Downfall: WSJ Edition
…Or, Hitler finds out that The Wall Street Journal misses why his meme is funny…
I love the Downfall meme (as does the director of Downfall). I’ve been surprised by how much I like it. Describe it literally—Hitler rants anachronistically about some contemporary, usually minor, pop-cultural event—and doesn’t it sound, at best, quease-inducingly disrespectful?
The Journal explains it like this:
Compared to Hitler and the Nazis, the ultimate evil-doer and genocidal madmen, any person or event—your hot-headed boss or Kanye West’s insulting Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards—will instantly look bathetic and ridiculous.
I think the meme is actually much weirder and more subtle than that.
Watching it, we all know that we’re laughing at movie Hitler. Actual Hitler is not funny. Photos and, worse, film, of Hitler remain incredibly unnerving, as do any sounds and images of actual totalitarian regimes, right or left. Nuremberg rallies, North Korean synchronized dances, May Day parades, Nazi salutes… seeing people subsume their individuality gets no less creepy with distance.
Yet they’re all easily and frequently parodied. Anything that takes itself seriously (such as Faulkner or Hemingway or this blog post) gives parodists a foothold. But the parody has to be a reenactment. Its power is in catching the essence of its source, the weird combination of certitude and lack of self-awareness. The Stalin video that Journal says is mysteriously less funny than the Hitler parodies is indeed less funny, partly because Stalin is less histrionic, but mostly because it uses the real Stalin. It lacks the element of the absurd, the knowledge that we’re safely watching a reenactment. A video of Napoleon could be funny, were someone to make a dead-serious Napoleon movie; the hand at his chest, the hat, the shortness… there’s good material there. If Hitler parodies have a unique savor, it’s because we all know what he looked and sounded like at the podium, and because he still creeps us out.
The best Downfall parodies use contemporary subject matter to take down Hitler, not vs. versa. What a relief that unspeakable evil can brought low by a few well-timed profanities and in-jokes about Oasis or the Xbox!
For parodying contemporary politics, the Downfall clip is long enough to offer subtle twists before its end. The “Hitler Finds Out That Scott Brown Won In Massachusetts” version spends less time making fun of Scott Brown than venting liberal frustration about Barack Obama and the failure to pass health care reform last summer. “Now it drags on like Stalingrad,” Hitler mourns—doubly brilliant writing since it sounds slightly unidiomatic and translated.
I hadn’t seen the meme used by the right until a video one of the Journal commenters linked to, casting Obama as Hitler. Politics aside, it’s less successful as satire. Most of the parodies have Hitler as Hitler, commenting on us. Casting the contemporary target as Hitler is a different, nastier twist, which of course in this case is tapping into real world rhetoric. It loses the element of the absurd. Hitler commenting on Scott Brown is funny because no one is seriously suggesting the two have anything to do with one another. One could easily do a funny right-wing parody, but Hitler would have to be commenting on Obama, not as Obama. Bank bailouts vs. talk of change, keeping Guantanamo open, continuing Bush’s wars… agree or not with the policies, there’s a lot to parody.
But would the twist then end up criticizing Bush? Satire is subtle. The best has no mercy.
