Thirteen pages into Tarantino’s screenplay for the film, Inglourious Basterds, Col. Landa
delivers the film’s thesis statement, essentially encapsulating the entire
narrative in one line. “I’m aware,” the SS officer tells the French Jew-hider
in his country house, “what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once
they abandon dignity.”[1]
Landa is referring to the lengths to which Jews in hiding will go to evade
being captured. He likens them to rats, yet interestingly refers to their
evasive means as feats. Perhaps the
SS officer admires his prey in this respect. Perhaps he admires the human
instincts that spring into action once dignity has been discarded.
In fact, the Landa character can be characterized by the odd
combination of polished politeness and brutal aggression, two seemingly
disparate poles, being situated as two natures proximate in one person, one
essence.[2]
This character is on full display when Landa is in the cinema’s office with the
famous German movie star, Bridget Von Hammersmark, whom the SS officer suspects
is a spy. At one moment, Landa “very delicately unfastens the thin straps that
hold the fräulein’s shoes on her [feet].”[3] As if Landa had turned on a light switch, he suddenly jumped the woman to
strangle her “lily-white, delicate neck . . . with all the violence of a lion
in mid-pounce.”[4] The
janus-face flashed inside Landa manifests now in the exchange between the two
characters.
It is no accident, I suspect, that Tarantino explicitly notes that strangling “the
very life out of somebody with your bare hands is the most violent act a human
being can commit.”[5] The
image of the most violent act possible literally in the same shot with a delicate neck of a cultural aristocrat
captures Tarantino’s main point: The giving up of human dignity impacts human
instinct, not to mention emotion and behavior, tremendously. Whether the person
is a Jew in hiding or an SS officer, the animalistic, predator-prey instincts
can kick in with remarkable speed and force, as though a severe thunderstorm
rolling in on the plains.
Whether the predatory and primitive survival behaviors are
indeed feats is itself an interesting
question. As discussed above, the Jew Hunter refers to the survival strategies
of the Jews as feats. He obviously does not admire the “rats” themselves.
Rather, he admires the extreme measures—more, precisely, that human beings are
capable of going so far acting on the instinct of self-preservation once they
have decided to abandon their dignity. Likewise, he doubtless identifies with
the violent lengths to which human predators can go once they have gently and
carefully removed the lady’s shoe.
Through Landa, Tarantino evinces a
fascination with the extremes on both sides of human dignity. Enjoying a
dessert in a nice restaurant, Landa clearly relishes his impeccable politeness
as something much more than a subterfuge as he interrogates Shosanna, the Jew
whose family he had murdered and whose cinema would host the Nazi high command
and other Nazi elite for the premiere of Göbbels’ National Pride. This penchant for precise politeness does not
detract from Landa leaping to the most violent man-on-man (or movie star)
civilian combat possible once he has turned off dignity’s internal switch. Most
importantly, the two extremes can coexist without blending in the least. Human
nature in its rich, complex (rather than moderate, or “every day”), and
stretched condition is itself the feat that Tarantino demonstrates and explores
by means of the film.
1. Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
(New York: Weinstein Books, 2008), p. 13.
2. I
have in mind the “fully human and fully divine” natures that are in Jesus Christ
without blending together within him.
3. Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, p. 136.
4. Ibid., p. 137.
5. Ibid.
