you're too young & eager to love

After watching Inglourious Basterds, I decided to try my hand at writing some of the characters. Initially, I wanted to try Landa (because, hello, Christoph Waltz, you are phenominal) but ... he was too difficult. I didn't feel up to the challenge.

I focused instead on Archie Hicox and Hugo Stiglitz. Michael Fassbender as Hicox intrigued me; he's charming and clever. He's also very skilled with accents. Stiglitz doesn't say much throughout the film but, as one of the Basterds, he's given more of a background than most of the others.

I didn't achieve much. I need to rewatch the movie. But here are my attempts!

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Hugo Stiglitz, the German. He’s a rough-hewn blonde, built of rigid lines; the man’s a brute, but he sharpens his knife with a skill and precision that suggests patience. It’s something that Hicox does not expect, and so he does not trust it either. This man, he thinks, will be the first to undo them. The least likely to remain stable. The wedge of his jaw, the coiled violence of his strong arms – there’s a simmering instability lurking beneath that silent bearing.

Hicox drapes himself against the doorframe, body slanted, with the cut of his spine suggesting an offhand authority. He is a lieutenant, after all. But Stiglitz glances up and catches him with his eyes – a look that, momentarily, has him pinned like a gasping, paralyzed moth, through the gullet.

When the Basterd draws his blade, without haste, down the strip of sharpening leather, Hicox feels flayed, pink and exposed.

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Stiglitz smokes his crumpled cigarette down to the filter. He speaks English with an accent, but his clever tongue is naturally rough.

Hicox’s English is sweetened by being British. A touch of upperclassman to go along with his scotch and water. Teasing like the point of light at the tip of a sword.

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Stiglitz scalps a Gestapo. Plunging the knife deep into the man’s head, he carves along the curve of his brain. Fragments of blood and bone cling to his hands; there’s blood on his jacket and shirt, on a scrape of skin by his neck.

The lieutenant feels a little sick. Not because he has not seen violence before, but because the German is calloused and quick, unflinching and seemingly uncaring about his role as a butcher. When he looks up, he salutes Hicox with a thin, mocking smile.

“You really are quite skilled with that.” The knife, he adds to himself, but his eyes motion towards the blade.

Stiglitz murmurs something that might sound like practice, but he likes how the other man sounds impressed.

Later, they slosh back a few mouthfuls of scotch together.