Quinton Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards serves as a combination of the Spaghetti Western and War genres. Taking the narrative structure and directing style from the Spaghetti Western and the aesthetic and characters from war movies. Through this synthesis the film provides an interesting critique of how genre trains audience expectations.
All historical movies have to straddle the line between making a good movie and accurately telling a story. War movies in particular face this problem because everyone is told over and over again the way these wars ended in real life, movies within this genre must maintain interest beyond the plot focusing more on characters and set pieces. Using Full Metal Jacket as an example, everyone knows the US lost Vietnam so the movie does not attempt to tell the grand story of Vietnam. Instead, the film focuses on the life of a few individual soldiers. While there are genre conventions within these focuses, like anyone sharing personal information immediately dying or most of the characters being stereotypes, these conventions are exclusively focused on moments and characters. Great War movies mirror the real world events of the war they are depicting, but almost no war attempts to tell the story of the war as a whole. For the most part, Inglorious Bastards follows these conventions with the movie being more focused on smaller events and the characters portraying ultra-stereotypes, most prominently seen in the British characters.
If war films are about characters and moments, Spaghetti Westerns are about plot and moments. Movies within this genre are extremely sparse in dialogue focusing more on ultraviolent action scenes in the service of a larger plot. Inglorious Bastards overtly takes the style of these movies. The Spaghetti western takes an operatic plot structure, telling simplistic stories in a heavily stylized way. This type of plot structure is most evident in movies that easily conform to traditional leitmotif scoring. Inglorious Bastards falls into the tradition of the revenge narrative, with Jewish people taking revenge on Nazis.
Through the synthesis between these two genres the film is able to comment on audience expectations. As war movies traditionally work to mirror reality, in the conclusion one would expect the Nazi position to be weekend but not destroyed and Landa to be taken by the Americans like his countless real life operation paperclip counterparts. But this is also a revenge Spaghetti Western, so the movie ends with Landa having a swastika carved into his forehead and Hitler being shot. Often war movies are viewed as a replication of reality, with students being shown Saving Private Ryan to display what D day was actually like. However, war movies like any other are not a reflection of reality but of the artist’s intentions and Inglorious Bastards displays that fact. We are completely willing to accept a man who can swing from building to building, but Hitler being shot is viewed as impossible. All historical movies are not real, while there are some innate human element in these like all art they are not –capital R- Real.
In including this as the final moment Tarantino is making the metafictional element of the film the dominate factor. This analysis of the films use of genre is an often overlooked part of the larger common analysis of the film as a commentary of the power of movies as a propaganda medium.
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