Should We Punch Nazis? Or, Grotesque Ethics & Ethical Grotesques: Brutalised Bodies, Evental Sites, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

This paper examines Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to argue that the grotesque treatment of bodies onscreen and the film's formal alignment between the bodies of Nazis and of the audience open onto the ethical dimension of Tarantino's work. This ethical dimension, the paper posits, has most fully emerged in Tarantino's "'rewritten history' trilogy" – Inglourious Basterds and the two films that follow it, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight – and it is directly linked to socio-political issues crystalized by the rise of the populist, reactionary right in the US and elsewhere in the world.