Quentin Tarantino Is Making Fun of You

Inglorious Basterds is about a World War II special unit called The Basterds, whose mission is to blow up a cinema while many dozens of high ranking officers and Nazi elite watch a propaganda film, including Hitler himself. The film shown at the cinema is about Fredrick Zoller , a German soldier who single-handedly kills 215 enemy soldiers from a guard tower. The film, titled Nation’s Pride, is exceptionally violent. From what we see, the film consists of little more than shots of Zoller shooting and killing dozens of American soldiers, and the crowd of Nazis loves each one. They cheer and laugh at each death, praising the film. Hitler even tells the film’s director This is your best film yet.

We can’t help but look at the audience of Nation’s Pride and find them a bit humorous and ridiculous. To view this repetitive, tasteless, and unnecessary killing as entertaining and well-made? To us, it appears to be nothing but a cheap spectacle movie.

But think about it — doesn’t this sound familiar? The Nazis are audience members watching a film, but so are we, watching Inglourious Basterds. Don’t we react with similar praise to Tarantino’s hyper-violent films when we’re the audience members?

I suggest that Tarantino is trying to say that us viewing Inglourious Basterds is similar to the Nazis viewing Nation’s Pride. We cheer at death, even when it’s tasteless and glorifies unnecessary violence. We see just as much excessive violence in Inglourious Basterds as the Nazis do in Nation’s Pride. While The Basterds are in the middle of their plan to blow up the building, the owners of the cinema, in a separate attack , set the entire cinema on fire and block the exit doors so the Nazi crowd is trapped and burned alive. Even though The Basterds’ mission to kill everyone in theater is fulfilled, they still shoot into the crowd of Nazis — more unnecessary violence — and blow up the cinema — more unnecessary violence.

Such over-the-top violence is seen throughout the film. People cut off scalps, get beaten to death with baseball bats, and get shot in the testicles.

Both Nation’s Pride and Inglourious Basterds contain excessive violence, but the similarities don’t stop there. Both protagonists carve Nazi symbols with a knife and are overly faithful to their country.

Even shots in the two films appear similar. Look at this shot of a person flying out the exploding cinema.

Look at the similarities between this shot and these soldiers falling out of buildings during Nation’s Pride.

Tarantino is showing us that his movie is not far off from Nation’s Pride. Even the film’s titles are comparable, where Inglourious Basterds is pretty much the exact opposite of Nation’s Pride. These films are similar, and so are their respective audiences. We both praise the violence in the film, we both cheer on death, and we’re both desensitized to the brutality of killing.

By comparing us to the Nazi viewers, Tarantino is criticizing our love for excessive violence. We’re a bunch of easy-to-please, dim-witted audience members who find entertainment in senseless, gruesome killing, in the same way that the Nazi viewers are portrayed as simple-minded audience members. He’s poking fun at us — he’s saying we’re as ridiculous as the Nazi viewers.

Look at other instances of unnecessary violence, and this is by no means limited to Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino does this in all of his other films as well. He sometimes even uses death for comedy.

It takes skill to pull an audience into a world where violence can act as a punchline, but there’s more to it than that. The screen helps remove us from the realities of death when we watch a film, and Tarantino knows it. The extent to which we can see death as a joke, however, is worth making fun of, and Nation’s Pride provides an allegory for how ridiculous we can be. Is it hypocritical that we can praise violence in a film yet denounce it in reality?

One final anecdote about the two films and their audiences. While Nation’s Pride is playing, Shosanna kills the real Fredrick Zoller, but nobody in the audience notices because they’re so engrossed in the violence of the film; they think the gunshot noise is just another sound effect. Is Tarantino making a commentary on how we don’t notice or address deaths in reality and only pay attention to deaths in the movies we adore?

Inglourious Basterds is not the only film to critique its viewers. In any film that features an audience, consider if the director is making a commentary about the audience actually watching the film. The Wolf of Wall Street is about the rise and fall of a corrupt businessman named Jordan Belfort. He’s unfaithful to his wife, steals money from thousands of people, has nobody who truly loves him, and spends years in prison. In reality, we would look as Jordan as a dishonest, despicable man. But look at the audience in the final shot of the film.

Do they look like the despise him? No — they adore him, and they want to be rich and famous just like him, no matter how much dishonesty it takes. Just like in Inglourious Basterds, the director is showing our flaws as an audience. Is Jordan Belfort really the type of person we should aspire to be like?

A clever director can use audiences, or even crowds of people, as a way of generalizing society as a whole. It’s most interesting, however, when the commentary is centered on the viewers of the film, who are far from perfect.

So, the next time you see any movie featuring an audience, ask yourself: Are they making fun of me?