Inglourious Basterds

I haven't watched this one for a little while, but I am reading a book about fascism and its depiction in movies, and it brought up some points that seem to apply. The book decries a lot of movies on the subject for oversimplification- the Nazis are evil, and the victims good- and points out that fairly frequently, this is done doing symbolic shorthand that was used in propaganda by the Nazis themselves: they are depicted as effete, impure, sexually deviant, feminized, a lot of things along those lines. They become stock villians of the kind the Nazis used to depict Jews, and describe more about what the filmmaker considers ultimate evil than the actual question of fascism and what it represents.

Inglourious Basterds, whatever else is the case, does not indulge in these faults. The titular Basterds are horrifying- they're sadistic, they're torture happy and kill crazy, they classify Nazi as a strain to be snuffed out in a way that readily recalls the viewpoint of the Nazis themselves towards 'degenerates', and they seem to have no real moral viewpoint of their own. The Nazis often display heroic traits- loyalty, cleverness, honesty, whatever. They don't come off at all well, and the movie never forgets that they are Nazis, but for the most part, their behavior is no worse than that of the Basterds, and there is quite a specific point made to humanize at least one (the new father).

What's deeply unsettling about the movie, then, isn't its use of movie tropes to explode movie conventions (this happens repeatedly in both of the main plot strains) but the audience response: in my theater, at least, the audience ate up every minute of torture and cruelty towards the Nazi soldiers. The movie seems somewhat designed for this: it's structured as a series of unbearably tense scenes, with chaotic violence always lurking a second in the future, so that when the violence is presented as something controlled- and controlled by the protagonists- it's a relief, and the laughter is almost hysterical. It's almost entirely a series of ambushes and counter-ambushes, with the closest thing to a depiction of a fair fight ending up with nearly everyone in the room dead, so the audience snatches at the violence perpetrated by the charming, amusing, familiar Americans, even though what they are actually doing is repellent.