Tarantino and the Ol' Switcheroo

I walked out of "Inglourious Basterds" about an hour ago. If you haven't seen it and think you might, I wouldn't read this now, but I would give the film four stars, out of four. Go see it and come back.

Violent, yeah? Oddly enough, I went to go see this movie with my mom, honestly can't tell you the last time I've seen a movie with her, let alone in the theater. In any case, all my mom would say was "that was so violent." (She'd never seen a Tarantino film before. She actually suggested this.)

Of course, that was the point- the violence was grotesque, and it served the purpose of the film, which was humanitarian. There's a juxtaposition of the violence of the movie (fairy-tale) and the violence the Nazis perpetrated in real life. This movie was a scalping of the Nazis, doing exactly what Goebbels had thought he was doing to film (there's the one line about beating the Jews at their own game.) It dehumanizes them in the worst way, because its dehuminization is a fantasy. Hitler's face getting blown off in the end, all the Nazis getting raked by machine gun fire, is the last laugh, it is the vengeance of the Jew that the main female character proclaims as she taunts the theater-goers to stare into her Jewish face (which is, of course, perfectly blonde-haired blue-eyed aryan.)

But doesn't the violence dehumanize us as much as the Nazis are dehumanized, and so tear apart the whole point of the movie? Again, no, it's a fanciful fiction, which makes the real violence of WWII that much more horrific. Hitler can portray himself as beautiful. In our film, he is disgusting, pimply and old, wearing a cape, a cartoon. That's what you get for being a supreme asshole.

Well, again, I've just seen this an hour ago. It still hasn't quite sunk in, and there's much more in the movie, but that was my first take. What do you think?