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cimoreneSome Finnish nerds made a cult comedy movie about Nazis having survived to the present day on the moon years ago, and it is now getting a sequel where they have a Nazi base in the center of the Earth and in which Hitler rides a T-rex.
The preview for this showed before Venom, and I was chided, “Come on, Nazis on dinosaurs! Isn’t it a LITTLE bit funny?” while around me the theater gasped and laughed like a roomful of 10-year-olds watching the take-out-a-helicopter-with-a-car scene from Die Hard 4.
(...By the same christian theologian friend who thought I was being a bit too Sensitive Jew about Finnish public school curriculum teaching the debunked Jewish Deicide charge (which was officially repudiated by the Vatican, that well-known progressive bastion, over 50 years ago)... to all the Finnish Lutheran second-graders in the country. )
“I’m just not able to find Nazis funny,” I said with ten thousand 😐-faces.
Interesting that this bold bad-taste comedy, essentially treating Hitler as another silly genre trope - dinosaurs:Hitler :: Alien:Predator, or sharks:tornado - is coming from Finland, a country which produces very few genre movies and one of the few countries officially allied with Germany in World War 2 (the USSR was trying to conquer Finland again, so they wanted to help whoever was distracting them). That’s a remarkably relaxed and comfortably distant view of Nazis; they seem to regard them as more embarrassing (e.g. the fact that Nazi officers who were wounded were sent to Finland to recuperate during the war) than scary or enraging.
That distant view is by definition not personal, and so it's not available to anyone for whom the topic is personal. It’s not accessible to me because my paternal grandmother’s parents emigrated from Poland with their immediate families only in the 1930s; because I was too young to have read The Devil's Arithmetic when I did, and wouldn’t have read it if books came with detailed warnings; because the Danish Jewish Museum was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti shortly after I missed my opportunity to go inside because it was closed on my free afternoon in Copenhagen.
Yeah, mocking fascists is important, mainly because it’s exactly what they don’t want. That needs to continue, remembering that they’re small, contemptible people, even as the evil they do is real and serious. (Both of these things are painfully evident from the news that’s come out of the US over the past few years - stories which emphasize one point or the other often competing for airtime.) The Finns behind this movie can’t have missed that news, so maybe it will inform the film. And maybe it will ridicule the Nazis mercilessly, and not just present them as comical T-rex riders - likely, though I still wouldn’t watch. Since I find material about the Holocaust extremely unpleasant to consume, I choose to in non-fiction only; so I wouldn’t watch even an on-the-nose, current-events-inspired film motivated directly by politics that agreed exactly with my own, if it also featured Hitler in a new fictionalized setting. It could do a fantastic job of mocking fascists without being that, and I hope it does, but maybe still remove the World War II history in your own eye before pressing someone else (not even limited to those of jewish descent) on their ability to relax about Hitler.
The preview for this showed before Venom, and I was chided, “Come on, Nazis on dinosaurs! Isn’t it a LITTLE bit funny?” while around me the theater gasped and laughed like a roomful of 10-year-olds watching the take-out-a-helicopter-with-a-car scene from Die Hard 4.
(...By the same christian theologian friend who thought I was being a bit too Sensitive Jew about Finnish public school curriculum teaching the debunked Jewish Deicide charge (which was officially repudiated by the Vatican, that well-known progressive bastion, over 50 years ago)... to all the Finnish Lutheran second-graders in the country. )
“I’m just not able to find Nazis funny,” I said with ten thousand 😐-faces.
Interesting that this bold bad-taste comedy, essentially treating Hitler as another silly genre trope - dinosaurs:Hitler :: Alien:Predator, or sharks:tornado - is coming from Finland, a country which produces very few genre movies and one of the few countries officially allied with Germany in World War 2 (the USSR was trying to conquer Finland again, so they wanted to help whoever was distracting them). That’s a remarkably relaxed and comfortably distant view of Nazis; they seem to regard them as more embarrassing (e.g. the fact that Nazi officers who were wounded were sent to Finland to recuperate during the war) than scary or enraging.
That distant view is by definition not personal, and so it's not available to anyone for whom the topic is personal. It’s not accessible to me because my paternal grandmother’s parents emigrated from Poland with their immediate families only in the 1930s; because I was too young to have read The Devil's Arithmetic when I did, and wouldn’t have read it if books came with detailed warnings; because the Danish Jewish Museum was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti shortly after I missed my opportunity to go inside because it was closed on my free afternoon in Copenhagen.
Yeah, mocking fascists is important, mainly because it’s exactly what they don’t want. That needs to continue, remembering that they’re small, contemptible people, even as the evil they do is real and serious. (Both of these things are painfully evident from the news that’s come out of the US over the past few years - stories which emphasize one point or the other often competing for airtime.) The Finns behind this movie can’t have missed that news, so maybe it will inform the film. And maybe it will ridicule the Nazis mercilessly, and not just present them as comical T-rex riders - likely, though I still wouldn’t watch. Since I find material about the Holocaust extremely unpleasant to consume, I choose to in non-fiction only; so I wouldn’t watch even an on-the-nose, current-events-inspired film motivated directly by politics that agreed exactly with my own, if it also featured Hitler in a new fictionalized setting. It could do a fantastic job of mocking fascists without being that, and I hope it does, but maybe still remove the World War II history in your own eye before pressing someone else (not even limited to those of jewish descent) on their ability to relax about Hitler.
