Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Inglorious Basterds
Last week, I finally saw the Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds. The point the movie strove to make is that there is no good side in war. While most films about WWII are heroic accounts of Americans and Russians beating back the evil Nazis, this one blurred the lines and depicted the ravage of Europe as it really was. In the film, a famous Nazi war hero is depicted not as a savage beast, but rather as a sweet, gentlemanly fellow, the kind you can't help but begin to like. Meanwhile, the Americans--the Basterds--are portrayed as the inhuman monsters. While the audience knows that the Nazis committed the truly bestial acts(extermination camps), we can't help but begin to sympathize with the poor Nazis who get their skulls bashed in with baseball bats or are machine gunned like sitting ducks. A common misperception is that war has rules; there is the right side (strikingly often the winning side) and the wrong, morally decrepit side. The fact is, war isn't a fair fight; it's a pitiless, honorless, fight to the death. Neither side can claim the moral high ground in war, though everyone seems to try, because there is no moral high ground in war.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The most interesting part, however, is that civilian life is not a fair fight either. It is not just in war that both "sides" morally fail. Though Nazis may have had terrible extermination camps, there were also camps in the US. Though by no means as terrible, the US set up Japanese internment camps. These were upheld by Americans not in Germany on the front but at home. I needn't say how many more examples of moral failure there are, one of the most glaring being slavery. War is merely a pretext through which people try to justify their wrongdoings. The wrongdoings can exist independently.
ReplyDeleteWhile Inglorious Basterds is by no means historically accurate, it does show, like many other war films, some of the brutality that occurs during war. I'd recommend watching something more along the lines of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers if you want a historically accurate depiction of American conflict in Europe, but Inglorious Basterds is a good movie nonetheless. War is never fair. If it was then it wouldn't be war. One side always searches for new ways to overcome their opponent and morals often fall by the wayside in search of victory. Personally, I believe that if any war had one side that could claim the moral high ground, it would be the US in Europe during the 2nd World War, as the Nazi's were not only committing genocide but horribly mistreating prisoners and civilians. Also they did not plan on stopping until the world was under their boots. The Americans were in no way innocent, but almost anyone can see their cause as just and their methods far nobler than that of their enemies or some of their allies.
ReplyDelete