Analysis: "Inglourious Basterds"

In my analysis of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, I touched on the fact that war, while an unfortunate fact of the human existence, is indeed hell, and how it will force either side to brutality and grey morality, no matter how honorable they are perceived to be. This has been a persistent topic in literature, such as in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and films like Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, along with countless others, many based around the Vietnam War. However, such films focus almost entirely on the epigram "war is hell," but I feel that not enough cinema focuses on another, less glorified statement about war: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it," a line attributed to Union Army General William T. Sherman. 2009's Inglourious Basterds, though, does analyze this quote, and does it quite well. Set against the backdrop of a very fictionalized World War II, it shows the story of two separate plots to assassinate the Nazi high command, including Adolf Hitler, by two Jewish entities: the American Special forces known as the "Basterds," led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and including Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz (Eli Roth) and German rogue Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, well-known for assassinating thirteen Gestapo officers and being freed from prison by the Basterds, and another plot formulated by French cinema proprietor Emmanuelle Mimieux, really Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jew whose family was massacred by the SS, under the orders of Colonel Hans Landa, "the Jew Hunter" (Christoph Waltz in his first Oscar-winning role). Shosanna's theater was chosen as the premiere for a German propaganda film, Stolz der Nation (Nation's Pride in German), starring sniper Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). She plans to burn her cinema to the ground, whereas the Basterds plan to rendezvous with their mole, German film starlet Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), and kill the High Command with dynamite. Things become even tenser for Shosanna when she realizes Col. Landa will be managing security for the premiere, making her absolutely furious. In a sense, it is also a story of revenge, one of Tarantino's favorite subjects, which he has explored many times, most notably in Kill Bill and Django Unchained. However, this movie involves the revenge of a woman who is angry about the death of her family, avenging loved ones, much like Django, where the main character enacts revenge on his wife's captors by killing them in one of the most stylized ways possible. The stylization cake, however, is taken by Kill Bill, which focuses on the Bride avenging the supposed death of her daughter, who was revealed to be alive at the end of Volume I, and Bill's revenge on the Bride for breaking his heart, both tragedies of love. Really, I could go on about this, but I'll save this material for future articles; I have to keep you readers entertained somehow. Back to the main subject: the cruelty of war, on both sides. The Germans have been ruthlessly massacring Jews simply out of prejudice and xenophobia, forcing millions to die by execution or other horrific methods in the death camps. In the opening, Landa himself interrogates a French dairy farmer and threatens his life and livelihood, forcing him to give up the location of the Dreyfus family, resulting in their death. However, in the context of the film and the film only, could it be said that the Allies are fighting fire with fire to an excessive extent? Watch the above videos again, and notice the cruel pleasure the Basterds take in murdering the Germans. Also, Lt. Raine states in the beginning of the film that each of his eight soldiers owe him 100 Nazi Scalps, and he wants his scalps. He carves swastikas into the heads of captured Germans to brand them forever as Nazis (possibly a reference to a moment in the Robert Rodriguez short film, Bedhead), and sends one survivor back each time to tell the tale. Also, towards the end of the film, Donowitz and fellow Basterd Omar (Omar Doom) go inside Shosanna's theater, as it burns to the ground, and into an opera box. They procede to pump Hitler full of lead with submachine guns, the film's crowning moment of awesome and the catalyst for Tarantino's alternate universe he sets all of his movies in. It, awesome and justifiable as it was for a group of Jewish soldiers (Roth's parents cried tears of joy when they fist saw it), was still cruel and brutal, no matter what. It is not a comment on World War II itself as much as war in general. Each side, regardless of their alignment, fights for a cause, oftentimes passionately. They are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of their country, and that is their duty as soldiers; it is patriotism in the most literal sense. However, occasionally, when a side fights dirty, like the Germans or Japanese did during World War II, the opponents must occasionally do the same. Does it go to far at times? Yes, certainly. It  is a mistake that happens to many countries, ranging from US waterboarding of detainees to the sickening massacre of innocent Vietnamese at the My Lai Massacre. In works of fiction, we see it in The Dirty Dozen and Inglourious Basterds. They fight cruelty with cruelty, out of their own rage. No fighter in war is immune to this; it's called bloodlust, and while some escape it, it cannot be completely escaped. Sometimes we don't hear these stories of poor men losing their sanity because of their situation; in the case of the Basterds, they fought out of defense for their Jewish heritage, and the Germans oftentimes deserved such retribution, even though in real life, not every German was a Nazi (for a cinematic example, watch a German film about "die Weisse Rose," or the White Rose, released in 2005. It's called Sophie Scholl: Die Ietzten Tage). In the case of other, real-life examples, men killed and committed other despicable acts, such as in My Lai, without reason or logic, only out of irrational thinking. Yes, war is truly cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

NOTE: After I wrote this article, I perused the TV Tropes page on Inglourious Basterds and found some interesting tropes relevant to this article. Read here for more.