pidgeon’s hunter parachutes from a British bomber, rifle in hand, determined that this time, when he gets his target in his sights, he will pull the trigger.

Back in 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this was pretty stunning stuff to watch on the screens in American theaters. Lang and his film were even scrutinized by Congress, leery of movies which demonized the Third Reich at a time when many stateside businesses enjoyed lucrative commercial contracts with German industries. But come December, the entire nation would find itself united against the threat of the Axis powers, and “Man Hunt” went from being a call to arms against the Nazi scourge to become, instead, a premier representation of war-time wish-fulfillment. Just like Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons in the pages of P.M. magazine, or countless Looney Tune shorts with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck drumming up support for war-bonds by plastering caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini with pies in the face, Lang’s film was by and large a product of fantasy, not just in terms of its serial-adventure action sequences and dreamlike mis-en-scene amidst enchanted forests and London fog, but also in its desire to live in a world in which global political disasters could be averted with the charity of a single bullet.

It’s exactly this type of magical world that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film takes place in, a fairy-tale that goes so far as to begin with the words “once upon a time”, and like Sergio Leone’s imaginings of the Wild West or Prohibition, it’s a fantasy that has about as much to do with reality of World War II as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had to do with the American Civil War. Like Leone, the one-time wunderkind writer/director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction has found himself criticized for gratuitous violence, perceived amorality and an irresponsible handling of past events that rewrites history to the point of willful ignorance. But while many may view the storied adventures of gunslingers “Blondie” and “Harmonica” or guerilla-soldiers “Aldo the Apache” and “The Bear Jew” as culturally insensitive, the war-film equivalent of classless exploitation flicks in run-down grindhouse cinemas, it is important to remember that their films represent the same kind of wish-fulfillment paradigm as Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt. What was propaganda one day becomes a legendary fairy-tale the next, and as John Ford’s seminal The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance pointed out, the temptation to substitute legend for fact can sometimes prove valuable.

For many, Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s fable/cartoon of Allied soldiers and French resistance fighters as bloodthirsty as the Nazi scum they seek to eliminate comes as a confirmation of all the worst traits his critics have accused him of over the years, from a gory level of self-indulgent sadism as insensitive to squeamish audiences as is his grasp of cultural and historical sacred cows deemed verboten by popular consensus. But while he’s just as politically and aesthetically incorrect as ever, his newest film represents a demarcation of several crucial turning-points—the cultural habits of the World War II movie in American cinema; the nexus of propaganda and fantasy substitutions for reality in genres as varied as war films, westerns and science-fiction; the nature and use of pastiche in cinematic output, and the subsequent creative cannibalism of filmmakers who themselves thrived upon the very same practice in their own imaginatively-derivative work; and the pilgrim’s progress of the one filmmaker who has, for better or worse, influenced the tide of both independent and Hollywood moviemaking like no other director since the days of the Movie Brats.

I: Holocaust Denial

Set largely in occupied France in the months surrounding the D-Day landings of 1944, Tarantino follows an unusual assortment of characters—an American secret-service operative (Brad Pitt) and his motley crew of Jewish troops wreaking bloody vengeance upon German footsoldiers; a young Jewish woman-in-hiding and cinema-owner (Melanie Laurent) escaping the unwanted affections of a German war-hero (Daniel Bruhl); a British film-critic turned spy (Michael Fassbender) and a leading-lady of German movies (Diane Kruger) who works undercover as a double-agent for the Allied powers. Tying all of them together are two things: their shared involvement, known and otherwise, in a plot to eliminate Hitler, the German High Command and end the war in one swift stroke, and their fateful brushes with Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the cunning, charming and absolutely psychopathic Nazi detective who betrays the Third Reich as casually as he once carried out its orders of exterminating Jews.

To say that the players of Inglourious Basterds and the narrative they inhabit represents a new level of dramatic hyperbole for the director is the understatement of this, or any other century. Tarantino spins his characters from the wholecloth of caricatures popular at the time—the Tennessee bootlegger-turned-lieutenant and loudmouthed East Coast sports-fans with accents as thick as their wits, the freckle-faced British commanders with their wall-maps, pointers and globes full of scotch-and-plain-water, the goosestepping Gestapo goons and prodigiously civilized Nazi hunters with all the melodramatic flair of a penny-dreadful’s villain, save the mustache to twirl or line of railroad tracks to which to tie the damsel-in-distress. It is at once the political-cartoon, complete with a stonefaced Churchill, weeping Goebells and whining Hitler in a little-boy cape, and the crass, polished piece of military propaganda, complete with wish-fulfillment action and a stirring “we can do it” spirit winning out over impossible odds.

It’s a type of film that has been with us, to varying extremes, ever since the second World War, always adapting itself and picking up steam in new times, and sometimes in new genres and costume-changes. Lang’s Man Hunt may not have ended with Hitler being riddled with bullets, as he is in Tarantino’s film, but from seeing der Fuhrer in the cross-hairs of a rifle’s scope to the sight of a lone sniper parachuting behind enemy lines, it carried that type of patriot pipe-dream as an implied promise. Throughout the war years he and other filmmakers contributed many more crowd-pleasing anti-Nazi films, from the Czech-resistance fable Hangmen Also Die and the ship-of-fools parable of Hitchcock and Steinbeck’s Lifeboat to the dutiful romantic sacrifice of Casablanca, waxing melodramatic about hills of beans amongst gin-soaked sand dunes beneath the sheltering sky. Even after the war’s end, the Nazi menace remained a strong source of cinematic threat, second only to the perennial flavor of gangsters and the Cold War scourge of communist provocateurs and their monstrous sci-fi stand-ins.

Oddly enough, it was science-fiction that would provide the biggest come-back for onscreen depictions of National Socialism and its demonic adherents. There was Godard’s Alphaville, which portrayed a renamed Paris under the technocratic occupation of fascist computer Alpha-60, numbering its citizens with tattoos and surrendering all rebellious human beings to firing-squad execution, an entire city converted into little more than a concentration-camp. There was Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil and its subsequent movie, pitting Lawrence Olivier as an elderly Nazi hunter against a bizarre, yet plausible sounding cloning-plot by Gregory Peck’s fugitive-scientist-at-large, Josef Mengele. Perhaps the most lasting and influential of all the sci-fi retrofitting of Nazi bootheel and fascist ideology came with George Lucas’ Star Wars films, where the goosestepping officers of the Galactic Empire in their military uniforms and oppressive stormtroopers lacked only the trademark swastika-armbands to show where they came from, no matter how much Ronald Reagan tried to link them with the Soviet Union. Even in his latter-day Prequel Trilogy, Lucas fashioned the fall of the Old Republic as a space-opera retelling of Hitler’s rise to power in Weimar Germany, with an ineffectual democracy sabotaged by an upstart Chancellor’s emergency-powers and ending in all-out genocide.

II: Fear Leads to Anger

In an interview promoting the Kill Bill films, Quentin Tarantino remarked that with his tale of Uma Thurman looking for revenge, he was largely doing his own spin on the types of movie that excited him when he was young, just as George Lucas had with his own films. It’s surprising that so few commentators had ever bothered to make the connection before—Both were shaped in their youths by trashy, B-movies (“Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon” style serials for Lucas, kung-fu and blaxploitation grindhouse films for Tarantino) and international art-house cinema alike (Kurosawa, Leone and Godard remain prominent, in varying degrees, in both directors’ works). Both channeled that cinematic appetite into filmmaking through the same kind of creative-pastiche their auteur-idols promoted—just as Kurosawa reworked Ford’s Monument Valley westerns and Shakespeare’s tragedies into medieval Japan; just as Leone ransacked Ford and Kurosawa to spin his own mythic vision of an American west shot on location in Franco’s Spain; just as Godard imitated the style and substance of Hollywood’s noirs and hard-boiled detective stories on the streets of Paris, so too did Lucas and Tarantino refashioned their favorite cinematic substance into their own alien stylings, spread panorama-epic across the canvas of the 2.35:1 scope.

Deconstructing the mythos of their cinematic youth while at the same time spinning a whole new mythology almost entirely of their own device, Lucas and Tarantino share much more in common than almost any other two filmmakers divided by generations and genres alike. Their similarities didn’t really become apparent to audiences until the Kill Bill films, which drew inspiration from the same jidai-geki samurai swashbucklers as did Star Wars. Tarantino even paid homage to Lucas himself with a Jeep’s license plate which reads “THX 1169”, a tongue in cheek reference to the director’s debut feature THX 1138 (and his own tendency to drop the title in his movies as an Easter Egg—including one instance as a license plate in American Graffiti). But even before then, one could see the shared interests in low-brow escapism—Lucas’ space-opera may have been influenced by a different set of paperbacks with yellowing pages, like Burrough’s tales of John Carter or E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series, but at the end of the day his Jedi Knights owe as much to pulp-fiction literature as the hit-men and prizefighters of Pulp Fiction. Even their mythologizing carries a debt to their common heritage of spaghetti-westerns—Lucas’ sci-fi fairy-tale may use different words to say “once upon a time”, but they carry more or less the same weight of recognition as when Leone used them in the West and America, or when Inglourious Basterds uses them in Naxi-occupied France. In that sense, Tarantino is every bit the mythmaker that Lucas is, turning World War II not only into the same kind of myth as spaghetti-westerns and space-operas, but into a kind of science-fiction as well—the alternate-history.

Star Wars carries an edge of historical revisionism about it, as well, resurrecting the phantom of the Nazi menace against the settings and stakes of outer-space. Amidst the aerial dogfights, spider-webbed greenhouse windows and relic Mauser pistols converted into blaster props, the original three films draw a large part of their iconography from World War II films of the 40’s and 50’s, not only regarding the Gestapo-tactics of Lang’s monocled agents but also in the thrill of combat and the art-deco atmosphere. Lucas famously patterned the famous Death Star run from the first film after the R.A.F. docudrama The Dam Busters, and perhaps even more famously (or infamously) referenced Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will in the Rebels’ eerily Nuremburg-ish closing ceremonies. Lucas asks the audience to try and see the moral questions of heroism—one of the constant reminders of the Jungian Dark Side—here through cinematic and historical allusion. It’s something he would repeat throughout his work both as director and Alexander Korda-style powerhouse producer, often returning the World War II as a reference point—when the Nazis open up the Ark of the Covenant at the finale of the Spielberg-helmed Raiders of the Lost Ark, how different is the sight of God’s wrath causing the faces of the villains to melt and explode from the Bear Jew’s wrath visited upon the face of Adolf Hitler, machine-gunned to Swiss-cheese like so many two-bit thugs from Dick Tracy?

Save for the over-the-top violence Inglourious Basterds exalts in and the anachronistic soundtrack of Ennio Morricone and David Bowie, it is very much the type of movie that might’ve been made in Hollywood of the 40’s, or at the very least pitched to studio-heads. This, of course, is the point. While commentators point out and decry the so-called racism of portraying nearly all Germans as murderous fascist thugs, it’s easy to miss that Tarantino’s aim is recapture the same wartime spirit and sentiments that informed call-to-arms moments of dueling anthems in Rick’s Café, simmering beneath the Hays Code surface. Distasteful as many of their actions and sentiments are, the Basterds represent many of the widely held beliefs Americans had toward their enemies in World War II, sweeping all Germans under the same Nazi-woven rug of generalities, as unwilling to see any difference between the uniformed leader giving out the orders and the everyday soldier who followed them. It’s a worldview that fits with Frank Capra’s scathing propaganda-documentaries or the xenophobia that locked up Japanese-Americans in internment camps for the duration of the war. Tarantino is holding up a mirror to that time period, as well, only he’s doing so with the much more direct route of explicit violence. War crimes committed by the Nazis and Basterds alike prove far more effectively confrontational than mere pastiche or cinematic allusions, asking us to examine the ugliness on both sides of “the last good war”. As Lucas himself summed up in the crawl to the last Star Wars film: “There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere”.

III: Bargaining With the Devil

Lucas was one to know about villainous characters, of course. His bad-guys could often be two-dimensional (Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine chews scenery well as a Nixonian Hitler by way of the evil Queen/Witch from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves) or just barely fleshed out enough to carry scars beneath their obsidian-shells (Vader makes a decently Arthurian Black Knight). Half the reason he dressed up the Evil Empire like Nazi Germany wasn’t merely to create historical talking-points for after-film discussions, but instead to simply give the audience a set of villains they could boo and hiss at without any feelings of reservation or purpose of evasion. While he’s gradually warmed to more humane characterizations of ethical corruption and its sources (the slow decline from democracy to dictatorship, Anakin’s Oedipal angst and star-cross’d-love fueling Faustian sell-outs), his most popular depictions of evil have largely remained steadfastly adherent to the same Manichean codes of binary good-guys and bad-guys. It’s a far cry from the nuanced, sadly affecting performance he elicits from Donald Pleasance in THX 1138, perhaps one of the best portraits of the moral ambiguities forced upon man by totalitarianism.

In the evolution, or rather devolution from that minimalist, surprisingly adult dystopia to several decades’ worth of children’s sci-fi fairy-tale (with the Nick Ray-esque teenage drama of American Graffiti in between), one can see that Lucas has continually regressed through the ages of his cinematic obsession, forever going backwards, as Polonius would, like a crab. Tarantino, however, has seemingly been stuck in the same adolescent angst of obsessive sex & violence cravings since Reservoir Dogs. If the director of Star Wars is a cinematic Benjamin Button, then the director of Inglourious Basterds remains a Peter Pan, leading his brotherly band of Injuns and Lost Boys across the Never-Neverland of wartime Europe, a paradise for any red-blooded all-American hero who wants nothing more than to collect as many Nazi scalps as possible. As many have pointed out, the vast majority of Germans seen throughout the film are nothing but cannon-fodder for Pitt and his crew, either to be gunned down, bludgeoned to death or let off with nothing but a warning and a fresh head wound, courtesy of Charles Manson. A few are let off the hook as honorable members of the Basterds—Diane Kruger especially excels as the Dietrich-esque film-star moonlighting as an Allied spy, only to end up with a slug in her gam and a vice-like grip about her neck.

Only Colonel Hans Landa remains, and while many critics have volleyed charge after charge of insensitivity and outright racism against the film, the praise granted to actor Christoph Waltz has gone justifiably constant, to the point of being near-unanimous. His depiction of the character is a vivid, yet thrillingly ambiguous one, in which Tarantino employs the well-honed dramatic craft of snappy screenwriting and suspenseful directing in long, sustained sequences such as the opening at LaPadite’s dairy farm, where simple pleasantries and polite bureaucratic niceties mask the sinister inclinations both of the character and his genocidal task. With his keen gifts of observation, dialect and a very prominent pipe, many have called Landa a sort of Nazi-version of Sherlock Holmes, a detective who uses his keen insight and wit to further the murderous ends of a fascist state. In that sense, he is similar to Alexander Granach’s Inspector Gruber from Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, a Gestapo gumshoe whose gusto for beer, broads and bowler-hats recalls Otto Wernicke’s Inspector Lohman from M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (a figure who would even be copied wholesale as “Inspector Krass” in The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Lang’s final film, portrayed by Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe).

Lang was a director who could illicit as much curiosity and sympathy for his monsters and villains as he could his heroes and detectives, a trait that Tarantino has sought to capture for himself as far back as the uncertain allegiances of Reservoir Dogs, keeping you guessing as to who the rat was with the same intensity as a paranoid crook or an undercover cop, trapped in a city on fire. With Landa, he creates a masterpiece of characterization, with a villain who keeps you on the edge of your seat until the end. When Waltz’s Colonel makes a deal with the Basterds to allow their operation to proceed as planned and blow all of the Nazi leadership to kingdom come, his motivations remain unclear, and unsettling. He isn’t turning against Hitler for moral reasons, like the real-life saboteurs of Valkyrie, or even to bring an expedient end to a war waged unwisely on two sides (indeed, the Russian front and the Soviet Union’s costly contribution to the war-effort goes entirely unmentioned throughout). Instead, he seems to be doing it purely on a whim. It’s a startlingly realistic image of evil as psychotic, unpredictable and in the end, self-destructive. Like Lang’s many masterminds and the madman from collaborator Norbert Jacques, Landa’s impulsive liquidation of the Third Reich carries with it the whiff of that namesake pun of suicidal-impulse—Je M’abuse.

IV: The Great Depression

Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films have long enjoyed the reputation of foreseeing the rise of Nazism, from the silent-epic Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler to the pre-war classic Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Even the cold-war coda, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse is obsessed with the ghosts and ruins of the Third Reich, set in a hotel filled with hundreds of spy-cameras left over by Gestapo surveillance units. But more than merely predicting the coming age of dictatorship in the power vacuum left after the country’s emasculation at the hands of the Treaty of Versailles, Lang’s films provide an effective chronicling of Germany’s progress through the dismal days of the Weimar Republic, the dark days of Hitler’s rule, and the divided days of the Berlin Wall. Through each era, he tailors the criminal mastermind and his underground network to fit the specific political climate he encounters—in the Cold War, Mabuse remains unseen and unknown, his various spies scrambling to interpret his will just as much as the detectives who pursue him, watched onscreen by countless video cameras; decades before, at the cusp of World War II, Mabuse is a forgotten relic of bygone years, seemingly rotting away in a catatonic trance in a Berlin insane asylum, but somehow commanding his army of criminals, each of them as fearful of their master as they are of the police; finally, Mabuse begins his enterprise after Germany’s humbling defeat in the first World War, using secret identities and psychic powers of hypnosis in gambling dens and cagily staged terrorist attacks to wage his own personal revolution against the country’s financial stability.

Yet each time, his schemes self-destruct—either by the disloyalty of his own subordinates, the slow but steady unraveling of his own powerful mind, or both. Likewise was Hitler himself done in by his own mistakes, the betrayal of many of his leading military men in coup attempts, and finally, by his own hand, down in the bunker. Though Tarantino reimagines Hitler’s death at the hands of American agents, members of the same Jewish race he tried to exterminate with his Final Solution, he is smart enough to let the ultimate responsibility for the Fuhrer’s extermination rest with Colonel Landa’s knowledge of and complicity with the Basterds’ plot, after the fact. It’s a Langian touch (despite the fact that Tarantino seems more interested in referencing G.W. Pabst, throughout the film) that draws back to the self-destructive era the Dr. Mabuse series was born in, during which it seemed the whole German social and political infrastructure would rot from within and collapse if it weren’t for somebody to step in and take command of the situation. Lang’s original film (which drew from criminal-mastermind serials like Fantomas and Les Vampyrs from Louis Feuillade as much as Norbert Jacque’s original book) was subtitled “A Picture of the Times”, and the zeitgeist which he sought to capture in that film was the moral and economic decay of the Weimar years, an era in which a shapeshifting, psychic villain like Mabuse through any social structure previously fenced off by the conservative aristocracy of the Kaiser’s rule.

As played by Lang-regular Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Professor Rotwang in Metropolis, Attila the Hun in Die Nibelungen and the ex-husband of Lang’s longtime screenwriter and mistress Thea von Harbou, whom he would later leave behind once she embraced Nazism) the Doctor remains a powerful boogeyman for Germany’s economic disasters—a manifestation of all the country’s worst fears while at the same time an outlet to get away from them. Lang would next create even more escapist fare with his Norse-myth inspired Die Nibelungen, which turned the conventions of the legends explicitly on their head and inverted them dramatically while at the same time bringing them to life in a manner that would do Wagner proud (Hitler and Goebells reportedly loved a recut version scored with music from the opera-house Ring cycle). The best examples of escapist works in mythological pastiche seem to peak in popularity during times of great national turmoil—Godard and his comrades of the French New Wave resurrected the auteurist-spirit of their favorite American noir and gangster pictures during a decade which saw massive protests and military coups in their country following disastrous colonial losses, including a great deal of political controversy and rioting over the cinema itself; Leone’s spaghetti-westerns came in a stale period of the Italian film industry, a stark, epic response to years of Neo Realist filmmaking from the likes of Rossellini, De Sica and Fellini—a school of cinema that had its beginnings at the tail end of Mussolini’s reign; even Lucas’ Star Wars and the age of blockbusters it sparked the fuse for (along with Spielberg’s Jaws) arrived on-screens in the middle of recession and malaise following the protracted conflict in Vietnam (a hand-me-down war from Cold War-era France) and the Watergate expose of Nixon’s political corruption.

So too does Tarantino’s mythic Inglorious Basterds find itself released at a time when American audiences are at their most disgruntled, disillusioned after years spent watching troops in Iraq and Afghanistan drive in circles and barely survive, and frustrated to the point of desperation by a decidedly barren economic climate. Some critics have tried to draw a parallel between the rampaging Basterds’ success in Tarantino’s alternate-reality and the use of such practices in the War on Terror’s wake across the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay, suggesting that the director implies that such strong-arm tactics could end our country’s campaign with Islamic fundamentalism just as easily as he imagines the end of World War II. But to put words in the mouth of the film and its director is not only irresponsible and lazy, dismissing a work on a perceived philosophy that has more to do with any given episode of 24 than even the most extended pieces of sadism the picture puts on celluloid, but also ignores a fundamental philosophy inherent in the nature of this kind of mythologizing, in the first place. If one is to accept Inglourious Basterds as a cinematic fairy-tale, as it aspires to, then one must accept the politics of fairy-tales, and the politics of fairy-tales, especially war-time ones, are not to second-guess history or to Quixotically wish, like an amateur Walter Mitty, that such stories were true, but instead to face reality, with accept it for what it is.

V: Acceptance On Their Behalf

Fairy-tales are, by their structural nature and the audience of children they are at least rhetorically intended for, largely coming-of-age stories. Not only do their characters often chart their growth to maturity, both symbolically and literally, but their worlds are often ones in flux from one status-quo to another—the generational drift of era to era, zeitgeist to zeitgeist. Modern-era repackagings of universal myths often take this into account—Tolkien’s hobbits mature as Middle Earth gradually moves from an age defined by magic, wizards and elves to one in which the kingdom of mankind governs. Lucas’ Skywalkers grow up against a backdrop of civil war and political unrest, as a democracy falls into dictatorship and rises back again. Even The Wizard of Oz chronicles the end of the Wicked Witches’ reign over Munchkinland and the departure of the Great and Powerful Oz from Emerald City at the same time it charts young Dorothy’s journey upon the yellow-brick road back to the monochrome of dust bowl-era Kansas.

Myths are about transition-periods in life, and it’s not by accident that Joseph Campbell’s fabled structure of the hero’s journey mimics, in many ways, the Kuber-Ross model of grief—after all, what does refusing the call to adventure amount to but denial; its subsequent punishment and vengeance fuelled mission but anger; the temptation-lined path of initiation but bargaining; the descent into the underworld but depression; the atonement with the father but acceptance? Just as the myths correspond, so too do the mythmakers themselves, though often seemingly locked in fixed places—Godard with his Orphean cinema as defiant quasi-terrorist agitprop without the humbling influence of his long-lost Karina; Leone with his revenge-fueled odysseys and guerilla pastiche as Achilles incarnate; Lucas with his conspiratorial mysticism, half Chomsky and half Castaneda, always standing in the crossroads on his own personal space Odyssey; Lang with his hopeless heroes and villains forever soldiering against a fate as oppressive and immovable as the boulder of Sisyphus; and finally Tarantino, wearing a shit-grin no matter what heinous crap comes his way, able to thrive in Dionysian splendor even in the grimiest genre, counting himself a king of infinite space no matter how small the box he thinks outside-of is.

Of all the filmmakers of the past twenty years he’s been active, Tarantino seems to be the happiest with where he is, never complaining of his little-seen efforts or making and breaking the same-old promises to return to smaller, more personal filmmaking. As such, his movies contain a Zen-like tendency to accept uncomfortable truths, and come to terms before the end—Mr. Orange’s undercover mea culpa while imitating La Pieta with Harvey Keitel; Jules’ heartfelt desire to walk the path of the righteous as the shepherd instead of the tyranny of evil men; Beatrix Kiddo’s surrender to Bill as a killer, instead of the secret-identity of a happy housewife. There are no such moments of clarity anywhere on the surface of Inglourious Basterds, though, unless you’re willing to get your hands dirty and read between the lines of everybody and their translators killing and mutilating each other before they reach the end. The only ones who accept their fate are the soldiers who unflinchingly face their deaths unafraid—the German soldier rocked to sleep with the Bear Jew’s bat, the Basterds playing Nazis a machine-gun lullaby as the house burns down. Instead, the film marks something of an era’s end for World War II movies, in general. With an alternate-history as radical as Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man In High Castle” or William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s “The Difference Engine”, Tarantino has given the world a pulse-pounding WWII story that everybody but neo-Nazis wish was the truth. And now that he, and we as a culture by association, has gotten it out of his system, everybody can move on.

For the past 60-plus years now, the second World War has remained a setting of near-evergreen popularity for filmmakers and audiences alike. As the first major war to occur just as cinema had developed its vocal cords and gotten its visual rhythms down pat, it naturally became the first major war to receive significant screentime for audiences around the world, both through documentary footage and major motion-pictures. Plenty of films have dealt with the conflict with varying amounts of accuracy and entertainment-value embellishments. A few become classics—The Great Escape and its star-making turns for Tom, Dick and Harry; Overlord and its existential malaise mixed with newsreel bombshells; The Big Red One and its journalistic savvy mixed with a movie-man’s moxie.

But if a single WWII film has affected the course of pop-culture for better or worse over the years, it has to be Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. An Oscar-winning blend of Omaha Beach blood and bullets with war-time morality hand-wringing along the way to a low-key remix of the Niland brothers incident, the movie single-handedly captured the public’s imagination, spurring a popular movement of books, television-shows and video-games all intent on reliving the experiences of the “Greatest Generation”, forever genuflecting at the feet of our elders. Thanks to films like Spielberg’s and Clint Eastwood’s late-period Iwo Jima double-feature, films about the Second World War could hardly be done in the name of fun, anymore. Consider how Ed Zwick’s Defiance tripped on the shoe-laces of its own self-importance, unable to give movie-goers a good time even with James Bond in the cast; or Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, crafting almost enough suspense to make you forget whether or not the German Resistance succeeded in assassinating Hitler, but not quite.

It’s taken Tarantino to bring back the Dirty Dozen days of unashamedly exploiting the war for the maximum amount of entertainment, instead of delivering a somber history lesson. It practically brings the spaghetti-western full circle, as over the years Leone and his imitators had gradually evolved the cowboy theatrics into tales of Mexican and IRA revolutionaries, almost standing in for Che Guevara as much as he stood in for Butch and Sundance in his own Bolivia showdown. With his fairy-tale of how WWII should have ended, Tarantino has made us all appreciate the good, bad and ugly of how it really did, allowing us all to finally stop putting the war on a pedestal, and putting it right back into grimy hands of playful imaginations once more. If the potential of Lucas’ upcoming Red Tails production is any indicator, we may finally witness the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen not only for their historical importance but also for their death-defying exploits in dogfighting as explosive and entertaining as anything shot against a backdrop of stars. Doing its namesake Bastardi Senza Gloria proud, we can only hope that Inglourious Basterds makes good on its promise to make the war fun again, and lead by example.