I don't understand how this is such a hard concept to grasp. So one by one...
It's funny, I had the same response the first time I heard of it and the first time I saw the movie. But through the context of an interrelated, b-movie type tarantinoverse not taking itself seriously
Had nothing to do with "not taking the movie seriously". It was a gut-punch of "THIS IS A MOVIE" so severe it killed the suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief isn't JUST letting one self go along with a completely impractical premise because it's sold so well, it's also just allowing yourself to go with the flow of a story in general. It's a vital component of immersion. The blatantly and over-the-top fictional glorification just went against all efforts to draw the audience into the movie. It sabotaged itself.
Early on in the film, when the two characters speak in French for several minutes for the officer to ask if they may speak in English because he doesn't want to continue butchering the Frenchman's language, you know in the back of your head that the real reason is so the entire scene isn't spent subtitled and so English speaking audience members who don't know either German or French get to just take in the scene without fixating on words at the bottom of the screne. You know this, but it doesn't interrupt your immersion into the film, because it's pulled off as a seasmless aspect OF the scene. There's no interruption, no pause where the actors acknowledge that foreign languages are "inconvenient". It's unlikely for an early-40sin-France scenario for some random farmer to both know English fluently and prefer it to his own language with a notorious SS officer, so were one so inclined to be overly-analytical one could spot plenty of logical incongruities with that particular scene, but they still don't take the viewer out of the moment, because they flow together just right.
None of this is true with the Hitler murder scene. It just comes off as absurd, and it reminds you, "Oh yeah, this is a movie." Your immersion has been severed. You're out of the film now. The actors never acknowledged the audience, but the scene itself still broke the fourth wall in such an irreparable way, it was the undoing of the entire film at that point. So it was a tragic waste of a good film to include such an absurd finale moment.
It's perfectly okay with me. None of the other events in the movie happen, so what's the problem with this?
That's just trying desperately to find excuses for the film. There was never a city in the U.S. named Gotham where some eccentric billionaire ever took up the mantle of a masked vigilante, but that doesn't mean it stopped me from getting pulled into
The Dark Knight and enjoying it for the fantastic film that it is. Some of the special effects were sloppy enough that it drew attention to the film production (namely the truck flip), but that's besides the point, and I already covered that above. But events not having transpired are simply irrelevant. All kinds of things took place in WW2 that the history books either actively went out of their way to avoid bringing up, or simply never got around to covering. So for all I know, it's easily conceivable that an American team of all Jewish soldiers existed. There's nothing unfathomable about this premise, so I can accept it as a basis for the film. Obviously persecuted Jews made it out of the entire conflict in a variety of different ways, so I can imagine some lucky Jewish daughter managed to integrate herself into society under the Nazis' radar. Again, it's not whether the events never took place, it's that they were conceivable. Batman never existed, but the gadgets on his utility belt were designed to be physically probably, so I could accept his badassery throughout the film.
Carving a swastika in the forehead so deeply as they did with Hans in the end is unbelievable too, so why is this more of a problem?
Because it's little more than a gigantic sign pointing at the gunning down of Hitler, reading, "THIS IS A MOVIE!!!" Like I said several posts ago, several days ago, drawing audience attention towards the fact that they're watching a film DOES work under some circumstances. But it failed utterly and catastrophically for
Inglorious Basterds, because the film never hinged on the audience realizing realizing this was all bullshit. No matter how ostentatious Tarantino films can get, they never relied on viewers expressly acknowledging that they're watching bullshit. Some random sicko store clerk and his cop brother abducting people from time to time and raping them? Not bullshit, so I need no prep or warning, and it won't take me out of the film. Yakuza being incredibly xenophobic and despising the notion that their new boss is "half-breed"? Not bullshit, so I've got no problem watching the scene it accompanies. Victim of brain damage recovering from a coma unable to move because her muscles have atrophied? Not bullshit, so watching her struggle to move her toes for several minutes as the mainstay of an entire scene in a ridiculously named "Pussy Wagon" car never takes me out of the scene. Carving swastikas in skin to vindictively acknowledge that corpses (and at the end of the film, a living person, for the rest of his life) were Nazis cannot be compared to shredding Hitler with an endless stream of bullets by suicidal soldiers decked out in dynamite in a theater that's being burned to the ground in terms of conceivability and plausibility. One sounds normal, if extreme, the other just sounds absurd.
