The Worst Films Ever Made, Part 2: Quentin, you're on notice

dissent rating: -2.99/10

Spoilers abound, be warned!

I have posted here previously about what I thought of the film that, to date, I consider the worst ever (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). And as much as I like Brad Pitt as an actor, another one of his films clocks in at a very, very close second. I speak, of course, of Quentin Tarantio's latest piece of sensless violence pornography, Inglorious Basterds.

Recently a recipient of a quite presitgious award, there's no denying that Tarantino is an influential filmmaker. And as someone who saw and sort of enjoyed the Kill Bill diptych, I will readily admit he has talent. In the proper context, I think he deploys that talent well. His half of Grindhouse satisfyingly subverts the helpless-girl-in-a-horror-movie trope, and Kill Bill, though at turns overly violent, is its own kind of subversion of the exploitation tastes of the Charlie's Angels franchise. Certainly Pulp Fiction is a solid film, and probably the one that best displays his talents (and doesn't, as so much of his work does, rely so heavily on violence in lie of story or characters). But two of his most influential films — Resevoir Dogs and now Inglorious Basterds are of a different sort. Sure, Resevoir Dogs sucks. And it isn't just because its most iconic scene is one of torture, glorified, heroic, hell even meant to be ironically funny in a pre-indie way (what with the retro soundtrack and all); it's also because the movie is plotless, meaningless, and while heavily stylized, ultimately ends up being more of an empty design template than an actual movie. Don't get me wrong, not all movies have to have substance, and everyone loves a good action flick. But the Bond films don't obsess and fetishize violence the way Tarantino does, and Basterds is the ultimate case in point.

When I first saw Saving Private Ryan, a good number of years ago now, the level of gore present shocked me. Not only was it the first somewhat-realistic war film I'd ever seen, but all the previous violent films I'd been exposed to, most of it up the James Bond alley, sanitized violence pretty heavily. A bad-guy red-shirt is shot, falls away, and there's no blood. Sure, I don't agree with American TV and cinema's heavy reliance on the troped of violence and guns and whatnot, but as depictions go, the Bond franchise is pretty blasé. It isn't as much about the violence (one could argue) and doesn't fawn over it. It's about one-deminsional hero/villain archetypes, patriarchal depictions of the masculine savior, and a lot of other stuff, and there is violence, but few people being violated. Private Ryan was a different story. It's depictions of war aren't exactly ground-breakingly radical (quite the opposite), but a dead man in Spielberg's film, a person who has had violence inflicted upon them, is obviously violated. It's really quite a shocking thing to watch if you aren't used to that level of gore (as most are these days — in America and elsewhere). And yet, unshockable as I think myself, Inglorious Basterds had my stomach churning at a few points, and ultimately, I don't think it was the violence.

Tarantino doesn't sanitize his violence in this movie (not that he often does) and perhaps his refusal to depict violent action as somehow humane and easy to witness should be taken as a virtue. But in this alternate-history vengance story in which a troupe of Jewish-American soldiers set out for no other purpose than to kill and scalp enemy soldiers, the terms are not of a drama or even a political statement. For that, the film would have to be current, it would have to address modern issues, which is does not. I find myself often tiring of World War II films, and this one only reinforces that: it adds no new story to the canon, no interesting insight that often comes from examining horrible tragedy. In fact, written from a modern perspective (in which American society has somehow been scrubbed clean of its own anti-semetism that was rife in the first half of the 20th century) it is nothing more than a high-budget rehashing of Tom Cruise's ridiculous sentiment about how he 'always wanted to kill Hitler' as a kid. And man, does Tarantino kill Hitler. Sets him up for the kill in triplicate, in fact, finally doing the deed with a big spray of machine gun fire, and another, as the camera lingers over the body (a fleeting linger, like Sharon Stone's naughty bits in Basic Instinct, but still a linger), that chews up the man's face for us to take in. Did I call Hitler a man? Yes, because this is the important point that Trantino misses in this feature-length masturbation that is Basterds: each of his dead villains, each 'Nazi,' though ficticious, is a stand-in for a real human being. All of the fetishizing of murder (since soldiers killing soldiers is still murder) is the murder of people, not Bond villains. Maybe that's the ultimate problem with historical fiction — your adolescent fantasies still exist in a continuum that's based in reality, and lingering, fawning, even relishing in the death of real people (and relish this film does, with every close-up of a German scalp being detached) is ultimately a sick enterprise. Don't get me wrong, the endeavours of the Nazis in the second World War were so far beyond the pale of crimes against humanity that they belie understanding; yet Tarantino, in the protective casing that is a work of art, aims to reproduce a similar kind of inhuman violence and expects us not only to enjoy it with him but to cheer (just as his Nazis do watching a propaganda war film in the movie's climax), even to laugh (just as his Hitler does watching the same film).

It's a sentiment that fuels America: us versus them; we're right, they're wrong; righteous violence in protection of home, family, and retribution against those who would do us harm. It's probably one reason why history classes in America so guiltlessly discuss the dropping of the atomic bomb, why Israel's rutheless, disproportionately violent foreign policy is to roundly lauded (and why Spielberg's Munich was so successful), why every home-invasion turned-on-its-head film is so satisfying—even why, in many ways, I enjoyed rather than scorn Death Proof. It's pretty much built in to the American pathology (though not unique to it) that the greater wrong someone does you or your people, the more license you have to dress somone up as their effigy and pump bullets into them (after you've done the real thing, of course, or even more so if you've been denied it). But I don't have the stomach for that in cinema any more, or on TV (jesus, is 24 still on the air?) or anywhere else for that matter. Hanging on to our grievances, taking eyes for eyes and never forgetting or forgiving or stopping hating is one reason why shit never gets done, and frankly the likes of Tarantino aren't helping the matter. Artists, along with their art, have a responsibility, and Quentin has to take responsibility for every person that went to see his newest film and walked out cheering, a bounce in their step, because some Nazis got slaughtered, nevermind how easy it is to use them as a two-dimensional villan you don't have to humanize, or as a historically distant placeholder for this fanciful notion of 'evil.' Where number one on the list of Worst Films Ever gets its position for being utterly worthless, devoid of interest or value and at the same time winning the praise it did, number two gets it for being a twisted, immature, onanistic, and morally bankrupt piece of anti-intellectual pornography. And that is all I have to say about that.