By Mallory Pickard

I categorically and respectfully disagree with Michaela Zanello’s judgment that Inglourious Basterds will win an Oscar by virtue of “default” if it does indeed win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film is Quentin Tarantino’s career masterpiece, and I feel the implied “offbeat comedy” and “tragic melodrama” of the narrative should not only be recognized as alternatives to genre convention, but to real life perceptions of good and evil that have become so ingrained in our culture, perhaps ironically, through film.

Inglourious Basterds provides us with not one, but two beautiful princesses-to-be in addition to handsome, eligible bachelors complete with a “Once upon a time” beginning. There is a perfect set-up for the traditional orphaned and virtuous damsel-in-distress narrative (Melanie Laurent), and the lone shoe Diane Kruger loses in a tavern after her identity is discovered comfortably parallels the whimsically romantic Cinderella story.

But happy endings were hard to come by in Nazi-occupied France, and Tarantino created Basterds accordingly. Shoshanna’s happy ending cannot be found in the charming, quarterback-dreamy soldier who pursues her because this is France in 1944, and Prince Charming is a Nazi who would sooner take pride in his number of executions than his number of touchdowns. Similarly, Bridget von Hammersmark’s celebrity-charmed shoe exposes her identity, but it is not the Prince who comes calling for Cinderella’s hand– it is a notorious Nazi who comes calling for the German double-agent’s throat.

So where does one find their own happy ending, their own knight in shining armor, in the midst of a war on basic humanity? Tarantino leaves it to his own true love – cinema – to fulfill the conventional need. In a time when language defined a person’s identity and too frequently their fate, the revisionist narrative of Inglourious Basterds allows for the universal language of justice to immortalize itself via filmmaking— above the barriers of language, military rank, or societal reputation.

It is Shosanna (Laurent) who has the final say in the fate of the Third Reich. It is also Shoshanna’s character who has existed under the name Emmanuel since her family was executed before her eyes by Hans Landa’s Nazi henchmen. Shoshanna cannot play at the language game like von Hammersmark (Kruger) who shifts between German, French, and English as needed, nor can she veer from her virtuous instinct long enough even to ensure her own vitality after she finally takes down Zoller, a Nazi who is equally relentless in his quest to conquer Europe and Shoshanna.

In other words, it is not the character of noble rank, the character who inhabits the right uniform, the character who says all the right things who achieves ultimate victory. It is the girl who cannot be defined by national, linguistic, or aesthetic expectations and the girl who refuses to play into the damsel-in-distress role who delivers the world from a government that operates within these rigorously defined borders. No less, she achieves immortality via film, a medium the Nazis heavily relied on to manipulate the public mindset and glorify their exploitations.

As Lieutenant Aldo Raine, Brad Pitt delivers a more scaled justice to his antagonist, Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz). Where Lieutenant Raine possesses an unwavering objective to achieve vigilante justice in Europe, Landa (“The Jew Hunter”) possesses an unwavering objective to become immortal in history books regardless of the means— to become infamous for the sake of being infamous. Raine’s quest to kill in order to let live versus Landa’s quest to kill in order to exterminate may illuminate Tarantino’s intentions in misspelling the film’s title— the traditional spelling is manipulated perhaps because when the proper form of anything is manipulated by evil (as by the “gentlemanly” character of Landa), then our definition of “proper” and “right” should be reconsidered.

After all, as a moonshine man who refuses to mask his Tennessee accent even in the midst of Nazi officers, it is unlikely that Aldo Raine would spell “bastards” any other way than phonetically— that is, with a Southern “e” in place of the proper “a”. The definition of the word “bastard” itself being “illegitimate” or “despicable” lends to the defiant and ironic misspelling. And when nationalistic Nazi forces hijack what society considers proper and legitimate language in order to normalize horrific behavior, then the ultimate tongue-in-cheek insult is not only to embrace a proper negative label like “bastard”, but to mock the atrocity rather than take offense to it.

In my opinion, Aldo Raine is the “e” in “Basterds”. He rejects appearance and properness as indications of truth or authority, and he is a non-Jewish American leading a team of Jewish-American soldiers (men who have no real nation during World War II— bastards) in an effort against men who have turned the idea of “motherland” into a vehicle for genocide and the abortion of an entire race of people. He is a figurative bastard of military parenting in his routine and voluntary defiance of the rules, and he plays father to a group of men who, solely by being born Jewish, have been labeled bastards of the world by the Nazis.

Accordingly, if Aldo Raine is the “e” in “Basterds”, then Hans Landa surely represents the “u” in “Inglourious”. It is a common vowel that marks the difference between American and Europeans spellings (“colour”, for instance), and for all intents and purposes, the distinction is unnecessary— it does not indicate an alternate definition or pronunciation, only an archaic formality in two separate forms of what is considered “proper” spelling.

Similarly, Hans Landa’s idea of distinction is superfluous and artificial; he equates appearance with identity in his virtueless, homicidal mission to become famed in one way or another, and appropriately, “inglorious” means “not famed or honored; dishonorable”. Tarantino dresses up the word “inglorious” with a “u” just as Landa dresses up his own monstrous intentions in overly formal language and mannerisms.

His character, though undeniably humorous, provides an unsettling explanation to years of questions that we have asked about Nazi Germany— mainly, how did so many people allow it to happen? Perhaps Hans Landa isn’t as much an offbeat comedic character as he is closer to the truth than Nazis portrayed in films past who are inevitably dark, twisted, and visibly evil. After all, sophistication is no indication of a person’s character. A man accustomed to and even entertained by the idea of genocide who also disguises himself as a gentleman is not less dangerous than a visibly ruthless killer, but infinitely more so— mainly because it is only individuals who know themselves and others outside of material culture who have the power to recognize such evil.

Even so, a story that begins with “Once upon a time” must provide some kind of happy ending. Despite the fact that Tarantino’s princesses consummate their wishes in death rather than marriage or procreation as the traditional fairy tale would have it, both play mother to all the victims of the war as both are instrumental in aborting Hitler and his cronies from the earth once and for all. Furthermore, Aldo Raine consummates his quest to abort Nazis from their stations of power in the final scene by permanently decorating “The Jew Hunter” with a carving that Private Utivich (B.J. Novak) fittingly claims is the Lieutenant’s masterpiece.

In classic fashion, Tarantino offers us an anti-happy-ending happy ending, a final scene of glorious justice in which the existence of millions of people is symbolically relinquished from a seemingly sophisticated society of monsters and returned in its free, undisguised form with the evil marked for all future generations to see— military violations, genre violations, historical violations, and misspellings be damned.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” The Academy may not be naturally inclined to favor an inventive, revisionist war film for Best Picture or Best Screenplay, but it should seriously consider the positive implications of empowerment over the traditional depressing gravitas of traditional war films. Tarantino has hit a gold mine of cinematic possibility with a groundbreaking screenplay, an unforgettable and overwhelmingly likable cast, and a narrative that has relinquished itself from the grips of cinematic convention at the risk of creating something greater. My verdict: victory.