ABSTRACT
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) ends with a glorious fantasy. In the mid-1940s, a group of American army Nazi hunters manages to herd Adolf Hitler and his high command into a movie theater and incinerate them. No such thing happened in “real life” and in the life of the film’s making, no one was actually burned and blown up. But Tarantino revels in the notion that in cinema revenge can be made to appear real and certainly emotionally satisfying. In Inglourious Basterds and again in Django Unchained (2012) he revises history and creates moving images of the revenge against history: film, he thinks, can allow us to fantasize the undoing of monstrous wrongs committed against Jews in one case and African American slaves in another. There is a violent naiveté in these films, a trust that the images and the stories they tell will make us somehow feel better about the past. They recreate not events that occurred, but events we somehow wish had occurred, though not until we have seen them in the films. There is a circuitry of memory and desire at work in which the films call upon a memory (itself based only on what we have already read and learned about, or seen in other films) and then create and satisfy a desire to adjust that memory for the better.
