Inglourious Basterds

Quentin invited us to a movie about Jews beating up Nazis on the battlefield and he showed us a movie about Jews beating up Nazis on the movie screen. This is a more interesting tale, it turns out, in part because there is truth to it.

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First, let's get this out of the way- Quentin is giving a certain amount of ownership of the Golden Age of Hollywood to people of Jewish heritage. This can be a touchy topic, since it runs near "JewsRunHollywood!!!" territory. But that notorious sentiment is suspect because it suggests a secret cabal, with organized agendas - not because it points out that a hell of a lot of the people who built and ran major film companies were Jewish. They were, and way to go team.

Ostensibly, this is a violent movie about warfare; baseball bats, machine guns, all the gory gory. But where were the concentration camps? Where were the Panzer divisions? A U-boat maybe? Important stories about militarism and genocide are actually very carefully dramatized and examined in lots of other movies, but here, as reviewers across America very cleverly observed, these elements are Mr. Not Appearing in this Film.

However, another less commonly addressed aspect of the Third Reich is discussed over and over in this movie, from several different angles and with substantial historical fact: Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.

With Quentin we know that whatever the story, he will be bringing his pet interests to the table: violence and movies themselves. In Inglourious Basterds, however, those things have already been brought to the table - by those guys in the matching arm bands. The violence goes without saying, and isn't really what the film is about. What we're really talking about is cinema, and if you don't appreciate the importance of cinema to the Nahtzees, then soldier, you need a lesson!

After all Hitler's #2 wasn't Göring and his Luftwaffe or Bormann and his politics or Himmler and his Gestapo. It was Goebbels and his movies. Message is power- more so than tanks or guns- and this was well known by the Nazis and by would-be totalitarians ever since.

In the film, Goebbel's success with redefining cinema is discussed directly - and Louie B. Mayer is held up as the competition. The conclusion is that the Reich is doing very well, with attendance up and a stable of real talent. But the battle of the Movie House is fought in the final reel, and the victory is Shosanna's.

Perhaps to demonstrate that collusion can't be assumed by combined efforts, Quentin presents two un-connected plans headed toward the premiere of A Nation's Pride. One is military in nature, conceived by gentiles, very complicated and goes wrong in numerous ways. The other is conceived by Shosanna Dreyfus, incredibly simple, executed with style and uses as it's only weapon cinema itself.

And here is where the real world comes in. No band of killer Jews was running around occupied France scalping Nazis. That was made up. But a largely Jewish-led film industry did use the awesome power of cinema to make Nazis the ultimate cinema villain beyond all measure. That happened quite nicely over the years. It is cinema that made the swastika the most well known symbol of evil imaginable- without movies we would see it only in history books. And it's not just the symbol- the uniforms, the salute, the German accent- all of these have come to define movie villainy.

Yes, a key battle was actually fought on the silver screen, and the bad guys lost. It is with movies that the Nazis tried to turn people against Jews and other "enemies of the reich", and it is movies that have made sure that they can never, ever take that uniform off.

And that's the meaning of Inglourious Basterds.