OR
L'esprit de l'escalier?
Chapter 1: Fertilization. The crime, the acting-upon, the gash-in-spacetime that seeds an act in another; all acts fertilize an answering act in another, and re-venge should more accurately be called "reply," "retort." What will Shosanna's retort be? Do we glamorize it by calling it Revenge, or is it the simple, logical reply to Waltz's act, equivalent in force and comprehensiveness, duration and intensity? She runs from him - in 2.5 hours the perps will run from her. But, strangely enough, WALTZ will not run from her. More on this soon.
Chapter 2. While one organ of, oh, let's call it Revenge, embodied in Shosanna, bides its time, another organ, lobe, wing, or flank, grinds coarsely to life via the Basterds...action initiated and carried through in ways grosser, more visceral, more practical and bean-counting, less grandiose, less vaulting and eloquent than Shosanna's forthcoming act...the only dead body she handles will make her dead too. Vengeance has its patient and impatient sides. Its dormancies and its Valkyrie rides. Does one > the other? The Basterds as Shosanna's own agents or raiders, messengers of her own consciousness? Well.
Chapter 3. The most peaceful chapter of the film, where revenge grows its arms and legs, blinks blindly in the womb. Again, the gestation. Everyone pushed to stark extremes - "we burn it down."
Chapter 4: Here, the violence cleanses.
Chapter 5: Birth? The Giant Face sees light at last - religious ecstasy, the judgment of a god, the total killing field of (Dreyfus/Tarantino's) screen, the dissolution of self, common calamity, envelope of fire, the most terrible of granted wishes. It satisfies, yes. And yet - It begins with her flight from them; ends with their flight from her. Shosanna flees Waltz's giant face, that will fill our screen for the next 2.5 hours; yet in the end Waltz does not flee hers. Symmetry or asymmetry? More triumphant to kill the lot of them (as she does), or scar the living remnant (the task of a surviving Basterd)? More accurate and efficient, as biology goes, to stalk and mark that remnant for the remainder of its natural life, rather than gloat over the inert dead?
Or not-yet-dead.
