Inglourious Bastards Basterds–UPDATED
August 26, 2009 / 3:23 pm • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier
Inglourious Bastards might be Quentin Tarantino’s best movie so far. As expected, it’s full of gruesome violence, gratuitous splattering blood, and revenge fantasies. For the subject, it’s all to the good: Nazis die.
Tarantino has some messages for everyone though and they aren’t politically correct. First the trailer. Here are some of the lessons from the movie:
1. Enhanced Interrogation works: The reason William Wallace from Braveheart fame was so remarkable was because he didn’t break. Nearly everyone, eventually breaks. When one gets a bad guy to spill the beans, good guys get saved. It ain’t pretty. But sleep deprivation, psychological discomfort, and in Tarantino’s case, a public head bashing are very effective means of extracting information.
2. There are bad guys. Now, in this politically correct world, only the Nazis may be used as bad guys. Don’t mention the barbary of Native Americans or current slave traders, or Hugo Chavez. Hell, don’t mention the barbaric acts of actual barbarians–the Barbary pirates. These days, the only acceptable bad guy is of German extraction. Anyone who is labeled “bad” is labeled Hitlerian. For fun though, when you go see the movie, just put an Islamist in the place of the Nazi. Every time. Just imagine a freedom hating terrorist biting it hard. It’s profoundly satisfying. If Tarantino were really that edgy, he’d have chosen a more relevant bad guy, but in these times, naming evil is passé.
The movie wins points artistically. The dialogue amusing. Among the blood, guts and nonsense, the story pushes forward with anxiety-producing anticipation.
What made me love the movie most, though, didn’t occur on the screen. The packed theater that made my vengeance-loving heart glad.
So, Americans still hate villains. Americans still want evil doers to pay. After years of mushy, morally ambivalent tripe like Crash, a movie comes out that’s pure good and evil. Well, not so pure. Because war isn’t pure. It’s messy, bad things happen, good people die and sometimes the best soldiers are just this side of normal. Righteous vengeance though, is satisfying. People want evil, innocent-killing psychos to pay–preferably with their lives.
Primal? Uncivilized? It’s pretty to think so. More like, normal people recognize that tolerating evil encourages evil. You know, like the Iranians who repeatedly raped a young boy who defied the Iranian leadership during the protests. That evil.
So, while I’m still waiting for Quentin Tarantino to show some real courage and portray the monstrosity that is Islamofascism–the psychotic Muslim element who carry around Mein Kempf for moral encouragement–I’ll take what I can get. And right now, a movie where the bad guys get incinerated is profoundly satisfying.
It’s nice to see the good guys win. It’s nice to see the bad guys suffer and die. I’m hoping that Inglourious Bastards starts a trend. Now, to choose a more timely enemy.
P.S. Brad Pitt is hot. And the way he says “Nazis” makes me smile. I’m saying it that way from now on. Nat-zees.
P.P.S. This is why I feel no shame about vengeance fantasies. There is no death painful enough to balance the inhumanity of what some evil bastards will do in the name of their despicable cause.
The moral equivalence crowd can shove their sanctimony up their collective ass. There are people right now who loved seeing Americans die in the World Trade Center. They relished it and still do. The Lockerbie bomber, Al Qaeda, the Taliban all glory in their death cult. No reasoning, no gentleness will change their black souls. Just as Nazis felt justified in their abject cruelty, so do the Islamofascists who carry out their modern mission of freedom killing violence.
The only solution? Kill the killers.
After reading Rachel’s post, I’m going to screw up my courage and go visit the site of the Twin Towers. Even though just typing this post makes me angry enough to cry at the injustice, I will see it. And when I go to Germany, I’ll do that heinous visit, too.
There is a reason America continues to fight this pesky foe. It’s us or them. Let it be them.
UPDATED AGAIN:
Actual, real live Inglourious Basterds courtesy Winston Churchill. I love him even more:
Some were in the Brigade – a unit set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1944, made up of more than 6,000 volunteers. He said: “It seems to me indeed appropriate that a special unit of the race which has suffered indescribable treatment from the Nazis should be represented in a distinct formation among the forces gathered for their final overthrow”.
The following year, the Brigade was in the front line for the Allies’ final push against the Nazi menace and worked with the rest of the British Army in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Official orders dictated that any Nazis captured should be interrogated, not executed. But the revenge squads within Brigade ranks had other ideas.
Go read the whole thing to get an idea of how the Nazi hunters exacted justice.
By the way, to the liberals out there: Was World War II a revenge fantasy? Because technically, the European theater wasn’t “our” war. I mean Germans didn’t attack us. And that war cost a lot of money. And hell, we still have troops stationed in Europe. I mean, it’s like totally a waste, ya know?
I do not regret that America took the war to the terrorist murderers. A sense of moral outrage should determine foreign policy. Barack Obama’s bland indifference to the people of Iran is telling. Should we go to war there? That can be disputed. But what cannot be disputed is that Iran is a totalitarian, fascist regime that wants to exterminate a whole race of people. IT IS EVIL. To not be affronted by their disgusting philosophy and actions is to show indifference to innocent, freedom-loving people.
The left resisted efforts to get involved in WWII. They didn’t want to see the atrocities of Japan, Germany and Italy, especially, because it didn’t fit their never ending selfish narrative.
Either freedom or tyranny is on the march. It is never static. And freedom must be bought or lost.
UPDATED:
The U.S. declared war on Japan December 8, 1941 in direct response to being attacked. Revenge? The next day, Germany declared war on the U.S. FDR offered monetary support to the British, stepping away from neutrality before this. However, one could argue that going to Europe was taking the fight to the enemy. Perhaps America should have simply played defense. It was not as though Germans were storming Manhattan en masse.
Also, for the “brown people” straw man argument: By defending the Iranian people against their psycho tyrant, I’m suggesting defending “brown people”. What did the war in Iraq become, if not a defense of brown people against Saddam Hussein and his sons and minions? What was the war against Iraq to begin with but a defense of the brown people in Kuwait?
Good grief. There’s evil people of every color. That racism card, though, that trumps everything.
UPDATED AGAIN:
In praise of the Bear Jew:
An old friend just attended the wedding of Eli Lake’s younger brother. I wrote my friend:
Do me a favor, really. Shake Eli’s hand and say thanks to the “Bear Jew” from another Brooklyn Jew, me. He did it Brooklyn style, the way I grew up. Some may have f**ked with me, but none came away unhurt, and never did again.
My old friend sent me this email:
Bruce,
I read your email to Eli and his parents- they all loved it and
that led to the handshake pictured here.
Also, I wrote a follow-up review of Inglourious Basterds here.
