Inglourious Basterds and the Question of Evil

Reportedly, when the German American actor Christoph Waltz was asked about his performance of such a convincing character of evil in Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds, this is what he is believed to have said. “Nobody believes they are evil. Everybody thinks they are on the side of good.”

Now, there is a lot of buzz around the statement by Christoph Waltz about how this represents a certain version of Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the banality of evil. But what I find far more interesting in this film is the encounter that Colonel Hans Landa, the Nazi SS officer, has with the American lieutenant Aldo Raine, or Aldo the Apache, played by Brad Pitt.

If you search the word Apache today, chances are that the highest ranked results would reveal the picture of a vehicle, probably a motorbike. So the most interesting thing about Inglourious Basterds for me is not how evil becomes a work of theatre. It is about how history itself becomes a theatrical adventure in that film.

Aldo the Apache is a Jewish American soldier whose name is both a reminiscence and an erasure of the Apaches of south western America who fought with Geronimo. Remember John Ford’s famous western Stagecoach. Yes, you will find there how the American army valiantly defeated the Apaches and claimed America for its own.

The ending of Inglourious Basterds features the signing of a treaty between Colonel Hans Landa and Aldo Raine. Landa is willing to opt for the esteem of Germany after he learns that Hitler has been killed in a fire that broke out in a theatre in a fictitious scene wherein Quentin Tarantino stages his revenge fantasy over the Nazis.

Now, you decide what is the bigger question. Is it whether Hans Landa represents the banality of evil through this amazingly convincing performance by Christoph Waltz? Or is it that the history textbooks have completely forgotten who the real Apaches were?

And that is what Quentin Tarantino realised best, which is why he took down the theatre of the Nazis scene by scene and frame by frame and proved that ultimately the bigger theatre was Hollywood.