StevenJ0001 wrote:Grand Illusion wrote:We get a close-up designed to make us squirm, to show the grotesquerie of the act.
I'm not so sure Tarantino uses violence and gore in that way. He
loves violence on film and revels in his own use of it just the way he enjoys violence in the exploitation cinema he admires. I think he presumes most of his his fans enjoy it as much as he does, which is probably correct. What was so different about this particular graphic scene? It seemed to me as "joyous" (from Tarantino's perspective) as any of his other graphically violent/gory moments. Nothing gave me the impression he was trying to rub our faces in it to generate the more layered reaction you suggest.
Piggy-backing on R0lf's disagreement with StevenJ: I'm tired of posters here trying to prove/disprove their points using Tarantino's personality as their argument. He certainly makes himself the center of his marketing scheme, and his comments alternate between illuminating and self-serving (and sometimes they are both), but very often these comments contradict each other and provide multiple ways of viewing the same material, depending on his audience. For instance, Tarantino said to an
audience at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in reference to the penultimate scene of the film:
Quentin Tarantino wrote:At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that’s part of the thing that fucks with the catharsis. And that’s a good thing.
That's more "layering" than StevenJ has allowed Tarantino to be capable of, but the quote doesn't mean much to me. Other times Tarantino has spoken of this scene as pure vengeance, revenge-porn for Jewish audiences.
I laughed at much of the film's violence, when it was implausible and cartoonish a la Kill Bill. At other times, however, the violence seemed to have extra weight, perhaps only from the subject matter, but perhaps because there was something inherently different. The opening scene's violent climax is over-the-top, but my reaction was one of horror as well as amazement; definitely not relish or pure orgiastic pleasure. One poster here or a critic remarked that his or her audience laughed at this scene, and that's a Barmy-level of criticism: can one audience stand in for all audiences? Does any audience's reaction determine the value of a film? Saying, as some here have, that because an audience or the majority of all audiences (an impossible idea to quantify) will confuse this film with real history, or will react vapidly or destructively to the violence, that therefore the film is amoral, dishonest, poorly made, etc. etc. is more of an attack on modern culture or teenage audiences than it is on Tarantino's filmmaking. Using his quotes to bolster this attack is like shooting fish in a barrel - you can find a Tarantino quote to support many contradictory arguments regarding his films.
In contrast to the opening scene, during the climactic scene in the theatre I felt a mixture of go-get-'em revenge and disgusted horror, just as Tarantino anticipated in his quote. If I had not felt that, reading his quote today would have merely informed me of his unrealized intentions (unrealized in myself only) or his dishonest appraisal of his own work in front of that audience. Reading his quote now, and reading many other quotes being tossed around, I find that he has a firm grip on me, at least, as an audience member, though at times he expects of me a bit more enthusiasm than I can generate, often for violence that I find no pleasure in. So be it. I'd much rather watch the film and use the elements therein to argue its qualities than his quotes, as that's not a firm foundation.
All this to say that the scene in question in StevenJ's quote, the very final scene of the film,
was to me both gruesome and symbolic, not inspiring any joy, but not without its own satisfaction. As a resolution to the film's skewed morality (as represented by the Basterds), it satisfied the desire to punish someone like Landa, or any Nazi, for his crimes, while at the same time repelling me by its plain awfulness. I responded similarly to Grand Illusion, questioning if any punishment was too awful for the Nazis, or if vengeance of any sort is morally right, but these thoughts don't add much to a film that uses revenge more as a motivator (for both characters and audience) than as a subject worth pondering. I viewed it more for its emotional resolution and plot significance than for its relationship to reality.
All questions about morality in this film seem to me secondary to the movie's main conceit of "what if...?" and the self-aware, suspenseful, humorous, thrilling, and disgusting ride that got us to those moments. It's completely contrary to how we've been trained to view World War II movies, where the Nazis can be either hated villains or sympathetic pawns, and the soldiers are either heroes worth venerating, or pawns themselves. In these films, every characters' actions are weighed morally, as in Saving Private Ryan's final epic battle. Since Inglourious Basterds isn't really about World War II and does not moralize, viewing it through that same lens is inappropriate.
Or perhaps my main point is that the violence of an exploitation film doesn't have to be either cheered or denounced, as if those are the only two reactions one can have to an element of a film.
