"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." – Aldous Huxley
Revenge is sweet. There are several evolutionary advantages that come from this sweet experience of ‘an eye for an eye’ that served our primate and human ancestors well in the ancient world and indeed to an extent today as well: a supposed ‘enemy' or rival is less likely to attack or mess with you knowing that you will seek vengeance in the aftermath of the attack and pursue an equal or worse counterattack. That pre-attack knowledge is a warning in itself that never needs to be uttered. And when an emotion is favorable to a species’ or an individual's existence, evolution makes it feel good, or sweet. The downside of this sweet emotion, however, is that it can dehumanize us to the point of becoming incapable of any sympathy or objective evaluation and blinds us from seeing not only the enemy's condition but also our own.
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Because of its feel-good characteristics, revenge is a widely and long used tool in filmmaking. There is at least some element of revenge in almost every Hollywood film released – we not only love the good guys but also love hating the bad guys and wish them dead or worse (and even like to see the reaction on their faces when, to quote Samuel Jackson, they are “struck down upon with great vengeance and furious anger” :) ) Sometimes, gifted directors like Tarantino (who wrote that Jackson dialogue) just push it too far, or too low, and take it down to sly levels of wishful vengeance just to give the audience a treat of maltreating someone (killing, actually) and calling it ‘righteous indignation.’ That is sure to attract more viewers and rake in a lot of bucks and shower more praise on him. No, I’m not talking about Kill Bill, but about Inglourious Basterds, a purported historical fiction.
The world today, and since 1945, hates Nazis. While we all show immense gratitude towards the heroism of the Allies for defeating the Axis powes, especially Nazis, and saving the human civilization from tyranny, we still cannot get ourselves used to the fact that the Nazis did not get what they deserved. They committed the single largest calculated mass murder of an innocent population in human history and conducted unspeakable experiments on them, and all they get for it is a jail term and a fair trial for war crimes? No, that’s not enough. We need more, or wish that they had gotten more. We want revenge. Avenge us, someone!
At least, that’s how the world majority feels today. And feeding on such a strong inner craving, sly and shameless filmmakers like Tarantino create their own personal favorite versions of history and lead events into how they wished it had ended – with Hitler dying of 10,000 rounds of bullets in a movie theater at the hands of our anti-Nazi Jewish hero and him killing the rest of the Nazi leaders in the same enclosure with a machine gun. Never happened, but still. As long as that’s what the audience want to see, who cares what a demoralized filth of a story it is. To make matters worse, our beloved Oscars promoted such irresponsible garbage by nominating it for Best Screenplay, Best Director, AND Best Film categories. To make matters still worse, and as expected, the film was a blockbuster and took home unprecedented accolades.
Historical fiction has been a well-received genre in storytelling for ages; it takes facts that did happen and peppers it with fiction to make a point, to prove a moral, to say something about those events or about the people involved in those events. But Inglourious Basterds, if it does say anything at all, says that we are all brutal savages who seek, as Huxley has rightly put in the quote above, the psychological luxury of destroying and killing with a good conscience. This is evidenced by the undeniable fact that what people loved the most about the film was, despite knowing with absolute certainty that it’s fictional, the merciless killing of the Nazis and their demigod leader, Hitler. They enjoyed it like it was a live News broadcast. A couple of old Jewish women were overheard in a theatre by someone I know saying during the climax, overjoyed as they were, “If only it were true.” The film was even publicized with the tag, “You haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Tarantino.” Yeah, sure!
Spielberg made a few mistakes like this early on his career with Indiana Jones. He tried to approach the Nazi concept with a certain dose of hatred towards them, him being a Jew and all. But, him being also an intelligent filmmaker, quickly corrected himself and made the gem of modern classics, Schindler’s List, avoiding any and all pitfalls of inducing anti-Nazi hate messages in the minds of the audience and showed with unhindered honesty the presence of compassion amid the cold cruelty of the Third Reich. The moral dimensions of this film are so great that Kubrick, a director who is worshiped by Spielberg himself, abandoned a Nazi Germany film project he was working on at the time because, as his wife later recalled, he felt he couldn’t top Schindler’s List. Spielberg preached humanity with that film, that there is no form of revenge so complete as forgiveness. I just hope Tarantino too wakes up the horror of his own morals before he decides to breed another set of Basterds.
A fairly recent Dutch film called ‘Zwartboek’ (‘Black Book’; director: Paul Verhoeven) deals with the same theme, albeit with a twist. This film, too, has certain elements of revenge in it, but unlike Basterds, it shows us, indeed makes us feel how depraved and base we become while seeking revenge, and also, unlike Basterds, it’s based on real events. A Jewish Resistance girl infiltrates Nazi senior officials’ office disguised as a Nazi supporter and a seductress to help the Resistance fighters with valuable inside information, thus enabling them to launch surprise attacks on the officers. But once the war is over, she is mistaken for a Nazi and imprisoned with the rest of the arrested Nazis in a prison that’s in a condition as deplorable as concentration camps. Now, since it is impossible for any of us to sympathize with a Nazi, and since we know that the innocent girl is a Jew mistaken for a Nazi and is being treated like one with contempt, which in turn earns her our sympathy, it becomes easy for us to see the dissoluteness of our merciless conduct in the name of revenge and how we become what we despise in the process. But Basterds, on the other hand, feeds on such dissoluteness and glorifies it.
No other film, not even the horrendous Indian films (all encompassing: Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, Sandalwood, Wood, etc.), has made me lose faith in humanity so much as Basterds. We may have come a long way since the War, and our morals may have advanced tremendously with acts such as ridding ourselves of capital punishment in a great many nations, but inside, our true primate self still remains the same bloodthirsty animal that were the Nazis. We are all really no different from the Nazis, no matter how much we deny and like to believe otherwise.
As a closing comment, I’ll quote one of my favorite quotations from Stanley Kubrick:
“Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up.”
Yes, that about sums it up.
