Film-Music Moment of the Day: Shoshanna Prepares to Murder the Nazis

If the quantum physicists are right and time is like a giant piece of fabric with all events occurring at the same moment, then I'm fairly certain that Inglourious Basterds helped the Allies win the war. Quentin Tarantino has created revenge propaganda so clear-eyed and boldly executed that it ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and demoralized the Nazis in some kind of crazy backward tipping point. History says that Operation Barbarossa was when Axis luck began to change for the worse, but maybe it was actually when Shoshanna Dreyfus reached through the hole in space-time that Tarantino made and gleefully murdered several hundred high ranking Nazi officials by setting them on fire. 

The montage in which she prepares herself to do so is the real film-music takeaway from the movie, and of course Tarantino unblinkingly joined the ranks of the very few directors (like Robert Altman and Sofia Coppola) brave and talented enough to put contemporary music in their period pieces in an effective way. "You're actually shocked at how well the lyrics to 'Cat People' work to her story," he told the L.A. Times.

Personally, I wasn't so much "shocked" as I was simply saucer-eyed with delight because Tarantino knows exactly what to do with David Bowie's ominous and opulent voice, placing it at the very heart of his film like a jewel while lavishing some old-school camera work on his heroine.

See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Colder than the moon
It's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
With gasoline

"It would've been easy to hire some artist to do the 'Ballad of Shoshanna,'" he explained, "and it could be telling her story in a very on-point, nail-on-the-head kind of way. I just don't like the idea of giving that much power to anybody on one of my movies," he continued. I would much rather work with a music editor than a music composer."

There's another great film-music moment in Basterds, and it's later when Shoshanna and Private Zoller gun one another down at point blank range to Nick Perito's instrumental version of "The Green Leaves of Summer," a track that sounds about as fresh as a fifty year old can of peaches in heavy syrup. It's a signature Tarantino move to set scenes of graphic violence to wildly inappropriate music, and the trick words again here. I actually giggled as one of the best film heroines I've seen in some time was savagely killed. The music cue is also a reference—no doubt—to the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo, for which the unbelievably saccharine vocal version won an Oscar for Best Song, and as if we needed more proof that Basterds is a film about filmmaking, Tarantino borrowed the Bowie track too; it was an original written for the 1982 remake of Cat People.

So thanks Quentin, you wonderful nerd. Thanks for inserting flowery music at the most brutal moments. Thanks for the well-placed White Duke. Thanks for projecting the gorgeous ghost of Shoshanna onto smoke and letting her laugh while she barbecues a theater full of Nazis to a crisp. Thanks for ripping a hole in the space-time continuum and helping the Allies win the war. Thanks for blowing my mind, again, at least seven different times. I love that a real auteur has the number one grossing movie in the country right now, and I love, love, love your wicked ways.

Comments

[Shannon]

Editors' note: Unlike Wes Anderson, who over-borrowed from Satyajit Ray scores in the Darjeeling Limited, Tarantino used this one theme in a highly editorial way. This is not the equivalent of a mash-up; it's more like sampling, when an artist takes a snippet of pop culture and reappropriates it in an intelligent/meaningful way.

[ElToddbert]

So, Tarantino uses a theme for another movie in his movie and you're praising his genius for it? Meh. Tarantino's one of the laziest users of music in film today. Rather than taking the effort to work with a composer, he uses ready made music with associations already in place-- the music does the work he's apparently unwilling to. A xerox of a xerox isn't filmmaking genius, it's the equivalent of a mashup-- something we wink and nod at because we recognize the parts, while the whole is quickly digested and forgotten.