Well, it was pretty interesting. Against rare and and stunningly preserved footage, almost none of which I'd seen before (and I'm practically David Irvingesque in my connoisseurship of Nazi film footage), Kenneth Branaugh reads excerpts from Goebbels' diaries with suspicious enthusiasm, tracing the rise and fall of the Third Reich through his oddly girlish writings.
No, I'm not suggesting Goebbels was a little light in the lederhosen. He wasn't, by all accounts, but I don't know how else to describe it. When he's happy you can practically see him jumping up and down and clapping his little hands with joy; when he's sad, you imagine him burying that pointy pockmarked face in a pillow to stifle his sobs. Branaugh is pretty good at bringing this out.
So the film footage itself is fascinating and Branaugh is as good as he usually is. The only bothersome thing was that the movie completely elided the fact that, even after Hitler took power, Gobbles was a class-struggling, purge-urging, capitalism-baiting socialist who described the coming workers' Utopia in the same way Dorothy described Oz (girlishly). Not to sound like John Ray or anything, but the Nazis were socialists--only for as long as they needed to be, it's true, but socialists nonetheless. Especially Gobbles. Here's a small hunk of a pamphlet he wrote in 1932 that lays out the Party's socialist plank:
The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism....A movie that professes to trace Gobbles' life shouldn't ignore a crucial aspect of it.
And again, just because I call him "Gobbles" doesn't mean I think he was homosexual, or that homosexuals have Nazi tendencies (as opposed to wanting merely to dress like them sometimes) or that there's anything at all wrong with being a homosexual. At all. It's just that, whether he was gay or straight, Gobbles gobbled Adolf Hitler--figuratively speaking, probably. And that's really bad.
Update: Here's the URL to Irving's website's movie section (no linking allowed): http://www.pzg.biz/films_nazi_propaganda.htm. Just don't buy anything. Who cares if the freak gets a couple of hits he wouldn't have otherwise?
Update II: The Drunkablog is still upset, however, that Irving is serving a three-year sentence in a Vienna jail just for exercising his right of free speech. Where's Mike Littwin when you need him?
Update III: One serving of Irving supplies 100 percent of your daily neo-nazi requirements.
No comments:
Post a Comment