Der Führer’s Face

To begin with, a caution. There is no way to write honestly about Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Inglourious Basterds, without revealing its gobsmacking concluding twists. So if you want to see the movie unspoiled, do not read further.

I am giving you one more chance to turn back. No? Then here goes. At the climax a Boston Jew in the guise of an Italian cameraman riddles Adolf Hitler with machine-gun fire until the Führer is a bloodied, mangled, unrecognizable corpse.

The year is 1944, the month July. Hitler is attending the premiere of a movie in a theater in Paris. As Hitler is being massacred, the theater is set ablaze by its owner, a hidden Jewess named Shoshanna who has become the object of a celebrated Nazi soldier’s desire, and her lover, a black man. Everyone dies.

The killing of Hitler and his inner circle has been made possible through the courtesy of a Nazi colonel named Hans Landa, nicknamed “the Jew Hunter.” A man of immense cultivation and murderous instincts, who we have just watched strangle a traitor to death, Landa has figured out the plan and taken its designer, a former Tennessee moonshiner named Aldo Raine, into custody.

Rather than saving Hitler, Landa has Raine, who is the leader of the platoon that goes by the misspelled name of the title, radio American headquarters to secure him a full pardon, a house in Nantucket, and a Congressional Medal of Honor. Which he does.

Thus, Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino has done something incredibly nervy here and, from a storytelling point of view, something that even I, a confirmed Tarantino hater, must confess is kind of brilliant. If there is one unassailable rule of historical pictures, it is that they must conform to the historical narrative in the broadest sense. In other words, you can’t kill Hitler a year early. You can have Hitler travel to Paris after 1944, when he never did so. You can have Hitler interrogate a fictional character, as Tarantino has him do. You can stage a battle that never happened. But you cannot change history’s timeline.

But then again, who says you can’t? Who made these rules? That was the startling narrative insight of the writing team of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis in 1985 when they conceived Back to the Future. They allowed a character to change something in the past and then discover, upon returning to the present, that he had actually made everything better. Before Back to the Future, time-travel pictures featured the iron law that any change in the past would only have calamitous consequences. This is something everyone watching Back to the Future knew, even without knowing they knew it–and so the joyous final five minutes proved to be the most blissful twist in movie history.

Tarantino has done Back to the Future one better. He hasn’t just changed the past for one suburban kid by turning his loser father into a winner; he has altered history itself to give one of its most monstrous events a cinematic happy ending. He has made a World War II movie in which Jews kill Hitler and the German high command, during which the Inglourious Basterds go marauding through France, torturing and slaughtering German soldiers and stirring fear and terror in every Nazi breast.

Because of what happens at its climax, there need be no Battle of the Bulge, no final year of the war; the millions of Jews who died in the camps between July 1944 and the war’s actual end survive; and even when the Nazis get away with it, they don’t, thanks to Aldo Raine. He carves swastikas into their foreheads so they can never hide from public condemnation.

The question Inglourious Basterds raises is whether what Tarantino has done here is even remotely acceptable–as pop art, as a pop culture document, as anything. Does ending the war in 1944 serve to erase the sacrifices made by so many to end the war in actuality in 1945? Does it make a mockery of the continuing genocide to pretend there was an earlier conclusion to it?

Taken literally, as though Tarantino were Oliver Stone trying to rewrite the facts of the Kennedy assassination to suit his own conspiratorial idiocy, Inglourious Basterds is so offensive that it beggars one’s vocabulary to find words to condemn it. Tarantino has traveled beyond the bounds of bad taste into a new realm of tastelessness. But this is too harsh. For what Tarantino has produced here is not to be taken literally, at least not once the picture has sprung its surprise and revealed that everything we are seeing is taking place in an alternate universe.

Tarantino displays no interest in, or much knowledge of, World War II, Nazism, the conduct of the U.S. Army in the European theater, the Jewish people, or anything else. He exists in a world entirely bordered by the movies he grew up watching on television and then on videotape during the decade he famously spent as a clerk at a video store. And with Inglourious Basterds, he hasn’t made a movie about World War II. He has made a movie about movies about World War II, about movies about Nazis, and about movies that offer satisfying revenge fantasies. The occupied Paris we see bears no relation to any Paris that ever existed; it’s the Paris of An American in Paris, only with Nazis in it.

As a result, one doesn’t watch Inglourious Basterds in a state of rage, or at least I didn’t. Rather, I was open-mouthed at its conclusion, akin to the first-night theatergoers aghast at the opening of Springtime for Hitler in The Producers. But I was not only open-mouthed at the wholesale revision of history; I was also open-mouthed because Tarantino pulled off something entirely new, and for breaking the narrative mold and pulling off a spectacular trick, he deserves some credit for originality.

I have seen so many movies in my life, and written about so many of them, that I am nearly impervious to surprise. But Tarantino fooled me. Now that you have read to the end of this piece, he won’t have been able to fool you if you choose to go see Inglourious Basterds. You will be able to judge, better than I, whether it should be protested and reviled for its misuse of history or whether it is, finally, so demented that it can be enjoyed on its own terms.

I think it can. But I’m not sure.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.