“Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” - Carl Sagan
What draws one to a particular mindset? What is the algorithm—political, social, psychological—that makes an ideology attractive to us? Do the collective torments of a society at large weigh more, less or equal to the personal yearnings of an individual in the drift toward a system of belief? Why are there (STILL) so many goddamn Nazis? These are the timeless questions that every self-identified progressive with a taste for black metal must ask themselves while riding the metro to a protest against ICE and bumping Burzum on headphones. What do my aesthetic predilections say about my philosophical bent, and is it possible for them to be completely at odds with one another? When does curiosity about a reprehensible movement or moment in human history mutate into uncomfortable fascination? Am I allowed to listen to Death in June? Should I? Do you?
I remember being in Bologna, Italy during a year where a local election was taking place. All along the latticework of ancient streets, pasted onto walls that had weathered the medieval and Renaissance eras, were campaign posters too numerous for the comprehension of a young man accustomed to our incredibly limiting two party system. One of the posters was for “The Fascist Party of Italy.” I must have been visibly taken aback, and my friend and tour guide Rocco Rambino (his real name!!) explained that they always “surprisingly get a lot of votes.” At the time this seemed nuts to me, but I am currently living in a suburb near the coast of generally Democrat-leaning Maryland and I can still spot “TRUMP 2020” flags on my daily walks, even though the election that he lost took place five months ago. I don’t mean to simplistically equate the contrarian and casually racist inanity of my boat-owning, paunch-waving neighbors’ attempts to own the libs with what is probably the ominously well-organized and ideologically dedicated composure of scary European fascists who are likely, it must be said, wearing very cool boots. I’m just observing that the attraction to inexcusable and openly intolerant ideas runs the spectrum of humankind and certainly doesn’t seem to be waning over time. If anything it is worse now—or at least more obvious—than when I was asking my friend stupid questions about pizza in Bologna.
German cinema has been wrestling with the rise of Nazism since the fall of the Reich, and the filmmakers of the Soviet world have been dealing with the sociopolitical issues of their respective nations—often with subtle aesthetic choices and subliminal subversive messaging to avoid the axe of political censorship—for roughly a century. These are societies that have never had the option of ignorance; the scars of their historical hubris remain nakedly visible in the monumental ruin of war, populations decimated by hunger and genocide, landscapes forcibly mutated beneath the tread of the tank and the bomb-born craters of aerial raids. My German-born film professor spoke of growing up at a time where it was entirely possible that the schoolteachers who taught him and the police officers who regulated him could have been ex-members of the Nazi party. They didn’t all just disappear. How many of them morphed into the more internationally palatable corporatist stormtroopers of free-market capitalism? How many just cut their losses and pivoted to Communism? I can’t make much of an educated guess on the trajectories of post-War European fascists, but I’ve spent my entire life parsing the totalitarian undertones of “American Exceptionalism.” When I look at a Trump flag at this point in American history, I basically see a burning cross. When I look at a dollar sign, I see a swastika.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was not quite a fascist, but he was certainly an authoritarian. Can his well-documented abuses of power be justified by the sublime end product of a film like 1979’s The Third Generation, which skewers with absolutely no prejudice the entire sociopolitical spectrum of his native land? Where are the American films that do the same? Robert Altman’s ensemble opuses were incisive towards the greasy wheels of our political parties and the idiosyncratic subcultures we’ve constructed along the edges of their binary power struggles. Kelly Reichardt has pinpointed the incursion of inequality into different moments of our history with Meek’s Cutoff in 2010 and again in 2019 with the phenomenal First Cow. Spike Lee righteously continues to point the finger/camera at the contradictions & injustices we’d rather ignore. The Western genre reinvents itself at least once per decade. And, thankfully, there is a growing body of work from American BIPOC, women and other marginalized groups finally being given growing degrees of opportunity to focus on their specific grievances and celebrations.
But what of the inherent and ongoing privilege that our country enjoys through its brutal worldwide oppression of other societies and cultures? What of the slaveowners on our currency? Who will provide the total evisceration of our existence and the “values” that make it possible, the unflinching dissection of a bloodsoaked empire that preaches democracy while placing children in cages, denying its own citizenry reasonable healthcare and universal access to the tools of our economic future, and blatantly ignoring the autonomy of less powerful nations? Which celebrities will star in a film that exposes how their enormous comfort is reliant upon the misery of the world’s unfortunate? And who will bankroll it? Amazon? The bizarre combination of American pride promoted through written-by-the-winners history books and the creeping sense of dissatisfaction born of unequal access to our grotesquely commercialized & materialistic culture has manifested itself in some scary trends, particularly the appeal of increasingly unhinged and well-armed fringe movements predicated on providing some vague answer to the questions nobody is asking. And nowadays it honestly doesn’t seem much better in most of Europe, despite the best efforts of their most perspicacious filmmakers.
This week I want to focus on two classic films that try to understand their characters’ urge toward submission, and the broader implications of a society’s totalitarian spiral.
THE CREMATOR (1969) dir. Juraj Herz
My favorite of all New Waves was the Czech one, and Juraj Herz might be the least celebrated participant, likely due to his preference for the horror genre. But even his horror films aren’t without their acerbic sense of black humor. This is a guy who made a movie about a sports car that runs on human blood, after all. Though it can be hard to stand out in a movement that gave the world visionaries like Miloš Forman (who would later become quite successful in the States) and Věra Chytilová (whose Daisies from 1966 remains, for me, the quintessential example of an indescribable masterpiece), Herz’s 1969 film The Cremator might just be the pinnacle of the entire “Czechoslovak film miracle.” An exemplary piece of Vantablack-dark humor and all-but-winking social commentary, its DNA can be found in films as varied as Harold and Maude (1971) and Man Bites Dog (1992). But The Cremator stands unique in its effort to connect the personal perversions of its increasingly psychotic subject to the incipient ills of his society as a whole.
Based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks, a Czech novelist primarily concerned with the era of German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War 2, the film takes place in 1930s Prague and follows the unreliable narrator Kopfrkingl, the cremator at a crematorium which he lovingly and disturbingly refers to as his “Temple of Death.” Immediately upon his introduction we can sense that there is something wrong with Kopfrkingl. Quick, jarring edits allude to his discombobulated mental state, and the use of fisheye lenses is stifling and disorienting, creating the sense that we are trapped within his madness ourselves, our view of the world as skewed and bizarre as his own. This is heightened by his tendency to address the camera directly, usually during some bout of dialogue that bridges several ingenuous changes of setting/time that occur both smoothly and abruptly, further enveloping us within the film’s cocoon of uncertainty. Kopfrkingl rambles endlessly about the “liberation of souls” through cremation, the benefits of an abstinent lifestyle (despite his continual indulgences in booze and visits to a brothel), and his obsession with the Dalai Lama and the reincarnation espoused by Tibetan Buddhism. Dude is a nut, but a strangely charismatic one. We cringe in discomfort as he alienates his family and coworkers, and we can see the writing on the wall as his obsessions search desperately for an ideology in which to contain them, but we nevertheless take a perverse pleasure from our time spent with him.
Kopfrkingl is a haunted man. The spectre of death, here represented by a silent woman with long dark hair, follows him everywhere. Is she simply a representation of his macabre occupation, or a premonition of the concentration camp victims he will eventually help to incinerate? He is also haunted by the sense of inadequacy he seeks to suppress, increasingly worsened by an old colleague who has bought into the Nazi propaganda that German occupation of Austria and eventually Czechoslovakia will help to alleviate the misery of rampant unemployment (uh-oh, sound familiar?) and repeatedly harps upon the unfortunate racial impurities of Kopfrkingl’s wife and co-workers. Kopfrkingl wants nothing more than to fit in, to be an integral part of some idealized society, free of the limiting and shameful nature of his own psychosexual addictions (his eye perpetually drawn towards nude, disembodied women) and hypocritical elitism (his own preaching of abstinence, undercut by his intake of alcohol and prostitutes, will fit right in with the Nazi propaganda of a superior culture achieved and upheld by base corruption and outright genocide). He is a bolt of unhinged energy in search of a conduit. Repressive regimes are built upon the capturing and molding of such fervent and unmoored seekers, from the Nazis to Amway, Scientology to Qanon.
There’s a lot going on in The Cremator, and I’m not particularly well-versed in the political and economic landscape of eastern Europe between the two world wars. Much of Herz’s family was killed during the Holocaust, so an interrogation into the origins of Czech collaboration with the Nazis is an understandable preoccupation for him. But it’s hard to watch the film today without recognizing the underlying root of Kopfrkingl’s malleable madness. His obsession with cleanliness and purity clashes with the reality of his desires and results in a psychological schism. Such a rift can lead to self-loathing and violent reckoning, as in the case of an unhinged sad-sack who murdered eight people at Asian spas in Atlanta in some misguided and deeply racist & misogynistic attempt to eliminate the “source” of his own desires which his fundamentalist church had convinced him were “evil.” But Kopfrkingl never reaches the breaking point; he simply adjusts his own sociopathic belief system to fit more comfortably within the tenets of the Nazi party. How many directionless American citizens, disenfranchised by the emptiness of the world so ludicrously promised to them by birthright, are currently doing the same thing? Until we can offer them some positive, meaningful alternative, there’s no telling how many people on the verge of lunacy will be drawn in by these heinous organized forces. There goes the racist, boat-owning neighborhood!
THE CONFORMIST (1970) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
If Pier Paolo Pasolini perfectly encapsulated the horrors of absolute power with his 1975 stomach-churner Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom, then Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist lays out a convincing blueprint for the banality of collaboration that made it all possible. But while Pasolini strips fascist ideology of its ornate trappings to reveal the hollow-eyed cadaver hovering at its center, Bertolucci goes in another direction entirely. His titular character, bland and dispassionate in a way that only the elite offspring of familial wealth ever can be, remains ensconced in the decadent style and visual architecture of an opulence maintained by the calculated suppression of any argument against it. To put it bluntly, Bertolucci’s film is fascist. The shots are all tightly composed, perfect in their sense of symmetry and strictly controlled in their approach to movement. There isn’t an unintended blemish in sight, and the compositions are nearly breathtaking in their rigidity. The sheen of perfection that fascist movements rely upon is here recreated faithfully, with the ultimate effect of further highlighting the moral rot and emotional vacancy at its core.
Marcello Clerici is a pawn for the National Fascist Party of Mussolini who has been assigned to assassinate his former professor, Quadri, now an active leftist in exile in Paris. Like Kopfrkingl in The Cremator, Clerici is a man obsessed with the desire to enjoy a “normal life.” We get the impression that his own family’s decadence has resulted in a descent into privileged, drug-addled madness, a source of shame for Clerici who wants nothing more than to maintain his status within the socialite realm of Italian tradition. He arranges to be married, despite his indifference towards his fiancé, out of a desire to simply possess a wife and children like everybody else. He seems to harbor no real commitment to any ideology (his former professor and would-be victim remembers him as a political opposite to what he has become), but he goes along with his assignments in the interest of “just following orders.” Soldiers, police officers and border patrol agents all do this when they kill people. Clerici just wants to belong; possessing no interests or substance of his own, he openly longs to become a cog in any wheel that will have him.
And like Kopfrkingl, he harbors a secret compulsion towards a perverse amalgamation of sexuality and death that would be, on the surface, decried by his chosen ideology (although history would reveal that the major fascist parties, and the Nazis in particular, leaned pretty hard in the direction of sexual perversity and death). The Conformist is a machine greased by the oil of flashbacks, and through several we become privy to an event in Clerici’s childhood when an older chauffeur shows him a pistol and proceeds to seduce him. The young boy Clerici goes along at first, before taking up the gun and shooting his molester, and then fleeing; a crucial moment in his psychological development, ignored and suppressed in the interest of fitting in. “Just following orders.” Unlike Kopfrkingl, this undercurrent of morbid sexuality doesn’t seem to warp his psyche in any meaningful way; on the contrary, he quite successfully and chillingly compartmentalizes it and moves on. Clerici erases his own true identity, presenting a clean slate to the outside world onto which any convenient image may be cast. Although his automaton march towards conformity is very briefly and mildly threatened by a romantic curiosity towards Quadri’s wife, he ultimately gives in again and does nothing to prevent her eventual murder at the hands of his collaborators. That he himself cannot carry out the murder is not evidence of some internal struggle; it is merely a testament to his utter and total cowardice.
By the end of the film, fascism has fallen, the head of a Mussolini statue is dragged through the streets, and Clerici pivots once more, not in the interest of self-preservation, but with the more mundane goal of simply changing with the tide. He betrays a former friend to the advancing antifascist mob, and the film ends with him shrouded in darkness within a literal catacomb, glancing back over his shoulder through the bars of his own personal prison. Totalitarian states may be envisioned and shaped by charismatic lunatics, but they overwhelmingly rely on the banal acquiescence of average people too afraid or apathetic to rock the boat. Fear and apathy, though seemingly contradictory, can work quite well in tandem to direct influence onto a society struggling with its sense of identity. Fear and apathy also happen to be the primary twin phenomena not only resultant from our current iteration of American culture, but quite actively encouraged by it. In tumultuous times (hint: these are definitely tumultuous times) it is vital to be selective of the narrators you choose to pay attention to, and the flashbacks of history should never be suppressed in the interest of a smooth running order. The horrors that we self-righteously analyze and collectively file away have not disappeared. They can happen here. They are happening here.
*this stomping noisepunk 7” that I almost forgot about seemed to fit really well here, but I also want to highlight two fantastic compilations from the countries that gave us this week’s films. Night Dwellers: Reek of Daylight is a start-to-finish slugfest of metal/punk compiled and released by some metal/punx in Prague. I don’t know if all of the bands are Czech, but I do think they’re all connected to that scene in some way. And they all fucking rip. Mutazione: Italian Electronic & New Wave Underground 1980-1988 is exactly what it advertises. The variety on display here is truly impressive, and every single track is weird and cool in its own weird, cool way. Italy rules!