I just realized, after typing this whole post, that I was responding to the idea that there are no good protagonists in Tarantino movies, when the actual assertion was that all Tarantino movies have bad protagonists. So, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are both out, as they features plenty of protagonists who are total scumbags, as well as a couple essentially decent people. I still think Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds count, though.
I’ve only seen Django Unchained once, when it was released, so I might have forgotten a scene, but I don’t think Django and Schultz personally tortured any slaves. There’s a scene where they watch someone who tried to escape get torn apart by dogs, but they don’t participate.
Schultz isn’t killing anyone extra-judiciously. He’s collecting legitimate bounties put out by the government. His motives are mercenary, which make him less heroic than Django, but he’s also (IIRC) literally the only white person in the movie who’s not a racist, and at the end is so overwhelmed by the injustice that he’s seeing around him that he’s compelled to kill William Candy, even though he knows he won’t leave the room alive if he does, rather than let it continue.
I 100% don’t have a problem with them killing people from ambush. That doesn’t make them bad, that just makes them smart.
I agree the Basterds were war criminals, but I don’t think that necessarily makes them bad guys - I think their actions were morally justified by their circumstances. I won’t say more than that, since you don’t want to get into that discussion here, which I respect. Although I’ll also note that I’ve also only seen Inglourious Basterds the one time, and I might be forgetting details that would make me reconsider.
Hmm. They set themselves up with Schultz as a slave dealer and Django as a trainer. My memory was that they actually participate in a match. From the Wikipedia summary, though, it seems like I misremembered that, and they never even got that far before their cover is blown. So, I stand corrected on that.
But:
Schultz is absolutely killing people extrajudicially (I don’t know if you wrote “extra-judiciously” as a typo or didn’t understand what I meant). He’s collecting legitimate bounties, but “Wanted: Dead or Alive” isn’t actually supposed to be a death warrant. It’s an authorization to use lethal force if necessary to apprehend a fugitive. Schultz doesn’t even bother with the apprehension part and jumps straight to the lethal force, which is exactly what extrajudicial killing is. It’s a movie, so I suppose we can rest assured that they never make a mistake, never misidentify a target, and that all of their bounties are actually guilty and would have been hanged if they had been brought in, but…I mean, if they were white cops gunning down black fugitives from ambush, would you see them as good guys?
You just brought The Conversation to mind: Harry the surveillance expert sure does act like he’s a dispassionate professional who just does his job and doesn’t bother with questions about who gets hurt; but, over the course of the movie, we see him show genuine concern when he realizes that, yet again, someone might get killed as a result of his latest efforts. And so, after struggling with his inner conflict over whether to intervene and what to do, he shows up to — well, nothing, really; it’s not so much that he tries and it doesn’t work out; it’s that, at the last moment, he doesn’t really try.
(But, of course, don’t sympathize with the folks he thought about helping; you can’t make a case that they’re the good protagonists, as it later turns out that they’re even worse than he is.)
Early in the movie, our heroes capture two German soldiers and proceed to murder one of them by beating him over the head with a baseball bat. That dude didn’t massively deserve to be murdered.
Heh, yeah, that was a typo. I guess I’m not clear if “Wanted: Dead or Alive” means “bring him back for a trial,” or “bring him back for a hanging.” I suspect, in practice, it amounts to the same thing, particularly in a West fictionalized by Quentin Tarantino. I think a little cultural relativism is appropriate here: in a contemporary setting, I’d find Schultz unacceptable. In a setting that values life as cheaply as the one depicted in Django Unchained, Schultz seems to value it more than most people. He’s a killer, sure, but he’s not cruel, and he’s not indiscriminate.
I mean… he’s a Nazi, so… maybe he deserved it a little?
I looked up the plot summary, and I’d misremembered that scene. I thought they’d captured one German, and killed him because they couldn’t hold him prisoner indefinitely, and letting him go would give away their position. But I’d forgotten that they took two, killed one, and mutilated the other before letting him go. So, yeah, that very much moves them into the “bad protagonist” category.
Any movie classified as Noir is going to fit the criterion listed (a protagonist who isn’t fully sympathetic to the audience; who isn’t fully admirable).
And any newer movie called “neo-noir” is probably called that specifically due to having no admirable main characters.
As for directors prone to “bad protagonists,” I’d suggest Brian De Palma. Carrie, for instance, is a sympathetic character for most of the movie–but when she starts slaughtering even people who hadn’t been tormenting her, the audience steps back from her.
(Possibly this is true of a substantial proportion of horror movies: a protagonist who initially gains our sympathy, but who forfeits it to some extent by the end of the movie—either because of behaving foolishly or thoughtlessly or arrogantly, or because of becoming violent to innocents.)
He was a decorated German soldier but I don’t know if he was a card carrying Nazi. One of the things I find fascinating about the movie is that the Germans are far more likable than the Basterds. Hans Landa is an evil bastard to be sure but he’s much more likable than any of the Basterds. And those poor Germans just drinking their beer seemed like such nice folks.
The German NCO in that early scene is pretty clearly supposed to be an old-school, professional Heer soldier. He’s not SS. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not a Nazi, and plenty of ordinary German Heer infantry enthusiastically participated in atrocities. But there’s no internal evidence we see in the movie of that on his part, and the Basterds don’t seem to have any reason to think so. They also don’t seem to care. He’s a German soldier, so by their lights, that makes him a Nazi, so they gleefully beat him to death, while he’s a helpless prisoner. And then mutilate their other prisoner, because a young German conscript is clearly a Nazi that deserves to be tortured and maimed. Everything we see in that scene is that the German prisoners are strictly abiding by the Geneva Conventions, and the Basterds are gleefully violating them. They’re war criminals.
Being a veteran myself, and having served through the Abu Ghraib era (and having been uncomfortably close to some of that), and having served in positions where I directly dealt with real life Enemy Prisoners of War and other detainees, that scene struck a little too close to home for me. I get that it’s a deliberately pulpy and over-the-top violent Tarantino movie, and I enjoyed elements of it, but…no, they’re Bad Protagonists. They’re war criminals, and the only “happy ending” for me would have been seeing Landa and the Basterds tried and convicted for war crimes.
I think this discussion is missing the point a little w.r.t. to the OP. Characters doing bad things in a war film (even things that break the rules of war) don’t make them bad protagonists necessarily. The way the brutality of war corrupts good people and makes them do bad things is like the main theme of pretty much every war film in last 50 years.
What makes these characters more “bad” is QT makes no attempt to show that at all (and I assume that is a conscious decision on his part). As far as we know these guys were doing all this stuff in basic training.
As I mentioned upthread, I don’t think this thread is really the place for an extended discussion of this issue. But I’ll just say that I don’t think I missed the point at all. I think the Basterds are bad protagonists. The scene in question had me rooting for the German soldiers.
Not always. The protagonist of Detour is definitely sympathetic: he’s trapped by a scheming woman. Kansas City Confidential also has a sympathetic protagonist (though he pretends otherwise)?
Double Indemnity, OTOH, has both leads being nasty people (though Walter regrets it in the end).
Someone upthread mentioned noir films. I was thinking of Double Indemnity, where Keyes is the only decent person in the movie, as I recall.
There Will Be Blood is a brilliantly acted and well made film, but it’s pretty much about an asshole being an asshole to everyone his whole life.
I haven’t seen any film versions of Lolita, but if they’re anything like the book, they’d probably qualify. I remember saying to my professor who assigned that book, “If you’re going to have such an unlikeable main character, maybe write a short story.”
I think there’s a good argument that the average German soldier deserved the same treatment you’d give an actual Nazi. They’re still knowingly supporting the Nazi state and aiding in a war of naked aggression, even if they’re not wearing the fancy jewelry and showing up at the social functions. Anyone who volunteered to join the army during the Nazi period is a villain, even if they weren’t in the party. And AIUI, the penalties for refusing conscription weren’t particularly severe, so even the draftees are morally culpable.
But “same treatment as an actual Nazi” still doesn’t extend to torture and gratuitous murder, and the actions of the Basterds were definitely out of line.
I think that POV only holds up if you have evidence that a large majority of ordinary German soldiers (not SS, obviously) were volunteers rather than conscripts.
Though did you feel the same way about the protagonists in Saving Private Ryan (or, if you’ve seen it Brad Pitt’s character in Fury, which is somewhat similar to his character in Basterds) when they executed german prisoners?
Speaking for myself I know I didn’t and it wasn’t because of the units they were from, or how they were executed. It was because both those films go to great lengths to show how the protagonists aren’t anymore “bad” than you or I. They’ve just been brutalized by the horrific nature of the war they are fighting and the terrible things they’ve seen happen to their friends
Basterds doesn’t do that. As far as we know Brad Pitt’s character is no different to Michael Madsen’s in Reservoir Dogs (“I don’t give a shit what you know, I’m going torture you anyway”).