Inglourious Basterds (2009)

 There is value in subverting expectations. Of playing with understanding and lack of understanding.

The basterds and their game is defacing the third reich, Of scalping the nazi fasciest pin head sons of bitches and showing them as the delusional and arrogant caricatures of humanity they are.  

There is need to understand that defacing and maiming in this way is a commentary on what nazis attempted to do to world history. It is an erasure of the power of propaganda. It is a very complex existential crisis and commentary on that crisis. In that used terror and an insane idea of racial purity… of purging a meme and not a gene. Because the failure of humanity is in a meme and not a gene.

The movie is about a Jewish woman and her black boyfriend burning down a theater and sending a message to Germany. The movie is about a handful of New York Jews and a Tennessean named Aldo. Scalping and mutilating the corpse of a delusion of racial purity.

And even when the compromises of a frustratingly complex reality infiltrate the screenplay and one of most vile evil characters in cinema is about to get away with murder. What happens is an ambiguous moment where a conniving vile character has a swastika carved into his forehead. It is a direct meta commentary on the power of cinema. On the ability of what the complexities of life and the nature of what illumination is. 

The question of the problem of nazis is the question of delusion. Two perspectives one objectively correct and one objectively wrong. A delusion of superiority of self inflicted isolation that is tangibly not true, of a belief in superiority that proved faulty by the scars of the self inflicted isolation of the delusion of ambition. The ambition of superiority is the sin. The arrogance of a Nazis perspective. That the narcissistic perspective it imposes of superiority is proof of its failing.

And like Aldo sometimes we’re left with an appreciation, that a masterpiece is as simple as justice and truth. Naming the fault of humanity’s enemy of pride and humbling ourselves if only by making them acknowledge what their ambitions were and why justice demands we reap what we sow.