Inglorious Bastards: Using Tarantino's Movie for a Teaching Case Study of Antisocial Personality

The character Colonel Hans Landa, in the academy award winning movie, Inglorious Bastards, offers an extraordinary case study teaching tool for high school psychology courses and for college students preparing for a career in psychology, psychiatry, criminal justice, and social work. Quentin Tarrantino, the producer, developed Christoph Waltz's character - Colonel Hans Landa to portray textbook behaviors associated with the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMR-IV) diagnosis of personality disorder. These disorders are antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder - or both.

My education and background, in the fields of teaching and mental health, draws me to constantly see potential learning experiences that can be developed by using movies as a case study. Students, in my experience, enjoy using a character or characters from a movie as the basis of a case study. Some movies I have used as case studies include: Breakfast Club, An Officer and a Gentleman, and now I would add Inglorious Bastardsto my list of case study movies.

Educational research indicates using the case study teaching technique is an effective approach to teaching educational content in a meaningful way. The value of the case study method is multi-faceted but mainly it supports students in developing analytical problem solving skills and teaches them to generate hypotheses about potential causes and the outcomes of various solutions.

There are many potential ways a case study using the movie Inglorious Bastards could be developed. One way would be to have students study what social, philosophical, and ideological message(s) the producer, Tarantino, was trying to make. Another way to use Inglorious Bastards as a case study would be to guide students to study the Christoph Walz's character Colonel Hans Landa. You could have students decide what, if any, DSM-IV diagnosis would fit the behaviors exhibited by Colonel Hans Landa. One last idea, about how to use Inglorious Bastards as a teaching tool, would be to have students compare the situations laid out in the movie with societal situations that are similar today.

Just having students watch the movie and have a discussion is not a case study. This is not to say it isn't an appropriate teaching lesson. To use Inglorious Bastards as a case study a teacher would design: 1) a set of questions or propositions students are to think about while watching the movie, 2) define areas of research to be conducted regarding the propositions defined, an 3) define the parameters of a final project.

Producer Tarantino's academy award winning movie Inglorious Bastards and the character Colonel Hans Landa is an excellent case study teaching project.