On one level, Inglourious Basterds is a sophisticated and knowing evisceration of fascist cinema—the war ends, essentially, in a conflagration in Shoshanna’s theater. And because this is Tarantino, scenes of unmediated gore are interrupted by debates about German movie-making, including a discussion (whose participants include Winston Churchill) of whether Joseph Goebbels runs his movie studios in the manner of Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick. But it is the unapologetic depiction of an alternate reality in which Jews torture and murder Nazis that made this film particularly interesting to a veteran REM-state Mengele-killer such as myself.

Early in the film, Aldo the Apache announces the goals of his unit: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.” Soon enough, the Basterds are committing war crimes, beating prisoners to death and collecting the scalps of dead Germans. “Every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps,” Aldo demands.

The horror-movie director Eli Roth—his film Hostel is the most repulsively violent movie I’ve ever seen twice—plays a Basterd known as the “Bear Jew,” whose specialty is braining Germans with a baseball bat. Roth told me recently that Inglourious Basterds falls into a subgenre he calls “kosher porn.”

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, says that after reading the first draft of Inglourious Basterds, he told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.

Tarantino told me he has received only positive reactions from his Jewish friends. “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”

It is not an accident that it took a non-Jewish director to concoct this story of brutal Jewish revenge. It is difficult to imagine a Jew in Hollywood—each one more self-conscious than the next—portraying Jews as vengeance-seeking knifemen. Neal Gabler, the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, told me that Jewish revenge fantasies aren’t entirely alien to the movie industry, but they’ve always been exercises in sublimation, Superman being only the most obvious. “Jews have gone from being nonexistent in film to being thoroughly represented, but no Jew would ever make a film like Inglourious Basterds,” Gabler said. “It’s too brazen.”

Tarantino in person is both larger and saner than he seems in his films and in his public appearances. He is a polite and enthusiastic host, and he spent part of a July afternoon with me analyzing German cinema of the 1920s, World War II iconography, and the career of Joseph Goebbels, which seems to fascinate Tarantino endlessly. (Goebbels provides one of the most amusing moments in Inglourious Basterds, crying when Hitler praises his latest film. “If Hitler says that this is the greatest movie you’ve ever done, I can see Goebbels getting choked up,” Tarantino said in explaining the scene. “When Harvey Weinstein does that, I get a tear in my eye.”) Tarantino was less thoughtful on the subject of torturing Nazis, but deliberately so. Excessive thoughtfulness, he suggested, is the reason his Jewish friends find most Holocaust movies so exasperating.