Fascism And Life

Fascism and Contemporary Cinema: From Fantasy-Space to the Real

(Figure 1.1 The Blind Side) The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock; 2009) tells the true story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a near-mute, acquiescent black teenager from a broken home and family, who is taken in by a white Christian family in Tennessee. Despite his rotund and powerful figure, Oher is a very gentle human being, and in lieu of this fact, he is induced by his new family to try out for the private school football team as an offensive lineman. At first, Oher’s passiveness is too much; he is beaten often at the line of scrimmage by opposing defenders. But no worry: the white mother (Sandra Bullock; Figure 1.1) instructs her ‘son’ to imagine the quarterback “as [their] family in the backfield.” And sure enough he does so—becoming such a great offensive tackle (and wonderful human being) that he now plays pro football for the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL1. The film so far has been largely celebrated for its “irresistible emotional appeal” (Variety) and its being about “simple human decency and economic disadvantage than it is about racial inequality” (James Berardinelli).

Sandra Bullock has also been touted as a

sure-lock for an Oscar nomination. The film has struck with popular audiences, as well, grossing $100,238,841 as of November 29th . In its third weekend, with a gross of $20.4 million in sales, the film re-claimed the number one spot over the recently-crowned Twilight:

New Moon, a rare feat for any contemporary release, let alone over a record-breaking teenage vampire romance. All of this isn’t puzzling given the lucrative nature of “family” sports pictures and, perhaps, the well-timed release of an inspirational, conservative movie amidst an economic crisis and a purportedly socialist President with unpopular fiscal policies. Our question is not why now is this film possible; but, instead, why at all? Specifically, why is it that a film like The Blind Side is able to capture popular imagination by any means? I will not attempt to answer this question entirely—it lies beyond critical method, a sort of farrago of intricate philosophy and human behavior. Instead, I will answer it through an appeal to a kind of fascism (in cinema) that is little understood, recognized. Fascism has historically been positioned as a kind of ‘response to crisis’ associated with terrorizing regimes (Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet2) that sought to convert depreciated national spirit into something horrific, but nonetheless perceivable and real. I will argue against such a limited reading, not so much denying the realities of those fascisms but opening discussion to what Foucault (describing Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus) has called “the fascism of the everyday.”3 Fascist Cinema: Triumph of the Will First, a quick audit of Fascist cinema as-we-know-it:

(Figure 2.1 Triumph of the Will)

This still (Figure 2.1) is from Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The film depicts the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg and excerpts of speeches from Adolph Hitler and various high-ranking Nazi leaders. Hitler commissioned the film and served as an unofficial executive producer; his name appears in the opening titles. The overriding theme of the film is the return of Germany as a great power, with Hitler as the True German Leader who will bring glory to the nation. I will now break down the film in too separate categories: content and form. The two categories are not exclusive, nor are they impermissible to readings that incorporate both to determine the collective weight of fascism within Riefenstahl’s motion picture. I have defined the content in Triumph of the Will through evident themes that are universally recognized as fascist and therefore, as per popular opinion, disgusting and reprehensible3. The idea here is that individual content that capture the distinct milieu of German Fascism (re: the exact transcription of Hitler’s address, the plot of the Congress taking place, etc.) are less useful than detecting widespread motifs and calculable imagery for all of fascisms that seem to exist. As follows: (i.) Decadent appeals to transcendence; a force or realm beyond us (ii.) Notions of wholeness and unity; a noble turn away from individualism for the sake of the Party (iii.) The inauthenticity of the Other; the disgust of “those against us, who are not with us” (iv.)The incessant, undeniable need and desire to be led; a sole figure who will administrate/ calibrate the national imaginary (v.) The unfinished ‘great’ history of the Romans fused with Nazi essentialism; the privileged nexus of “the national situation” (Jameson) to the world-spirit.

This fascist content in Triumph of the Will alerts the viewer in obvious and manipulative manners. I’m thinking of the opening shot of the Hitler’s plane gallantly flying over the marching masses to Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (we will

discuss this form—the use of powerful and evocative music—in the next section). Or Hitler’s speech about the continuance of a unique task bestowed on the German people to carry out to the world. These contents always seem to point to something beyond themselves, packaged and loaded with meaning that escapes proper sublimation to the masses. Here words and images are merely potent and seductive signifiers; their insertion (and consequence) in a exceptionally German ‘langue’ is only mediated by those who carry out the speaking and deciphering. Next, form. Riefenstahl accomplished the dramatic representation of power (and, really, power deferred to an instrumental authority: the Führer) through a fetishization of power-structures and power-images. Obviously, there is the omnipresence of Speer’s neoclassicist architecture, such as the Zeppelinfeld (Figure 2.2) stadium and the Volkhshalle; Speer, moreover, was listed as the architect of the film, collaborating with Riefenstahl to design a majority of the sets used in the movie. These architectural marvels were Romaninspired, large rotundas and prominent columns that adorned enormous halls and gather areas that looked much like the Pantheon and the Coliseum. Encapsulated in these buildings were direct lines to a political imaginary that established itself in ancient Rome: the immaculate formation of the modern individual and the demonstrative participation in a Nation-Empire by all its people. Riefenstahl, understanding the force of such images, positions her camera to capture the illustrious heights of the buildings and architecture; skillful montage creates what I call ‘uneven affection-images’ by drawing inherently understood juxtaposition between crowd and ‘affection-object’: cheering masses—building; overwhelmed soldiers— Hitler; and so on. The idea here is that rather that despite the fact that many times the ‘affection-object’ is unnatural (re: it does not draw a causal relation to the crowd, even the

images of Hitler), it is nonetheless naturalized by the commanding influence of the political imaginary. Is this not precisely what is accomplished with the Nazis use of Wagner and other classical composers in the propaganda films? First, we have the grandeur of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg transition into Wessel’s Die Fahne hoch (Horst-Wessel-Lied); and as opposed to drawing out the unnatural connection between these tunes, image supersedes difference, fusing the two pieces into something greater than the whole.

(Figure 2.2 Triumph of the Will) Another operative move by Riefenstahl is her foreclosing of fiction by the treating entire feature as documentary. But let’s remember the contradiction with this feature in propaganda films: while the documentary does have an element of bias and persuasion, this is fundamentally confined, by the filmmaker, to an assembly of images and narrative as opposed to deliberate manipulation towards the a central message or theme. Susan Sontag’s points out the elaborate fantasy of Triumph of the Will and it’s innumerable seduction as a documentary in her article “Fascinating Fascism”; however, whereas Sontag thinks that anyone who suggests the film is such is being “ingenuous,” I would argue that this is the ingenious temptation of Triumph of the Will, which situates Fantasy, after all, as the sublime —that which, even when we are fully aware of its absurdity, does not relinquish its hold on us and its ‘reality effects.’

These are, so far, very limited and cursory observations of content and form in Triumph of the Will. What they should point to is a central strategy of fascism that takes on a territorializing logic of the cinematic process and cinema-image. While Riefenstahl’s film is composed of images and formal applications that are certainly Nazi-laden and Nazi inspired, the essential properties of the work, as I have emphasized, are applicable to a wide-range of applications, not only endorsement by other nation-states but by incorporative paradigms that necessitate the reproduction of its ‘wholeness’ and ‘goodness.’ A further point before we move on—this in order to anticipate the jump from stringent propaganda to the development of narrative forms of fascism. The fascist elements of, let’s say, a film like Triumph of the Will appropriate a singular cause: Nazism. But with the disentanglement of late capitalism from historical enterprises (as such seemed impossible through early renditions), this cause is one of flux; it escapes categorization. Let us be clear, instead, that while something such as The Blind Side sanctions and inculcates the white paternalism/capitalism/heterosexuality it does so not through any singular and exclusive contribution of imagery. Instead it seems to be a limitation of perspective, a reversal of fortunes; whereas I will argue that it discourages alternative, not only of what Mark Fisher describes (invoking Margaret Thatcher’s famous saying) of capitalist realism but also cinematic language and form itself. We should instead envision the transcendence of fascism as something that limits function, that suggests reality as something prescribed and knowable to a limited minority of exclusive interest and class.

Unquelled by geographical or historical singularities, Truth and Unity are inculcated through what Habermas has called “common sense” (literally, ‘sense held in common’). One of the presuppositions of neoliberalism is by its exposure—really, fostering—to postmodernism and consumer society that it effectively destroys the possibilities of Fascism, which is historically understood as a Modernist project. But consider the narrative described by David Harvey: “By the end of the 1960s embedded liberalism [the economic model of postWWII founded on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, namely strong ties to stable currency and large-scale social services, government projects] began to break down[…]Signs of a serious crisis of capital accumulation were everywhere apparent. Endnotes: [1] Consider the bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) discussion of the film Hoop Dream, which was unanimously celebrated for its stark look at black poverty and disenfranchisement. And while hooks celebrates the film’s initial ‘progressiveness’ what is elided, in the end, is a proper and necessary endorsement of the black individual who is shunned from the game of basketball, because of limited skill and opportunity. Rather than championing his ability to work through the educational system, the film performs a move of reducing his upward narrative, documenting it as essential failure by a individual with dreams beyond the reach of ordinary hard-working African-Americans. [2] The fascism of Pinochet was, of course, supported by U.S.-driven liberalization interests. [3] “Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Anti-Oedipus.” Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. University of Minnesota Press. 1983.