Once upon a time in… the Midnight Myth Podcast studio, Derek and Laurel took on their first study of Quentin Tarantino with his 2009 masterpiece Inglourious Basterds. This alternate history of World War 2 paints a bloody picture of power and revenge in Nazi-occupied France. We follow two independent assassination plots on Hitler and the German high command, which converge, of all places, in a cinema. In this episode, Derek & Laurel interpret Inglourious Basterds as, by turns, a fairy tale, a Western, and a classical or Elizabethan revenge drama. We’ll discuss why Seneca the Younger was Ancient Rome’s version of Quentin Tarantino. We'll learn why QT likened Shosanna to Joan of Arc. We’ll dig into the ethical quandaries presented by this movie’s very existence. We’ll really put the music into “Enzo Gorlomi.” And we’ll barely scratch the surface.
Recommended further reading.listening:
A fantastic collection of essays on Inglourious Basterds can be previewed here.
Read Sheldon Roth’s essay, My Son Killed Adolf Hitler, here.
A pretty good list of the cinematic and intertextual references in Inglourious Basterds.
The untold stories of women in film get a closeup in this story from Film School Rejects.
My Favorite Murder did a great episode on Hannie Schaft and the Oversteegen Sisters, teenage assassins who took on the Nazis (AKA real-life Shosanna/Basterds).
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