aesthetic nihilism

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2010)

Watching Tarantino's latests makes even the average non-critic movie-consumer realize that there can be a huge disjuncture between the aesthetics of a movie and its thematics. Tarantino obviously has talent for the former, but not the latter, at least not in a clear way (this isn't necessarily a bad thing though). Of course, as everyone will say, the dialogue is good, the acting great, and the cinematography beautiful. And perhaps this will make it a great movie for some who also find its motifs of righteous revenge and bodily destruction satisfying. The best scenes in the movie are the scenes of building suspense, like the encounter in the tavern basement. I can't help but like Brad Pitt's character too, but maybe that's because I'm from rural Virginia.
What bothers me about the movie is precisely its imbalance, the masterful cinema that has left behind any sort of moral message. Tarantino's ethics are very perverse: he turns Jews into Nazis, which seems to be the implication of the movie (just think of the last scene with the Bear Jew spraying bullets on Germans trapped in a locked room). Tarantino is hanging everything on the question of whether 'righteousness' justifies violence (in a similar way to Boondock Saints and a million other movies appealing to masculine code of redemptive violence). I will even hold out the possibility that Tarantino is aware of the moral-messages he is communicating, a very real possibility if the trivia facts on IMDb are true, such as how Tarantino makes several cameos: as the first German to have his scalp removed, as the hands strangling Hammerstock to death.
How could one watch this movie, and not ask about its ethics? Even if Tarantino is consciously manipulating moral-messages, that does not necessarily rescue this movie from nihilism. Its the same nihilism in pulp fiction too: kill or be killed. Or, kill the ones who have killed your kin. Except now its writ large on the mythology of WWII so sacred to the 21st century mind.