Hitchcock defined film suspense as a ticking time bomb. Think of Mrs. Bates’s shadow creeping closer and closer to Janet Leigh as she unsuspectingly showers, Bernard Hermann’s frantic score in the background in Psycho. Think of the zombie hands pulling the woman‘s face ever closer to the jagged piece of wood in Fulci‘s Zombi 2. Think of Jack Torrance walking into Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. It’s the terrible anticipation of a disastrous event. The disastrous event can come as a surprise to the audience and the protagonist, like the naked woman in Room 237’s bathtub turning into a rotting corpse. The audience can become aware of the horror before the victim does thanks to the omniscient camera, as in the shadow of the knife rising behind Janet Leigh’s oblivious shoulder. Or, as with the eyeball slowly approaching the sharpened splinter, the audience and the unfortunate victim can both know exactly what’s going to happen, with the suspense coming from the agonizingly prolonged anticipation of it all. In every case, the audience is gripped by the terrible curiosity of watching someone move towards calamity. And the operative word is move. Suspense scenes tend to be highly kinetic, powered by physical momentum and usually some kind of tension-producing musical sting.
What you don’t generally find in most suspense films is dialogue. People talking to each other is about the least suspenseful thing you can point a camera at. Conversations usually involve people standing or sitting in one place (unless the conversations were written by Aaron Sorkin), and if people are having a conversation, it also usually means that they’re not in imminent danger of catastrophic death and/or maiming. Now, two people could be having a regular conversation, and in the middle of it, they could be decapitated or set on fire or something, but that’s not suspense, that’s shock. One of many ingenious things about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the bold decision to include several extended suspense sequences that include nothing but dialogue, with little in the way of camera trickery or unsettling music to torque the tension-meter.
Take the epic, near-half-hour-long opening sequence in which SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Walz) searches for hidden Jews on the property of a French peasant. It’s a masterpiece of suspense, and it involves almost no actual movement; Landa and the farmer sit at a table, Landa talks to the farmer, and that’s pretty much it. At one point, the camera pans down to reveal to the audience that there are, in fact, a family of Jews hiding under the floorboards, but that’s all there is as far as motion of the frame or within the frame. Instead, Tarantino cuts between two-shots of the pair sitting together, close-ups of Landa, close-ups of the farmer, and close-ups of the various props that Landa fiddles with during the interrogation.
The tension is driven at the onset by the iconic nature of the setup. “Jews hiding from Nazis” is a good shorthand definition of “dangerous situation.” The question: will the Jews be caught, hangs over the scene like a cocked Luger, freighting every gesture and statement from Landa with menace. Tarantino sustains the tension by keeping Landa’s dialogue, and his gestures, consistently genial. The audience doesn’t know at any point if Landa truly suspects that the farmer is hiding Jews, and that uncertainty becomes more and more unbearable as Landa draws out the interview with trivia and bureaucratic formalities. He praises the beauty of the farmer’s daughters, he lauds the deliciousness of the farm’s milk, he goes through a meticulous rundown of the names and ages of the one unaccounted for Jewish family in the area, the Dreyfuses. The audience knows that the Dreyfuses are hiding under the floor, and with that knowledge thick in the air, Tarantino pushes against the grain by making the scene look as mundane as possible. Landa doesn’t just ask the farmer what he knows about the Dreyfuses. He takes out a huge ledger, puts together a comically complicated fountain pen, and writes the information down, with Tarantino cutting to close-ups of Landa’s pen gliding across the page. Visually, these shots are prosaic to the point of humdrum, but nevertheless, every pen stroke is charged with tension because of the danger that the Dreyfuses are in, the uncertainty as to their fate, and the fact that Tarantino goes out of his way to prolong the danger and uncertainty. Landa’s dialogue becomes riveting as the viewer tries to figure out just how much he knows from the words he chooses. Is Landa really at the farm house for a perfunctory visit, or is he toying with the farmer for his own amusement? Landa beings to drop clues as to his real knowledge during a soliloquy about what makes him such an effective hunter of Jews, but once again, Tarantino denies the audience confirmation, allowing the conversation to lead off into tangents that sharpen the tension by prolonging it.
Traditional cinematic suspense is a shot of the timer on a bomb tick down to zero Inglourious Basterds is a series of suspense scenes where the bomb is never shown on screen. The bomb is in the viewer’s head, but there’s no timer indicating how much longer the tension will last. What makes Inglourious Basterds work as a suspense film is that the lack of visual cues that normally let an audience know just how much suspense they’re going to have to endure. Be it the timer on a bomb moving towards zero, or a killer getting closer and closer to an unsuspecting victim, visually oriented suspense scenes have a reasonably predictable termination point. The bomb timer will either hit zero or be defused with a second to spare, the killer will cross that last few feet between him and his victim. Including the farm house scene, Inglourious Basterds features two hugely long, dialogue heavy scenes that are suspenseful because they’re comprised largely of dialogue and because they go on for a long time. The longer the characters talk, the less sure the viewer is of just what’s going to happen and, more importantly, when it’s going to happen. All they have to hold on to are the meandering dialogues of Tarantino’s endlessly coy characters, and a camera that seems determined to focus on only the most inconsequential objects in the room. Critics often dismiss Quentin Tarantino as a serious filmmaker due to his hopelessly juvenile mindset and preoccupation with shallow popular culture. But in Inglourious Basterds Tarantino shows a singular ability to delay his audience easy gratification and to show immense attention to every detail in every scene, from the intricate web of film references woven throughout the dialogue to props like Hans Landa’s ridiculous and disarming calabash pipe. Whether you find these scenes gripping or tedious, one word that would never come to mind is ‘juvenile.’
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