[COLUMN] Inglourious Basterds Is About the Power - and the Horror - of Cinema | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Inglourious Basterds, which was released in theaters 15 years ago in August 2009.

Like so many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, Inglourious Basterds is a film in conversation with the history of cinema.

It’s probably not too controversial to describe Inglourious Basterds, a movie set in Europe during the Second World War, as “a western.” The film came at an interesting point in Tarantino’s career, and could be seen to form a loose trilogy with the two westerns that directly followed it: Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Tarantino joked that he wanted to call the film Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France, which ultimately serves as the title of the film’s first chapter.

In its opening minutes, Tarantino immediately frames Inglourious Basterds in the context of the classic western canon. Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a small farm to talk to property owner Perrier LaPadite (Denis Ménochet). He suspects that LaPadite has been harboring Jewish fugitives, the Dreyfus family. It is a tense conversation, with a strong undertone of violence, and it very deliberately evokes westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

At the end of the scene, LaPadite breaks under the pressure. He admits that the Dreyfus family is sheltering under his floor. Landa has his guards come into the cottage and empty their machine guns into the floorboards, murdering most of the family. Only a single member of the family survives – Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) – fleeing across the fields. Landa steps out through the doorway to watch her run, a sequence framed to evoke an iconic image from John Ford’s The Searchers.

That shot in The Searchers is a piece of American mythmaking. It is one of the most famous shots in the history of American cinema. Known as “the doorway shot”, that image is imprinted on the American consciousness, and it immediately suggests frontier heroism. As such, there is something profoundly unsettling about Tarantino’s decision to effectively open Inglourious Basterds by recreating one of the most famous shots in American history with a literal Nazi.

Inglourious Basterds is a movie obsessed with the power of the image. Shosanna escapes to Paris, and takes over a movie theater. Winston Churchill (Rod Taylor) sends film critic Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) on a mission to assassinate Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke). Hitler is introduced posing for a portrait, his frantic and petulant demeanor contrasted with the regal quality of the image on the canvas.

Inglourious Basterds focuses on the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film, Stolz der Nation, modelled on the heroism of (and starring) soldier Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). With Hitler and his associates attending the premiere, Shosanna and the Allies plot an assassination. Shosanna ultimately sets fire to her cinema with the German High Command inside, using nitrate film as kindling. As these victims are locked in a room and burnt alive, the sequence evokes “a horribly familiar Holocaust atrocity.”

It is a shocking and provocative climax, but it speaks to the movie’s intent. At one point, Tarantino’s juxtaposes the piles of bullets depicted on screen as Zoller massacres wave after wave of extras to the spools of highly flammable film piled behind the screen waiting to ignite. Inglourious Basterds seems to ask which of those two objects is truly the more powerful weapon. In a very literal sense, Inglourious Basterds uses film to defeat fascism.

This is pointed. One of the defining aspects of Nazi Germany was its embrace of propaganda, particularly through the language of cinema. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) appears in Inglourious Basterds. In his briefing with Churchill, Hicox delivers an overview of “German cinema under the Third Reich.” The film includes multiple references to The White Hell of Piz Palu, a film starring future propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Inglourious Basterds is in some ways an attempt to reclaim cinema and avenge its use as fascist propaganda.

However, there is something interesting in the way that Inglourious Basterds is structured to resemble a western. The eponymous crack American insurgency squad dispatched behind enemy lines is led by Lieutenant Aldo “the Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt). Raine has a prominent scar across his neck, which is never explained in the film itself. However, Tarantino has confirmed was the result of an attempted lynching.

The Basterds strike fear into German hearts by collecting scalps from their victims. Although the European settlers also collected the scalps of the indigenous population, the practice of scalping lingers in the popular American consciousness as an example of the alleged “savagery” of the Native American population. As Elias Johnson pointed out, the ubiquity of this image of the indigenous population created an impression Native Americans “possessed no other but a barbarous nature.”

Inglourious Basterds is in constant conversation with the tropes and conventions of the revisionist western. At one point late in the film, after a meeting in a cellar bar goes horribly wrong, Aldo finds himself debating the particulars of “a Mexican standoff” with the lone survivor (Alexander Fehling). It’s a bold choice to apply the moral ambiguity of the revisionist western to a conflict that is generally regarded as “the Good War”, the morally righteous struggle of democracy against fascism.

However, Tarantino is doing something very deliberate in applying a modern take on the American foundational myth to Nazi-ravaged Europe. After all, there was a long association between American cowboys and the Third Reich. In Hitler’s Vienna, Brigette Hamann alleged that Hitler had “a secret cowboy fetish.” He was an avowed fan of the pulp western novels written by German author Karl May, even opining at one point that “it would be nice if his work were republished.”

Hitler wasn’t just fascinated by the aesthetics of the western, but he embraced the underlying ideology. He praised the way that the European settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand.” It is a metaphor to which he would return, sharing his plans for the future of Ukraine, “There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”

Of course, it wasn’t just Hitler. There was a long historical association between the myth of the American frontier and the German pursuit of lebensraum. Frederick Jackson Turner, the father of the American “frontier thesis”, would proudly boast that “American colonization has become the mother of German colonial policy.” As such, it feels deliberate that Inglourious Basterds positions its heroes as the indigenous characters in the classic western, with the Nazis as the cowboys.

There is a sense that Tarantino is not simply indicting the Nazis. Instead, he is using the Nazis as a vehicle for a more provocative critique of a longstanding American institution. Tarantino has been very vocal in his criticism of director John Ford, a filmmaker “famous for defining the western genre.” Tarantino has repeatedly called out Ford’s westerns for “the jingoistic white supremacy on display.” He is not wrong; Ford defined the American West on screen, including its racial framework.

However, Tarantino’s criticism of the western goes beyond Ford. Discussing D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that was “the fledgling film industry’s first blockbuster hit” and which singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan, Tarantino explicitly likened the source material to Nazi propaganda. “If you ever tried to read The Clansman, it really can only stand next to Mein Kampf when it comes to just its ugly imagery,” Tarantino told The Root while promoting Django Unchained.

This is key to Inglourious Basterds. Although set in Nazi-occupied France, the film is haunted by the specter of America’s own racist past, even beyond Aldo’s lynching scar. Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) remembers being tied to a post and whipped, imagery evocative of slavery-era punishments. Playing a drinking game, Sturmbannführer Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl) likens King Kong to “the story of the Negro in America”, acknowledging the film’s none-too-subtle racial subtext.

In hindsight, it makes sense that Tarantino would follow Inglourious Basterds with both Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, two more literal takes on the revisionist western which render this subtext as text. Those are movies very explicitly about the racism and white supremacy woven into both the settling of the nation and mythology that built out around that founding. However, Inglourious Basterds deserves credit for laying the groundwork for those more explicit interrogations.

Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight were all released during the Obama administration. Obama’s election had been seen by some to herald “the arrival of a ‘post-racial’ America”, proof that “America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land.” Obviously, this was not a case; the years since have seen various attempts to reckon with the country’s racist past, to varying degrees of success.

In this sense, Inglourious Basterds was ahead of its time. When it came out, fascism seemed a historical curiosity. 15 years later, it has become an ongoing concern. Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight explore the complicated legacy of the western as a collective myth. Tarantino’s iconoclasm predated debates over what to do with Confederate monuments or how to deal with beloved-yet-racist texts, but it resonates even more strongly in that context.

Inglourious Basterds is about the power of cinema, but not in the achingly sincere and affectionate manner that one might expect. Instead, the film interrogates the use of cinema to fashion national mythology, and the way in which these myths might serve some darker purpose. In Inglourious Basterds, cinema is an artform, but it is also a weapon. Rendering familiar western iconography uncomfortable and uncanny, Tarantino asks his audience: what is being shot and why?