America has a thing about war movies. Specifically, World War II movies.
And it’s at least understandable, if not totally defensible. It’s really the last time we can be said to have been objectively, totally “the good guys;” it’s what made us a world power, and it was far enough away that we could easily romanticize it while still being connected to it, envisioning our soldiers as tragic heroes while making “the enemy” into borderline comic book villains. Remember that, it’ll be important later.
The Vietnam War doesn’t get the same treatment. This is most likely becausefor one the media had grown to the point where images from the battlefield could be sent directly to people’s homes, grounding our view of the war firmly in reality. Two, America really, really did not handle anything about Vietnam well.
This is why WWII gets films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Patton” Vietnam gets “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon.” They’re dark, violent, brutally honest, realistic and they reflect our collective feelings about their subject.
American films focusing on the War to End All Wars: Part Two, however, remain more or less free of the cynicism and, if I may humbly offer, sense of reality that films focused on other wars are marked by. The two I mentioned earlier, which manage to examine both the very grey and gray morality of fighting a war (“Patton”) and the actual horror and chaos of a battle (“Saving Private Ryan”) still end up casting a very rosy light on the whole idea of war.
The men in these movies are still noble and heroic, just decent working men caught up in something greater than themselves, and they’re still unambiguously the good guys. And for every even-tempered, complex film like these two, we get another three like “Flags of Our Fathers” or “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which aren’t exactly shy or subtle in romanticizing the idea of war.
This needs to stop. Not only do I think it makes for boring cinema, but it isn’t healthy for our collective psyche. It’s like the high school quarterback who still thinks he’s Prom King, despite his beer gut and rapidly-receding hairline. Yes, we did a great thing in not letting Nazis take over the world, but eventually, at least cinematically, we need to move on.
Now, until recently all I would’ve had to support my argument was my ranting about desensitizing ourselves to violence, living in and romanticizing the past and generally being bored with the topic. However, I believe that we can now say, decisively, that we can stop making World War II movies now. And it’s all thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.”
SPOILER ALERT: It’s my firm belief that this film um…broke World War II movies. Forever. It completely deconstructed the genre, turned it on itself, put it back together and did it so seamlessly that you hardly even notice what it’s doing until well after it’s over.
So remember that whole “borderline comic villain” thing from earlier? Yeah, the first time we see Hitler in the film, it is in a cavernous, brightly-lit and cartoonishly-colored room featuring a giant effigy of the man himself in the background. Also, he’s wearing a cape. He (nearly literally) is presented as a supervillain. Which, granted, he almost was in real life, but he was still only a man.
Now, this black and white, simplistic take on the morality of war is subverted by nearly every other character in the film (Christoph Waltz’s character might be the only exception). The one German character we really get to know is portrayed as a more or less nice guy.
Nazism aside, there are a few quick moments that humanize the Germans in the war (“Most German soldiers are [somebody’s son]”), and all the protagonists of the film, from Shoshanna to the Basterds, are borderline sociopaths. From Head Basterd Aldo Raine’s initial, Patton-esque speech about how “Nazis ain’t got no humanity” on, he and his men both serve as a parody of our frequently simplistic and dehumanized views of war, and subvert it by massacring soldiers in cold blood. Frequently with a smile on their faces, arguably becoming just as bad as the evil they’re fighting.
These two competing presentations of war’s morality collide violently in the climax of the film, where a theater full of Nazis cheers a German war film in which their war hero is slaughtering countless, faceless American soldiers. Suddenly, our American war heroes burst into the theater and begin mercilessly gunning down all of the nazis, including Hitler and his posse. And we, as the audience, stand up and cheer.
And just like that, Tarantino totally broke World War II films by making it. It’s the movie that perfectly breaks down our attitude towards a defining event in our nation’s history. It’s the movie that gives us our supervillain view of “the bad guy,” before smashing it, violently and bloodily, with a messier, less comfortable but ultimately more realistic view of our past, laying it to rest and allowing us to move on.
It’s also the movie that shot Hitler in the face with a machine gun. So...where do we go from there?
Do you think that the Nazis deserve more film treatment? Is Austin just completely off base? Do you know of an optimistic movie about Vietnam? Let him know at wellens@wisc.edu.
