My problem with this film is that it tends to present the protagonist as far more intelligent and articulate than the average white supremacist.
Conversely, his best friend and fellow Nazi, the fat guy, is presented as the biggest idiot on the planet.
In reality, I think most of these people are somewhere in the middle. They're certainly nowhere near as self-aware and thoughtful as Derek (if they were, it's doubtful that they would ever have been attracted to white supremacy to begin with), but like any real human being, even Trump, they're not going to be a two-dimensional moron.
Perhaps Nazis like the film because Derek is presented as this almost superhuman and glorified figure, who is smart, highly literate, wise, reasonably good-looking, and single-handedly outplays a whole team of black men at basketball (*eyeroll* yeah, right...) Sure, he does, eventually, change, but for a large portion of the film he's like a Nazi-superman.
Also, too many of the scenes of Nazi violence, like the attack on the Korean supermarket, are presented in picture-pretty black-and-white slow motion rather than anything uglier and nastier, and thus befitting the characters' vile nature.
For a far more credible and nuanced film about white supremacists, that presents these people as neither heroes/anti-heroes, nor completely braindead ciphers, I'd recommend Daniel Radcliffe's recent Imperium. The white supremacists in that film are not presented as remotely appealing, but nor are they presented as two-dimensional and unbelievable monsters. Instead, they're depicted as relatively mundane thugs or family men and women, and we get a sense of why they harbour such messed-up and stupid ideas, without the film remotely making sense of their twisted logic.
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Thrillhouse (1509)
6 years ago
Why am I not surprised that your credible alternative to an articulate white guy beating a black guy in basketball is Imperium's nationwide conspiracy by a motley crew of drunks, screw ups, and talk radio fans, coordinating to execute a plot to destroy the entire globalist cabal by using highly advanced technology, only to be twarted by a plucky FBI agent brave enough to penetrate their vile underworld? I don't buy the basketball game either but that's just patronizing.
Let's keep something in mind here. This is a movie made by the most ethnocentric group of people in the world in order to condemn the ethnocentrism of the least ethnocentric group of people in the world, as a violent death spiral. You can afford to be just a tad more charitable in your willingness to grant agency to the forces of the underclass.
Let's look at it a different way. At heart the conflict here is about whether Nazis are threatening or pathetic. They can't be both at the same time so they have to be portrayed as one or the other. Back on planet Earth, formerly esteemed scientist and founder of DNA James Watson had his Nobel Prize retroactively taken away because of a comment he made about race and IQ. Of course Nazis are going to be low status, if you make them that way. The internet has to be censored like crazy to keep us in line. News articles can't have comment sections, or they'd get flooded with Nazism. It's clearly threatening and maybe it ought to be. I recall one side saying Iraq had WMDs.
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[deleted]
6 years ago
Somehow, I posted my message in the wrong thread. It was meant to be a response to an OP asking why the film was so popular among the far-right.
Anyway, as for your response, I'll first start off by saying the following: I certainly wasn't on the side that said that Iraq had WMDs. I was against the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. I trusted the intel provided by the UN weapons inspectors which nothing in Iraq despite scrupulous investigation. And I always had my doubts about the pretext for invading Afghanistan, which was confirmed when Bin Laden ended up being found in Pakistan, a supposed US ally (like Saudi Arabia...Ha!)
As for Imperium, I thought the white supremacists, although screw-ups, were still portrayed more credibly than American History X, where they're mostly a braindead rabble led by a basketball prodigy/borderline genius (why is he hanging out with these people again? Do they make him feel superior, and if so, doesn't that make him an even bigger a-hole than we're led to believe?), or something like Mississippi Burning, where they're the typical toothless and grotesque rednecks. In Imperium, they're presented as a 'diverse' (not in the sense the word is commonly used today) group of disaffected youngsters and thugs who dress up in the full Nazi regalia, and ultimately more subtle, and thus more sinister/effective family men and women, who dress like any other regular suburban family. The 1988 Debra Winger/Tom Berenger film Betrayed also did a good job of presenting these people as credible 'family' men and women, with businesses and proper jobs, whilst not shying away from their malignance of their philosophy.
Of course, I suspect, in view of your rabid anti-Semitism, you probably admire these people, and so, I guess we'll both have to agree to disagree with respect to our viewpoints, although I'd hope that you'd eventually see how stupid it is to castigate an entire group of people simply on the basis of their ethnicity.
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Satan2016 (25525)
3 years ago
Bin Laden simply crossed the border because the US could not invade Pakistan. Afghanistan will be safe for terrorists in a few months!
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