Looking at it that way, Inglourious Basterds isn’t just a random series of movie quotes, but an examination of how movies shape our view of the world. Tarantino has made a mash-up of war movie characters and clichés, showing how “reality” looks different depending on which movie we’re watching and which country made it. And he builds toward a climax that demonstrates the power of movies for good and evil. They’re great for rewriting history, creating an alternate version of the Holocaust where, as he told the Atlantic, we get to “see Germans that are scared of Jews” and “take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.” But movies are dangerous when people confuse them with reality. Laurent’s only mistake in the film comes when she confuses the heroic and sympathetic onscreen persona of a movie actor with the real thing; for an instant, the propaganda power of the movies works on her too.
In its own way, that may show that Tarantino is a bit out of touch: he’s assuming movies are as important to his audience as they are to him. Tarantino, who famously worked in a video store before he became a director, is a product of video-store culture, of the first generation that could watch almost any movie ever made. Today, movie history has become a niche market, and many of Tarantino’s references are liable to get lost among younger viewers. A shot near the end of the first scene has the villain as a shadowy figure framed in a doorway. It’s an homage to John Wayne in The Searchers, but viewers may mistake it for an homage to Star Wars, which copied the shot as well. Tarantino has made a movie about the importance and power of old movies—just when movie history is starting to be ignored. There’s something noble and quaint about his belief that the great German director G.W. Pabst (who is referred to constantly in Basterds) still matters.
That disconnect between Tarantino and the mass audience may help explain why the Kill Bill movies opened strong at the box office but tapered off quickly, and why he’s less influential than he used to be. Peary thinks that the pseudo-hip style of Pulp Fiction “has become everybody’s way of looking at the world,” but in many ways, that’s not true: today’s directors are busy aping the self-conscious quirks of Wes Anderson, or Judd Apatow’s improvisational messiness, and Tarantino’s movie-geek style almost belongs to another era. Haselbeck thinks that “Pulp’s enormous cultural impact could have also been just a very lucky coincidence in movie history.” The question now is how Tarantino will cope with the end of movie history.
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