A reader writes:
I didn't like Inglourious Basterds, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. Then I read this article by Jonathan Rosenbaum, wherein he quotes the author Daniel Mendelsohn "Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into Nazis, that makes Jews into 'sickening' perpetrators?" The inherent problem with revenge fantasies and revenge films is that they play to the basest parts of who we are.
We are, or should be, civilized. And that means that we do not seek revenge. We cannot go out willy nilly and start killing everyone who ever hurt us. And for the most part we don't. Tarantino never mentioned it but one reason that Hitler and many of his followers were so eager for the slaughter of the Jews was due to a misguided sense of revenge: the Jews did all this to us, now it's payback time.
The alternative to revenge is justice, something that is more civilized but far less cinematic. When bin Laden was killed, the president said "Justice has been done." He was exactly right. We didn't parade the man around, riddle him with hundreds of bullets, display his carcass for the whole world to see (or fly a giant banner saying "Mission Accomplished). We shot him, buried him – done and done. Killing someone, even evil men like Hitler and bin Laden, should never be pleasurable, but obviously Tarantino hasn't quite figured that out yet.
Update from a reader:
Your reader missed the point about that movie. It was a fantasy about killing the killers before they could finish murdering 6 million people. It would have been a revenge fantasy if the Nazis had been killed AFTER the war. One of the painful parts of that history is that Jews were powerless to stop the murder of so many of their own. What's wrong with a movie that imagines that history otherwise?
The Dish 