Inglorious Basterds

I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds.  Heidegger's justly famous essay on the origin of the work of art talks about a hermenutic circle (or spiral) about trying to differentiate the whole of the work from what the parts are.  It's hard to know how to break in.  Inglorious Basterds is a grindhouse revenge-fantasy on the second world war.  It's about the viciousness of the Nazis, and a vicious retribution that should make you sorry for them.  I think the way I'm going to break in is in terms of Genre.

Grindhouse, for my money, is cinema for the weak, or rather, for those who are afraid of, and need to cover up their weaknesses with a prurient fondling of shock at sex and violence. That's a hoity-toity definition for a pretty common answer to a widespread hunger, the male equivalent of mills&boon and soap tv.

Can you use Grindhouse to talk about the holocaust?  Yes, you can do anything if you like.  Tarantino has done it; and of course its auteur grind-house, very cinematic and engaging, and with the dialogue and drama deftly constructed.  The end result is an enjoyable film, a memorable film, and a film with a moral - but the three are loosely tied together. What is memorable and enjoyable is not moral. It impresses you with a point, but it makes you a worse person.

I'm now very curious about 'Django Unchained', Tarantino's next film.  It seems likely to be a counter-part of Inglourious Basterds, unsubtly ramming home the point that Slavery in the South of the USA was an engine of violence and injustice that made with South liable for unlimited violence toward justice.  When Andrew Sullivan was objecting to a lack of anti-genocide protections for social classes, I thought he was right, but that the protections should not be universal, because there have been classes for whom it might be justice - for slave traders or slave owners to go into a Gulag for life would not have been unjust. Though it might have been counter-productive.