Inglourious Basterds

Seen at: Lincoln Popcorn Palace, Cheyenne, WY on Sun. Oct. 25

This must set some kind of record for me, for delaying and delaying while a movie is in theaters until the last possible chance to see it. How long has Inglourious Basterds been out? At least ten weeks, I'd say. It actually came and went from the second-run theater in Fort Collins, making me chase it down outside of town while it was still showing.

I'll admit that I hadn't exactly been looking forward to seeing this. Scratch that. By the time I actually sat down to see it in the theater, I was very much looking forward to it. It might be more accurate to state that I had been waiting for the right moment, when I knew I'd want to see it.

Don't get me wrong---Tarantino is a great film maker. I won't argue that. But for various reasons, his work just doesn't connect with my soul as it did fifteen years ago when Pulp Fiction came out. During that time, he has grown as an artist and expanded his talents, but meanwhile I migrated away from an appreciation of seeing the world and human nature through his particular lens. Ironically it was watching lots of classical movies that made me stray from the Tarantino faithful. I say 'ironically' because Tarantino's films often come across as a non-stop homage to films of the past.

Tarantino pays homage, to be sure, but Tarantino's past is a revisionist one in many ways, as if he wants to tell us that film makers and actors back then didn't really understand human nature the way that he does, in his enlightened contemporary state. When it comes to people, I think he wants to tell us, Classicism was a lie , so he is going to show it all to us the way it really was.

This attitude is actually what I consider the greatest delusion of the Postmodern Era, namely the assumption that the Postmodern paradigm is the one that really existed all along, but it was just covered up by the self-delusions of earlier times. Specifically it is the notion that humans are without honor, beast-like in their motivations, and that any other viewpoint from the past is wrong, and needs correcting. I think much of Tarantino's work, along with much of contemporary period cinema, reflects this unspoken notion.

I'll admit that over the summer I was particularly put off by the advance marketing campaign for this movie, which seemed to scream out the notion I just mentioned---"You haven't seen World War II until you've seen it through Tarantino's eyes." Gee whiz. And all this time, I thought that I'd gotten a decent impression of the war from Audie Murphy starring as himself in To Hell and Back, made in 1954 using surplus equipment from the war and by a crew that probably fought over the same ground ten years earlier. But what the hell did those guys know? It took a guy who cut his teeth fighting in the trenches of a Southern California video store in the 1980's to really put the right spin on it all.

And then there was the trailer for this movie, featuring Brad Pitt doing a cheesy southern drawl while exhorting a bunch of Jewish-American would-be psycopaths to be as cruel as possible to the enemy. Here's Tarantino at his most Postmodern, conveying that honor and decency are handicaps, that the way to defeat the Nazis is to become as much like them as possible. No war is really about ideals, we are told, but about survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. That's all there is to it. Any other higher motivation is for losers. What a beautiful reflection of an America in which we now shrug off the use of Nazi "enhanced interrogation" techniques in a phony war to justify our empire. I guess Tarantino may be right about us---at least as we are now. But like I said, it burns me when he puts forth the notion that we were always this way. That's the Postmodern Delusion.

Also I gleaned from the trailer that this was going to be a Jewish revenge fantasy about the war. That's OK on some level, I suppose, but it just seems to be the capstone on the trend over the last few years in Hollywood cinema to assert that the meaning of World War II began and ended with the Holocaust. Leave it to Tarantino to take that idea to a whole new level, to its logical fulfillment.

Waiting all these weeks to see the movie probably helped me burn off some of these expectations, so that when I finally sat down to see it, I was indeed looking forward to it. This ought to be fun, I thought to myself. Tarantino is nothing if not pure fun.

But I have to say a little about where I saw this, which turned out to be the perfect locale. It was last Sunday afternoon, and I had set out for Cheyenne, about forty miles north of here, to see a completely different movie at a multiplex up there, because that other movie (which I'll write about later) was no longer showing in Fort Collins. But I never got around to seeing that movie on Sunday.

With about an hour to kill, I pulled into downtown Cheyenne and parked. Since I hadn't spent much time in the capital of Wyoming lately, I figured I'd give myself a little walking tour of the downtown, but just around the very first corner I ran smack into the huge marquee of the Lincoln Popcorn Palace, a looming classic era theater which I hadn't heard of, because it wasn't in the Google Movie listings for Cheyenne. What a find! What an afternoon!

The large neon script spelled out "Lincoln" and the marquee below listed the movies showing with those big fat red marquee letters. And there it was, starting in only a half hour, Inglourious Basterds. My plan had been to drive down to the north Denver suburbs to see it later that week, but I knew instantly that I had to alter my plans for that afternoon and go see Inglorious Basterds right then and there. It was just the perfect circumstances.

Two wrinkled one dollar bills at the glass booth bought me a matinee ticket. The inside didn't disappoint at all. It was one of those old-time theaters that hasn't really been renovated but retains much of its faded charm and original decor, right down to the typography on the exit signs in the soaring auditorium. Sure it's a little worse for wear after so many years of use, and its subsequent conversion into a second-run house, but just imagine what the multiplexes of today would look like after fifty years without significant renovation. Yikes. They don't build 'em like they used to.

Now as for the movie itself---well it was indeed very fun. No complaints there. Within the first few minutes, during the opening "Spaghetti Western" scene on the French dairy farm, I knew it was going to be a very good movie. On a narrative level, it is nothing if not superior. Tarantino knows how to tell a good story, and his ability has grown better over the years.

Normally one of the things about movies that really drags me down is when I see a plot point coming from a half hour away, and sit there waiting for it to inevitably unfold. Tarantino avoids all this by making the story jump ahead past all these inevitabilities. It's a highly refined version of the style he has cultivated over the years, and by now it seems seamless. This kind of storytelling thwarts the petty tension on a low-level, but allows the building of tension on a higher level with a narrative that never got mired into the convention domino-upon-dominos of what "has to happen next." This feature by itself is one of the strengths of Postmodernity, by the way, and Tarantino is the master of it.

Given that the movie tells a darn good story in an entertaining way, I can forgive a lot about it, but the film is also simply downright well made. Seeing so many movies lately, I have begun to really appreciate when a movie is good as a production. You can really tell when the producers, directors, crew, actors, etc., really went all out to make a quality product. This stuck out to me last year when I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie that I had mixed reactions to overall. It was simply a well made movie, and I can see why it got nominated for Best Picture. The same is definitely true of Inglourious Basterds.

Moreover the sadism I feared would dominate the movie, especially in the context of Jewish revenge fantasy, was much less overpowering than it could have been, partly because of Tarantino's aforementioned style of narrative. The movie, I thought, had just about the right amount of revenge fantasy present to make the narrative work as it did. In the end, I couldn't fault the movie on that level.

Yet also in the end there were things about this movie that kept me from completely embracing it. I ruminated this as I drove home in the dark across the Wyoming-Colorado state line on the High Plains.

First off is the Postmodern Conceit I previously mentioned, that honor is for suckers. At the end of the movie I couldn't help feel that the Nazis came off as looking more honorable than the Americans. We Americans, we are to believe, are better and wiser because we don't fool ourselves that life is anything more than survival. Thankfully that wasn't the dominating theme of the movie, but there was enough of it there to stick out to my Classical eyes to put a deep dent in my appreciation for what I'd just seen.

Or maybe this was the dominating theme. I can't tell yet. Maybe Tarantino is truly equating Classicism with Nazism on some level.

But as you might expect, if you've seen Inglourious Basterds, the biggest barrier to my embracing the film was the alternative history ending. This twist ending concept is so weird and novel---the rewriting World War II to give it a "happier" ending than it had, without any overt consciousness that it is taking such grand liberties with the past. I'm not quite sure what I think of it, and I debated with myself in the car over whether I was just being a stick-in-the-mud for not accepting this an artistically valid way to make a World War II movie.

After all, aren't all movies fiction? Aren't they all a warped version of known events in order to tell a good story? All movies severely bend history, because the artistic medium demands it, so why not bend it to this degree, if it tells a good story? I could see both sides of the argument, to be sure, but my sentiments nevertheless fall on the side of striving to be accurate to the "large" features of the historical record, the inescapable ones that seem to define the very meaning of the event? But on the other hand, have we entered a new era and thus should I just "get over it," as the Postmodern cry would urge me?

I couldn't help think that Tarantino effectively created a new genre with this movie, breaking the ground by monkeying with certain facts of history on level that previously was considered out of bounds. But like I said, I'm not sure what I think about this. It turns me off, yet it forces me to question my own artistic assumptions. After a year, I might know the answer. For now I'm a little too shocked by the ending to be able to think about it rationally.

Even as I reluctantly try to figure out a way to digest and embrace this movie, I more and more believe that next March Tarantino may well be standing on a stage in Hollywood accepting the Best Picture Oscar. Seriously, looking ahead at what remains to be released this year, what else is going to beat it? If it does indeed win the big prize, it will undoubtedly open the door to a new type of historical narrative. Are we really ready to go through that door? Is this a new level of artistic expression and freedom, or a sign that we've reached the logical vacuous end of the Postmodern Era?

If nothing else, the movie got me asking a lot of questions, not only about history, but about movies as an art form, and about my own appreciation of it. What more could you really ask for, for two bucks on an afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming?

And as for the Lincoln Popcorn Palace---it's my new favorite theater in the region. What fun indeed.

Verdict on movie: A superior production, and great fun for an afternoon, but what has Tarantino wrought with this?