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Dec. 25, 2021 - I Don't Speak German

01:10:41

UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep#4 Inglourious Basterds (2009)

For Christmas, here's a little gift for our treasured listeners, a bonus episode - originally available only to our patrons - on Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Beware content / spoilers

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Time	Text
	It says here that you speak German fluently.
	Like a cat and jammer kid.
	And your occupation before the war?
	I'm a film critic.
	This is I Don't Speak German.
	I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
	Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
	Content warnings always apply.
	Hello everyone.
	It's IDSG bonus episode four now.
	It is four, isn't it?
	Yeah, four.
	It's four.
	And we're recording.
	If you're listening to this, then you're one of our Patreon backers.
	So thank you so much for that.
	And this is just for you, at least for the foreseeable future.
	And we're recording this on the 20th of April, 2021, just in case we do release this.
	Well, it's the 20th of April for Daniel still.
	It's now the 21st for me because of weird time stuff.
	Because we can't just have one time.
	around the world.
	No, no.
	We have to have like time zones, you see, because human beings being human and not being super rational and able to understand.
	Yeah.
	Sadly, we're not all as rational as James Lindsay.
	So we need these systems to compensate.
	But yeah, that's the that's the date.
	20th Stroke 21st of April 2021, just in case this does end up being released for a wider release later on.
	I think it's important to state the date of recording to situate it, you know, for people in the future.
	The Derek Chauvin verdict just came down.
	That's what I was going to say.
	People listening to this in the future will remember it probably, you know, the 20th of April 2021, probably remember it primarily for being the day that the Derek Chauvin murder trial verdict came in.
	Killsy on all three counts.
	It's remarkable.
	The system works, it turns out.
	That's right.
	The system works.
	Yeah.
	We proved to him that our way works, Batman.
	That's it.
	Yes.
	Well, that's how it's going to be spun, certainly.
	I don't think that's actually the best moral to draw from it, but there you go.
	It's telling, as I said on Twitter, that we're all so relieved that a policeman was found guilty of a murder that he was actually filmed committing.
	Well, you know, I saw I saw a reference that there were something like 15,000 office, quote unquote, officer involved shootings since 2005.
	And of those 15,007 of them have actually resulted in conviction.
	That's the system.
	That's that's the system working.
	Yeah.
	This isn't something, you know, a policeman being held accountable for an unlawful killing of any kind.
	It's not something that happens very often.
	And I think we need to give credit where it's due, which is to the the rebellions and the uprisings in the United States.
	Who kind of made it happen and really like this became a political football.
	This became something that people had to pay attention to because of the street level activists in Minneapolis and around the country and around the world, honestly.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	As Frederick Douglass once said, power concedes nothing without demand.
	And I think this is a perfect illustration of that.
	But I don't know.
	We don't want to go too far into this sort of topical stuff.
	I think our next main episode is probably going to be some sort of news roundup episode.
	But again, we don't really traffic in that mainstream news.
	We're here to give you the news that isn't fit to print.
	The news about... We don't do regular news.
	We have Cantwell news to replace that.
	Yeah, and Haying news and Oh yes, there's more of all of that, more of all of that next week.
	As a warm up to the to the full James Lindsay experience.
	That's right.
	So yeah, having I think we needed to acknowledge that, that that happened today.
	But having done that, I think let's move on, you know, respectfully, let's move on to the main topic of this bonus episode.
	And this is a bonus episode for Patreon backers.
	So it's a fun one.
	And it's a it's a movie chat.
	And this one is Quentin Tarantino's movie Inglourious Bastards.
	Now, Daniel, this is a movie that you're very familiar with, and a movie that I've only just seen for the first time.
	It was my turn to pick the topic of our bonus episode, and you said, come on, Jack, choose an episode, and you had to remind me, and I was just unable to do it.
	I couldn't pick one.
	And in the end I just threw my hands up and I said, oh fuck it, let's do Inglourious Bastards.
	And you were actually pretty nervous about this, weren't you?
	In case I hated it.
	You weren't interested in doing a podcast with me if I was just going to be pissing and whinging and moaning the whole time.
	Well, I mean, for me, it's like, you know, Tarantino is a is a, shall we say, complicated figure in terms of pop culture.
	I think, you know, I'm I'm going to I'll put my heart on my sleeve here.
	Like I'm I'm a long term fan.
	I've been less than enamored with the last couple of his films, which I think do kind of get into this kind of self-indulgent, less interesting territory.
	Which are the two most recent?
	It's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	The last two are Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	Hateful Eight, right.
	Yeah, I haven't seen either of those, but yeah.
	Hateful Eight is doing something interesting.
	It's kind of a mess and not in the mess that Tarantino films are always a mess.
	It's just kind of a mess.
	It's doing some interesting things.
	I think the film was worth seeing.
	I have no idea what's going on, you know, thematically, because until that movie came out, I had a very kind of clear understanding in my mind of what Tarantino's kind of like larger project was.
	And then Hateful Eight hits and I'm like, oh, yeah, this just yeah, totally fucks with my head.
	And then once upon a time in Hollywood, like actively goes against what I thought Tarantino was doing for his whole career.
	So we will see what he has always said.
	he will make 10 films during his career.
	And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is number nine.
	So we get one more, unless he continues to make films after that.
	But once that is done, then maybe the thing becomes clear.
	But for right now, yeah, I'm less enamored with the last two, but I've been a big fan of Tarantino throughout my life, really.
	And that's partly like aesthetics, and that's partly like I saw Pulp Fiction at that right exact moment in my life in which it burned itself into my brain.
	I think there are a lot of people who are like that and I try not to be like the bro about it like I do understand that like the things that I love are the things that other people hate but also like um you know like Tarantino was willing to be to he has his he has his artistic sensibility as a willing to just kind of do that in public for people and he puts out a product he doesn't even talk about his own movies he he literally resists
	People asking questions about the meaning of them, which is something that is both good and bad because I think, you know, people both kind of grant him, over grant him a certain level of, you know, mindfulness to certain things, but then people also kind of like criticize him in ways that I think are unfair.
	Um, and all of this is, like, there's this giant mess.
	Like, talking about Tarantino, you always have to just kind of wage your way into this to some degree before you can even begin to talk about, like, the actual product that you're looking at.
	But yeah, his aesthetic sensibility works for me, and that's partly because I saw Pulp Fiction at that right moment, and partly because it just, it just does.
	I know that you have a much more complicated relationship with Tarantino and I thought that this would be a film that would either strike you as something like interesting and enjoyable and that we could have a conversation about or would strike you as the most terrible thing ever committed to celluloid and something that you like gritted your teeth through in order to like You know, even get to the end of it.
	And if that was your experience of it, it's not like I can't take the fact that you would hate the film as much as I wanted us to have, like, an interesting conversation about something.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And so, like, if that was your experience, then it's just not going to be a good episode.
	So that was kind of where I went with that.
	It's not like I can't take criticism of Tarantino.
	If you're a Tarantino fan in 2021, believe me, you understand the criticisms.
	All right.
	Let's just put it that way.
	Well, spoilers, it's the former, not the latter.
	I enjoyed it.
	I thought it was interesting.
	So cool.
	It's only, I think, the fourth Tarantino movie I've seen because I've seen Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, I suppose, because pretty much everybody on the planet has at some time or another.
	And I've seen Django Unchained.
	But I don't think I've seen any others.
	Yeah, the other ones would be Death Proof.
	He did a segment in Four Rooms, but nobody cares about that.
	He wrote Bad Romance.
	Jackie Brown would be kind of the big one that you're missing, I think.
	Kill Bill.
	And then the most recent two.
	Right.
	No, I haven't seen... I've seen True Romance, which he wrote, but of course that was directed by Tony Scott, I think, wasn't it?
	Yes, it was.
	He also did a draft of Natural Born Killers.
	I think he has a story by credit on Natural Born Killers, but Stone went in a completely different direction on that.
	Yes, I can tell you about Tarantino forever, by the way, so we should not keep doing that.
	So what's the history of this film?
	I mean, there's one particularly vile elephant in the room that we do have to mention, which is Harvey Weinstein.
	Who is a vile, disgusting man who's dying in prison.
	Not because, I mean, there was a news article that came out.
	It's like he's going blind and he's like slowly dying.
	And that's because that's what prison does to old people.
	Harvey Weinstein is not special in that way.
	As a prison abolitionist, I am perfectly fine if Harvey Weinstein dies in prison.
	And as a fan of many of the products that he produced, I am fine if he dies in prison, frankly.
	You know, Harvey doesn't really come up and there's no reason to talk about him.
	At this point in talking about Inglorious Bastards.
	We acknowledge his crimes.
	He is a vile, despicable human being who deserves every bit of suffering he is receiving from the carceral system.
	And I say that as someone who is opposed utterly to the existence of that system.
	We're acknowledging it.
	Well, his name's all over the front of the film in big letters.
	You kind of have to mention it.
	Right, right.
	And Tarantino was, Weinstein's was really like the crown jewel of kind of Miramax in the 90s.
	And then the Weinstein Company, after they lost the rights to the Miramax name, right?
	Tarantino was kind of their big star.
	He was there, you know, he got to do what he wanted.
	They gave him a lot of money to make his films because he gave them a lot of credibility.
	And so, you know, Tarantino obviously is connected to all that.
	And he has said in interviews that there are things where he should have asked more questions about, you know, certain things that happened.
	I mean, he was dating Mira Sorvino for a while in the late 90s.
	And apparently she was one of the victims of Harvey Weinstein, although it was not as overt as some of the other stories that we've heard.
	But like was definitely a victim.
	And he kind of challenged her and was kind of an asshole about it, you know.
	And ultimately, you know, when you have these kinds of power structures, they affect everyone involved with them.
	And certainly Tarantino is not ignorant of that.
	And I think it's fair, you know, if you say I can't watch any film that has Harvey Weinstein's name on it.
	I get it.
	Like, I don't, like, I'm not going to argue with you.
	And if you say, like, you shouldn't even be talking about this because Tarantino should have known more or knows more than he's saying, or he has all these kind of other things.
	I understand what you're saying on that, too.
	I disagree.
	I think that he's an interesting filmmaker, and I think that there are lots of artists throughout history who have, you know, much more complicity that we seem to not, like, kind of feel the necessity to reject outright.
	But I'm also I'm just not going to argue like it's not it's not it's not for me to say.
	Yeah.
	If you think we shouldn't be talking about this movie because of Harvey Weinstein and because of Tarantino, Tarantino's complicity with Harvey Weinstein, turn it off.
	I'm sorry.
	You know, it's just, you know, we make the decisions that we make.
	Yeah.
	So switching to the movie itself.
	Firstly, was it released in 2009, I think?
	August 21st, 2009.
	I saw this on theatrical release.
	It was something that he was writing.
	There are kind of early versions of the script that were rumored as early as like 1998.
	1998.
	So it would have been right after the Jackie Brown release.
	So he spends about 10 years kind of writing and rewriting this script.
	This is sort of his gangs of New York in the sense of like, he just kind of kept going back to it and expanding and cutting and expanding and cutting.
	And there, it went through a bunch of different versions, a bunch of different drafts, very few of which have been made public.
	I, at one point did go and try to find, you know, some of the various scripts just to see what this would have looked like if it had been made in like 2002.
	But it's really hard to kind of get at some of that.
	And I hope one day Tarantino will die.
	And hopefully, like we get a whole bunch of like paperwork to understand kind of what the what the history was.
	But yeah, no, this did go through a very long revision process, which literally everyone who was in the movie commentary industry at that time was kind of aware of.
	And I mean, for a while, if you were... I was a movie fan.
	I was kind of an internet movie nerd in 2004.
	And then kind of thought like, well, this is never going to get made.
	This is kind of the dream project that will just kind of go on forever and nobody will ever actually give him the money for it.
	And then it just kind of shows up one day in 2009.
	So I have a take on this story and I'm just going to kind of lay it out right here.
	And that is this is not a movie about Nazis.
	This is a movie about the war on terror.
	And if you look at When it was started because you know around 98 so the kind of the late Clinton administration and then into kind of the early 2000s which is when he would have started to kind of really write in the script and then released mid-2009 the first months of the Obama administration this is about this this is when it was written and I think Tarantino is a
	Very political filmmaker and I don't think he gets enough credit for that because a he doesn't talk about his movies in public and b he doesn't make films that are kind of explicitly about like he didn't make you know some version of you know Black Hawk Down or Zero Dark Thirty or something like that.
	He made this but I think it is infused with sort of like his thoughts about the war on terror because as of necessity it would be.
	And the reason I say that is because during this time period when this film was being produced there are a ton of Nazi Oscar bait movies.
	And Tarantino is the jewel of the Miramax empire at that time and later the Weinstein company.
	He is Kind of guaranteed Oscar gold.
	He gets nominated for Best Director.
	He's never won it.
	He co-won for Best Screenplay with Roger Avery for Pulp Fiction.
	That is the only Oscar this guy has, but he's nominated for every freaking movie, right?
	Although I don't think Death Proof did, but there's reasons that didn't.
	I like Death Proof.
	Nobody likes Death Proof, but I'm the Tarantino defender, so it's fine.
	But I think he is a deliberately political filmmaker and I think there are political messages in his work but he doesn't talk openly about that, right?
	And so what I see is a movie that's kind of about the Oscar bait Nazi movies that were prevalent at the time.
	So if you like look at like Schindler's List which is very like Mockish and sentimental about the Holocaust.
	It's very much the story of someone who is telling this highly fictionalized story of the Holocaust, to be clear.
	It's not that like Oscar Schindler wasn't like a real person, but like, this is not the story of Schindler's List is not the story of the real Oscar Schindler.
	Post Schindler's List, you got a ton of movies that were designed to sort of mine that Oscar gold and were designed to sort of give a certain feeling about the Holocaust and a certain simplified history of World War II.
	Yeah.
	And Tarantino's rejecting that entirely, because what he's kind of doing here is saying, well, look, the Nazis are people, too.
	Right.
	And in this telling, every time the bastards kind of go out and do something, the glorious bastards led by Brad Pitt's character, they're thugs.
	What are they doing?
	They're chopping people's heads off.
	They're scalping people.
	There's no subtlety to what they're doing.
	They were explicitly framed as terrorists.
	And then if you kind of view that through the lens of the War on Terror era, you start to go and you view it through the fact that Nazi leaders, and many times in this film, Deliberately mock America's history on race.
	You know, the American Olympic gold is measured in Negro sweat, as Joseph Goebbels said in this film, right?
	The King Kong reference during the card game.
	Lots of references like that.
	And if you start looking for them, you can find tons of stuff that Tarantino is very aware of the history he's playing.
	Aldo Reign's ostensible Apache heritage, for instance.
	You get the, just the Native American character.
	I forget.
	I always forget the name of the character, but the Native American character in the card game that the other, the German soldiers, the enlisted men are playing, the name of that, like, quote unquote, native chief was a series of books that directly inspired Adolf Hitler.
	Yeah.
	To create the Holocaust, because it was all about the clearing of Native Americans from the land.
	This is literally like, this is text within the film, but Tarantino never draws, there's no attention drawn to it.
	But there are all these references to this kind of material.
	And so it is a criticism of That of the way that we kind of treat Nazis in movies and the way that we treat the Holocaust as this kind of thing that makes us look good.
	But it also is challenging our kind of own like racist assumptions as like very good Americans and like we went off and won the war.
	And then also flipping that war on terror narrative kind of back on itself.
	It is trying to make us interrogate a lot of different really complicated things about the way that we feel about World War II and sort of the narrative of World War II given in Hollywood, but also the kind of story of the war that we were being given at the time, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, that we had been kind of fed and sort of the justifications for that.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And whether all this is intentional, that's maybe an open question, because, you know, who knows whether Tarantino had all that.
	But it's I feel like it's there.
	And I feel like there's so much that points directly to it.
	Like if you look into the details of it, it's hard to not imagine that Tarantino wasn't doing it intentionally on some level.
	Right.
	I agree.
	To me, it was very clear watching it.
	Basically, this film is a defense of the moral position of the Iraqi resistance.
	To be honest, that's how I read it.
	It's about a country, I mean, most of it's set in France, that has been invaded and occupied by a foreign power.
	And it's about not only native people to that land, particularly Shoshanna, the Jewish-French survivor of the massacre at the start, but also her boyfriend at the cinema whose name I can't remember.
	It's about their resistance and it's also about the resistance to the rule of those occupiers By this group of Jews.
	Now, it's cloaked, as it were, in kind of American rah-rah, you know?
	They're all Americans, for a start.
	They're not native to the place that's being occupied.
	They're Americans who've parachuted in, or whatever.
	But they are... I mean, they've literally parachuted in.
	Yeah.
	Oh, you know, a lot of people who fought the American occupation of Iraq weren't native to Iraq, but they are Jewish.
	The whole point of this group of men is that they are all Jews, that the inglorious bastards are all Jews.
	That's the entire point.
	It's sort of a deliberate act of provocation to put together this band of Jewish soldiers who are, as you say, they are basically terrorists.
	I mean, there's no basically there.
	That's just what they are, just texturally.
	I mean, they I mean, literally, there's a line that, you know, it's like we won't the Germans will fear us.
	And, you know, they literally mark their victims.
	You know, like the whole point is you're going to tell stories about us that are going to put the fear of God into into every German soldier so that our violence will be seen as larger than it actually is.
	I mean, you know, it's it's text in the film.
	These are terrorists, right?
	And they're heroic!
	So what you have, in essence, is a group of terrorist fighters who are resisting the invasion and occupation of a country through acts of violence against the occupying force.
	And the film is uncompromising Not only in its depiction of the brutality of what they do.
	I mean, what Shoshana does to the people in her cinema is just, you know, just on the level of human suffering depicted, it's appalling.
	And what the bastards do to their victims, again, the violence is just awful.
	But the film is uncompromising in its endorsement, frankly, of that, because it does depict the Nazis as people, But it depicts them as, despite that, nasties and therefore people you need to fucking kill.
	And I really, really liked that.
	And it's not... I mean, we can we can adapt that to, you know, it's a very relevant film now because it's just uncompromising and it doesn't deny the humanity of these people.
	Nazis and fascists and people like that.
	But it does say, yeah, they're human.
	But nevertheless, they need to be stopped.
	They need to be stopped by any means necessary, including, you know, put them down if needs be.
	They, you know, Shoshana dies.
	She was going to die anyway, as part of her own plan, but she dies because, what's his name?
	Zola.
	Shoots her.
	And that is Frederick Zoller, who is, he's a wonderful, I mean, I don't want to get sidetracked, but I love that character because he's a wonderful feint, you know, because it looks to start with, like, they're going to be doing a kind of the decent, ordinary, Boy, who just happens to be a German soldier and how he strikes up a relationship, you know, that's where the film looks like it's going.
	I mean, it's Tarantino.
	So you're a fool if you expected to actually do that.
	But that is it's it's referencing loads of stuff like that, that we've seen.
	And then he turns out to be a Nazi war hero who got medals from slaughtering American soldiers and he's best friends with Goebbels.
	And he's also deeply manipulative and a creep and a nice guy who gets to the point where he's about to rape her, basically.
	So I love that, the way that unfolds.
	But to get back to my point, she dies at his hands because She is the only person in the entire film who, for a moment, shows any kind of sympathy or concern about the well-being of a Nazi.
	She shoots him and then, you know, I watched that and I was actually saying out loud, now put another one in his head to make sure, and she doesn't.
	I was saying that in the theater in 2009, just to be clear.
	But she doesn't, because she's basically, you know, she's a decent human being and she doesn't like what she just did, despite the fact that the guy is a dangerous creep.
	So she goes over and sort of puts her hand on him and that's when he shoots her.
	So it's the one moment when anybody makes any allowance for their humanity is the moment that gets them killed.
	Because although they are unquestionably human, they're also just People who are actively engaged in furthering just this absolute monstrousness.
	So the film is just not only is it completely uncompromising and it's in it's at it's we won't have any of this sort of fake nuance about about these people that you do get in this sort of Oscar bait holocaust stuff.
	But it's, to me, watching it, I mean, to me, it was like, yeah, this film is just saying, if somebody invades and occupies your country, you have the moral right, you know, and I'm not, I'm not actually out on a limb here, the UN agrees with me, you do have the right to do anything you have to do to get them out.
	And it's very refreshing, I think, to see that sort of clarity.
	Right.
	And like no one, like this film created a huge conversation, shall we say, in the discourse.
	Twitter existed in 2009, but not... It wasn't Twitter as we know it.
	No.
	No.
	I mean, if this came out today, this would be, you know, we would spend like two years arguing about it on Twitter.
	And this was one of those things where in 2009, think piece after think piece after think piece, like every blog was sitting and talking about like, You know, all the problematic things, all the amazing things, all the mess, all the, you know, there's a ton of stuff you could talk about in this movie.
	I routinely call this my favorite movie of all time.
	Is it actually like the film that I'd say is the best?
	But it's probably not.
	It's up there, but it's an easy answer for me is to say, yeah, yeah.
	And Glorious Bastards, basically my favorite movie of all time.
	I've seen it countless times.
	I will, I will literally just sit and rewatch certain sequences of this is, you know, just sort of 20 minutes of like just pure cinematic joy.
	You know, I've seen, I've seen it countless times.
	I mean, I don't even know how many times I've seen it because I will often just kind of pull up 20 minutes here and there and just enjoy it again.
	So I'm very familiar with this film and I find new things in it almost every time but it seems that like particularly on release there was no conversation about what I think and what you seem to have gotten from it the clear moral message of the film and the clear analogy to I mean, I would say then current news, but also it's still here now.
	So, you know, like it's not like, you know, 12 years later, we're still in the same clusterfuck.
	So everything's fine.
	But we didn't see that kind of conversation happening at that time.
	It was much more about sort of like, You know, is it is it even reasonable for a Gentile to make this movie?
	You know, should this be a Jewish director or should this be, you know, should there have been more, you know, like again, it just created this huge discourse that I absorbed kind of at the time.
	And no one seemed to sort of get what I thought was the obvious point of the film.
	It's frustrating.
	It's frustrating.
	Like, you know, I want to sit down and put my thoughts in, like, a very neat, organized essay at some point.
	But at this point, talking about Miramax and Tarantino, not a great thing.
	Not a great thing to be doing in public, you know?
	Yeah, it's interesting how small its cultural footprint is, really.
	I was actually, like, looking on YouTube and it's like no major, like, breadtuber has ever done anything about this film or Tarantino more generally.
	And I think that's a shame.
	Even if you find him problematic and difficult, and even if you kind of condemn the man in the end for his crimes, for the crimes that we know about, I think that would be overkill.
	But like, I understand people who disagree with me, just to be clear.
	Even if you condemn him, the work is interesting.
	The work is worth talking about, right?
	But I think there's also like the kind of the controversy around him and the controversy, like the shitstorm you get into talking about him maybe is like the thing that prevents a more
	nuanced leftist analysis of films like this and film and his work more generally because I would defend like large portions of his filmography personally and I feel like that gets kind of overwhelmed by the fact that like yeah he used the n-word 147 times or something in Pulp Fiction you know and that seems to be like the end of the the end of the conversation more clearly And I get if that's your line of the sand, I'm not going to argue with you.
	I get it.
	I think if you're dismissing all the other things that are in this filmography because of that, you're missing some stuff, right?
	And particularly if you're white in doing that, I think you're missing a lot of things.
	Like I get an African-American person or a person of color, you know, like saying, I don't need to deal with that shit.
	Yeah, I'm with you.
	I'm with you 100%.
	I don't think white critics get to have that excuse, honestly.
	Sorry, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting militant.
	I'm creating, I'm creating, man, we're going to get so much hate mail.
	It's going to be, it's going to be phenomenal.
	I'm going to, I'm going to be kind of even more militant myself because I was saying, I'm surprised by, you know, having seen it now, I'm surprised by the smallness, the relative smallness of its cultural footprint.
	I think if you had to describe the things that it's most remembered for, It's probably remembered most for two things.
	It's remembered for the character of Hans Lander.
	And it's remembered for the fact that, of course, infamously Hitler, as well as Goebbels and Goering and Martin Bormann die at the end of the film.
	They're killed in whenever this is supposed to be 1942 or something like that.
	1944 is like it starts and it starts in 42 and ends in 44.
	And actually, and this is something I noticed upon this rewatch.
	When Shoshanna is hanging letters on the outside of her theater, it is specifically June 1944, i.e.
	D-Day is upon us.
	So yeah, there's something there's something interesting there.
	I just literally like it only on those watching did I kind of put those pieces together.
	Yeah, that's kind of interesting itself, because the end of the film becomes about this, if you want to put it in what to me sound like reductive terms, this alternate history, you know, where the war goes a different way.
	The thing about history turning one way or the other based on Decisions made.
	That's that's textual.
	Lander actually has his line, doesn't he?
	What shall the history books read?
	Although that's I mean, maybe I'll get back to this, but it's kind of complex that but but putting that aside, it's interesting that if you do a film where you have an ultimate end to World War Two, You set it in 1944 after D-Day, so you're preserving most of it, aren't you?
	If the war does in fact end pretty much immediately as a result of the events of the film, then it's shortened the war by roughly a year, which is interesting.
	You've still got most of the major events of the war.
	D-Day has happened.
	You've got the Allies advancing across Europe.
	Converging on Berlin and stuff like that.
	So it's interesting to me.
	It's a tweak rather than a massive change.
	Those are the two things that people remember it for.
	The counterfactual history where Hitler, etc.
	is killed.
	And the standout character of Hans Lander.
	This movie is why Christoph Waltz gets to be a Bond villain.
	Bond villains at this point in time are using everybody else's actors who play villains.
	I love that Daniel Brühl, who played Zoller, goes on to be a Marvel villain.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And apparently he's now in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
	And I'm I would almost like I'm waiting for that one to be done and I'm just going to bench it at some point.
	But like there was there was a thing of like, well, if they brought back the Daniel Brühl character, I'll kind of watch it on principle.
	Yeah, because he's underserved in the actual movie he appears in, isn't he?
	Yeah, no.
	Although he's one of the great Marvel villains, you know, which speaks to how terrible the Marvel villains actually are.
	But he is one of the better Marvel villains.
	I love him.
	And like, he's the only good thing in Civil War, as far as I'm concerned.
	Yeah, he's actually got a motivation of sorts.
	I'm getting a soft.
	Unlike everybody else in that film.
	No, it's but what I was working around to is this kind of I feel like and then here I'm going to get almost more more Tarantino pro Tarantino militant than you here sort of almost to my own surprise.
	Well, I have been masking my actual pro-Tarantino feelings.
	You've been hiding your Tarantino power level.
	I've been hiding my power level, yep.
	Yeah, no.
	But I feel like there's something about this film that people kind of don't want to champion, almost.
	And I think it is actually It's that theme that to me just jumped out of it, which is basically, you know, the Iraqi resistance, they have the moral high ground.
	And that's kind of untouchable.
	It's kind of unsayable, you know, that most people on the respectable left don't want to touch that with a barge pole.
	They don't want to be associated with it.
	So I think whether they consciously realize it or not, I think people are kind of People shied away from this because what's hidden inside it is just too incendiary.
	Let me justify that.
	I agree with what you're saying.
	And let me, as the Tarantino nerd, as an aside, If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, my plan was to do some kind of long-form project about Tarantino.
	I remember, yeah.
	The worst thing about Trump getting in is that he derailed both our writing projects that we had planned.
	Yeah, no, I was going to plan to do that and then like the fascist one and suddenly the thing that I had been working on for six months turned into something that was desperately necessary for the world.
	Also, it's very good that I didn't do that because I would have gotten halfway through Jackie Brown and Me Too would have hit and the Harvey Weinstein stuff and it would have put everything in a new light.
	Yeah, you know, really would have been a complicated place to be.
	So let me put a little bit of like, you know, my justification Tarantino here a little bit.
	If you look at his career, He does two movies, which are a bunch of white guys, mostly white guys, in skinny ties and black suits doing gangster shit.
	Yeah.
	It's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
	And then he does a movie, Jackie Brown, that's 1997, in which it's an adaptation of an Albert Leonard novel.
	And one of the innovations, one of the things that he changes from the original novel was suddenly the protagonist is a black woman.
	Because Pam Greer had auditioned for him at a certain point, I think for a role in Pulp Fiction, which was like Rosanna Arquette's friend, I think, in Pulp Fiction, was the role that she was in.
	He thought, you deserve better than this.
	I'm going to write a movie for you down the line.
	And she's like, yeah, yeah, whatever.
	And then Jackie Brown.
	A lot of people consider Jackie Brown his best film.
	And I adore Jackie Brown.
	Every time I watch it, I love it more.
	I love Inglorious Bastards more than I love Jackie Brown.
	I might love Django Unchained slightly more than I love Jackie Brown, but I fucking love Jackie Brown.
	It's an amazing film.
	And if you call it his best film, I agree with you.
	It's fine.
	But then he takes seven years off, right?
	And he does some directing for, he directs an episode of ER.
	He does a lot of that kind of stuff.
	He does some script editing.
	He does some producing.
	At the end of it, he produces Kill Bill, which was going to be like this big epic four-hour movie that got cut in two for complicated reasons that we don't have to get into.
	But he produces Kill Bill, then he does Death Proof, which is half of the Grindhouse series, and then Inglourious Basterds, and then after that, Django Unchained, and then after that, Hateful Eight.
	So the reason I went through the history there is, so he does two movies which are like gangster, like white guy movies with skinny ties and suits.
	Every protagonist in a film that he made between 1997 and 2015 It's a marginalized person, either a woman, a white woman, or an African-American woman, or an African-American.
	Find me another filmmaker.
	Find me another white filmmaker who has done that, right?
	That's a superficial analysis.
	But using his cred within the filmmaking industry and choosing to do that with it, when all the people who were inspired by him were going off and making more fucking stupid gangster films.
	The Tarantino, the gangster film ethos, the indie gangster film ethos that Tarantino created, the sins of that ethos are mostly not found in Tarantino's movies.
	They're found in the stupid shit that was produced afterwards.
	Yeah.
	I think there's something there.
	Whatever his personal politics, whatever his personal flaws, whatever's kind of going on with him, the fact that he really did spend like most of 20 years making films That did not center white guys.
	That means something.
	That's something that we have to confront if we're going to talk about Tarantino as an artist.
	Even if you're going to condemn him and condemn the films, you have to do it within the framework of Reckoning with that.
	And I see Inglorious Basterds, like the way that I framed that because all the advertising in the US went towards Brad Pitt because he's the big star in the movie.
	The international trailers overwhelmingly focused on the real hero of the film, which is Shoshanna.
	One thing I had trouble with initially was I mentioned earlier that Lander's line, what shall the history books read, and it seems to be there as a sort of punctuation point at that moment where history hangs in the balance.
	Depending upon what Aldo Raine decides history is going to proceed the way we know it did, our history, or it's going to change.
	And if you look at it just on that level, it doesn't actually work because you have Shoshanna, who is, she never intersects with the bastards.
	They never meet her, they never talk to her, they never find out about her, nor she, them.
	And if you take the bastards out of the cinema, as Landa effectively has by that point, you still have Shoshana's plan to lock all the doors, set light to the celluloid, the nitrate film, and burn all these people alive inside the cinema.
	And I watched it and I was waiting for the storylines to intersect.
	And I was struck and a bit puzzled by the fact that they didn't.
	And I was watching it and I was thinking, well, the film is, it seems to be saying we've reached like a pivot point in history where it's going to go one way or the other.
	And we haven't actually, because completely independently, if Aldo Raine had told Lander to go fuck himself, basically, they'd still all die because of Shoshana's plan.
	She gets killed by Zola, but even that doesn't stop it happening.
	So there's like an inevitability.
	The alternate history that happens in this film, it's alternate to us, but inside of this history, it seems to be completely inevitable.
	It's happening, whatever the inglorious bastards do.
	And that, initially, that did puzzle me.
	In a good way, because I was thinking this can't be an accident.
	I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that happens accidentally.
	Tarantino apparently has this story he tells about writing the script and he gets to a point where he can't he writes himself into a corner and he can't figure out what to do.
	So he just says, oh, I'll kill Hitler.
	Well, I'm sorry, I don't believe that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's that's kind of story that Tarantino tells.
	Yeah.
	When he doesn't want to tell the real story.
	One day we will learn.
	He's in his 60s now.
	He will retire one day and he will write memoirs and I will read through every fucking page of that.
	Sure.
	What it suggests to me, really, is this subversion of, as you say, it's marketed in America as a Brad Pitt war movie.
	Maybe with an ironic twist, but that's what the posters look like.
	It looks like an action movie set during World War II where Brad Pitt fights Nazis.
	You could put the Brad Pitt tank movie, I think it's called Fury or something.
	You could put like screenshots from that from the ads from that and screenshots from the ads for Inglorious Bastards side by side and not tell which movie was which.
	Yeah, but the film internally subverts that.
	While it is completely on the side of the bastards, as I say, it's uncompromising in its support for their quite horrific violence.
	Because ultimately, you know, everybody they attack is a fucking Nazi.
	So The film doesn't.
	There's no... I never felt the slightest bit moralized at any stage.
	Oh, isn't war terrible?
	Look at... It never does that.
	The closest it gets, I suppose, is with the young soldier in the beer cellar who's just had a kid.
	Yeah, I was going to say Maximilian's dad is probably the one.
	But even he, I mean, he's shown to kill the waitress in the bar.
	Yeah.
	And he's he's he's about to kill Bridget von Hammersmark.
	You know, he's he's still dangerous.
	He's still ultimately a Nazi with a machine gun.
	And he needs to be he needs to be put down the film.
	I never got the feeling that the film was engaging in any of, as I say, that sort of faux nuance and and moral.
	I think there's a difference between I think there's a difference between like having sympathy for someone and kind of being on their side.
	Yeah.
	And I think the film is very aware of that.
	And that's a very deliberate Yeah, because that's exactly the sort of voice, you know, crucial moral distinction that is always completely elided in these sorts of simplistic depictions.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You can't be on his side.
	And in the situation of war, that means you've got to kill him and you're in a situation of war because he's in a country he shouldn't be in.
	You know, ultimately, the film is very clear eyed about that.
	And I really appreciated that.
	As I say, the film is unequivocal about being on the bastard side, but ultimately, they're kind of superfluous.
	Ultimately, history is not in the hands of this group of guys, white guys sat around.
	Well, again, it's ambiguous.
	One of the men sat around the table is Jewish.
	One of the men sat around the table claims Apache heritage.
	We can treat that how we want to treat it.
	But it's ultimately a group of guys sat around a table thinking they're deciding which way the world will turn, what the history books will read, but what the film is actually saying that no, it's not in their hands, it's in the hands of this of this Jewish woman.
	And of course, that ties in with with Tarantino's perennial fascination with revenge.
	And I think that's that might be how he gets to the point where he makes a series of movies that are about marginalized people, women or people of color, because he is perennially fascinated by revenge.
	And maybe it leads him to the people who most deserve a bit of revenge.
	I mean, look, the revenge flick is basically built on like, we're going to show a bunch of like tortures or terrible things done to people.
	And we as an audience want to feel morally justified for enjoying that, right?
	And so the traditional thing is you find that you create a rape victim, or you create somebody who's a victim of a crime, or you create, you know, like those sorts of things, and then watch them blow a bunch of people away.
	That's the exploitation version of this, right?
	Which Tarantino grew up with.
	But Tarantino's answer to that is, well, with my sensibility and my budget, like, let's show a Jewish woman who was almost murdered by the Sherlock Holmes of the Nazis, and show how she actually burns his motherfuckers alive.
	And that's deliberate.
	Like, that's got to be a choice, right?
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	As many times as I've seen this film, you're actually kind of presenting things in a way that I have not considered before in quite that way.
	You and I could do probably 20 episodes talking about Inglorious Basterds, frankly, because we haven't even gotten into the various characters and what They mean for the story, but this is Shoshana's, this is Shoshana Dreyfuss'.
	She's the protagonist.
	She's the core of this film.
	She's the one hiding behind the, beneath the floorboards at the beginning, and she's the one whose laughing face burns the Nazis alive in the movie theater that she owns, because when she escaped, she was given it from, like, There's a ton there, right?
	That's the through line of the movie.
	What you were saying about the bastards being superfluous, I think that's... I agree.
	That's intentional.
	That's built into the movie.
	The bastards give us sort of the moral angle on it.
	But ultimately, they're not the ones... If the bastards had all been killed in that basement in the middle of the film, the ending really doesn't change.
	No, not really.
	No, they're superfluous to everything.
	Ultimately, this is Shoshana's story.
	She.
	Decides to do a thing.
	She convinces her boyfriend, Marcel.
	Sorry, I thought it was Marcel, but I couldn't remember it, so I didn't fill it in earlier.
	But Marcel, great actor, great performance.
	Love it.
	The one black character in the film is the lover of our protagonist.
	Probably says something.
	Complicated feelings there.
	But yeah, we end the film with She burns the place down.
	And so the bastards are mostly there for the for the for the money shot of Hitler being shot in the face a whole bunch of times by by Eli Roth, which another really complicated thing that we have to consider when we talk about this film.
	But yeah, no, like you're right.
	The bastards could have all died.
	Hammersmart could have been shot in that bar.
	Everybody dies.
	Shoshanna comes in and like kills all these people.
	Yeah.
	As far as the plot goes, the Bastards have no influence.
	No, really, really.
	The only effect they have in really changing anything is that they kind of save Hans Landa.
	That's basically all they achieve.
	Well, then what if the Bastards had not been involved in this, if Hans Landa had not been chasing the Bastards?
	What would he have been doing?
	He was not looking at, I don't know, like, this is where, like, the real nerds, like, we could get into, like, character motivations in terms of, like, people discussing his films on forums and whatnot and, like, what the strudel scene means and what the restaurant scene in the middle, in terms of Shoshanna and Londa, whether He suspects her, whether he knows what's going on or whether he's completely oblivious.
	There are many, many, many forum comments talking about this particular issue and the various interpretations of such as to whether he knows who she is and is planning this from that point or whether he's completely oblivious.
	I don't know.
	Do you have a thought on that topic?
	Well, you could argue, I suppose, that the one thing the bastards do actually do that's pivotal is that they distract him.
	I mean, if I had to come down on one side or the other, I would say that he doesn't know who she is, but he knows she's somebody.
	You know, he just gets that detective feeling when he looks at her.
	She's hinky, you know, it doesn't scan.
	And he recognizes her from somewhere.
	And, you know, if he weren't distracted at the movie premiere by the presence of Bridget Von Hammersmark with her leg in a cast, And these obviously fake Italians, then he might have had a chance to figure it out.
	That would be a justification for the Bastards' existence, right?
	You've actually, you've taken the joy of the Bastards being heroes away, and then given the slight bit back to them, in terms of like, well this is what the white dudes can actually do, is distract from the real It's to distract the villains from the real heroes by speaking in really bad Italian accents.
	So I feel like that's what we do on this podcast now, do really bad Italian accents.
	That's the lesson I'm learning.
	Okay, yeah, that's gonna be the show from now on.
	Daniel and I will pretend to be Italian filmmakers and speak to each other Italian camera Italian cameraman.
	Yeah.
	And that will distract the Nazis so much.
	The Nazis listening to us, it will distract them so much that the real heroes will come and burn all their shit to the ground.
	Yeah.
	I could live with that.
	If I thought that would work.
	If all I had to do was do an Italian accent and all the nonsense would go away, believe me, I can also do a terrible Italian accent.
	I can't do a good Italian accent, but I can do a terrible one.
	Arrivederci!
	Buongiorno!
	I'm a huge fan, obviously.
	I know this movie in and out.
	Is there anything you'd like to discuss for a few minutes?
	Obviously, this is profoundly about cinema itself.
	Kind of outside our remit, I suppose.
	But it is.
	This is a film fans movie, clearly.
	I mean, it's filled with references to cinema.
	It takes place in a cinema, most of it.
	More than any other movie that Tarantino has ever done.
	Like one of the first shots in the film is One of the daughters of the French farm owner spreading a sheet along a clothesline, as if to suggest, as every review from 2009 did, that we're watching a movie projected on a white screen.
	Yeah.
	And it ends with Brad Pitt's declaration when he looks down at the swastika he's just carved into Lander's forehead.
	This might be my masterpiece.
	That's another thing that reviewers at the time picked up on.
	They took that as Tarantino boasting.
	And Tarantino said in interviews at the time is like, I wrote this to be my best movie.
	Like this was this was the thing.
	This is the movie he wants to be remembered for.
	And this is someone who does not talk about the meaning of his movies.
	He does not talk about themes or subtext or whatever.
	He talks about production.
	He talks about influences, et cetera, et cetera.
	He does not talk about like what the meaning of the movie is.
	He wants to be more subtle than that.
	This is the one that he says he wants to be considered his masterpiece.
	And I'm willing to take him at his word on that.
	I think this is the one.
	If you want to know who Tarantino is, this is the movie.
	And it is very openly a cineast movie.
	You know, it's a It knows its history.
	It talks about Riefenstahl, and it talks about Pabst.
	The secret operation is called Operation Kino, for God's sake, and the British officer they hire, they hire him because he speaks German, although not all that well, as it turns out, and because he's a film critic.
	Which is fantastic.
	He speaks German fine.
	He just speaks with an accent, which he is able to defend.
	But then also he does the three run.
	I have no idea if that's true, but I love it.
	I don't know if it's true in Germany.
	I have been to the Czech Republic and The three, but that's a legit thing.
	Is it?
	Yeah, you do the three with the thumb, and then the first finger, and then the middle finger, as opposed to the first, middle, and ring finger.
	It's actually the better way to count to three.
	I think we should adopt it in the Anglophone countries.
	Whether the Nazi officer would get through that entire conversation and then go, you made the three rogue and decide to kill these guys is kind of an open question.
	It's a great scene though.
	It's brilliantly constructed.
	Again, we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the pleasures of this movie.
	But there's a series of these scenes in the movie, which are just conversations around tables.
	You know, it opens, obviously, with the scene with Lander visiting the French dairy farmer's cottage.
	And then you have the, as you say, the strudel scene with him and Shoshanna in the restaurant.
	And the other one, is the conversation in the beer cellar.
	And you don't get to beer cellar, that's obviously a deliberate reference.
	And they're brilliantly written to build up tension, you know, because you know that there's all this stuff going on beneath the surface, even down to details like the SS officer in the beer cellar scene, you know, he suggests that they play the game with the cards.
	And he's obviously trying something out there, but it gets aborted.
	But you know what he's throwing because you can see that one of the names on one of the cards is G.W.
	Pabst.
	Did you recognize that that's the same SS officer who picks up Shoshanna to take her to meet girls?
	Yeah.
	I watched this movie many times before I realized that.
	Yeah, no, I like an embarrassing number of times before I realized that was the same actor.
	Yeah, because he's a he's a vicious bastard.
	He deliberately lets her think she's being arrested.
	I love I love that the arrest again, it's another it's another faint like, you know, we our original impression of Zola is that he's going to turn out to be like the sweet German soldier who Who's a human being underneath it all and he turns out to be a really nasty piece of work, quite aside from the fact that he's a Nazi.
	That arrest turns out to be an invitation to dinner with Goebbels.
	I mean, given the choice between being executed on the spot or having dinner with Goebbels.
	I really like the depiction of Goebbels in this film.
	It's very accurate because Goebbels was like this pompous, obloviating, opinionated guy who had delusions of artistic greatness.
	I love the bit where he asks her about actors she likes and she mentions Lillian Harvey, and he explodes with rage because, of course, Lillian Harvey, she was a refugee from Germany who had actually helped Jews escape the Nazis.
	And one of my favorite bits in the film is when they're in the cinema watching the movie, which, you know, this artistic masterpiece of the Third Reich, it's basically just German man in window shoot Americans, Americans die.
	Which is oversimplified, but kind of what a lot of the German cinema that I That's kind of what Goebbels was producing.
	It's also what a lot of American war cinema was and British war cinema was on the other side.
	And then what a lot of it is now, like, frankly.
	But I love that Hitler is watching it and he's just jumping up and down in his seat with delight.
	And he turns to Goebbels at one point and says, oh, it's your best movie yet.
	And Goebbels is just overcome with emotion.
	He starts weeping and Hitler doesn't notice.
	I thought that was Because that is absolutely accurate.
	Goebbels was just obsessed with Hitler.
	I thought that was great.
	My wife did graduate work in the theater.
	She did an MFA and took classes in theatrical production as part of her graduate program.
	That's as much as we will say about the biographical history of my wife on this podcast.
	But she took some classes and After this movie came out, which was in the time that she was kind of like doing that, she talked to me about the, there's this sort of stereotype, there's this figure of the quote-unquote staged Jew in the academic literature of the time.
	And The Stage at You is this kind of like weeping, pathetic figure, like a childlike figure in many kind of like stage productions of the kind of the 20s and 30s that was there to be kind of a, to be poked fun at, kind of a court jester kind of character.
	What she told me was, in her opinion, the Nazis in this movie were stage dude characters.
	And that is, if you look to Hitler, where he's like pounding on the table, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.
	You can watch the performance of the actor playing Hitler.
	He's almost clutching a purse, right?
	He's almost sort of, you know, in this, like, huddled into himself.
	And Goebbels is treated the same way.
	Like, he's kind of sobbing.
	He's got his shoulders up.
	He's got his...
	They're treated as pathetic, ridiculous figures, right?
	And, again, I have not read the academic literature.
	I would love to kind of look at it.
	But the Sage Jew character is sort of like the same kind of figure, right?
	What Tarantino was doing is kind of flipping the bill and kind of treating the high up Nazis as these like ridiculous childlike figures who are in control of, he never mentions the Holocaust, right?
	There's no mention of gas chambers.
	There's no mention of any of this cause no one.
	in this movie knows about that at this point.
	And we don't have to see that.
	We just know these people are stupid and ridiculous and awful.
	And whenever I'm listening to Mike Enoch ranting for four hours or five hours, he and Eric Stryker, Joseph Jordan, did a five and a half episode of Striking Mike.
	A couple of weeks ago.
	And all I can think about is like, you know, this movie of Goebbels and Hitler sitting in those theater seats.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	That's my image.
	That's the image that I have, because it's true.
	They're fucking stupid and ridiculous and childish.
	They have no understanding of anything.
	And yet they have enormous power because society gives them power.
	Yeah.
	The film isn't saying that.
	Like, Glorious Wrestlers isn't about that, but it's kind of about that.
	Well, it gets the Nazis perfectly, so it becomes about that.
	Yeah.
	In our context.
	All the way through the film, the Nazis are depicted as the ludicrous people that they were, because they were ludicrous.
	The SS officer in the beer cellar is this guy who's posturing for effect.
	Goebbels is this lacrimose, creepy, crawly, little blowhard.
	Who's fucking his interpreter.
	Yeah.
	Hitler is this sort of pathetic old man who's almost fretting about how things look.
	You know, I think maybe I should go to the premiere.
	Lander is clever, but he's also, he's juvenile.
	There's something infantile about him.
	Firstly, his sadism is juvenile, but he's found a sort of fits of giggles.
	He gets his attempts at English language idioms wrong and things like that.
	They are pathetic.
	But this is this is great because they they were pathetic and they are pathetic and laughable and juvenile and ridiculous.
	But the film doesn't.
	It shows you that.
	And Zola's another one.
	Zola is like this spoiled, pouting little boy who's who's sort of he wants, you know, he's a he's a show off who's obviously incredibly into himself, but also kind of He likes the idea that he doesn't like all the attention, and he thinks he's entitled to this French woman that he's met.
	Well, Zolder sees himself, and this is the way I understand Zolder, he sees himself as the centre of a romantic comedy.
	He sees himself as like, oh, there's a theatre owner.
	I'm going to go and have a meet cute and we're going to and then I'm going to see her in the cafe and we're going to have a banter and then at the end of the day she's going to be my wife and submit to me and we're going to have beautiful Aryan babies together.
	And he is charming, right?
	He thinks he's in a World War II themed rom-com.
	One of the things I said was that, you know, the conversation about it seems to have centered a lot on the counterfactual ending, you know, and I was watching it and I was thinking, well, is this really any more inaccurate than most Hollywood movies about history?
	It's just it changes one big thing we all know about, that's all.
	Singling this movie out as inaccurate strikes me as, you know, showing a touching faith in the accuracy of most Hollywood history movies, to be honest.
	Well, it makes the false history obvious.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, Tarantino is, he's very emotional.
	Like, I get the feeling like he kind of goes where he thinks the story needs to go.
	So he writes these characters and then says, like, and then how does this end?
	And the end is like, you know, a rubber Hitler with bullets in his face.
	Like, that's the end that comes in this world with these characters, you know.
	And it's hugely artificial.
	It's deliberately artificial, right?
	And I think there is a place to say, like, how do we feel about this in terms of, like, the way the real history went?
	And I feel like that's kind of the question that we should ask about this.
	I think you're right.
	I think it does draw attention to the kind of false history that... the decision inherent in telling a fictional story about World War II.
	There are fucking video games that are like, hey, why don't we replay the events of air battles in the Pacific?
	That's no less fictional than shooting Hitler in the face in 1944.
	But those things are mainstream because they don't question a kind of official narrative about how we're supposed to feel about World War II.
	For my Nazi listeners, Who are going to quote that out of context.
	That is not because I think Hitler was right.
	Hitler was clearly worse than any other person in the war.
	The Germans were wrong, and they did actually initiate the war.
	Yeah.
	They lie about this.
	Yeah.
	They did actually initiate the war.
	The Nazis deserved a whole lot of terrible shit happening to them.
	This is not defending the firebombing of Dresden, etc, etc.
	No, I am very clearly not saying that.
	I'm very clearly not saying that.
	the war and it's like oh no he said the holocaust didn't happen yeah no i am very clearly not saying that i'm very clearly not saying that what i'm saying is that in the west it got turned into a very simplistic uh narrative in which the heroic allies went and crushed the obviously evil
	nazis and the nazis were obviously evil but the allies had a lot of blood on their hands in the same way and in some cases the same kinds of blood and the same kinds of uh awfulness and the The propaganda says, let's not look at that because the Nazis were bad.
	And I think that if you want to have an actual understanding of the Nazis, and you want to defeat the Nazis in the real world today, and you want to defeat the terrible people who would use that, you have to understand the real history of World War II.
	You have to understand the real moral narrative of World War II.
	If you're going to do that, Inglorious Bastards, for all of its fictional history, does way, way better than almost any other movie about Nazis ever.
	Oh yeah, just on the narrow question of accuracy.
	This is far from the most inaccurate screen dramatic depiction of Hitler.
	Even it wouldn't even be in the top 10, I think, if you tried to quantify this somehow, you know, narrative, dramatic screen depictions of Adolf Hitler in terms of inaccuracy.
	I don't think this would even make the top 10.
	And, you know, even the quote unquote serious ones.
	Especially the quote-unquote serious ones.
	Like the comedy ones actually get closer to the truth because Hitler was ridiculous.
	And that's something that we try to do on the show, right?
	That's something that we try to talk about is the ridiculousness of these figures and how terrifying they are.
	If they had political power or if they decided to go off and like shoot a bunch of people or whatever.
	Like if you think of them as like cartoon villains That's as wrong as treating them as heroes in some way, right?
	You know, you have to understand them as people who were deeply, deeply stupid and ridiculous, who pursued this kind of particular ideology in a particular way.
	But yeah, you have to understand it in context.
	And if you're not doing that, you're not going to be able to fight Nazis.
	And that's, again, what we try to do on this show.
	And that's, I think, what Inglorious Bastards is doing.
	Yeah.
	You know, in its in its way, in its way.
	No, absolutely.
	This is a this is a very fine anti-fascist film, I think.
	I hope people like this.
	I feel like most podcasts about inglorious bastards probably just consists of guys sort of saying, oh, that Hans Lander, what a bastard.
	But he's kind of cool.
	But I don't like him, but he's kind of cool.
	That's my suspicion.
	Yeah, I've found virtually no conversation around Inglourious Basterds.
	It really meets what I would consider even a base level of discourse around Inglourious Basterds, frankly.
	Which I say, is a gauntlet thrown down.
	There you go.
	Challenge issued.
	Okay, thanks everybody.
	Chapel Trap House, Inglourious Basterds.
	That's the way we beat the Nazis.
	No, no, please don't.
	Red Scare, get Amy Therese on.
	Michael Tracy and they can have a really great... You know what you're used to go like, but isn't Frederick Zahler kind of hot and isn't...
	That's exactly the Amy Therese line.
	Oh, God.
	Oh, God.
	We're going to encourage the worst kind of thing.
	Oh, yeah, we really should not have done.
	We really need to wrap up now.
	Thanks for listening, everybody.
	And tune in for all our future bonus episodes, which you get exclusively if you are kind enough to give us money on Patreon.
	One dollar a month to either one of us, to either of us.
	Talk about a bargain, and look out for our regular episodes.
	The next one's probably going to be a news roundup episode, because there's been a lot of news.
	Yeah, I wanted to do James Lindsay, but there's a ton of news.
	We've got to do the news, I think, at this point.
	It's just not necessary.
	More Nick Fuentes.
	There's a Nick Fuentes news.
	I'm excited to talk about this Nick Fuentes news.
	It's going to be great.
	It's going to be good.
	Yeah.
	And then on to James Lindsay and other assorted assholes.
	OK, that'll do it.
	Thanks for listening, everybody.
	Bye.
	That was I Don't Speak German.
	Thanks for listening.
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