10 Fan Theories About Tarantino Movies That Make Perfect Sense

In Inglourious Basterds, World War II doesn’t end in 1945 nor does its main antagonist Adolf Hitler die a coward’s death by his own hand in a bunker below the streets of Berlin while his Nazi cohorts opted out of life in similarly spineless ways after realising the war would not be won by Germany

Instead, the war ends a whole year earlier in 1944 in a Parisian cinema showing a Nazi propaganda film where Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are gunned down and the rest of their upper-level co-conspirators die in a fiery explosion inside the theatre.

Better yet, their deaths are a collaborative effort between the very people the Nazis oppressed: the young Jewish woman who owns the cinema, her black lover and the titular Basterds – a Jewish-American commando unit employed to put the fear of god into the Third Reich by going around scalping and branding Nazis.

Within the Tarantino-verse, this apparently means that all films set within the Realer Than Real Universe after the end of World War II – like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and True Romance – follow this alternate version of history. Which, as we’re about to see, has far-reaching implications for the kind of society that develops in the Realer Than Real Universe.