Most remarks on film begin with a summary of the plot and then thoughts on those events. With Inglourious Basterds, it seems likely more effective to reverse this formula because it is not a film composed of things like events that then create what you’d call meaning; the film is pure meaning and Tarantino’s most referential, despite its seeming the least.

If Tarantino never made another film and never gave another interview, this film would still be all you’d need ever to make sense of his work.

Whereas the old school uses mundane things like silence, exile, and cunning (yes I’m comparing QT to JJ: You should cancel immediately your paid subscription and boycott the advertisers) Tarantino uses laughter as a primary wedge into splitting open conventional mimetic devices. People in the film are laughing constantly, but they’re never having a good time. No one has a good time when they seem like they’re having a good time. Sure, Hitler has a good time for a little while—but what do you think it means for Hitler to be the only character who gets his rocks off?

No. No one has a good time but everyone laughs jackal laughs. The audience laughs. The show I attended was filled with laughter. I laughed a lot and I would have laughed more if I had been alone. But, here’s the thing: The film is not funny. The scenes that get the most laughs all have to do with massive amounts of killing, threat of massive amounts of killing, or xenophobia. And Brad Pitt’s accent. Those are the only things that get laughs—but most of the film just is killing, barroom disquisition, and Brad Pitt’s accent. And none of those is funny.

So why does everyone laugh all the time—on and off screen? Everyone is always laughing because they’re creating (or viewing) an explicitly subversive entertainment. It’s an entertainment that should not be entertaining, but it is wildly entertaining. And when our mind gets stretched first one way then another there is a rupture; from the rupture emerges mirth qua band-aid. I laughed the most when (SPOILER ALERT) every one god damn fucking died at the end.

Brad Pitt was crazy over-the-top, wasn’t he? He had the whole Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High scar thing going. And he was all Naaaaatsee this and Naaaatsee that. At the beginning of their quest, he tells his men that they owe him 800 Naatsee scalps. That is, because he’s part Indian or something. Of course, the Indians scalped settlers because the settlers started scalping Indians. And settlers scalped Indians because the Earl of Wessex scalped some Danes waay back in the day. Who knows where he learned the behavior from. His dad, probably.

Violence is cyclical and eternally recurring. It exists in a vacuum. The context for violence is always already provisional—it serves as an occasion for more violence. The Nazis invaded Poland because of the unfair restrictiveness of the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles was so restrictive because of the rapid expansion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire fifty years prior to that. Before that, there was shit to do with Sardinia and Prussia, I think. But whatever. We get it. “We didn’t start the fire. / It was always burning, / Since the world’s been turning.”

Of course we didn’t start the fire. Except for when we do. There’s a moment toward the end of the film where the ostensible villain, SS Colonel Landa, makes an offhand remark that the Allies’ plan to blow up the Nazi high command is basically an act of terrorism. I don’t think he’s right, but it does underscore the general idea of the conversation during which Brad Pitt and the temp from the Office are finally captured by the Naaatsees.

—What’s that saying you people have about shoes?
—Shoe’s on the other foot? Yeah, I was just thinking that.

LOL, right! Shoe’s on the other foot, indeed. I thought at first that this was Tarantino’s great Shoe’s On The Other Foot film. After glorifying violence (or at least being known for glorifying violence) for the last seventeen years, he’s finally making the film that makes violence seem unsavory, uncool. I thought, He’s taking the piss out of violence as a stylistic signifier. He’s showing that it’s all groundless and unwarranted and that revenge is a dish best left unserved. But then he had to go and ruin it at the end. Which is cool. Like I said, this is going to be Tarantino’s defining work (even if it’s not his best or second-best work).

What happens generally is that SS Col. Landa kills a Jewish family. Of course, a blood-splattered girl (Shosanna) escapes. Of course, she’s going to be wanting revenge. Then Brad Pitt recruits a bunch of Jews to go kill and scalp some Naaatsees, which they do to great effect. Then we find that Shosanna is actually a beautiful, blonde film nut. In the only super-explicit Tarantino-y moment, she has a talk about a film with a person that killed a crazy amount of people. They even made a movie about it! It’s called Kill Bill Stolz der Nation! Then a bunch of people die, then Brad Pitt gets captured, and then a bunch of people die. Fin.

It’s hard not to see that the Allies and the Nazis are portrayed as two sides of the same bloodthirsty-tale-of-revenge-coin (there must be a German word for that). Whereas in Kill Bill you could somewhat condone Beatrix Kiddo’s actions because, well, she was really beautiful pissed wronged by Bill, it’s hard to identify with the Basterds. Maybe if you’re Jewish then you would. That’s the point of their being composed all of Jews (mostly). Revenge is personal. But, I’m not Jewish and I had a difficult time understanding their specific actions even if I understood in a general sense that they were doing something that wasn’t 100% horrible.

The Nazis, save for Act 1, were relatively toothless. They just wore their ridiculous uniforms (the Basterds were dressed in plain clothes) and had funny, nasally sex. Those accents! Even if the Nazis promised that they would change, really swear-to-god-I-will-CHANGE they were marked in awesomely gruesome fashion. But whatever. I don’t feel bad for the Nazis, which is good for Tarantino because if I did, this movie could be called Inglourious Quentin Tarantino Is A Basterd.

[The rest of this is going to be about the end of Inglourious Basterds, FYI.]

So, whatever. Acts I-V.8 were just about, like, stylizing violence, quirky characterization, making fun of Germans—the usual shit. If the film had ended more like Pulp Fiction, where everything works out pretty well for most of the people involved, then it would have been merely OK. It’s the final ten/fifteen minutes that makes it the most batshit crazy thrilling piece of film in a long time. It’s not so much that the movie needed saving—I enjoyed basically every moment of the first two-and-a-quarter hours. It’s that the end of the movie offers something singularly sublime.

I don’t know—I’m no film critic—if about 10% of a movie is transcendentally strange and beautiful and blithely hedonistic, can that elevate the whole thing? Generally not, I think. But in this case, it does. The final movie within a movie within a reference within a ghostly, raving smoke woman is one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. Because, again, the symbolic compression of

1. Stolz der Nation, itself playing—
2. and in obvious opposition to the end of Kill Bill 1
3. and in the context of its being played in the fictive WWII—
4. while a theater full of hundreds are being
5. burned alive
6. blown up
7. and shot

made my head basically explode. The only thing I could do was to start laughing. The ending is, let’s say, unexpected.

This part of the film was basically Hamlet^4. I thought that Tarantino was going to condemn violence, but he ended up portraying the undeniable appeal of violence. I thought that he was going to stylize violence and make it desirable, but he ended up making it the most sickening thing possible. I thought Tarantino was going to criticize his previous films, but he ended up making them seem tame in comparison. Except, in making a meta-critique of his body of work, Tarantino ends up making the most insanely violent scene in his career. That disembodied smoke face laughing!

It seems as if Tarantino is aware that his films are violent and perceived as violent, but he hasn’t found a kind of capital-A Artistic way of portraying violence. I don’t care what you say, he’s trying to make a Great Film, despite (I mean, by means of) his stupid cultural references. (Yes, the Searchers allusion was a bit much.) It’s as if he has on the one hand realized the pointlessness of violence (as evinced by Kill Bill 2 and much of Inglourious Basterds); but he doesn’t realize that revenge does not constitute valid grounds for reigning death upon people. He has two gods and they both want to shoot your balls off and cave your head in.

I was really hoping for Brad Pitt to kill SS Col. Landa, but his marking him makes more appropriate. It’s the bloodthirsty middle ground of a bloodthirsty dichotomy. The only redemption in the film is un-death. Being marked or becoming a mark. Not dying, but not living in any meaningfully corporeal way. Inglourious Basterds was not that great of a film, but the ending was transcendentally ineluctable, which is, I suppose, one of the purposes of film.