A Crooked Glance over the Second World War: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a film never to forget, and on its way to become a cult in the upcoming years. The film has a strong element of satire, and humor is blended inside the plot so well, we have nothing to do but admire the work which consists of unexpected or maybe shocking scenes, subtle messages on contemporary politics and the film industry, and a completely distorted even crooked viewpoint to the history. Although this unconventional point of view may seem like hypocrisy, as Jewish revenge depicted as it is equally be bloody as Nazi deeds, but it can also be seen just as an entertaining fictional movie using the icons of the Second World War.

The historical inaccuracies of this film cannot be examined, for it is made of those inaccuracies. Actually, the film itself is not a typical Tarantino work, since it is dealing with the Second World War, and the director is never known to work on these kinds of war topics. Thus, it is best to talk about the historical background of the film, and how it presents history with sarcasm, dark humor, satire and subliminal messages.

Firstly, within the film, we encounter scenes what we can deem as breaking the fourth wall. A truly remarkable scene at the end, where Shosanna changes the films and switches from a Nazi propaganda movie to a piece of film made by her, which is a statement of punishment, is shown to a theater full of Nazis. Stygian laughs in the burning theater and the image of Shosanna’s face reflected in the smoke are all references to a revenge taken by the Jewish people. The smoke with Shosanna’s face on it can be considered as the spirits of all the Jews who were killed and suffered. The locked burning theater is undoubtedly a parallel to the concentration camps. How those can be deemed as breaking the fourth wall is clear; as it can be seen at the end of the movie, Aldo Raine says that it might be his masterpiece, could very well attributed to the director himself, for the director, with the script and the scenes wanted to get an absolute intellectual and artistic revenge from the Nazis, and in broad sense, racism.

This war and revenge by the movies is the basis of the film. When Lieutenant Hicox is being charged to join the Basterds, he briefly interrogated by Winston Churchill, asking that who Goebbels (who is the propaganda officer and film producer of Hitler) can be a rival of in the Hollywood film industry, Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick, two Jewish film producers. The movie inside the film, Nation’s Pride is a propaganda movie and that movie too has its answer when the Bear Jew and Omar kill all the Nazi Party members with machine guns from a “bird’s nest”, as the same words used by the star of the movie, Frederick, who tells Shosanna where he has defended his country and killed nearly three hundred enemies.

Nazis were very well pictured in the movie too. Apart from the extremely picturesque and pathetic Hitler, all characters are well developed and precise. Colonel Hans Landa, a truly remarkable character maintains a new dimension to the movie with cunning, evil but also polite and cultured attitude. Also, the German officer in the shootout scene in the basement French tavern also has cunning and dangerous qualities among his characteristics. A good example how the Nazis see the world is when they play the game of guessing who their characters are by asking questions. After a number of questions, we see that the script is so carefully written, that we think the officer goes straight to the answer, King Kong, but eventually his answer would first be a “negro in America”. This may show that Nazis never saw black people or Jews as more than a mere animal, or a beast that needs to be taken care of. Another example to this can be Landa’s explanation of the Jewish people as rats. They see rats as a nuisance and objects for abhorrence, but there is no visible reason behind it; it is just a state of being of the Nazis.

While the Nazi characters are carefully developed, because of the story of Shosanna, the story does not focus enough on the Basterds. The Bear Jew, Donny Donowitz and Hugo Stiglitz could be unforgettable characters just like Tarantino created in his earlier films, like Jules Winnfield or Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction, who both and along many more have become cults, for example Winnfield’s constant quotations from the Book of Ezekiel has become a popular culture figure. The absence of the scenes of these characters can be seen a necessary measure for the film is already too long, but those characters could be worked on for the viewers’ pleasure.

There are several aspects which can be discussed for the film as the points where film does not have success. Firstly, it needs to be stated that a careless mistake has been made. While Hitler talks with the soldier who has been let to live by the Basterds, there is a huge map behind Hitler which contains where the German army and other countries are. There writes Otmanien (Ottomans), in contemporary borders of Turkey. This is either an overlooked mistake or the lack of knowledge.

Moreover, the historical references in the movie are only remotely connected with the real history. While no special Jewish American army groups or brigades served in the Second World War, the British Army had a volunteer Jewish Brigade from the British colony of Palestine. They also had German origin Palestinian Jews and they were very fluent on the German language.

Also, fighting behind the enemy lines in France is not completely fictional. In the same year as the film, 1944, nearly a hundred Jedburgh teams (among a secret operation of Britain and US secret services) were sent to France to create a fear as a part of psychological warfare. However, these Jedburgh teams only consisted of three or four men and they got their training in guerilla warfare.

Alongside the lack of real historical data considering the Second World War, a criticism can be made if we consider American History and how “war” is pictured in this film. An old enemy of Americans is the Native Americans and now the enemy is the radical Islamists for decades. As told by the Americans, this subjective history shows Native Americans as barbarous and primitive savages, who scalp their enemies as a tradition. They do not take prisoners in the war, for that is not in their culture. They make guerilla war, basically. When it comes to the radical Islamists, the most gruesome fact and the most feared thing attributed to them is the suicide bombings, where they have no intention to separate the military and the innocent civilians. In Inglourious Basterds, Jewish American soldiers use all this aspects, what Americans fear and oppose the most.

Basterds scalp their enemies, take no prisoners, and kill people with baseball bat. They literally use the Apache tactic to fight their enemies. Just like the Taliban tried to create a fear and terror by videos of killed American troops, Basterds mark their enemies to create a psychological pressure where they go. In the theater scene of the movie, Basterds decided to send two soldiers with dynamites wrapped around their legs to kill the top Nazi officers and to effectively end the war, just like the radical Islamist suicide bombers, but as it is also stated in the movie, there are not only the army officers, Gestapo or SS; there are also film critics, civilians and actors. The most feared and criticized civilian death is deemed as nothing in this fictional movie.

However it can be seen as a bit exaggeration if we attribute the making of this film to the US as a whole. Tarantino himself talks about the movie as follows: "... despite its being a war film, Inglourious Basterds is my spaghetti western, but with World War II iconography." Therefore this completely fictional and even distorted film cannot be seen as a historical film but as an action thriller, using the characters of the Second World War.

The movie, Inglourious Basterds is a really successfully shot, heavily satirical and humorous, and sentimentally revenge seeking masterpiece-to-be. The inadequacies of the film are not about the cinematography but the way it deals with the material. It can be seen as a mere hypocritical action thriller regarding the Americanization of the history, or a very innovative way to tell a story, using a history told by many people with many films and other medium, in a new and unconventional way. It is better to be seen as the latter one for the film never claimed to be a historical war movie, but an ingenious attempt of entertainment.