by Ryan Stewart
“Donny doesnt give a fuck.”
-Eli Roth
Donny doesnt give a fuck, is how Eli Roth sums up the bloody-minded motivations of his character in Quentin Tarantinos delirious new WWII film, Inglourious Basterds. A Boston-bred Jewish kid turned soldier who is fully aware of the existence and breadth of the Holocaust as its occurring, and is motivated by inconsolable rage towards Nazis as a result, Donny is one of many carefully-sculpted, subtly modernized characters in a film that is itself a counterfactual kaleidoscope, cut loose from the moorings of history and propelled solely by the emotional impulses of its makers. Donny’s blind, seething anger, and the justice he dispenses with a baseball bat are the secret weapons of the Basterds, an unlikely platoon of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into Nazi-occupied France by the Allies to act as a roving insurgency, capturing and mutilating Nazi stragglers in order to unnerve the German high command. At least, thats their mission until they become tasked with something even grander – a top-secret assignment to target the Nazi leadership, which is personally shepherded by a cigar-chomping Winston Churchill.
Among other things, Inglourious Basterds is ultraviolent, which makes it not utterly new terrain for Roth, who is a long-time friend of Tarantino, as well as the writer/director of the horror smash Hostel and its criminally-underrated sequel, Hostel: Part II. Time and again, Roths work has examined the notion of pleasure as a counterpoint to pain, putting a microscope to characters who secretly relish the opportunity to cause suffering in others, and with Basterds he deepens that examination considerably. Few would doubt the righteousness of Donny’s cause, yet this is a soldier for whom revenge has seemingly become indistinguishable from bloodlust; for whom torture and execution are a personal reward, to the point that it’s impossible to imagine him existing within the confines of a real army, or even a more traditional war film. Roth recently called up SuicideGirls to discuss the real-life implications of playing a man consumed with a desire to take Nazi hides, as well as Nations Pride – Inglourious Basterds’ faux Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film that bears his directorial stamp.
Read our exclusive interview with Eli Roth on SuicideGirls.com.
