Inglorious, indeed.

NOTE: This film hasn't made it to Europe yet, and I'll admit that I haven't seen it. I wrote this before it came out and everything here is based on the previews and interviews with Tarantino.

Am I the only one bothered by trailers for Tarantino's mysteriously misspelled latest, Inglourious Basterds?

Don't get me wrong; all that I'm about to say could be taken wrongly. But let's get real. Is it really right to be making yet another movie glorifying "badass American killing power" when that "badass" power is at this moment (unjustifiably) killing people in the Middle East? Should we really be glamorizing such violence as scalping our enemies at a time when national and ethnic tensions are at all-time highs? At a time when conservative radio commentators are actually using hate speech to blame Mexican immigrants for bringing in swine flu?

Not only that, but isn't it more than a little insensitive to approach WWII Tarantino-style? The director made his name on gratuitous violence that is supposed to somehow serve as an ironic force in message-making, but I don't quite see how bashing in Nazi characters' heads with bats is ironic, no matter how terrible those soldiers were in reality. More to the point, in interviews the director's said that the movie is incredibly violent, with one scene mirroring Reservoir Dogs' warehouse scene. He also originally modeled the Jewish protagonist on Kill Bill's bride, but then pulled her characterization back a bit so that she wouldn't resemble the Uma Thurman character too much.

What really seems to get me the most, though, is that the movie appears to contain more cliched American soldiers, more stereotypical German Nazis, more "us against them" mentality that is justified through these stereotypes and enacted in authorized violence against "them" as retribution. There's no historical contextualization (like that fact that even serious pacifists and Nobel Prize winning anti-war authors like Heinrich Böll were forced to fight for the Nazis or die themselves) or seeming concern for audience reception (like increased refrains of "I don't know why we don't just nuke those Commi -- I mean, Arab -- bastards!") It's just too much. (This is where I plead with you with my hands.)

The Nazis were evil; let's not misunderstand each other. The Nazis were evil. But this is where it gets thorny and where misunderstanding could arise because I'm about to say some things that not everyone's going to like. The "us" in that "us versus them" equation isn't always so perfect either. We seem to forget the devastation caused by the atomic bomb. It's like we all read that book about the Japanese girl's thousand something birds in elementary school, learned how to make origami swans and forgot all about both afterward. We also don't really acknowledge the Allied firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden, Germany, which, incidentally, killed more people than either atomic bomb. Then there was our good war ally, the British. When WWII started, they'd just made Ireland fight a bloody war for independence and were making damned sure the Indians didn't do the same. All the while, the British were fighting a war for "democratic principles" and conscripting colonized subjects to fight. Let's not even start on the Russians.

But instead of telling this side of the story, we have yet another WWII movie about Nazis when it would be really nice (and damned interesting) to see a war movie that wasn't about Nazis for once. The Japanese were forcing Korean women into sex slavery and using chemical weapons on the Chinese. Where's that movie? How about the Eastern front or North Africa? (The English Patient doesn't count.) Or Great Britain's conscription of colonial subjects into military service? Or Ghandi's independence movement in India, partly concurrent with WWII? Or the rampant anti-semitism all over Europe at the time? (Believe it or not, there is still a French politician so anti-Semitic that he denies official reports of concentration camps.) Or, for that matter, where are the movies about the equally rampant anti-semitism in the U.S. during the early 20th century as espoused by such national "heroes" as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford?

(A classic case of "us" being naughty, Ford was an avid anti-Semite. In 1920, he published a series of articles entitled "The International Jew: The World's Problem" in the Dearborn Independent. His efforts attracted the attention of the Fuhrer himself: Adolf Hitler was quoted in a 1923 interview as saying, "We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America." Ford's relationship with Charles Lindbergh, in his own words, was based on their mutual disdain for the Jewish people. Lindbergh's opinions were also recognized by the Third Reich: they awarded him the Service Cross of the Golden Eagle, a German medal with four small swastikas, given to foreigners for service to Germany.)

I realize that I've gone off on a bit of a tangent, but it all hopefully served a purpose. From a purely spectatorial perspective (yeah, it's a word, even though it sounds weird), I just don't want to see another cliched WWII movie that just happens to be directed by Quentin Tarantino and thus contains more violence and self-satisfied attempts at irony. From a human perspective, and if the trailer's any indication of the movie's contents, I think it's in bad taste and a bit of a slap in the face to veterans and survivors. Unless Inglourious Basterds turns out to be something unexpectedly brilliant -- something that is able to exploit stereotypes in order to undermine them -- I'm seriously worried about the kind of message it sends. Hate is never warranted, and killing should not be justified by initially unjustified hate. Perhaps Mary O'Hare's warning to Kurt Vonnegut when writing his "Dresden book" Slaughterhouse-Five should be heeded by a few more filmmakers, especially Tarantino: "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

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