Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds received such a pan from The New Yorker that I thought twice about going. But I got to see it on the big screen for a buck when it came to the Crossroads 6 Cinema in Tucson, which viewing refreshed my memory regarding both the truly entertaining and exciting nature of Tarantino’s filmmaking, and the curious resentment toward it by certain film aesthetes.
Inglourious Basterds not only held my attention from the beginning but it kept me wondering throughout about what would happen next, and moreover, it kept me surprised about what did. Critics didn’t agree with how Tarantino “made up” some stuff about WWII history, but I liked this element of the film. WWII history is so canonical that no “fact-based” film on the period can be genuinely surprising, thus cue the violins and watch the hunt for the last Sullivan brother behind the German lines. And while this one conceit itself was a fabrication, without which Spielberg’s film would not have been the typical fare that it was, the emotional territory covered by the movie is entirely predictable, and its fan-fared outcome can be guessed from the get go.
Because Tarantino “changes” aspects of the main WWII story, his viewer really doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and strangely, or ironically, the real events of the period actually become more gripping. The horrors, the hatreds, the deaths, and all of the sufferings of that era become somehow more particularized and polarizing, more tensely watched and appreciated, when they are less the depiction of documented events. When the outcomes cannot be predicted or correctly guessed, a viewer is pulled into the ride of the film, and in my case, left devastated and drained, yet thrilled by the immediacy of it.
I cared about, had family histories connected to, and had even written on commission about, the WWII period, long before I saw this film. But the film made me feel more of what characters in that period might have felt when going through what they went through their histories. I already knew what the facts of their experiences were, but the film made me feel what it might have been like to have lived then, and those feelings were terrifying, exhilarating, disgusting, frightening, hilarious, exhausting, revolting, and very very sad.
Something similar, on a smaller scale, happened to me when I watched the fragment of film in From Dusk Till Dawn which is shot from the POV of the child molester/murderer, as he imagines the little girl he has kidnapped flirting with him, and “asking for it” from him. I found this alarmingly direct experience with such a warped and psychotically justifying mental force both emotionally true and utterly terrifying. Had it been portrayed more factually faithful, would it have created a more moving effect on me?
I remember reading a required paper about this From Dust Till Dawn filmic event to my classmates in a graduate course at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center for the Arts only to have them label Tarantino an idiot savant, among other things. This was before the Kill Bill series and Inglourious Basterds, and I’m not sure where those classmates are now or what they would think today. But what Tarantino reminds me of is how sometimes the things we make up are more evocative than the factual timelines of life, that all art is made from a distillation of the materials with which the artist works, and that this distillation is itself a further fictional process, a process where details are cut or added to punch up its effects, in order to make human beings feel or think or wonder or curse or respond, in kind, in new, oily, ways. A little Brad Pitt never hurts either.
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