American basterd II

Two equally-great directors?

(Being the second part of the three-part - probably - series "American basterd")

Quentin and Leni - A Love Story

If there's one thing you can say about Quentin Tarantino, it's that he's both highly self-aware, and hyper-aware of film history (or at least the segments of film history that suit him) - and his screenplays tend to be pastiches of film trivia that match his personal quirks. Thus the script of Inglourious Basterds is a blizzard of obscure film references (often even obscure to the director's fans). Of course you could argue - and I'm willing to play along - that the whole point of Inglourious Basterds is the mash-up of history and film fantasy: after all, the idea of the flick is that WWII is ended "early" by a Jewish girl immolating Hitler, and the entire Nazi leadership, in a movie theatre in Paris (by means of inflammable nitrate film!).

So in a way the many film refs represent the movie's plot gone meta: Tarantino's characters are not merely players in his fantasy of history, but are also avatars in his personal history of fantasy. "Aldo Raine," the supposed hero, is almost too obvious in its references, while "Emmanuelle Mimieux," I suppose, represents a polyglot of Yvette Mimieux and the famous 70's porn milestone; meanwhile "Bridget Von Hammersmark" is likely a combo of Metropolis star Brigitte Helm and contemporary director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; I'm sure I missed zillions more (indeed, perhaps everyone and everything in the movie is a reference). Just to drive the point home, in one scene (a kind of parlor game) all the characters are playing other famous characters, and even their characters (like Edgar Wallace and his creation, King Kong); everybody represents somebody else.

Yet it's surprising how un-resonant all this is; the references simply operate like links on a Wikipedia page - they don't build into anything. Perhaps that's because there's nowhere to build to. Tarantino's conceit, of an action-movie ending to WWII, simply doesn't correlate to the buried themes of the real, historical conflict - it doesn't illuminate anything, or extend anything; after all, it's an adolescent imposition on an adult situation. Thus it actually shrinks everything, draining away both moral and meaning: the Holocaust becomes an abstraction, the Jews become action heroes, and Hitler comes off as perversely comical. In fact the images of Goebbels's literal, burnt body photographed outside Hitler's bunker (above left) are far more shocking and resonant than the vengeful inferno conjured by Tarantino.

Maybe that's why the director seems not merely self-aware, but actually a little nervous about his own position vis-à-vis his creation: he clearly realizes he's gone a bit far by turning the Holocaust and the Occupation into objects of personal diversion; indeed, what he has done the Samuel Jackson of Pulp Fiction might think of as a sin! So Tarantino spends a lot of time subtly back-pedalling, and working through a veiled apologia for his own movie, by citing a lot of other directors with questionable politics. And perhaps that's why he has his blonde, blue-eyed (!) Jewish cinema owner ("Shosanna Dreyfus"), whose entire family was murdered by Nazis, nevertheless host a German film festival at her Paris theatre, because, she says, "in France, we respect directors." Uh-huh. (After all, why let a little thing like the slaughter of your family get in the way of your film-going?) At such moments it's hard not feel Tarantino fumbling for an excuse for whatever atrocities he may be about to commit - because after all, it's not like he's Leni Reifenstahl, is it?


White-on-white melodrama, proto-Nazi style.

Funny you should mention that name! Because Leni's movies likewise figure in Basterds - only not the ones she directed for Adolph directly, of course; Tarantino's not dumb enough to go gaga for Triumph of the Will. Instead he merely flirts with the edge of "controversy" by repeatedly referencing The White Hell of Piz Palü, a slab of mountain melodrama (above) in which Reifenstahl chewed the scenery under the direction of G.W. Pabst (while Arnold Franck shot the Alps - I think the whole thing is now up on Youtube). He even has one character (a film critic!) describe himself as "from Piz Palü" - in other words, he has popped right out of the screen, like Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo, from a magical land where pure film exists free of all historical and political reference.

But do you think there really is such a place, Toto? Even Quentin's not so sure - note the ironic escape hatch in that film title, The White Hell of Piz Palü. "White hell" = Nazi Germany, get it? And just in case you don't, Shosanna has a token "Negro" lover, "Marcel," to keep Quentin's Mandingo-thang going, and help hold his "progressive" badge in place (the exploitation of the Gen-X version of anti-racism is his only actual political stance). Marcel's status as agitprop is more obvious than usual, however, because he doesn't have much to do or say until the finish, when in another moment of big, dumb metaphor, he provides 'the spark' that creates the final conflagration. Although needless to say, the director still knows precisely how to flip the identity-politics card, and can't resist a few homophobic flourishes - his villain, Hans Landa, is hilariously epicene, and just to seal the deal, before Brad Pitt carves a swastika into his forehead, he whispers that he's doing it because the Nazi is a "pecker-sucker" (apparently "Nazi" isn't a bad enough insult). So I guess us faggots can keep our pink triangles in Quentin's parallel universe (although we can probably count as political progress the fact that this time around, Tarantino only whispers his homophobia).

But anyway, back to that big apology! If we decided, like Shosanna Dreyfus, to "respect" directors who collaborate with fascists (like Leni), or cohabitate with FoxNews (like Quentin), what would be, or should be, our reasons? Tarantino offers several arguments over the course of Basterds, but some of them are contradictory, and all of them are specious.

The Screen and the Smoke Screen: Triumph of the Will vs. King Kong vs. Battleship Potemkin

But first let's take a closer look at the little parlor game at the center of Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino makes his case via the "real" movies his characters discuss, and that haunt his own film - the work of Leni Reifenstahl, King Kong, and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. All of these, it is hinted, have horrifying political subtexts, which, it's also hinted, we should ignore.


Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Eli Roth's Nation's Pride.

Take King Kong, that primal RKO backlot fantasy of a giant, romantically-inclined ape taken from "Skull Island" to New York, where he meets a spectacular end atop the Empire State Building. In Tarantino's eyes, or at least the eyes of his Nazi factotum in Basterds, it's a tale of "the American Negro carried in chains to the New World from Africa." (Never mind that Skull Island was in the Indian Ocean.) Meanwhile Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein's famous silent evocation of the first rumblings of the Russian Revolution, pops up in the imagery of Nation's Pride (above), the synthetic Nazi propaganda flick (directed by torture-porndog Eli Roth) that draws Hitler and his entourage to their doom. And the leading lady of Piz Palü, of course, wound up promoting the Führer himself.

Obviously, to Tarantino, these three very different movies, which land in various zones of "pop," "art," or "propaganda," are all similar at some level. King Kong is racist, Potemkin is fascist propaganda in reverse, and Leni may have looked good on an Alp, but she was a Nazi in embryo. Like his own work, they're all entanged in unsavory politics of various stripes. Therefore Tarantino's implication is that if we reject Inglourious Basterds, we must also reject them.

Yet is that really true? (And even if it is true, is it much of an argument for Inglourious Basterds?)


The white woman in peril! 1933's King Kong.

But first - sure, there's enough to some of these ideas to give them traction among college professors and video clerks. The claim that Merian C. Cooper's (and Ernest B. Schoedsack's) King Kong is racist, for instance, is by now a freshman-year film-course cliché. And not without cause: all kinds of racist and sexist tropes are at play in King Kong - the virginal "white woman" is what Kong most desires, before he dies atop the biggest phallic symbol in the world, etc, etc. Thus were a zillion academic papers born, as well as outraged commentary by the likes of the Daily Kos.

But at the same time Kong seems to transcend racist categorization; his attraction to Fay Wray's "Ann Darrow" is portrayed as love, not lust, and he can't be defined as "the other," either, because by the end of the movie we all identify with him, not his white persecutors. Every kid who sees King Kong thinks Kong is cool, and Ann Darrow is an idiot. And as the film has been repeatedly remade, it has steadily shed its bigoted baggage - in the Peter Jackson version a few years ago, Naomi Watts's Ann was openly in love with the big lug, and the "native dance" of the original was portrayed as, yes, a racist construct performed for a 30's white audience. The core of the movie had moved beyond its original trappings.

Time has pulled a kind of reverse number on Battleship Potemkin; its politics, frozen as they are in 1925, seem to hostile viewers like a naïve call-to-arms for Stalinism. Yet needless to say, the originality and power of its vision far exceed anything Quentin Tarantino has ever come up with, and of course the film does roughly transcribe an actual historical event, a real rebellion.

This correspondence with the real world makes Potemkin the antithesis of Basterds, and renders its parody in Nation's Pride more than a little bizarre. You have to wonder - did Quentin and Eli really think this through? They seem to be saying that while their auto-erotic torture fetish can be co-opted by crazed Republicans, that's no different from Eisenstein's vision going south with Stalin.

Only not really. The salient question is again whether the essence of Potemkin transcends the political outcomes that followed it. Did Sergei Eisenstein actually prescribe an oppressive political model, point by point, which Lenin or Stalin might have followed, as we can see by now is the case with the far right and Inglourious Basterds? Hardly. Indeed, Eisenstein found himself continually under fire from the Soviet dictatorship - they understood his movies were about liberation rather than pseudo-progressive autocracy. Projects were taken away from him by the authorities, and he was officially denounced for his forays into the West (unbelievably, he attempted to make films of Arms and the Man and An American Tragedy!). It's true that throughout his career Eisenstein tried to engage with (and influence) Stalin's dictatorship - a terrifying prospect, certainly (and far more frightening than standing up to the likes of Sarah Palin). But the great Russian director was certainly never some tool of tyranny, and the suggestion from the likes of Eli Roth that he was is nothing less than dishonest and insulting.

So despite Quentin's attempt to align himself with the likes of Merian C. Cooper and Sergei Eisenstein, there's really only one filmmaker in the trio he cites with which he's truly comparable: Leni Reifenstahl.

More on that correspondence in part three of this series.

American basterd

Our answer to Hans Landa?

Recent polls show 58% of Americans are eager to waterboard the undie-bomber to get information out of him. Less than a third of Americans seem to think this would be wrong (while 12% "aren't sure").

Surprised? I'm not - those numbers are probably why the Obama administration hasn't dismantled our torture regime (much less charged its true begetter, above, with war crimes). Granted, the poll in question is by the right-tilting Rasmussen, so we should knock a few points off those numbers. Still, it seems these days many Americans love torture even more than they love comfort food (of which it probably counts as a form).

And why shouldn't they? Hollywood has been feeding them a steady diet of it since 9/11. Indeed, Tinseltown's notoriously "liberal" culture seems to break down completely where torture is concerned; we're force-fed the virtues of diversity constantly, but it's hard to think of a single movie or TV show that has taken a strong stand against "enhanced interrogation." Instead, "torture porn" has become ubiquitous, in fact by now has devolved into sub-genres, from the police procedurals on TV to the fratboy stylings of Hostel to the Oprah-esque self-improvement regimen of Saw.

Of course the avatar of all this was Quentin Tarantino, the man who pulled "pulp" into the mainstream; indeed, what struck one immediately about his breakthrough movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (way back in the early 90's), was the centrality of torture to his vision. Curiously, however, his fans and critical supporters cast a blind eye on this predilection, even though Tarantino often interrupted the flow of his films for U-turns into bondage and sadism; his plots effectively stopped while characters got their ears chopped off or were sodomized. Given the grosses for Pulp Fiction, even fewer dared comment on the director's obsessions as he kept up the good work in further movies (and no one noted that his one film without an explicit torture sequence, Jackie Brown, was quite the bore).

Talk and torture

But with his latest, Inglourious Basterds, the bound and tormented elephant in the room became impossible to ignore: almost every sequence in the movie revolves around some form of interrogation. Indeed, there's no real "action" in the picture, and not much in the way of a chase, or love story, or political intrigue, either; the whole thing is either talk or torture (or both). As a result, at last the "progressive" mask so many liberals had clasped to the director's bloodied, union-busting brow began to slip, particularly as the far right crowed about his obvious support for "enhanced interrogation." And the far right was quite right to do so: every scene in Basterds, just like every episode of 24, devolves into a session of coercive questioning, in which the victim (a French farmer, a Nazi soldier, a German actress) inevitably gives up the truth to his or her tormentors. See? Tarantino says over and over. Torture works!

Of course whether or not the political meaning of that message was central to Tarantino is open for debate. Indeed, the fact that sadism is a sexual, not political, obsession for the director has been made pretty explicit by his partner in crime, Robert Rodriguez, who, in his portion of their double feature Grindhouse, inserted at the beginning of every sex scene a scratchy title telling us that this particular reel had gone missing; so we skipped the skin and dove right back into the severed limbs. The violence served as a sexual surrogate.

In this, of course, Rodriguez and Tarantino were only consciously operating in a long tradition. The essence of "pulp fiction" has always been the transliteration of violence (political violence included) into sex; its chained slaves and cell-block women were and are always devised and presented as fetish. And I suppose once upon a time, when sexual drives still had to find traction in the real world, an intellectual case could be made for them as a means of fomenting political progress and "liberation."

But is that still the case? Today many people find a simulation of freedom in a "second life" online, and the Internet has made masturbatory satisfaction so readily available that the new sexual problems are not frustration but impotence and boredom. Thus pulp isn't about liberating anything anymore: it is, instead, merely a cog of the system, a niche sexual product that Big Brother (along with, I'm sure, the Chinese communists) is happy to dispense on the Net, even if you can't find it at Wal*Mart.

At any rate, Tarantino doesn't present his scenarios as a means to the pleasure of liberation - no, the restraint, the encasement is the source of his satisfaction. His attitude maps intriguingly to his generation's fascination with tattoo and scarification: in effect, the only way to "rebel" for Gens X and Y, who have been smothered with acceptance and tolerance, is to attack themselves. Thus Tarantino is obsessed with pushing himself and his fans through endless gauntlets, and as soon as he works through one scenario, he has to start another - someone has to be bound in leather, or tied to the hood of a car, or paralyzed, or even buried alive, as soon as possible. In Inglourious Basterds, he even combines his jones for restraint with his foot fetish: his fictional German star, "Bridget von Hammersmark" (God), is shot in the ankle, then tortured, and finally appears with her broken foot encased in a cast, but in nose-bleed heel position, nails painted blood red. Quentin must have creamed over that one.

As, let's admit it, do we. Societies often mimic the psychological tics of their artists, so it's no surprise that something similar is going on in our public embrace of torture: like Tarantino, we conflate it with our entertainment (and I suppose it's inevitable that we eventually accord it an Oscar). Indeed, it's obvious that we torture with a difference. Hitler and Stalin tortured out of psychosis, but also, it must be admitted, out of cold, but realistic, political calculation - and neither of them made movies about it (meanwhile, we've even made comedies about Gitmo).


Why we torture.

In contrast, Americans torture for the sake of a fantasy - our chances of being caught in a terrorist attack are lower than being struck by lightning. And yet we persist in the practice, almost cling to it. We're torturing, at the deepest level, because it comforts us, much the way a Thomas Kinkade picture does, and in a perverse way reinforces our sense of cultural superiority: we can torture because we're trying to stop the killing of Americans, who are of course the most special people on the planet. And we revisit the mix of horrifying thrills and warm moral certitude that torture gives us in movie after movie, show after show.

Yet when you point out the new political meaning of this kind of pulp - that it re-inforces modes of subjection rather than liberation - those who are still in its thrall inevitably scream bloody murder. Don Hall, the "angry white asshole of Chicago," for instance, got his panties into quite a bunch last summer when I first brought up these points about Inglourious Basterds (Hall sent me emails calling me "a douchebag and a coward" for days, it seemed - an obvious sign I'd hit him where he lived). At that time, I promised a thorough dissection of Basterds, on which I never delivered - I'm busy, Tarantino is deeply dispiriting, and the continued applause from the far right seemed to make my political points self-evident.

But I sat through the movie again over the holidays - a nephew got it from a clueless relative - and I felt there was a bit more to say about Tarantino's intriguing self-critique (or perhaps apology) in the picture. And now this piece of Republican catnip has actually been nominated for an Oscar. Hence, this and the following posts.

Did Tarantino prime us for Cheney, Part III: The Incompetent Basterd

What Aldo Ray might have done to QT after seeing his latest.

I confess, I feel a little silly. I was girding up for a kind of epic takedown of Quentin Tarantino, after my mentioning of the obvious fact that his cult of vigilantism and torture matched precisely that of torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney.

But then I finally caught Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds, and was forced to view the situation in an entirely different light.

Not that Tarantino isn't pernicious (he still is, and how), and certainly the political case against him is still worth making.

But in a word, his movie sucks, which in a way makes it hard to take this debate too seriously. I expected to be perhaps outraged, perhaps angered, perhaps revolted by Inglourious Basterds. I didn't expect to have to fight to stay awake. Indeed, à la Dick Cheney, I found myself looking forward to the promised atrocities, if only to clear the current slate of cardboard characters trading film refs in French and German. Worse still, over the movie's course its director is revealed as so incompetent that his proponents' adulation looks utterly ridiculous. I feel a bit foolish for having ever taken them seriously.

For to be blunt, the only feeling a mature adult could have after watching Inglourious Basterds is "I wish I could get those two and half hours of my life back from that bastard!" But oh, you so can't. Carving a swastika in the perp's forehead might be some solace, but would it turn back time? No. And you'd still be left with the depressing realization that with Basterds, Tarantino hasn't merely jumped the shark, he's turned around and blown it, too. He has become Generation X's answer to George Lucas: a soulless director whose obsessions once overlapped those of the zeitgeist, but who was revealed as an artistic shell once history moved on. And recognized Inglourious Basterds as his Phantom Menace.

Still, the discovery of the movie's mediocrity does lead to a whole new arena of Important Cultural Discussion. Which I think I'll initiate right now! I promise to get to the insidious political import of Tarantino's oeuvre, really I do. But first I have to savor the sheer shittiness of the work in aesthetic terms. And taking a tip from the auteur himself, I've decided to divide my critique into chapters. To wit:

Chapter 1
In which our hero deploys the Holocaust as a marketing tool

Some have been offended by the "jewzploitation" aspect of Inglourious Basterds. I'm not sure how they've managed to maintain their indignation, however, as there is nothing at all Jewish - not a shred of that great culture, identity or spirituality - in the movie, aside from Eli Roth's missing foreskin, I suppose (which isn't there either). Sure, the spirit to offend that longest of humanist traditions is willing, but the execution is weak, because frankly, QT couldn't care less about Judaism except as an excuse for his own goy perversions. Thus the "Jews" in the movie are "Jews" the same way the homosexuals in Pulp Fiction are "hillbillies" - they're called that for marketing purposes, but they might as well be ninjas, or nuns on the rag, for all QT cares. In short, Inglourious Basterds is about as "Jewish" as Midnight Mass at St. Peter's. So sorry, but they still don't get to kill Hitler.

Chapter 2
In which it is revealed why our hero cannot handle a camera

The true mystery of Quentin Tarantino's career is how he managed to watch so many movies without learning anything about how to shoot one. Well, maybe it's not such a mystery - after all, he only really liked the bad ones. And while there may have been some effective chases in Reservoir Dogs, in Inglourious Basterds, as in most of his work, Tarantino seems to be handling the camera with boxing gloves on. Medium shot is followed by coverage shot which maybe is jazzed up with a POV - the gap was all the more glaring as I'd just seen the brilliantly nimble District 9, but it's hard to think of any other well-reviewed movie that's as clumsy as this one. (And you can completely forget about QT ever reaching the conceptual heights of, say, Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock. Not no way, not no how.) Inglourious Basterds plays, unsurprisingly, like some grindhouse flick from the 70's - which, I know, is the whole idea! And since 70's grindhouse flicks were often badly made, QT's aesthetic requires that things be done cheaply and crudely. You have to admire this strategy from a career perspective, but it's worth noting that many directors of trash, like say Mario Bava or Dario Argento, nevertheless look dazzling next to Tarantino. They did their trash up in high style because they had talent. But Tarantino doesn't, so we're stuck watching Mr. Majestyk over and over again, only this time with the occasional high-production-value money shot.

Chapter 3
In which our hero learns to destroy even his pretty-good sequences with a ridiculous soundtrack

No doubt you've heard about David Bowie's Cat People ditty popping up in Occupied France. What you haven't heard is that there are disastrous music cues sprinkled liberally throughout Basterds. Soemtimes there's a film-junkie justification at hand - mashing "Für Elise" with Ennio Morricone I guess would make sense if you were QT - but this doesn't make the resulting dislocations in tone any less laughable. Only of course I suppose QT fans will tell you that's the idea, too, just as an awkward little kid who trips and falls will insist, "I meant to do that."

Chapter 4
In which our hero discovers a postmodern disguise for an unfortunate gap in his writing ability

Back in the day, the fractured narratives of QT's movies seemed innovative. Now, they look like a crafty way of covering up the fact that he can't tell a story to save his life. Jackie Brown meandered, Kill Bill was clunky, and Death Proof stumbled repeatedly until its closing chase. But with Basterds, QT seems to have reached a whole new level of embarrasing incompetence, script-wise. He thinks he's juggling three or four separate story lines, but instead he's constantly dropping and picking them up again. There are the "Basterds," the fantasy pseudo-Jewish "band apart" who scalp Nazis, and then there's Shosanna Dreyfus, who escapes the clutches of the "Jew hunter," Hans Landa, and then there's the Paris cinema where the Basterds and Shosanna and Hitler himself converge, and then there's the German spy and the British film critic - and oh, what a godawful mess. People get offed before we even care who they are, and then sometimes return when we really don't care if we ever see them again. Given the lack of any actual dramatic development, the actors do the best they can, and a few (Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger) manage to impress with their skill, although not with the kind of genuine characterizations that should win awards. Meanwhile we hope - indeed we pray - that the torture's going to come quick, to spare us from the aesthetic pain of all the awkward exposition and labored film parlance. As for those who insist that various scenes in the movie are "unbearably tense" or that Tarantino "orchestrates the suspense superbly" - you really should get out more often.

Chapter 5
In which our hero demonstrates that quotation shorn of context is meaningless and insulting

As Inglourious Basterds grinds on, we realize that its many "plots" have been devised merely to create little scenes in which characters reveal that they're sourced from within movies, and that they're within a movie that's itself about movies, and that - are you still awake? Probably not, because somehow meta was never so meh. Yet the refs keep coming - QT even begins to add substitles, or even scrawled IDs, to the frame to help us out with who and what he's referencing. Perhaps the director does perceive at some level the airless absurdity of his conceit; that may be why his characters seem to float, untethered, in a weirdly empty environment. But at the same time, QT doesn't seem to comprehend the sense of vacuum his direction produces as anything like self-critique. That the meaninglessness of his own method should resonate with us seems to be lost on him. Likewise the fact that the great films of the past depended for their meaning on their own contexts likewise seems to fly right over his fanboy head. And thus the many, many "references" within Inglourious Basterds begin to feel more like smears. Aldo Ray in particular, who saw action at Iwo Jima, would probably choke to see how Tarantino has parodied him here, but something tells me G.W. Pabst, Sergei Eisenstein, and even Leni Reifenstahl would also gladly kick him until he was dead once they saw his weirdly pointless, yet somehow always patronizing, "homages." So Eisenstein was a Commie, and Reifenstahl was a Nazi - both choices begin to look rather good against Tarantino's vaguely libertarian vacuity. At least they "meant" something. And isn't that the bottom line of anything you'd want to call "art"?

Did Tarantino prime us for Cheney? Part II

Sometimes, it seems, a culture writes its own critique before a critic can even get to it. Despite the screams from several vapid bloggers over my bringing up the parallel between Quentin Tarantino and Dick Cheney, some on the far right are already making much the same point - only this time approvingly. Over at Big Hollywood, an offshoot of Andrew Beitbart's bizarre quasi-fascist new media empire, someone named Chuck Devore, a California State Assemblyman and candidate for U.S. Senate, is already wondering, "What if Tarantino had the 'Basterds' take Taliban scalps?"

And I have to hand it to Devore - he may not be a professional critic, but he immediately perceives the political subtext of Tarantino's new opus:

It is interesting indeed to see those who applaud Tarantino’s latest, admittedly excellent work, revel in the unbridled revenge against Nazis who get what’s coming to them. Many of whom, without batting an eye, view al-Qaeda killers as deserving of respect, protection, and the benefit of civilian law. Since all that separates al-Qaeda from the Nazis is the means - industrial power, modern education, and an organized national base - one wonders why a certain amount of cognitive dissonance wouldn’t kick in after a liberal enjoyed screening “Basterds.”

Devore goes on to point out the obvious parallel between Cheney's arguments and Tarantino's dramaturgy:

To the point, what would a liberal think of the scene where Lt. Raine interrogates a captured German sergeant, demanding the location of a German outpost and its supporting artillery? As the German NCO refuses to talk, Raine orders one of his men to kill the prisoner with a baseball bat. When the two remaining German prisoners see this, one runs in horror and is shot down, while the other is brought over and threatened with the same deadly treatment. He talks, saving the lives of the American commandos. For the prisoner’s troubles, Raines carves a swastika into his forehead. By comparison, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during interrogation seems rather pedestrian.

There's more, much more, about the Hague and Geneva Conventions, etc., etc. Go read the whole disgusting thing. And at least admit to yourself, Tarantino fans, that Devore is right - Inglourious Basterds is nothing if not a brief for the kind of abuses Cheney and the CIA got away with at Guantánamo and black sites around the world.

So I suppose the ball is now in 99seats' and Isaac Butler's court - if only either one knew how to swing a racquet! As for me, I'm not sure I even have to write a whole series on Tarantino anymore - I feel as if Devore's done the work for me . . .