Inglourious Basterds: Comic Book or Graphic Novel?

Darling CF,

Recalling the days we spent aswelter amid our video-game art and chandeliers, all I can summon up to say on this sunny September morning, when so much of your city is burning and you are in a housedress, is: You! Makeup!!! And have you seen Inglourious Basterds? Because it is a riproaring superfun marriage of makeup and fire.

[SPOILER ALERT: the rest of this is about stuff that doesn’t happen in Inglourious Basterds and some stuff that does]

Inglourious Basterds is a long string of references and allusions that ends up being the film equivalent of tofurkey when you were hoping for a nice juicy bird. It is, in shape, more or less what you hoped it would be. You are full by the end. Plotwise, though, it’s a long exercise in distraction in which you have to forget that what you’re eating is tofu in order to enjoy it. As anyone who has eaten tofurkey knows, this isn’t really possible unless you have lots of blood and really excellent costuming.

Tarantino’s a master of spectacle and the magnitude of IB’s penultimate ending should satisfy—and does, visually, and that counts for a lot. But the fact is, he launches a thousand ships and leaves a number of ‘em languishing, forgotten, at sea. I’ll get to why this matters in a minute.

First I want to admit that it shouldn’t matter because Tarantino’s approach to moviemaking is like Jon Stewart’s approach to political commentary: they both claim they’re buffoons and insist that their objective is satire and entertainment. This is a genial half-truth, and their fans always insist that they’re really doing some serious statement-making.

With Tarantino, I’m not convinced this is the case—or—and maybe this is a better way of putting it, and I feel he’d be the first to agree with me—the only statements in which he’s sincerely invested concern movies themselves. Whether it’s slashers or spaghetti westerns or kung-fu films, his movie-making is really meta-movie-making and it’s (not quite) equal parts homage and entertainment. It’s almost—almost—fan fiction.

To put it another way, it seems wrong to blame Inglorious Bastards for not being a graphic novel when all it wants to be is a comic book.

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