Saturday, June 5, 2010

Oh those Nazis, they can't do a thing right.

Encountered at 2:55am approx, Sunday

Ever since Downfall I’ve had a bit of an issue with the believability of Nazis in films. They’re such a pervasive cultural phenomenon that their characterisation often lapses into the realm of parody, with writers clumsily pinning on trope after trope like so many iron crosses.

Imagine my delight this morning when I turned on the TV to discover a menacing Kommandant standing over two captured Americans. He was in a long black leather jacket and pedantically neat and greyfaced; the dark, immovable, inhuman pillar* to the Allied prisoners’ ruffled-and-bruised-yet-wide-eyed-and-righteously-defiant golden boys. When he spoke to his troops it wasn’t in German but English tinged with an accent that put me in mind of Colonel Klink.

His face was expressive as a ventriloquist’s (as all evil Germans’ should be), his hat was historically inaccurate and I was just about to change the channel when... “be sure to scream so vwe know vwen zey have found you”.

“Who are ‘zey’?” I wondered.

My masochism compelling me, I watched on.

And a good thing I did too, because the screen was quickly filled with screeching humanoid creatures with batlike wings. Only for a moment, though, because no sooner had the prisoners been left to their baffling fate than the scene had cut to one of a grizzled army major telling a young soldier of how he had lost his wife and son, and that the young soldier’s exfoliated, bleach-tooth’d face reminded him of his dead son’s to the extent that they could have been brothers. The implications were so subtle I wanted to cry.

Anyway, the screeching bat creatures. Desperately flicking through the TV guide for answers, I found this:

Sometimes I think there’s too much money going into the American film industry.

*curse you phallic imagery!

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