This isn’t a review of IB, so there are no spoilers. However, I do recommend the movie. Not, of course, as any kind of historically accurate evocation of WWII or the Nazi aggression or the genocide carried out against the Jews of Europe. I recommend it rather as a compendium of everything that one could ever wish for or should be in a movie script about such terrible things.

Justice. Sacrifice. Poignancy. Wit. Suspense. Heroism. Humor. (Gallows humor.) Revenge. Closure.

It is amazing just how many movies have been made and continue to be made about this horrific era of Euro-American history. I must have seen at least a hundred myself, starting in my youth with The Diary of Anne Frank and Judgment at Nuremberg, and, later, Schindler’s List and The Pianist, and, even more recently, Defiance and Valkyrie.

By my high school years I had probably read dozens of books about two things: conspiracy theories about JFK’s death and the Jewish Holocaust. I even read (or attempted to read) William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich, and, when I heard of Simon Weisenthal, the great Nazi Hunter, he became one of my heroes. My experiences came, mind you, no more 20 years after the end of WWII. They would have been fresh in the public mind. We are still dealing with the images, reports, scale of these events.

In fact, there seems to be no end to the number of movies that can be pitched, produced, and attended by the public, at least in the West, about the Holocaust and related themes. That is its impact and enduring effect. (Nevertheless, how exactly did The Reader get made?) Outside the west, people are too worried by the ongoing threat of genocide, brutality, starvation, forced labor, and so on, in their lands to be interested in cinematic renderings. The Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian genocide, the Darfar genocide—these are all very close at hand, yet these seem to have already faded from much of our social memory. . . The West thinks of itself as oh-so sophisticated and morally beyond the kinds of hate and murderous decadence depicted in these films. But it’s not.

That is why, I would suggest, that Tarantino’s film is important. Or, if not important, useful, in addressing the nagging guilt that surfaces within the human heart when we witness wanton disregard for life and for liberty. That is, the sinking feeling that somebody, me, you, somebody, should have and could have done something but didn’t. We need, viscerally, to capture a sense of what it might have been like to be have been such a heroic person, to enact, even vicariously, a rescue or a retribution. I am not saying that is why Tarantino made this movie, but I can say that this is what makes me admire it as both compelling storytelling and as a viable alternate historiography. We want the Nazis to be punished, degraded, humiliated. If not then, now. So what if it occurs during a commercial movie screened at hundreds of poorly lit multiplexes?

The What If genre works in books and movies only if all the pieces, the landscape, characterization, atmosphere, verisimilitude, dialogue, and so on, maintain their authenticity and integrity from beginning to end. Any slippage, and you have mere melodrama and more propaganda. C. S. Lewis distinguished this feature of fiction as the clash between “realism of content” and “realism of presentation.”

Both, he said, are valuable and necessary, but realism of content, he cautioned, does not need to trump realism of presentation as a mode of writing, and, I would add, movie making. That is, we should not automatically value or rank higher realism of content above one that invents its circumstances, characters, settings, as long as the auteur is playing fair with the tools and technologies she has been given and the storyline he is trying to maintain. (He said these things, BTW, in defense of myth and fantasy as ways of storytelling, no doubt having himself and Tolkien in mind.)

Inglourious Basterds brazenly rewrites history, marries a 21st Century consciousness to its characterization and dialogue with an anachronistic filmmaking style (music, closeups and camera angles that quote movies as different as Hitchcock’s Notorious and the Sound of Music—it’s hard to look at Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna and not think Ingrid Bergman), wistfully makes war heroes out of film critics, actresses, cinema owners, and projectionists; and, in its deepest regions, becomes ultimately a movie about how movies can change history, if only through manipulating and reforging the images that reside in the hearts and minds of moviegoers.

“Ah, if there had only been an Lt. Aldo Raine,” one may sigh, to demoralize the Nazis. “Ah, if only Europeans had made more and better films about heroic freedom lovers, thus denying the fascists access to the public mind,” another may muse.

So, in the end, Tarantino produces, potentially, two appreciative, motivated audiences: filmgoers who want to be more noble, daring, and brave; filmmakers who wish to explore those regions of the soul that perpetuate or seek to end violence, thereby substituting love, mercy, and grace, and then inculcate those values among those who want to be more noble, daring, and brave.

But perhaps there is also a third: people who prefer their history and their films to be always like Goebbels’ “Nation’s Pride,” and cannot discern the difference. A movie, for this third group, is always just a movie.

Or, one might say, always less than a movie.

 
Posted in Movies by Bruce Edwards

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