Spoilers:
Well I watched the film last night. I thought it was interesting, better than Death Proof (no annoying reset button pushed on the characters after the first forty minutes, though the basement bar scene comes close) and even better than Kill Bill due to a relatively more complex take on revenge. I still had a number of issues with the film mainly because I agree with Mr Finch’s comments that the tendency towards parody defuses the tension and interest in the characters and vice versa but it wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared (I wonder though if you were meant to come out of it with an apocalyptic Dogville-styled 'kill 'em all and let God sort them out' hatred for humanity as a whole though? Everyone's tainted, dumb, corrupt or ineffectual, yet when they start becoming vaguely competent and organised things become even more disturbing)
I do feel that Tarantino is finally starting to get back in control of his speeches though. After Kill Bill pushed the portentous power that pop culture speeches could have as far as they could go and into absurdity (the “silly rabbit” exchange between Thurman and Liu and the comic book chat in the second film come most quickly to mind) and Death Proof took casual bar chatter to tedious extremes, “Inglowerious” (as I like to call it due to the number of shots of characters looking threateningly at each other) felt as if the speeches were being relatively more reigned in to service the story.
I especially liked the questions of sympathy, guilt, revenge and retribution (whether performed straight away or deferred) and reasonableness, as well as the role that ideology plays in an individual’s actions that the film plays with – the ‘evil’ characters are the most reasonable and down to earth just with a hideous but clearly defined agenda, while the ‘good’ characters are amoral psychos who care nothing about wishy-washy ideas of ‘apportioning blame’, instead just killing everyone.
There is also the sense that the higher up the ranks you go, the more parodical you become, just as your life becomes more intertwined and dependent on the continuance of the ideology you have allied yourself to rather than simply superficially subservient to it – so both Landa and Aldo (and the Mike Myers character) are more broadly played than the men they command, just as Hitler and Churchill are broader caricatures still (I do wonder if the introduction of the parody Churchill is meant to prepare the way for the assassination of Hitler at the end of the film, given that there were fears of assassination attempts on Churchill’s life? Which in itself raises the question of body doubles) I felt Mike Myers was pretty good in his cameo scene, although I couldn’t help being reminded of an uncanny resemblance to
David Mitchell throughout!
I liked the way that the first speech in the farmhouse with Landa interrogating the farmer contrasts interestingly with the Basterds interrogating their German prisoners. Landa and the Sergeant seem more businesslike in their actions, accepting that death is a necessary part of war whether of others or their own. However the farmer and the Private left as the only survivor of the ambush are both irrevocably scarred by their encounters, one physically and the other mentally. These first two scenes seem to be the key to the idea of war marking a person by their actions that comes up again with the later swastika carvings and Bridget von Hammersmark – is it better to die a noble, uncomplicated death in a role determined for you by society or to collaborate and survive but have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge of your collaboration? The Sergeant prefers to have his head brutally bashed in, but isn’t that in a way preferable to selling out with the hope of saving yourself and instead having a permanent mark cut into your flesh to remind you of that betrayal – a symbol of a broken covenant that alienates you from acceptance by either side?
Then there’s the restaurant scene speech where Shosanna is placed in the same position as the farmer was – having to make small talk with Landa. That speech introduces with the dessert the idea that food might be able to be used to give someone away, which of course does not pay off here but in the ‘fingers of Scotch’ scene in the basement bar.
The long bar scene is the one which introduces the theme of spying as muddying the ideological waters for an individual too much. In a way Bridget is
too good at playing along with the Germans, which is why they keep insisting on pestering her with fatal consequences for everyone. There is also the first flicker of real hatred in the film as Wilhelm lets Bridget know that he detests her for her own betrayal. It is telling therefore that Bridget is the person who kills Wilhelm rather than Aldo or his men – an attempt to remove all traces of her guilt for taking a starring role in a badly botched production? Thereby making it ironic that the dropped shoe and Wilhelm’s adoring request of Bridget’s autograph earlier in the film (actors as inherent betrayers of the audience’s ideals of who they ‘really’ are based on the roles they play?), brings about her downfall.
The Basterds also treat her with contempt in vetinary hospital scene so, like Landa later on, Bridget is not likely to receive much sympathy from her new allies despite her collaboration. She anticipates Landa’s own betrayal, so it makes sense that he would be driven to get his hands dirty himself for the first time in order to brutally kill her – but that in itself is the beginning of his own downfall.
The speech between Landa and Raine in the darkened restaurant is where it becomes obvious, if it had not already in the first scene, that Landa is more about the power trip than the ideology – he does not care about who he is tracking down (the ‘Jew Hunter’ nickname has gone from a proud mark of a job well done in the farmhouse scene to a reductive burden by the time of the restaurant one), but that his role gives him status and influence. That is what is removed from him by the final action of the Basterds – they finally found someone appropriate to perform their mutilation on…and yet it still repulses.
Interestingly the Shosanna section is completely disconnected from all these futile machinations – there it is just purposeful, single-minded retribution. I liked the relationship forced on her by the Audie Murphy war hero type (with the down home decency contrasted with the mass murder he committed, albeit officially sanctioned mass murder as if that makes much difference to the dead) that complicates matters, though I did not particularly like the way this played out in the end as Frederick becomes petulant and potentially sexually violent in the projection room thereby allowing Shosanna to kill him without as much guilt compared to if he had remained charmingly naïve towards her throughout. Keeping Frederick sympathetic throughout the film would have highlighted the face to face killing she now had to perform rather than just lighting the touchpaper and standing back, as the necessity of the murder (to ensure the success of her own ideological revenge) would have to overcome any doubts. By being given that violent moment from Frederick (which compares to Landa’s attack on Bridget, though I feel that one is more motivated) she is now ‘allowed’ to kill him.
It would also have made the moment which follows particularly powerful as Shosanna sees Frederick’s image live on through the film before Frederick kills her. The two warriors have to be allowed to kill each other separately from the rest of the carnage after a significant duel (just as Landa and Bridget von Hammersmark have to have their own dualistic confrontation). She and Frederick are then married together in the splice from one to the other in the film itself, Shosanna contradicting Frederick but both of them espousing the ideology of death from beyond their own deaths. After the screen burns out their images truly become ghostly as they flicker on the air instead (however there is seems to be a cinema reference there that tempers the high drama, but more on that further on).
I would argue though that it isn’t just a neat cinephile joke that the nitrate cans are used to burn down the theatre – it is a familial retribution by Shosanna using all the tools her aunt and uncle left her to carry out their revenge on their behalf. She is able to herd the Germans into a confined space under a pretext and murder them mercilessly which of course brings up ideas of the gas chambers.
So much for the actual plot – what about the filmic references? This feels like the first time that a Tarantino film has referenced his own previous films as much as other films in general. The whole farmhouse scene, with the young girl hiding under the floorboards is reminiscent of the murder of O-Ren’s family in Kill Bill Vol. 1; the pop culture chat in the bar reminds both of the restaurant scene in Reservoir Dogs and the noodling wanderings between groups of characters at different tables in the first section of Death Proof; the basement bar shoot out is similar in escalation to Reservoir Dogs; the post-shootout standoff between Wilhelm and Bridget reminds of the significant meeting in Kill Bill between The Bride and another hitwoman in a hotel room who has just found out she is pregnant, which by letting her go is the trigger for The Bride’s own brutal treatment – though unfortunately for Wilhelm Tarantino appears less sympathetic to men who have children than he is with women; the lobby of Shoshana’s cinema feels laid out similarly to the Japanese club at the end of Kill Bill Vol 1, with the projection booth comings and goings situated in the same top right corner of the set as O-Ren’s private booth was in the earlier film, the same kind of double stairway with balcony that matches and the top down shot of Shosanna after she has gotten into her outfit of vengeance, while not as elaborate as the one in Kill Bill, seems to tie in the similar shot that follows the The Bride going to get changed into her Bruce Lee inspired jump suit; the foot fetish thing that Tarantino likes gets a disturbing workout in the Cinderella scene of trying the incriminating shoe on and then the focus on Bridget’s foot going limp as she is strangled by Landa; the restaurant scene with Landa making a deal with Raine seems similar to the scene between Butch and Marsellus in the club in Pulp Fiction; the famous star getting treated roughly runs from Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction through Jungle Julia in Death Proof to Bridget von Hammersmark here; and the final ultra violent scene perpetrated by the good guys on the bad guys which leaves a nasty taste in the mouth due to its dubious morality is also extremely reminiscent of the celebratory ending of Death Proof.
In terms of other films I thought the opening farmhouse scene similar to the massacre of the homesteaders in Once Upon A Time In The West - the scene which introduces Henry Fonda as the bad guy, and the top down shot at the end of Bowie's Cat People tune not only reminded me of the Kill Bill sequence as mentioned above but also started me thinking of De Palma’s films, most specifically Snake Eyes as the camera fluidly pans around the milling crowd at an important event where actors mingle with the public and important political figures, and where an assassination is to be attempted. However in the final inferno scene the De Palma film Inglourious most resembles is Carrie, as the panicing audience futilely attempts to break down the barred doors and escape the carnage, while Hitler gets one of the gratuitous gore shots inside the sequence to make his death more significant than everyone elses.
