Improved Postmodern essay - Inglorious Basterds

“Postmodern media manipulate time and space”. To what extent does this definition apply to texts you have studied?”

Postmodern texts that I have studied manipulate time and space in a number of different ways. Postmodernism rejects the truth of time and space, enabling film directors such as Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Basterds) and Christopher Nolan (Inception) to manipulate the conventions of films allowing for greater creativity. This manipulation helps to present some important aspects of postmodernism, such as hyper-reality, self-reflexivity, simulacrums and bricolage. All of which are used for comedic effect and/or to provoke audience emotion and enable media producers to carry fourth important references, ideas and meanings to their work.

Prior to the postmodern era, modernism existed; during this phase texts were made to be realistic and in particular ‘traditional war films’ (such as saving private Ryan) were supposedly accurate accounts of historical events. However directors and producers of films often overlooked pristine historical details and tended to focus more on explosions, action and excitement in order to acquire commercial viability. Frederic Jameson theorised the idea of historical deafness, whereby films were created with inaccurate historical details, subsequently misinforming society, thus meaning that our knowledge of the war is gained from inaccurate war films and that the majority of events that occurred in ‘traditional war films’ were in fact untrue. This then had subsequent effects on the audience and became an incorrect schema for them to relate to future texts. For example Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’ has been labeled as an extremely inaccurate and farfetched war film due to it’s historic flaws, however, it is no less realistic than other war films such as Saving Private Ryan or Pearl Harbour that claim to be and are perceived as a true reflection of war events.

Audiences and critics scrutinise Inglorious Basterds for its inaccuracy. This is because they have been distorted in to accepting that other falsely accurate war films like Saving Private Ryan (for example glorifying America’s insignificant role in winning the war) are legitimate and realistic, when in fact they are not. The purpose of postmodern texts, such as Inglorious Basterds, is to be so blatantly inaccurate historically (Expressing Hitler’s death as an assassination), that other perceivably accurate texts are exposed to be equally as ‘untrue’.

Therefore, Tarantino’s postmodern text is manipulating time. The chronological order and factuality of events that occurred during WW2 are completely reshaped in Inglorious Basterds, and albeit occurring around the same time, the accuracy of such events has been completely tampered with. For example the way that Hitler’s death is depicted, as an assassination is a complete manipulation as it is universal knowledge that Hitler’s committed suicide just moments prior to his capture. It could also be argued that equally inaccurate modernistic texts also manipulate time and space, for example the National Geographic Channel produced a documentary called Beyond the Movie: Pearl Harbour which covers some of the ways that "the film's final cut didn't reflect all the attacks' facts, or represent them all accurately." However Tarantino manipulates time and space through postmodern texts intentionally rather than due to lack of regards for historical accuracy. He does things through a number of platforms; he creates a bricolage of genres and influences by including many intertextual and textual references from different era’s of interest or importance to himself. For example the stark black and yellow font employed in Inglorious Basterds, used when introducing Hugo Schtiglitz, is a self-referential homage to his own past work, all of which employ the very iconic Friz Quadrata Bold used Iconically in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. This is bringing fonts in to a WW2 film that perhaps wouldn’t have been used or even existed in film until decades later, thus manipulating time and space.

Furthermore, within the opening sequence, Tarantino holds a still shot of the LaPadite’s French farmhouse after the ‘Once upon a time, Nazi occupied France’ which resembles the opening sequence to “The Sound Of Music”.  Again, this is a pastiche of the fairytale genre, to remind the viewer of the fact that they are watching a fictional war film. Tarantino’s deliberate combination of genres into

Inglorious Basterds does not halt anywhere near there in fact, within the same opening scene; Landa drinks his entire glass of milk in one gulp before massacring an entire group of people. This is similar to an early scene in Pulp Fiction where Jules drinks an entire cup of Sprite in one gulp before he commits a massacre, and it also pays homage to Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in which, the main character, Alex DeLarge famously drinks milk before committing acts of ‘ultraviolence’.  Here Tarantino further merges genres together in order to manipulate time, he includes intertextual references to scenes of films that are set more than 50 years later in time to mock the validity of supposedly ‘realistic’ traditional war films. More discrete examples of manipulation of time and space like so, may only be picked up on by the more literate and intelligent viewer, something which Jacques Derrdida cited as being very important when trying to understand the deeper meanings of post modernistic texts. Which explains why Inglorious Basterds and further postmodern texts will be perceived completely differently by variant intellects.

Further manipulation comes in the form of various pastiches and homage’s, one such of these is the Homage to David Bowie, when his song with Giorgio Moroder from Cat People ‘Putting Out The Fire’ is played during Shosanna’s preparation montage for her revenge. This manipulates time as it places a song from the 1980’s, in to a previous era, a war film set in the 1940’s; he does this in order to pay homage to David Bowie who Tarantino admires musically. Also, in the bar scene, Michael Fassbender, Til Schweiger, and August Diehl are involved in a Mexican standoff, much like the endings of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This is an intertextual reference to some of Tarantino’s previous work; he does this in order to pastiche the ‘conventional’ war film genre, by placing an out of context scene of a Mexican standoff in to a WW2 film, in order to mock such films in a sort of ‘Hey…look I can put anything in this war film and still make it more realistic/accurate than those other films’ mindset. Also homage is paid to ‘The Dirty Dozen’, a favoured war film of Tarantino. This is seen in the second ‘courtyard’ scene where lieutenant Aldo Raine is assembling his group of Basterds. The similarity in terms of mise-en- scene and of course cinematography is manipulating space and time, recreating a scene from a text of a different era and applying it to a modern text.

Other more obvious intertextual manipulations of space and time are the ‘slipper on the foot scene’ between Colonel Lans Handa and Bridget Von Hammersmark which is identical to that of Cinderella (again, reinforcing the hybrid of genres always omnipresent in Tarantino’s works) and the upwards - facing camera shot at the end of the film, when Aldo Raine and ‘The Little Man’ have carved the swastika into Colonel Lans Handa’s forehead. The camerawork in this scene in particular is almost always featured in Tarantino’s other works (such as Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Death Proof) and is another clear example of manipulating space and time to create a hybrid-genre film, which in turn reveals to the audience the equally ‘unusual’ nature of other war films they once held as being truthful and accurate.

The overly stereotypical representations of Aldo Raine, in terms of his heavy southern accent, and Hitler, with his features of hair and moustache emphasised alike are other examples of how equally stereotypical other war films are. On the other hand Inglorious Basterds includes uncannily realistic features, for example ever present are long dialogue’s in French and German, which adds realism to the text as most traditional American war films usually feature the Germans and French speaking in English with an accent. In this sense, Tarantino creates a hypereality in the film whereby the audience may find it difficult to distinguish, which parts are historically accurate and which parts are not, which is itself manipulative of space and time. The short film ‘Nations Pride’ featuring Frederich Zoller within Inglorious Basterds is another example of an overly emphasised and historically inaccurate war film, the very kind Tarantino created Inglorious Basterds to shun. The ‘film within a film’ is a very deliberate manipulation of space and is perhaps the boldest feature that reminds the audience they are watching a fictional film, which is just as fictional as any other inaccurate WW2 film. Tarantino himself stars as a soldier in the film within a film, which pastiches further this idea of the perception of historical accuracy.

Despite the obvious informative meaning of Tarantino’s work, it is arguable that to the less literate and intelligent audiences, the ‘historical deafness’ will only be amplified, creating an even more distorted view of history because of texts like Inglorious Basterds. Something Jameson feared would accompany postmodern texts.   

In the future the boundaries and existence of postmodernity are bound to change. It may be argued that over time, due to the large number of texts that will be created, whether it be consciously or subconsciously, that everything thing will become a complete or part copy of something pre-existent. Henceforth, it may be that no matter how much supposed originality or creativity a producer puts in to making a text, due the volume of texts being/been created previously, everything will become postmodern.