What the F is Going on!?! Part Seven: Worst Case Scenarios

I picked out my relevant movies in the middle of the summer, and the context of their inclusion didn’t seem especially clear at the time, just that they gave a little insight to the ideology of the Trump Administration. As time has gone on, the parallels are much less hypothetical and much more directly relating to current events by the day. This is a bigger batch of movies from the watch list, but they very much show parallel ideology, worst case scenario playing out of events and a history of corruption of power in the United States as well. While some of these movies depict Nazi’s or Neo-Nazi’s or the death of heads of state, their inclusion is not meant as wishful thinking or meant to ascribe a label of ideology onto any current political figures that don’t identify in these ways.

Inglorious Basterds and Downfall both tell stories about the death of Hitler, one quite fictional and the other as historically faithful as possible. The aspect of Downfall (2004) that always stuck with me wasn't necessarily the deaths in the bunker or the famous moment Hitler chews out his generals and they realize it is all over; it is something about the way he talks. One of the running phrases Hitler keeps going back to is insisting on strength and his disgust at weakness. For me, it's this trait that brings so much light to the rise of Nazis in the ‘30’s that was the crux of propaganda that snowballed into broad hatred, militarism and genocide. I first saw Downfall a couple years after it released in ‘04, and this relatively subtle use of language rather than outright nationalism or antisemitism felt like the slightest of hints to the “shock and awe" mentality of military might in the war in Iraq. 

It wasn't even necessarily a Conservative or Republican point of pride to have a mantra of strength, but even more basic like something from frat guys and a "caveman mentality.” I had a roommate in college who was very involved with Rainbow House who was once present as one of the frats had to apologize for a homophobic incident and their defense was that it was practically an involuntary response to their “caveman mentality," a phrase that has stuck with me for decades. I always thought that was a phrase that relates to anyone that thinks society can be fixed with "common sense solutions," and that always seems like a lack of understanding of the complexity of the world, but it's the kind of distillation of issues that is easy to spread as propaganda. Common sense would tell us that with strength you can succeed and weakness something that must be done away with. 

It's the propaganda and the urge to seize power that brings the movie Vice (2018) to mind about the life of Dick Cheney. He used strength and weakness as a lever for his own enrichment. Yes, he became wealthy because of it, but Vice really shows that he used the desire of others for strength as a lever for himself to slide more political power in his direction. It's questionable if he really believed any of policy he worked toward, it seems he chose to be a Republican out of opportunity rather than ideology. In Downfall, it's clear that Hitler had blinders on, fixated on the ideology to boil it down to simply “strength.” Interestingly enough I had written this section before news of his passing, it's interesting to see that there is very little defense for his life and political career, he managed to have more power than the President as VP and used that power to launch us into two bad faith wars that were total disasters. The good things that could be said of him were that he was not against gay marriage, although he did little to bring our country closer to it, and he spoke out against Donald Trump, although he created the environment that would allow him to come to power.

It's that failed and disgusting fixation on strength and weakness that made Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) an unsettling movie for me for many years. In the historical fiction revenge film that shows us the brutal assassination of Hitler and most of the commanders in his orbit Tarantino seeks revenge on the Nazis not by posting that the Strength/Weakness dichotomy is a false and dangerous view of the world, but to assign strength to those fighting against the Nazis. In the end, the good guys are violent and demonic, purveyors over a fiery hell to burn the sinners. I always worried that this was entertainment to excuse romanticism for strength and revenge, and in some aspects of life this has been the route that has been taken. This could be a view of the behavior of Israel in Gaza, overextending punishment into revenge and even further to justify displacement and genocide, the evils that brought on the necessity for a Jewish state to protect against in the wake of the Holocaust.

Now, during the Trump years, as it is apparent that many Trump followers and some advisors have admiration for Hitler and his views, or with the deployment of masked ICE agents to work as a secret police that profile based on race rather than Constitutional requirements that an arresting officer clearly articulate about the commission of crime by the identified party are tactics that echo the rise of fascism in the ‘30’s. Since 2017 I have found myself coming back to movies set in World War II as reminders of the pain of that time and the morality of fighting back.

Unfortunately, we have a weird history in our country of those clinging to Nazi ideology and have made their own propaganda fantasizing political violence through domestic terrorism to spur a race war that would result in a fascist overthrow of the US Government. That isn't a new piece of fiction, but The Turner Diaries , a self-published neo-Nazi piece of fiction from 1978. It was the inspiration for the Oklahoma City Bombing and popularized The Great Replacement theory in American culture, that is often referenced in conservative news outlets. This was the inspiration for the real-life characters in the recent movie The Order (2024), about a conservative movement in the ‘80’s split between religious preaching and domestic violence. The Order is a shocking movie that feels like a piece of fiction until the ending reveals that it is entirely based on real people and real events.

One of the most horrifying movies of last year is the “what if” movie Civil War

(2024), about a group of journalists traveling through a war-ravaged United States on their way to interview a fascist President. While the film was written to blur parties and state affiliations on different sides of the violence, California and Texas are on the same side of the fighting, in a way that’s a bit of a mental stretch, it feels very real as a worst-case scenario. The Nick Offerman president is a repugnant propagandist lying with ease to the American people in a way that is hard to distinguish from Trump, right down to a violent distaste for journalists and foreigners. This is the dream scenario for the extremists of The Order, and a path that The Turner Diaries would dream of, truly a necessary cautionary tale of political violence. Thankfully, it still seems that political violence has not been accepted by the major news outlets, and as much as they are willing to settle lawsuits to gain access to the administration there still hasn’t been a complete pass for dishonesty or excessive force from the administration, even if coverage feels more cherrypicked. 

It became clear by 2008 that almost every facet of the Bush administration was a failure, President Bush himself seemed to come aware that others like Cheney were taking advantage of him and Cheney knew that he did not have a following for his own leadership. They continued the peaceful transfer of power, faded away and their bad acts have mostly been forgotten. Hitler couldn't separate his ideology from his sense of self, so he ended things in his bunker. Trump had the following, and the cult that he tried to overturn an election. He's back in power and apparently, he is building his own bunker.