[spoiler abound]
I was hoping to start a new type of blog entry a long time ago about what new things I experienced upon seeing a movie for the 2nd time. But I'm starting that now.
I'm so overwhelmed by the opportunity to see such a wide range of movies that it is hard to prioritize what I will see for a second time. Fortunately I have somewhat formalized the second viewing movie selection process. If a film is one of my top 10 of the year, then I make a point to see it again sometime. Even limiting things to that 10 each year is difficult. Not only do my various year-end lists accumulate to dozens of movies over each year (this blog has top tens going back to 2008), but when I see a movie that second time, I pick up so much nuance and complexities that I start questioning why I don't watch every movie I like a second time!
Case in point... Inglourious Basterds! I wasn't too INSANELY thrilled with it the first time around, but now I am ashamed for being even the slightest bit disappointed. Quentin Tarantino's scripts are deceptively multi-layered, and I believe the thrill with seeing a NEW TARANTINO MOVIE as it first comes out is such a rush that you are kind of hyped up the whole time. Then as the filmmaker start to play some little tricks on you with expectations and pacing it becomes a little harder to appreciate. But that's what the best films and filmmakers do, raise questions and give you some twists that stay with you as you leave the theater.
But after finally watching it a second time, and with Django Unchained fresh on my mind, I am appreciating this a whole lot more.
I might make this a multi-parter but the most intriguing dimension about Basterds experience #2 was the commentary on myth-making and the medium in which those myths are made. I think a somewhat distracting aspect of Basterds the first time around was, with all the epic dimensions of World War II and Nazi philosophy, that there were so many scenes discussing movies and the detailed setup of the climatic scene in the cinema at the conclusion of the movie. Now, on second thought, it is almost the perfect setting to understand what the movie is doing on a grand scale with all the characters and scenes. This is because of the ability of movies and cinematic propaganda, in the wrong hands, to manipulate emotions in volatile situations to alter the reality that the masses believe in.
There is this fascinating commentary throughout the movie on the mix between the myths created by the enemy on each side of this epic conflict and the actual reality in which they behave.
In the opening scene, Colonel Landa is pretty much 99% sure as soon as he walks into the dairy farmer's house that he is hiding Jews, and he uses his incredible evil charms and performance to use the reputation of the Nazi regime's viciousness to get the farmer to break down and confess to his crime without a single bit of physical torture.
In turn, it is often more important that the legend of the Basterds spreads among the Nazi soldiers, then if that ragtag group is necessarily successful, tactically, in defeating the Germans. When fake Hitler tells the only survivor of the attack in the ditch from the film's second major scene to not utter a word to anyone and his experience, he understands that as the legend of the Basterds grows-- of the 'Bear Jew", of the scalp collecting, of the inhumanity of this group as they seek vengance-- it will be a logistical distraction to the nervous rank and file as the war continues.
In this regard, the scene around the showing of the Nazi propaganda film at Shoshanna's cinema is very fitting, while not as subtle. The young soldier is incredibly shaken by the cinematic depiction of his bravery, because he was actually there and had the memories of killing all those people, while the audience uses the movie to build up their own emotions and belief in the courage of their regime. The cinematic myth and the actual memories are too much to deal with, so the soldier wants to find comfort in his own mythology of unrequited love and decided to escape with a visit to the projection room where Shoshanna is making the final plans for the mass extermination of the theater-goers. The soldier, after being clearly rejected for the last time, can no longer act like the smitten young man he pretended to be and succumbs to his uniform and image, becoming just as brutal and angry as any other Nazi. Good and evil, predator and prey, are now more clearly black and white, when it comes to what the powerful can do to the weak. Or is it that cut and dry? Because after Shoshanna shoots the young soldier, she looks at the filmed depiction of him suffering during Nation's Pride, and is manipulated into having just too much empathy for that character on screen. She then gets close enough to the young Nazi shot on the flow, not quite yet incapacitated, to bring upon her demise.
These elements within the movie are fascinating themselves, but then there is the whole experience of the movie Inglourious Basterds itself, as it comes to the modern viewer and how he comes to terms with this movie and the real history of Nazi Germany. Because, in fact, this movie is emotional propaganda for anyone who wants to believe, at least temporarily, in the fantasy that what went down in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s wasn't as epically horrendous and destructive, to Jews and Gentiles alike, as it actually was in reality.
There was actual criticism that this movie was rather callous towards the actual Jewish persecution at the time. By dehumanizing the Basterds through their brutal actions it does take them down to the Nazi's level, in many degrees. No doubt war was hell for both sides in the actual war, and creating this amorality definitely makes it hard to condemn one side as completely evil. It is definitely NOT a movie for young people to be INTRODUCED to the history of the time (God help us if teenagers slack off at history class in high school but lap this stuff up). But this thematic thread of the cinemas power to create myths and emotional comfort applies to what contemporary viewers bring to this movie as well. We don't want the Nazis to 'win' either, and Tarantino plays with that emotion by not only making the Nazi's lose, but making most of them all die in most extreme, ridiculously violent and painful way possible. I'm not sure if we are supposed to feel bad about feeling elated when this happens, but if you know enough about the actual Holocaust (or the seige of Leningrad, and so much more) you hold a dark comfort as this movie makes at least a fictional version of the most horrible people in history get held accountable for what they 'did'.
Which brings me to the conclude by discussing the confusing journey of Colonel Hans Landa, brilliantly performed by actor Christoph Waltz in a way that makes it so we will very likely never understand everything that motivated this character. I think, upon my first viewing 3.5 years ago, this character's switch, prior to the cinema massacre, threw me off, but now I understand it a lot better. I think the strength of that first scene (and our expectations fully realized of what Tarantino plus Nazi plus brilliant actor could do) set up a belief that this person is an unshakeable, brilliant, and completely loyal SS officer. Fast forward 4 years later, and he is still as intimidating as ever, but perhaps a little exhausted in holding onto a myth in his regime's superiority and very clearly tired of his once-proud nickname of the "Jew-Hunter".
Colonel Landa's charms don't seem to be completely in service of the Jew-hunting cause. As with most of his violent characters (Jules in Pulp Fiction, Bill, Ordell in Jackie Brown) Tarantino wants to make you personally like his most disturbing characters so that you are filled with a mix of satisfaction and dissapointment when they are threatened. The nuance of Landa doesn't stay hidden for very long, as he shows "mercy" on Shoshanna, and lets her run away even after he has her in his gun sights. Small comfort after he just supervised the murder of her entire family, but also suggests he is more interested in his own grand feelings of being powerful than exterminating every 'rat' he finds.
It's not entirely clear how dirty his hands get as he presumably performs additional high-level security tasks for the Nazis over the years, but my second viewing almost convinces me that his strangling of the spy actress Von Hammersmark was his breaking point. Rather than another culmination of a tension-filled interogation to weed-out another hidden traitor, you can see Landa visibly shaken by the level he has to go to take care of this problem. All his personality and sophisticated manner in which he does his job is finally thrown out the window when he has to take care of a problem by removing life from this world with his bare hands. You think that his methodical way in which he rounds up Brad Pitt is suggesting he is moving on with business as usual, but he now wants to act in his own self-interest and use the Basterds to betray his regime and leave the "Jew-Hunter" moniker once and for all, while also wiping the slate clean on all his past actions. In Tarantino's perfect use of ambiguity in dialogue, Landa doesn't offer a clear answer to Lt. Aldo Raine on the welfare of Von Hammersmark, suggesting that the poised colonel was starting to believe this was one killing too many in service of a regime that he no longer believed in.
Once you take on the identity of a group with a reputation, however, you can't just switch alliances through your actions alone. It turns out, in the incredible final scene, that Lt. Aldo Raine was the character most fixated and confident in who the enemy was, come hell or high water. Colonel Landa might have made a deal that saved lives, betrayed his country, but he will always be a Nazi. I'm sure many Jews who thought they were good patriotic Germans were branded, literally and figuratively, despite of their actions. It was something they couldn't take off, regardless of what kind of profession they had or what kind of life they lived. Thoroughly beating the Nazis at their own game had to mean not only beating them tactically but thinking of the enemy as savage subhumans. Lt. Raine callously projects that mission as the movie's final statement.
"Something you can't take off"... Brad Pitt's character says before he deforms the foreheads of the survivors of his attacks... that could easily mean something you can't switch off. Because while movies and myths live past their makers and their impact is effected by the audience that hears them over time, there's nothing subtle about an evil symbol carved into your body. Landa might have been loyal until that turnaround at the very end, but in an almost cartoonishly fixated way, Lt. Aldo Raine always thought of Nazis as monsters that had to be destroyed, regardless of what rank they are or how much humanity they demonstrated when under duress. Aldo Raine's branding is a brutal action in multiple ways given the context of the themes in this movie, in that it 'cuts' through the acts and deception everyone and everything is playing on eachother. That person was a Nazi, and that's all that matters and all that will matter as these surviving characters live their future lives (presumably with a hat or heavy layers of forehead makeup). Does it create even an ounce of sympathy for the Nazis in this movie universe? I think it creates the potential for sympathy, but the film allows the observer to see the actions of Nazis mirrored through the Americanized actions of the Bastereds. Then a viewer can question their own knowledge of history, their own past, and their own heritage, and reach their own conclusions. Some of that questioning of who deserves sympathy will be enveloped in myths, images, and rhetoric. It doesn't take away from what actually happened once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France, but Inglorious Basterds, while being a fun suspenseful movie on one surface, also portrays how contemporary audiences might approach a significant part of human history whose perception has been warped by time and artistic interpretation.
