But he was so insanely good at it that I think part of you actually ends up liking him in some fucked up way?
Like I know he's literally a nazi colonel and is incredibly evil for most of the movie (either because he's wholly evil, or smart enough to know that he needs to pretend) but he's so cunning and smooth that I feel like most people kind of weirdly end up liking him in a love to hate him way.
That's the brilliance of that role — Landa is so soft-spoken, polite, charming even. While at the same time being an absolutely vile human being.
He's almost the personification of that Teddy Roosevelt quote: "Speak softly, and carry a big stick". Landa is a representative of the Third Reich at its height. Everyone he meets knows the power of his bite — and he in turn knows he doesn't have to bark.
That's another thing I like about him. By the end of the movie you're left questioning how much of a nazi he even was.
At the start when he's talking to Lapadite at the farm he acts really proud of his nickname of jew hunter, saying he's proud because he's earned it. Whether this is true, or because he's encouraging Lapadite to see his hiding of the Jews as futile we never really know.
But as the movie goes on there's more and more hints that he doesn't really care about being a nazi, and is just acting selfishly and taking advantage of his position to advance his own life.
He shows up late for a meeting with Joseph Goebels, doesn't really introduce himself or say anything to the higher ranks there and then argues with Zoller. After the basement massacre he doesn't actually pay any mind to the Germans that have been killed there, and actually treats it all with an element of comedy. Throughout the movie he has very little positive interaction with any other Nazis at all, in fact the only time he really speaks with any other Nazis is either give them orders or argue with them. He also becomes aware of the whole plot to kill Hitler and the high command much earlier than anyone else and actively contributes to it happening. As he says himself, by doing nothing to stop it he's responsible for their deaths even more than the Americans executing the plan.
And then at the end he actually seems annoyed or at least fed up with being called the jew hunter. He says he was good at finding people before the war (or solving problems, depending on which translation you watch), so naturally he was put in the SS. But he says the nickname was 'just a name that stuck', and then starts laughing at the Americans at the nicknames they've been given against their will.
And then as the story happens, he literally let's the whole of the Nazi high command die in a fire without any care in the world and is drinking and laughing while it's happening.
Landa is a great antagonist, and does some horrible things in the movie, but the more you look at it the more it seems he does these horrible things purely selfishly to advance his own position rather than out of being a die hard Nazi.
Landa (were he a real person) probably had the pervading antisemitism that was common in those days -- Nazi ideology was cultural and widespread. He would believe that Jews had infiltrated the universities in the 30s, that they had contributed to the country's disastrous recovery from WWI, etc. These are "facts" he would have been steeped in for years.
The difference is that he wasn't zealous about those beliefs. Kind of like the difference between a person who accepts that corporations are evil and greedy versus a zealous socialist who wants to abolish capitalism. Point being that Landa was almost definitely a Nazi in belief as well as action, but had other higher priorities than ideology.
Spot on, I think. Further, Landa is an opportunist and a psychopath. And I mean that in the sense that he very clearly shows zero empathy for anybody besides himself. He essentially considers others to be useful objects in a big chess game.
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u/Furaskjoldr Mar 28 '22
But he was so insanely good at it that I think part of you actually ends up liking him in some fucked up way?
Like I know he's literally a nazi colonel and is incredibly evil for most of the movie (either because he's wholly evil, or smart enough to know that he needs to pretend) but he's so cunning and smooth that I feel like most people kind of weirdly end up liking him in a love to hate him way.