I just saw the 2009 movie by Quentin Tarantino called Inglorious Bastards (or “Inglourious Basterds”) and was taken aback by my reaction.
Spoiler Alert: If you have not seen Inglorious Bastards and you’re planning to do so, then don’t read this yet. Please bookmark this page and return at your convenience. 🙂
The IMDB page on the movie is here.
It’s a story about a group of Apache-style, gorilla warriors made up of mostly Jewish-American soldiers operating behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied France. They are ordered to take out the leadership of the German Reich, including “Uncle Adolf” himself, at the premier of a propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels.
The idea is that they can bring the whole war to an end in one night by blowing up the theater.
Unknown by the Inglorious Bastards, the cinema was owned and operated by a French woman whose Jewish family was massacred four years earlier by the German colonel called the “Jew hunter.”
As you might imagine, she was still pissed off.
She didn’t know about the Inglorious Bastards’ plan, but that’s okay, she came up with a good one.
She had a collection of 350 nitrate movie prints and she unreeled and piled all the film up behind the screen.
Days earlier, she filmed and had printed some footage of herself. She spliced her film into the last reel of the German movie.
At the right time, her boyfriend locked the theater and took his place behind the movie screen.
The Germans are laughing and cheering as the hero of the movie, a German marksman is killing his 300th American soldier. Suddenly the film of the woman starts. Her face, 30 feet wide and shot and lit from below, appears.
She announces that she is the Jew who is about to kill them all.
Her boyfriend set the prints ablaze.
The theater becomes an inferno — an oven — a furnace.
The woman on screen is laughing.
Some of the Inglorious Bastards left in the theater open fire from a balcony, machine gunning Hitler, Goebbels, and other German officers and their dates as they clamber over each other trying to save themselves.
There is lots of screaming.
The Jewish pair of Inglorious Bastards are getting some satisfaction out of killing the Nazis.
Bombs go off and everyone dies.
Mission accomplished.
I’m half Jewish.
Watching movies about the Holocaust really upsets me.
I’m sure they do most people.
If you have Jewish blood, then you have the added sense of knowing that if you had been in those countries at that time then you too would have been taken to the ovens.
Just thinking about it long enough makes me cry.
But, I didn’t get any pleasure out of watching people, even evil jerk-offs, burn to death and get machine gunned in the back. It was upsetting. Tears came to my eyes.
I am relieved to learn that I’m sensitive to that sort of treatment of even terrible human beings when I might have a historical reason to want some payback.
Don’t get me wrong, in war I would certainly kill the enemy – it’s good business – but I wouldn’t take any pleasure in it.
The whole situation in the movie is wonderfully mixed. It’s revenge for the Jews, but it’s also a sneaky (some would say terroristic) way to end a war and save lives.
Good job, Quentin. Lunch this Tuesday in Oklahoma City?
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