Inglourious Linguists
It seemed obvious to me that Quentin Tarantino’s sub-theme in Inglourious Basterds LRB, 10 September). This is thrown into relief by Christoph Waltz as the Jew hunter Hans Landa, who is chillingly fluent in any language a particular situation requires of him. ‘Don’t any of you Americans know any other languages?’ the German double agent asks of Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine and his Nazi hunters. The British are slightly better but it is an Englishman’s use of German that gives the game away to August Diehl’s ‘endlessly smiling SS officer’. He then compounds his slip by holding up three fingers to order three whisky glasses instead of two fingers and a thumb, as apparently a German would, thus confirming the SS officer’s suspicions. I hadn’t realised the German-speaking Englishman was played by a German actor, as Wood tells us; given the point the film is making, I suppose it had to be that way. And it may be that Pitt ‘has the worst imitation of a rural Southern accent imaginable’ but he uses his own language with great wit. Aldo is not stupid, as Wood surmises, just monoglot. The reason he says less and less as the film goes on is that he is pretending to be an Italian and dare not open his mouth. But it isn’t Aldo who is responsible for burning down the cinema and shooting the Nazi leadership. Shosanna and her black lover start the fire. Landa could have stopped the other half of the plot but he lets it happen once he has arranged to change sides and join the Americans. ‘Who knows foreign languages, wins,’ the film seems to be saying. was the Anglo-Saxons’ inability to speak anything other than English (
Incidentally, the actor who plays Landa may not be quite the über-linguist the film suggests. Buried in the credits, I noticed ‘Voice Impersonator for Christoph Waltz’.
-Julian Preece
This is an actual clip from the low budget ET rip-off Mac & Me. I must have repressed all memories of this film after seeing it as a child, because I can’t recall this impromptu dance sequence nor did I remember how epically fucked up this movie was.
Mac & Me has always been a throw-back joke, but I now realize there is something deeply troubling about this film, and I’m beginning to suspect it was part of some horrid CIA-sponsored psychological experiment. Judge for yourself.
