Quentin Tarantino’s newest film, Inglorious Bastards, stars Brad Pitt and begins filming this week in Germany. Telling the story of Jews taking violent revenge on their Nazi tormentors, the movie includes the exploits of a unit of Jewish members of the US Army, led by Pitt and known as “The Bastards”, who torture, scalp, and disembowel their Nazi victims. It shapes up, according to the script, as a real Tarantino blood fest. It’s also a total fabrication — one that has deeply troubling implications about Nazi guilt and the hatred of Jews.
The fact that this story is made up should be enough to upset us, but not because it uses the Holocaust as a back drop for entertainment. The truth is Steven Spielberg did it with Schindler’s list, for which he received an academy award. And the list of well received holocaust situated entertainment projects is too long to list here. Let’s just all admit that the adage that “there is no business like Shoah business” was true long before Quentin Tarantino set out to make Inglorious Bastards. Perhaps it should not be so, but it is. Why that is, is another conversation.
But in fabricating this tale of Jewish vengeance, Tarantino asks us to consider some pretty ugly things as we munch our popcorn, some of which are quite dangerous and potentially anti-Semitic as well. The least problematic issue being the sympathy that will be evoked for the Nazi victims (how’s that for a twisted concept?) of the Jewish vengeance brigade whose story is the focus of the film. And who could not feel some sympathy for people, no matter their crime, who are subjected to such horrible deaths?
Of course, we may find ourselves feeling no sympathy at all, which is even more troubling. For if we find ourselves feeling no sympathy for the victims of this story, are we meant to think ourselves no different from the Nazis who felt nothing as they went about their own evil pursuits? They too pursued their mission as one of fixing the world by ridding it of what they considered a real problem. So does Tarantino invite us to a kind of moral equivalence between the two groups?

If this is not his point, and I pray it is not, perhaps he needs to invent horrible acts of vengeance because he can not imagine that Jews did not do this. And why is that so hard for him to imagine? Simply suggesting that no “reasonable” audience member could possibly fail to appreciate that this is all made up, is not a good enough answer. First, movie audiences are not limited to reasonable people. And second, in a world filled with people who have been convinced that the real holocaust never happened, how hard is it to imagine that others will accept that this fictional event actually did?
More importantly why does Tarantino even want to suggest to the world that it did? What is attractive to him in telling this story of blood thirsty Jews roving Europe taking revenge on their neighbors? It’s not much of a stretch from this story line to older stories of equally blood thirsty Jews using the blood of their Christian neighbors for rituals including the making of Passover matzah. Those stories were as false as that of “The Bastards”, yet they inspired generations of hate and violence against innocent Jews.
I do not think that will necessarily happen because of this film, nor do I think that Quentin Tarantino purposefully stepped into the deep waters of historical anti-Semitism. In fact, I think there is great value in raising some of the admittedly painful questions evoked by our revulsion and/or satisfaction at seeing the horrible punishments received by horrible people. But I also wonder if these were the issues in Mr. Tarantino’s mind when he set out to make his movie. I wonder if he appreciated the potential ugliness of his story and the hatred it could inspire? I wonder.