The best film I saw this year was Tarantino’s magnificent and misunderstood Inglorious Basterds. I wrote an initial reaction to it here and I stand over it. A lot of critics seemed to have liked it as a display of Tarantino’s power and range as a director while either regarding it as morally trivial or, worse, as questioning the verity of the received narrative of WWII. They see Landa as the film’s most attractive character and seem fascinated with the scene when where Eli Roth’s character bludgeons a German sergeant to death for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of German forces.
Now let’s think about this for a moment. What kind of imbecile would you want to be to find Landa an attractive character? Sure, he oozes – and that’s the best verb – charm but it’s not a big secret that a lot of complete cunts are right charmers. And when he sees that the game is up he turns out to be not even a loyal Nazi. As for the dead NCO, who knew that the bulk of Germany’s armed forces fought with valour and determination till the very end?
The real moral center of the film is Aldo Raine. He’s not a sophisticate like Laine but he understands both what Nazism is and the sole and only cure for it.
