Let me begin with a story.
I had just moved back to New York to begin graduate school after a year-long hiatus picking up odd jobs (Chinese take-out hostess, tea shop barrista, creative writing teacher) in Austin and St. Paul. It was literally my second day in the city, and I was crashing with a couple of friends in the Lower East Side. Inglorious Bastards had come out that same weekend, so I walked to Chelsea alone for a midnight showing. There was virtually no one there. The theater darkens. Trademark Tarentino credits, in bold yellow, flash across the screen, set to his trademark bewilderingly apt choice of music. My heart leaps with excitement. "This is really happening," I tell myself. It's been five years since Kill Bill, which I saw on DVD alone in my dorm my freshman year of college. It's been two years since Death Proof, which I streamed alone in my tiny apartment in Austin. And now, as I sit in this theater, I recognize immediately, in a strange moment within the present that transcends into the future, that what was about to happen will always be, by and large, among my fondest of cinematic experiences.
Watching Inglorious Bastards for the first time was me watching a movie I had never known could exist. The movie transcends genre and narrative, history and fiction, characterization and objectivity. It reveals itself often and yet hides so much of its own construction as well. It functions as both a wholly American invention and a sweeping International film, having no outright determinable origin and featuring talented actors from across Europe (half the film is spoken in French and German for Christ's sake). It defies gender roles and expectations, and toward the end, even complicates what was established regarding the goodness of its characters. It's an alternate reality set within historical realism, and remarkably, a film about the power of film, about how film has the potential, both literally and metaphorically, to determine the course of history. And all the while, as it achieves all these splendid things, it also remains the first film to boldly achieve what will forever change the course of social consciousness, the mythologizing World War II.
When I use the phrase "mythologizing World War II", I refer to something very particular and distinct. Of course, we have been presented with cinematic historical fiction regarding the war for decades. But never has a film taken the occurrence of Nazism and turned it completely on its head by providing an essentially imagined world that takes place within the circumstances of Nazi occupation. The very premise, that a rag tag group of government assigned Jewish-American vigilantes are out to destroy the Nazi regime by any means possible, is not meant to be digested a typical World War II film, but rather, is essentially a revenge saga that almost, but not even quite this, "just happens to" take place during the event. What this manages to do is take World War II as we have come to know it, and desensitize us to it, not deliberately, but ultimately in a way that reveals how distant it has become from our current world. This desensitization is similarly inevitable for every major important historical event, and yet, with the onset of film in the 21st century, no literature or art has come close to achieving this with such brilliant and mastered magnitude as Tarentino's vision. I wonder if Hellenistic Greeks felt the same way upon experiencing the Illiad and Odyssey for the first time, as generations and collective memories of the war faded and evolved in the face of posterity.
The fact that Inglorious Bastards was a huge blockbuster and not controversial further supports my position that at a given point, civilizations come to approach history through unique modes of story-telling and engagement. World War II, particularly the good vs. evil nature of Nazism, will never be again be strictly relegated to the cinematic confines of historical accuracy. The ultimate feat for any artist, if you ask me.
Now let's see what Tarentino can do with American slavery in Django Unchained.
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