In Afghanistan in 2010, most frontline units Lyle spent time with had at least one Jewish Marine, and every one of them was nicknamed Bear Jew. That’s the reach this movie had with the war-on-terror generation, and this episode is about what that reach meant. Carlos Hogan, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the newest of the show’s rotating bench of fellow veterans, grew up bonding with his Apache-pilot dad over Aldo Raine quotes and brought this film to the show.
Tarantino gets called one of the master stylists of his time, Christoph Waltz’s Landa one of the most memorable performances of the era, and the long dramatic tensions flawless. The debate ends up being over what such art is doing. Lyle calls it the greatest Zionist film ever made—if not by intention, at least by affect. The id-gratification of vengeance and the lesson that you’re nobody unless you’re the one doing the killing, arrives as moto fuel for a generation convinced they’re still killing Nazis. The critics get read into the record, from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s charge that the film is “morally akin to Holocaust denial” to Daniel Mendelsohn on Tarantino “turning Jews into Nazis,” swastika brandings included. Christopher Hitchens’s warm-piss verdict gets a laugh and a shrug.
All of us end up playing devil’s advocate at one point or another. The conversation ranges from the chapter construction, the pastiche, and a multiracial anti-fascist coalition doing the killing, with the real history of the Jewish partisans lurking somewhere behind the reactionary dream. And one more critical, Americanist tell gets noted: Not one Russian appears on screen. Tarantino’s early draft reportedly had Fredrick Zoller sniping Soviets in a walled-off Russian city. The finished film moved him to Sicily.
Further Reading
“Debating Inglourious Basterds”, the Film Quarterly roundtable
“Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino” by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust” by Daniel Mendelsohn
“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” by Fredric Jameson
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple
Teaser from the Episode
Inglorious Basterds Trailer
