Inglourious Basterds is the seventh feature film from American writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Released in 2009, the film follows two interconnected narratives: one of a group of Jewish American soldiers working to assassinate Nazi leadership, and one of a young Jewish cinema owner seeking revenge for the deaths of her family. The film was both financially and critically successful: it earned six BAFTA Award nominations, eight Academy Award nominations, and was included on IFTA’s list of the 30 most significant films of the last 30 years.
I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. How can this film possibly be about peace? The audience watches as characters collect Nazi scalps, bomb buildings, and bash heads in with baseball bats, all set boisterously to the tune of spaghetti Western soundtracks from the 1960s and 1970s. This is a story of revenge, a concept often considered to be antithetical to peace and post-conflict recovery. If Inglourious Basterds were any other film, it would end with all characters realizing that revenge isn’t worth the toll taken on their individual and collective morality, and the audience would leave theatres with a sense of righteousness and an easy image of what peace looks like. But that is not what this film does. It is inglorious, and its characters are bastards, people amoral and blasé enough to enact violence casually and seek out all-encompassing revenge for injustice.
This is in direct contrast to the tropes typical of a World War II film. Audiences are used to seeing Jewish characters in films about the 1930s and 1940s portrayed as victims with no agency, as stoic martyrs even, walking teary-eyed but with chins held high toward their own extermination. These depictions leave us emotionally drained, while side-stepping some challenging questions: what could/should people do to protect themselves from violence, and what kinds of violence are valid in the interests of self-protection, justice or revenge? Inglourious Basterds challenges this trope; and it tells us that in some cases, peace is resistance, even if that resistance is violent. The Basterds kill without blinking an eye, but the people they kill are active participants in a machine that systematically commits genocide against numerous groups, among whom Jews are the primary target. An effective response to such violence, fearmongering, and genocide must meet the requisite set by the oppressor to have any kind of impact on characters in power, or so the argument might go. And thus we can read the violence in the film as extreme, disturbing, but somehow proportional to the injustice and cruelty we see from the first two minutes of the film.
Inglourious Basterds also takes care to highlight the solidarity between various minority groups, drawing particular attention to how that solidarity makes both individual and group resistance stronger. The result—the murder of Hitler, Goebbels, and several hundred other Nazis—is achieved not only by a group of Jewish Americans, but also by a French-Jewish woman, a German female spy, and a Black French man. The film takes the typical victims of the two genres it emulates—racial minorities in Westerns and Jews in World War II films—and gives these victims agency and the power to resist their oppressors.
One final note on violence in media: Some stories function as pedagogy, attempting to show their audiences how to behave in the face of injustice or how to build and maintain a peaceful existence. Inglourious Basterds is not one of those stories. And it is fundamental not only to understand that, but to understand that not every story needs to be pedagogical. While the reversing of narrative tropes and portrayals of solidarity and resistance in this film are thought-provoking and potentially impactful, they are not didactic. Rather, the film expects audiences to apply their critical thinking skills to what they see; to recognize the stylized violence as fictional (and constructed in part for entertainment), and to take away challenges/questions/reflections, rather than lessons for life. In short: please don’t scalp people in the name of peacebuilding.
What do you think?
- What roles can resistance play in peacebuilding?
- How do we tend to visualise the relationship between revenge and peace/peacebuilding?
- In what contexts do we legitimise violence as a pathway to peace? And do we legitimise violence for certain kinds of people but not others?
- What can Inglourious Basterds tell us about the roles we tend to assign different groups in our narratives/visualisations of conflict, conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding?
- What does solidarity and intersectionality mean to you?
- What role can trope inversion play in constructing a thought-provoking narrative, that stretches habits of visualising peace and peace-building?
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Arden Henley, April 2023