Bastardized History: How Inglourious Basterds Breaks through American Screen Memory

This essay argues that Inglourious Basterds’s self-conscious Americanization of the Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture’s tendency to adopt the Holocaust as a screen memory. Rather than participating in this phenomenon, though, the film uses postmodern parody and what I term “historiographic meta-cinema” to lay bare the ways in which Hollywood representations of the Holocaust have shaped, and in some cases have distorted, public memory of the event. In its revision of history, I suggest, the film calls attention to the appropriation of Holocaust memory by American popular culture and consequently draws attention to America’s reluctance to confront its own legacy of racial prejudice.