Historioplastic MetafictionTarantino, Nolan, and the “Return to Hegel”

But the image of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream-image may not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological, so that, in the worst case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were crude reality.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

OPENING THE WOUND OF HISTORY

Quentin Tarantino’s World War II epic, Inglourious Basterds (2009), concludes with a striking subjective shot. The viewer is suddenly given the point of view of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). By this point in the film, Hitler has been shot repeatedly in the face, burned in a celluloid-fueled fire, and then absurdly obliterated (along with the bulk of the Nazi high command) in an explosion Landa helped orchestrate. Historical fact has been flagrantly effaced and a gratuitous and self-congratulatory revenge fantasy has taken its place. Yet in this final shot we are oddly and uncomfortably trapped by the camera, left to peer out helplessly through the eyes of Landa, the infamous “Jew Hunter.” As we look on, the leader of the Nazi-hunting “Basterds,” Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt), along with the last surviving Basterd—Private Smithson Utivich (B. J. Novak)—take a moment to admire the swastika Raine has just carved into Landa’s forehead. Raine and Utivich gaze steadily and contentedly into the camera. The final lines of the film are Raine’s: “You know somethin’ Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece.”

The self-reflexive nature of the scene is obvious, if not ostentatious. Perhaps equally obvious is the fact that this final point-of-view shot functions to implicate the audience: like Landa, we’ve been justifiably branded. Given our naive enjoyment of the pointless violence of the vengeful Basterds (their scalpings, their gleeful beatings, etc.), we have exposed our own Nazi-esque impulses, our own willingness to stereo-type, to refuse the possibility of complex motivations and unique situations. But surely our complicity runs deeper than this? After all, it is specifically Landa with whom we are finally linked. Like Landa, we have exposed our perverse inclination to revel in and abuse the possibility of rewriting history, of rewriting our very identity. Raine, we must recall, does not get the chance to “brand” Landa until Landa turns himself over to the Americans, denies his allegiance to the Nazis, and renounces the “silly” title of “Jew Hunter” as a misnomer. Raine’s final act, then—his “masterpiece”—is clearly motivated by a desire to check Landa’s perverse mutability, to fix the man in his truth, to anchor him to a past he can never deny. Raine explains his motivation earlier in the film, as he prepares to inflict one of his “tattoos” on a different German soldier: “I’m gonna give you a little somethin’ you can’t take off.” Raine assumes that, after the war, the bulk of German soldiers will simply remove and destroy their uniforms and in turn their complicity in the horrors of Hitler’s reign. Thus, at the very moment the film seems to celebrate its clever manipulation of history, Raine works to forestall the very possibility of such a manipulation.

By linking the audience to Landa, by “fixing” the audience in an overtly restricted point of view, the film undergoes a surprising dialectical inversion, a certain “negation of [its] negation” (Hegel 2010, 98). On the one hand, the film clearly revels in a type of perversity (in the sense that Slavoj Žižek tends to employ the term), the very perversity that defines Landa’s villainy—the abject willingness to be whatever the Other desires, to be whatever the audience wants to see, to be the World War II movie we wish were true. On the other hand, the film turns its ostensibly irresponsible/postmodern playfulness against both itself and its viewers, using it to stress a certain responsibility to the very thing it simultaneously identifies as utterly out of reach: the Real of any particular historical event. In this sense, the “open” wound Raine inflicts parallels (or metonymically stands in for) the...