Education Freestyle

cited: The Movie Critics

Tarantino took plenty of liberties with Inglourious Basterds- from casting the gore-heavy director of the Hostels, Eli Roth, as the “bear Jew” who loves smashing Nazi heads, to transforming Christoph Waltz’s character (SS officer, Col. Hans Landa) into a light-footed, nimbly joyful philosophizing detective (and the most interesting character of the film)- none of the audacities compare to The Big One. QT re-wrote the end of the war.

Audacious, to be sure. But irresponsible? I was shocked when a friend of mine, an adventurous movie critic who has often loved Tarantino’s work, said that he was seriously offended by the movie’s big, explosive, death-in-a-Paris-movie-theater climax. He said that he thought Tarantino had stepped over a line of historical veracity, and that audiences, especially younger ones, might be led by Inglourious Basterds
to embrace the idea that World War II was just another meaningless pulp fantasy. By now, I’ve heard this line of reasoning echoed in several
other places; it could even be the core of a potential backlash. Yet the reason I was shocked is that even though I take history pretty seriously myself, it never even occurred to me to think of Inglourious Basterds as a “trashing” of history. In a strange way, the picture is far too outlandish for that. To me, the movie, and especially its ending, is defiantly a vision of war as a filmmaker’s lusciously subjective, almost childishly wish-fulfilling B-movie fever dream. The great, sick joke of the film’s grindhouse logic is that even though what it shows us didn’t happen, in a larger, almost abstract sense it did happen. (I mean, it’s not as if the Nazi high command, in the end, wasn’t destroyed.)

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You could argue that a lot of Hollywood World War II films that we think of as more or less “responsible” have done a variation on the same thing, albeit a lot less…extremely. The Dirty Dozen, for
instance, isn’t exactly a sober-minded PBS documentary; it’s a lurid piece of exploitation (which is exactly what Tarantino, and so many of us, love about it). And if you think back on all the World War II movies that were made in the period after World War II — like, say, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) or The Longest Day (1962) — the real, and insidious, illusion may be that they offer a “true” vision of what actually went on during the fighting of that war. I could name a hundred piously mature Hollywood war films, and even documentaries, that don’t get half as close to the deep-dish,
loopy aristocratic inhumanity of Nazi-ism as Hans Landa’s opening monologue in Inglourious Basterds does.

So, where do we draw the line between artistic representation and “fact”? Should Hollywood have to justify itself to a historical board before releasing its next blockbuster? Before we hold our entertainers too accountable, take a moment and think about which of your favorite classics wouldn’t make the cut.

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My Take: I’m not a stickler when it comes to historical realism- I understand that movies, like all art, are completely artifice. But I also understand that is the reason why writers make up names, cities, even countries (when was the last time you were in The Simpsons‘ Springfield?). The end of most movies carry the “the preceding was based on fictional characters and events. Any resemblance…”, and that’s how I like it.

If writers and directors insist on making movies about actual events, they have a responsibility to do the research. More and more of us are educated from a screen rather than a book (how much of our education about the Holocaust came from movies like Schindler’s List?). Keep fiction with fiction and fact with fact, Quentin. Your best movies are pure fantasy, anyway.

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