to quote woody allen from annie hall: "they're always giving out awards. best fascist dictator: adolf hitler. if an award like that really did exist, though, they’d probably end up giving it to mussolini."
up for eight oscars at this year's academy awards, a satirized hitler co-stars in inglourious basterds. no stranger to the academy, adolf has been represented before and won for pictures like black fox (best documentary) and downfall (best foreign). tarantino's basterds, however, depicts the notorious subject in a much more cartoonish manner akin to chaplin's the great dictator (nominated itself for 1940's best picture). consider how the first few scenes of the fuhrer illustrate a "type" as much as they do a politcal icon. cloaked in an illustrious cape, hitler is shown mid-tantrum pounding on his desk looking more like a foiled super-villain than an actual leader of germany. his ineptitude becomes a source of comedy and he is positioned in a very basic dichotomy of good and evil - the source of his rage being the titular g.i. joe task force of the basterds (the good guys).
showing a proclivity for comics (tarantino's kill bill has a scene that's fully animated as well as a scene in which bill waxes on the mythology of superman), tarantino fashions this tale of sadistic jewish revenge in an aesthetic of glamourized violence. within the realm of the comic (emphasis on the visual/surface), endings such as the over-the-top hitler assasination/german third reich blaze work because they are purposely theatrical. the fact that this revenge is exacted within a movie theatre, by a theatre owner, who insists on filming herself is quite revealing. on the other side of things, in addition to the super-heroic identities of "aldo the apache" and "the bear jew," the basterds are joined in their parallel plot to destroy the nazis (project kino) by a german movie star, an english soldier who happens to be a film scholar/critique, and a renegade german soldier (hugo stiglitz) who is equipped with his very own "origin story" and marquee title. while it is impossible to undo the past, inglourious basterds uses these caricatures of film to revise the course of history. through its theatricality, the film becomes a parody of itself.
it is precisely this type of bastardization of history along with language that animates the "ratatat" world of inglourious basterds. just like a comic, the film uses the english language graphically; most of the film existing in subtitles and characters oscillating spoken languages without hesitation, complete with numerous misnomers. take the film's title as cue that there is nothing "proper" about the idealization of a history where hitler's face is machine-gunned to death.
