Inglourious Basterds

[1]2,203 words

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic, sic] has been hyped as World War II action movie-cum-sadistic gorefest. In reality, it is a self-indulgent snorefest. I thought I would need a gin and tonic before I went in, but it turns out what I needed was a cup of coffee. Yes, there is some gore and sadism, but frankly I found myself hoping for more of it. Anything, really, to relieve the sheer boredom.

This is Quentin Tarantino’s worst movie, and that is saying a lot, given how bad Kill Bill [2], vol. I [2] is. Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s Citizen Kane, and it has been The Magnificent Ambersons ever since. If you find this review entertaining, let me assure you that it is far more entertaining than the movie itself. Nothing here should be interpreted as encouragement for you to waste your time and money on this preposterous and dull film.

Inglourious Basterds is about a team of American terrorists, consisting of seven Jews led by a gentile, Aldo “the Apache” Raine (played by Brad Pitt), who hails from Tennessee and claims to be part American Indian. The character is clearly based on Tarantino himself, since he too has an Italian name, hails from Tennessee, and claims to be part Cherokee. The mission of the Basterds is to terrify the Nazis by killing them in the most sadistic manner possible and mutilating their corpses. The dead are scalped. The survivors have swastikas carved in their foreheads.

Holocaust narratives are filled with tales of thousands of Jews herded to their doom by relative handfuls of Germans and their collaborators. Although this sheep-like behavior seems rather unlike the hyper-aggressive and unruly Jews of my acquaintance, most people accept it at face value and then wonder: What was wrong with these people? Why didn’t they fight back?

Tarantino has asked the same question [3]: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”

Inglourious Basterds is his answer. During WW II, the Jews needed the leadership of someone like Aldo the Apache, a mostly white man with a bit of red savage mixed in, just like the people who have churned out six million holocaust flicks need to take direction from Quentin Tarantino. With Tarantino in charge, the war would have had a very different end, and Inglourious Basterds shows us how.

Should Jews be insulted by this premise? Of course they should. But the movie itself is far more insulting still. Indeed, this is probably the most anti-Semitic movie ever released by Hollywood. Tarantino’s Jewish characters are one-dimensional, inhuman monsters. The Jewish Basterds are all as ugly as Der Sturmer cartoons. They have virtually no lines in the entire movie. All they do is skulk around, waiting for Aldo the Apache’s commands to murder and torture Germans.

The most prominent of the Basterds is played by Eli Roth, just another degenerate Jewish director of repulsive horror films. Roth plays the “Bear Jew,” who beats Germans to death with a baseball bat. He is the funniest thing in the entire movie, with his pouting, prissy mouth, drag queen makeup, and shiny brilliantined coiffure. Roth’s large, hairy body (anyone can take steroids) looks menacing until one hears his high, hysteria-edged voice. There was laughter in the audience every time this castrated gorilla opened his mouth on screen.

Too shallow to realize that he was playing a monstrous buffoon, Roth really got into the role, praising Inglourious Basterds as “kosher porn [3]” (is there any other kind?). He really gets off on fantasies of killing Nazis: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education.” They sound like lovely people, and I am sure they are really proud of what a successful boy Eli turned out to be.

Other Jews were equally smitten: Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender,  told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.

Tarantino also reported received uniformly positive reactions from his Jewish friends: “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”

If all these Jews have no objection to their tribe being portrayed as one-dimensional vengeful sadists, who am I to complain? Perhaps the shoe fits.

The most prominent Jewish character in the movie is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Shoshanna (played by Mélanie Laurent), the daughter of a Jewish dairy farmer (that got the first laugh of the movie). Her family is massacred in 1941 by the SS, and somehow she turns up a few years later with an assumed French identity running a movie theater in Paris with her Negro lover. When her theater is chosen to premiere a new German movie in the presence of Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Borman, and other leading Nazis, she plans to bolt the doors and burn the place down as an act of revenge.

Shoshana is a character of reptilian inhumanity. A young German, Frederick Zoeller (played by Daniel Brühl) is obviously smitten with her. A film enthusiast, he tries to strike up a conversation about movies. The contrast could not be clearer. He is warm, sincere, and polite. He sees her as a fellow human being and a fellow film-enthusiast.

She sees him only as a racial enemy. She takes no interest in him until she discovers that he is both a film star and a war hero, which she thinks she can use to her advantage. (He does not reveal these things to her initially, for he does not merely wish to impress her, but to befriend her.)

Her only flash of human emotion comes at the end of a scene in which she meets the SS man, Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who murdered her family, but it just heightens the impression that she is a cold-blooded master of deception and intrigue.

Shoshanna’s inhumanity is heightened by comparison to Uma Thurman’s revenge-driven character “The Bride” in the Kill Bill movies. The difference is not just a matter of who played the role (although Tarantino decided that as well) but of how the actresses were directed.

Hans Landa claims that he is effective at hunting Jews because he knows how they think. The meaning of this is made clear at the end of the film, when he turns out to be a traitor.

The Allies do not come off much better than the Jews. Aldo the Apache is the only American. He is a loud-mouthed, sadistic, duplicitous jackass with a hillbilly accent. Brad Pitt plays him for laughs, and he is genuinely funny. There are three Britons: the handsome German Michael Fassbender as film-critic Lt. Archie Hicox, Mike Myers as General Ed Fenech, and the wreck of Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill. The first two come off as effete wankers, and Churchill might as well be Jabba the Hutt.

All of this is in strong contrast to the portrayal of the Germans, even the German traitors. First of all, they are mostly quite good-looking and sexy. (As P. J. O’Rourke said [4]: “Nobody has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually revished by someone dressed as a liberal.”) Second, they are dignified, charming, and polite with strangers; warm, playful, and fun-loving among friends. Even though the Germans are supposed to be the bad guys, they are the only people in the film with whom most white people can readily identify themselves. This means that white audiences can only feel revulsion at the sadistic Jews who murder them.

Hitler, of course, is portrayed as a monster. He first appears wearing a cape, which is appropriate, since he is played as nothing more than a comic book villain. (Martin Wuttke is surely the ugliest Hitler ever.)

Goebbels, although he is portrayed as somewhat arrogant (like a film director, perhaps), comes off overall as warm, sincere, playful, and even a bit lovable(!). Tarantino has obviously immersed himself in German films of the era, and it is clear that he has some admiration for what Goebbels accomplished. (In a scene set in England, it is stated as plain fact that Jews run Hollywood, and Goebbels is given credit for giving them a run for their money.)

The true star of the film is Christoph Waltz, whose portrayal of Hans Landa is absolutely riveting. He is such a magnificent character that Tarantino had to turn him into a traitor in the end, otherwise he would be the true hero of the film as well.

The other star is Daniel Brühl who plays Frederick Zoeller, the young war hero who becomes smitten with Shoshanna. His character is the most likable and most tragic of the film.

Now let’s examine the climax of the movie. I have no qualms about giving it away, since I don’t want any of you to see it anyway. Shoshanna hosts the premiere. Hitler and all the top Nazis come to the theater. She splices her face into the fourth reel of the film. Once the fourth reel is playing, her Negro lover bars the doors to the theater. Suddenly, Shoshanna’s face appears on the screen: “This is the face of Jewish vengeance!” she screams, while the Negro sets the building on fire. The kindling he uses are movies printed on highly flammable nitrite film. (Jews use movies — and Negroes — to create mass death and destruction in this country too.)

Meanwhile, two of the Jewish Basterds (including the preposterous Eli Roth), who have infiltrated the theater without knowing of Shoshanna’s plot, run amok with machine guns, killing Hitler and Goebbels and other Nazis. The theater then explodes. Everybody dies, Jews and Germans alike. Götterdämmerung.

The climax of Inglourious Basterds is obviously based on the Oscar night massacre in neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s novel The Brigade [5]. If you don’t believe me, read the novel for yourself.

The symbolism and the message could not be clearer: Jews use movies and movie theaters as tools to destroy their enemies. And since the white people in the audience can most readily identify with the Germans, the message gets through: the Jewish movie business is a tool of hatred and vengeance directed against all white people.

Why would Quentin Tarantino make a movie about World War II in which Germans are portrayed as attractive human beings, Americans are portrayed as sadistic buffoons, Englishmen are portrayed as effete wankers, and Jews are portrayed as cold-blooded, inhuman mass murderers?

Why would Quentin Tarantino borrow plot elements from neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s The Brigade [5] to craft a climax for his movie? Why would he use that climax to expose the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood?

Is Quentin Tarantino a Nazi-sympathizer?

Of course not. Nothing could be further from the truth. Quentin Tarantino is simply a nihilist with an unfailing instinct for finding and desecrating anything sacred. In Pulp Fiction — his one great movie, and his most sincere — Tarantino showed a profound grasp of the spiritual meaning of the duel to the death over honor, symbolized by the Samurai sword. In Kill Bill, vol. I, he made a giant joke of it.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has taken the one truly sacred myth in modern Jew-dominated America — especially in modern Hollywood — namely WW II and the holocaust, and he has desecrated it by inverting all of its core value judgments and reversing its stereotypes. In the process, he has exposed the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood. Why? Just because he can.

The fact that Quentin Tarantino could desecrate the holocaust, expose Hollywood’s agenda, and sell it back to Hollywood’s Jews is a testament to his twisted genius and their shallowness and moral imbecility.

I wish Inglourious Basterds were a better movie, since I think that many white people would benefit from seeing it. Yes, the explicit message is that it is good for Jews and their hillbilly dupes to sadistically murder Germans (and any other enemies of the Jews, for that matter). But the largely white audience with which I saw the film did not seem terribly comfortable with this message.

Yes, they found Brad Pitt funny. He really was funny. But the sadism directed at Germans did not amuse. In the last scene of the film, where Aldo the Apache graphically carves a swastika in the forehead of Hans Landa and pronounces it “my masterpiece” — pathetically enough, this is probably Tarantino’s view of the film — there was no laughter.

For the subliminal message was coming through loud and clear: we are all Germans now, and every time we turn our eyes to a movie screen we are seeing the face of Jewish vengeance.