This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Intro:
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-Fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far right's conversations. Daniel tells me what he learned from years of going where few of us can bear to go and listening to what today's far right – the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists, nazis, etc. – talk about and say to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their Youtube videos, their live streams, et cetera. The Waffle SS I call them, and do they waffle. Daniel listened so we don't have do. 1
Needless to say, these are terrible people and they say terrible things, so every episode comes with a big content warning. Daniel and I talk freely about despicable opinions and acts, and sometimes we have to repeat the despicable things that are said, including bigoted slur. So be warned. 2
Jack:
Okay, welcome to episode 32. A bit of a mental health break this week, a bit of a relaxing, less taxing episode for us. Because we're not going to be talking about anything serious. We're just – we're going to be talking about a movie. And maybe some other things too. Well, we're going to see where it leads us. 3
Sorry, Daniel, what's the movie we're going to be talking about again? 4
Daniel:
We're going to be leaning into the stereotype that all these nazis have about us and we're going to be talking about a Marvel movie today. 5
Jack:
[sarcastic:] Huh! 6
Daniel:
We're going to be talking about Captain America: The First Avenger. [laughs] 7
Jack:
Right. 8
Daniel:
The movie, the only movie about punching nazis, that's what this is. 9
Just – we realized from the last several episodes things got really, really dark and I don't want the listeners to slit their wrists or anything. And Jack and I both kind of come out of talking about movies and TV shows and books, you know, through this kind of leftist political lens. And we thought – and we do get requests from people who remember us from days, like hey, be really nice if you could do an episode not about nazis for once and so we thought, ah, let's do a movie discussion, just as a little bit of a palate cleanser, although we will also be talking, I think, I bit about how the modern alt-right and the modern far right movements interpret pop culture. Because they do a lot of that stuff. And we're going to talk about how these themes work into that. 10
So it's still kind of on brand for us. We're not going to make a habit of this, although we do have lots of requests of particular movies people would like us to cover. 11
Let us know what you think of this but this is sort of a little bit of a break episode. Just doing a little something different and giving people a little bit of a palate cleanser. And then next week we get back to the real hardcore nazi stuff, and I'm going to do a news roundup episode the next one. So look forward to that, that's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of Cantwell bullshit, even more than in the last one, so... yeah, that's kind of what this and the next episode are going to be. 12
Jack:
Great. I'll have to see if I can source some copyright-free news TV show music, you know – [beatboxes news segment jingle] that sort of thing. I'll have to see if I can find some... for next episode. 13
Yeah, so this one is about Captain America: The First Avenger and, you know, assorted, uh, phenomena. 14
I think you like this film, don't you? 15
Daniel:
I have a – again, just be clear here: the Marvel movies are my kind of comfort food these days. They're big. They're dumb. They're stupid. They're relentlessly pro-American imperialism. I cannot defend the war politics of these things. I cannot defend them on really any kind of artistic merit. But I do have a – an enjoyment of these. I really like these films, and I like this one quite a bit, although I have some structural issues with it. 16
I kind of like the thematics. I like the characters. I don't like, you know, the structure of it. I don't like the way it basically doesn't have a third act. It's kind of all setup and no payoff. 17
Jack:
Kind of like life in that respect. 18
Daniel:
[laughs] Right. You know – when your movie ends with and then your hero freezes for seventy years it is kind of difficult to figure out a good third act structure I guess, but... 19
Jack:
Yeah. 20
Daniel:
Yeah, no, I largely like the film. I like the franchise. I like the character. I like Chris Evans as the character. And I think there is some kind of interesting stuff going on here in terms of the way it plays with some of its – with some of the character beats. 21
And so, overall, I do enjoy this, although – I get accused all the time by nazis of like, you get all your politics from the Marvel movies. [sarcastic:] Yes, that's exactly what happens, I get all my politics from watching the Marvel movies. Clearly, I agree entirely with the politics of Captain America: First Avenger and in fact get all my moral rectitude from that. Because I've been programmed by, you know, those people with the three parentheses around their names. Yes, that's exactly true. That is exactly what's happening. 22
Jack:
That's right, yeah. We both do get all our politics from Marvel movies. That's why we're both so incredibly fond of billionaires who own towers with their names on. 23
Daniel:
[laughs] Exactly. That's why I'm a huge Elon Musk stan. I'm just constantly fawning over Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Yeah, George Soros, obviously. Praise be to Soros. 24
Jack:
That's right. Praise be upon him. 25
Daniel:
[laughs] Moving on... you're not a big fan of this one, right? 26
Jack:
No. I don't like this film. And I do enjoy quite a few of the Marvel movies, just as you say, on a level of, you know, switch your brain off and sit back and have fun entertainment. I enjoy quite a few of them on that level. 27
But this one – I do not like this one. I find this really very trying. 28
Like you say, about the end being just, he freezes, and then he wakes up, and then he waking up in the present day is the last five minutes of the film. I think – I mean apart from the fact that I'm just – even by this point, I'm so sick of origin stories. I think it would have been a much better idea to skip the entire World War II – what is actually, in actuality the body of the film – and just make the film about Captain America waking up in the present day. And dealing with something – in the present day throughout the entire film. 29
With flashbacks to his origin during the war, if you want to. 30
And then you could – you know, it could still be the Red Skull, because that's the classic Cap adversary. But it should be, you know, the classic thing where the Red Skull was – is woken up in the present as well. You know, like the Demolition Man thing. You know, you don't need to worry about originality with these things. 31
Daniel:
Right. Yeah, ripping off the plot of Demolition Man counts for originality as far as these scripts would be concerned at this point, right? 32
Jack:
Absolutely, yeah. 33
Yeah, because I just don't – I do not like – look, aside from the – I have all sort of problem with this film. Firstly, a lot of this film is kind of about bullying and embarrassment. And those are just things that I have – I just have a visceral reaction to that. 34
I do not want to watch anything that's about – that's focused on, as plot beats, bullying and embarrassment. And, like, I would say two thirds of this film is the – what's he called, Steve Rogers is this little squirt who's being bullied. And he's being embarrassed by – because he keeps on trying to join the army. And he's being embarrassed because his friend has to get him dates because he's so tiny. And he keeps on getting rejected and humiliated and beaten up and bullied. 35
And then he manages to get into the army. And he spends most of his time in the army being ridiculed and bullied and humiliated... [laughs] things like this. 36
And it's only really – and then he gets turned into Captain America. And then he spends a whole lot more of his time being humiliated and ridiculed and bullied, because he's forced to be this sort of ridiculous propaganda figure. And that, for me – I just find it grueling to watch. I don't know what that's entertainment. I don't know. 37
Daniel:
Sure – 38
Jack:
Maybe that's just me – my personal reaction to – 39
Daniel:
Yeah, no... no, that's interesting that you have that – there's is a nails-on-a-chalkboard element to the film, I think, for you. 40
Jack:
Yeah. 41
Daniel:
You know, it doesn't – to me, I think, it doesn't grate. I do wonder sometimes when we talk about these things if some of the tone that doesn't bother me that bothers you or kind of vice versa is sometimes just a difference between these sort of American versus British cultural sensibilities? Because I don't think this is, you know – I mean it does kind of focus on the fact that he is bullied and miserable and unhappy even as super soldier chad, you know. 42
There definitely a virgin-chad dichotomy going on here... which is, you know, kind of interesting. 43
I did try to rewatch this film as a nazi would see it. I tried to sort of – maybe we can kind of get into that: how... even though I couldn't find anybody talking about this film specifically, I think it would be interesting to come and sit and talk about what I think the nazis would kind of get out of this, you know. 44
Jack:
Not to derail you, but I do – I have thoughts about this. The fact that – the character pretty much explicitly goes from being an untermensch to being an übermensch, and that's kind of his arc through the film. I think there is a certain irony to that. 45
You know, his entire appearance, really, especially after the procedure, it's – well, I mean, he looks like a neoclassical fascist statue. And I think there's a whole complex of irony centered on that, isn't there. 46
Daniel:
Right. And that comes directly from the comics, which – I mean, the character is really from the – 1941 I think is when that – 47
I'm not a, I never got into comic books as a kid, and I think that's part of why I enjoy these movies more than a lot of people. It's because I don't have these sort of pre-existing relationships to these properties, except for just from the sort of cultural zeitgeist kind of idea. But I think there is a meaningful – if you just want to get into that idea – 48
Certainly, one of the big criticisms that the alt-right figures, you know – Enoch talks about this – these guys did kind of grow up with comic books and they'll, (a) spend an hour blaming us for getting all our morality from Marvel movies and talking about Marvel movies and such. Oh, they're going to [cheer?] when they see this episode comes out. They're just going to laugh and laugh and laugh. Yes, that's right, never enjoy things. You have to talk about race science all the time. 49
But, you know, their big criticism is that these are all – all the original comic book characters all were written by Jewish teenagers essentially, created by young Jewish men living in New York in the 30s and 40s. And so there is this – they call the comics medium the four-color Jew for instance. That idea that – you know, in real life I'm a – in real life I'm weak and scrawny and I'm this sniveling little Jewish characters, et cetera et cetera. Those are not my thoughts, this is sort of the interpretation that they kind of give this. 50
And then, but really I have this magic thing, it's going to make me be the übermensch, and that's the thing that I'm always supposed to be in real life. But ultimately, on the inside, you know, I don't come by that honestly, it's not who I am. Who I am is the scrawny kid. 51
And having the powers that Captain America gets, that Steve Rogers gets: that allows to him to beat up the Nazis, but ultimately, it's a fantasy. 52
It's embracing this sort of slave morality. We're supposed to be weak. We're supposed to protect to defenseless. As opposed to being strong and working together to keep the people who're subverting our society out. 53
And so they'll say it's just this hugely, quote-unquote – this Jewish narrative just runs over the entire thing and, like, infects your brain. They talk a lot about how pop culture just does that to people. It's just – and so, they actively try to avoid absorbing any of this – any of these kinds of films because – or really any pop culture, any television... It's like, cancel your Netflix, all that kind of stuff. 54
They avoid these kinds of cultural products because of the perceived Jewish influence that teaches horrifying lessons, like [sarcastic:] genocide is baaad 55
Jack:
Yeah. I bet they don't really. [laughs] 56
Daniel:
[laughs] Well, and then there is some guys, like – there is a show called The Pause Button, and it's part of the kind of extended TRS network. It's run by this guy Borzoi, who is also the co-host of The People's Square, with our good buddy Eric Striker.... one day we'll get to that episode, we'll see.... 57
Jack:
One day... 58
Daniel:
He's got some news happening, so we'll come back to that, but.... He actually does a movie and TV podcast where they'll sit and talk about, like, movies and TV shows, and – and kind of run it through this kind of nazi ideology, run it through, like, from their perspective. 59
Ultimately, really, that's a podcast that I'll listen to maybe thirty minutes of, you know, if I've seen the movie or the TV show and I want to get some context, and then usually turn it off because it's a really kind of obvious – they don't really go into any kind of depth on to, like, the properties, it's just about, oh, this is all Jewish and degenerate. 60
It's very rarely at all interesting on more than [the level of], like, okay, I get your idea, yeah, yeah, it's not Aryan enough, whatever. 61
Or they put these totally bizarre reading into things that kind of save it for them. I don't know, it's kind of interesting. I'd have to pick an example, but – they did not do this movie that I've seen, so unfortunately I didn't get to listen to that to play some segments or anything. 62
But yeah, no, there are people who will talk about pop culture, but – They'll sit and watch like one episode of Rick and Morty, and then criticize the entire thing based on, like, Morty is just kind of gross. Like, why would you want to – or Rick, Rick is – why does he have vomit on his mouth, I mean, it's just this Jewish stereotype of – disgusting – why can't we like look towards the ideal. And [they'll] completely miss, like, yeah, that's kind of the point, you're supposed to think he's nasty and disgusting. 63
There is no subtlety to life in these observations, right? There's no sense of, you sense, yeah, it's trying to do this. They just think the whole thing is just programming from these dastardly Cultural Marxists or whatever. 64
It's weird to listen to these guys try to criticize media because they're just so bad at it. But it does give you a real sense of, you know, kind of what the – what their overriding perspective is. 65
Because I can see the film industry as this sort of – this industry built on competing actors, you know – competing firms, companies, and then actors trying to get ahead, everybody is kind of squabbling, doing their thing, producing in this massive capitalist economy, trying to draw profits off of it and also trying to please their big-name stars. I mean, I can look at the industry as an industry. With horrifying things going on inside of it, et cetera et cetera, but – it's possible to understand this and draw conclusions based on that. Ultimately, when these guys talk about it, it's like, obviously they're just Jews, and they're just trying to subvert you. And that's kind of the end of the thing. 66
So how you do four-hour podcasts when that's kind of your answer, well – yeah, it's very difficult to listen to, which is why I don't listen to much of it. 67
Anyway, sorry, I've been talking too long and not about Captain America, so – we should maybe get back to it, I guess. 68
Jack:
No, no, that's really interesting. Although, you know, as so often happens with this, I'm kind of theoretically fascinated by this peep I get into this little subculture that I know nothing about, and very few people know anything about. And yet at the same time, as so often happens, it just turns out to be – well, they just sit around for hours, blaming the Jews. So it really just seems to always be – they sit around for hours, blaming the Jews. 69
Daniel:
It's slightly more sophisticated than that, but then it becomes, like, oh well, it's just homosexual degeneracy. Which is ultimately something that is fed into by the Jews. Which is – you know, ultimately. And so it's all about, like, how – you know, there is no sense of – one of the things that I find interesting in terms of, like, sociologically or sociopolitically, about these films, about the franchise in general, is that in the mid-80s there was an explicit project by the Department of Defense to essentially give away materiel to the film industry, so long as they gave script approval to the Department of Defense. 70
Jack:
Absolutely. 71
Daniel:
So all these movies are made with the explicit endorsement of the US military apparatus. [sarcastic:] And no, not like the Jews in Israel, okay? 72
Jack:
Yeah. 73
Daniel:
It's a different thing. [laughs] 74
But so, literally, there's like a handful of people who have just, like, certainly – who have just gone through all of the scripts that have been made, that have any kind of military theme, for the last thirty years. And it's been this explicit project of, like, after Vietnam, they made a bunch of movies that made the US military look less than spectacular, and we want to make that not happen anymore. Top Gun is kind of the first big example of that. 75
But all these films are made with the explicit endorsement of the US military. So of course they're going to portray the US military as heroic and victorious. Any kind of even glancing critique gets blunted by being kind of shunted off and used in their various ways of doing that. And so these films – ultimately, this becomes most apparent in the most recent one, Captain Marvel, in which the lead character literally starts wearing the colors of the US air force because of, like, heroism and, rah, Americanism. 76
It's one of the most tone-deaf things imaginable. 77
Any kind of systemic critique has gone completely out the window. Even pretending to exist by the modern – by the more recent films. So, yeah. 78
But again, that's something that you'll never hear them talk about. Like, oh, there's an explicit project by the Department of Defense to do this. And if they do bring it up, it's like, well yeah, because they're ultimately obeying their corporate masters in Israel. 79
Jack:
Yeah. 80
Daniel:
That's something that you and I get to say and go, this is an obvious thing that affects the entire world that these films are presenting. And, you know, this is a material thing that's in this history, that's literally in the closing credits for every one of these films, that we have to acknowledge before we can even begin to talk about how these films deal with American imperialism, American exceptionalism et cetera. 81
And I know that that's something that you've got kind of on your mind in terms of talking about the film. So, I don't know, do you want to try to kind of move into that? 82
Jack:
Well, I mean, you were talking about that real integration now between the United States military and Hollywood. Which is very real thing and a very big thing. People don't – I mean, you mentioned that crop of post-Vietnam movies. You know, you got The Deer Hunter. You got Apocalypse Now. You got various movies of that kind. And some of them are very fine movies. I mean, I think Apocalypse Now is an amazing film. But to be honest, I mean – I'm trying to think – there is one that Brian de Palma won – what's it called – 83
Daniel:
Casualties of War? 84
Jack:
Casualties of War, yeah. 85
That's possibly the strongest, in terms of its critique of what the US army got up to in Vietnam. But even that – it's very individualized. It's very particularized about – it doesn't take in the broad sweep of it. 86
Let's be honest here, you know, the US attack of Vietnam was a historic crime. It was practically genocidal. It was an act of aggression. What the US got up to in Vietnam is absolutely beyond atrocious. 87
And this crop of movies that are still – you know, spoken of routinely as anti-Vietnam war, anti-US military, very critical, very – you know, Platoon and all that sort of – I mean, if you look at them, a lot of them, most of them I would say – they don't really live up to anything like any sort of systemic critique of the US invasion, or US imperialism at all. I mean, certainly, Apocalypse Now, which I think is the greatest of them, that's incredibly racist to be honest, in the way it represents indigenous people in the part of – they're actually in Cambodia, aren't they, where they're filming. But, and, you know, The Deer Hunter is an incredibly racist film. It's written by John Milius, is a very right-wing guy, you know. He invents this thing where US prisoners are being forced to play Russian roulette by the Viet Cong, as they call them, et cetera. And yet even so these films are essentially about how bad Vietnam was for the Americans. 88
They are routinely trotted out as evidence of – we have this whole thing, the Vietnam syndrome, which was – after the Vietnam war we had the perceived – and I think there was a lot of reality to it – reluctance on the part of the American people to countenance wars. 89
Particularly ground wars, you know, with troops going in. 90
And the US establishment put an awful, a huge amount of effort, very consciously, into trying to counter that ideologically. You know, throughout the Reagen years and onwards. And I think this collaboration between the US military and the State Department and so on and Hollywood is a very deliberate part of this. And here I am, trying to – I don't want to be a vulgar Marxist, I want to look into the sophisticated way in which culture interacts with ideology and how they, et cetera et cetera. And then, you know, you look into it, and the army is just paying Hollywood to present them in a good light [laughs] Vulgar Marxism gets the job done in this instance. 91
To an astounding extent – like, there is one famous instance of a movie, Rules of Engagement, which is – I think it's mentioned in the Jack Shaheen documentary Real Bad Arabs that we were talking about just recently on another podcast, where he talks about the original script. It's supposed with this very ambiguous thing, because it's about a soldier in Iraq, or Afghanistan I think, who opens fire on a crowd of people outside an embassy. And it's supposed to be this very sort of questioning, ambiguous piece about what happened, and there's multiple view points about why he did it and what he saw and what was happening. 92
And as I remember the story, basically the US military, having supplied loads of materiel and props and stuff and their funding and so on, and their script approval, they said yeah, you're going to have to change the ending. And so they just change it so that all the people in the crowd that the US soldier guns down, it turns out, they all have machine guns. So it's just amazing how direct it is. 93
Daniel:
[laughs] Yeah, I know, it's completely just built around this concept of the – again, you can't do the systemic critique. There is no systemic critique. Even films which get painted as being, you know, kind of aggressively anti-war are really sort of there are a few bad apples kind of films, ultimately. 94
You don't get the sense of, like, no, the entire thing we're doing in Afghanistan is an occupation of an oppressed people and like, we're going in and murdering them, because that's just what the – because we want oil, ultimately. 95
We want geopolitical strategy. And we'll, like, bomb Cambodia as a way of preventing the spread of communism to, you know, whatever. Yeah, again, that kind of complicated material reality versus kind of the ideological construct and what that means for, like, the project for a New American Century and, you know, the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan and blowback from al-Qaeda and all that. 96
Really, really fascinating stuff – none of which is ever brought on American screens virtually ever. 97
My favorite example – I haven't Platoon in a number of years. I remember quite liking it when I saw it, maybe ten or twelve years ago. It's probably worth a rewatch. Actually, now I'm having this conversation I want to rewatch a bunch of those old war movies. Kind of, you know, go through them with a little bit more politically sophisticated lens. But, you know, that's a film that's based on Oliver Stone's own experiences fighting in Vietnam, you know. 98
And lot of his characters are kind of one-to-one recreations of people he knew. And even then you sort of get the sense of, like, there is this sort of futility and sort of like being a soldier and you're just kind of fucked up on drugs all the time. You're trying to do well but the system is not allowing you. 99
But even then, it really just kind of comes down to, well, you've got the hippie military guy, in Willem Dafoe, and you got the hard-assed Nazi kind of military guy, in Tom Berenger, and it becomes this kind of dichotomy. It becomes this sort of, you know, well, if we can only just have more war mongerers, more of our military officers should be more like Willem Dafoe as opposed to the bad guy, you know. [laughs] 100
Even then it doesn't seem to question that imperial logic, you know. It kind of says, war is hell, war is bad, but it – again, it's incredibly focused on the US soldiers' experience – 101
Jack:
Yeah. It's all about the – 102
Daniel:
Stone does try to correct for that later in his career. He makes several films that are essentially about how bad it was for US war veterans, which to be – not to countersignal that, not to say that that isn't real, but it doesn't really get at the core thing that was really kind of going on in that conflict. 103
Jack:
Yeah. Which was the, you know, the genocidal, essentially genocidal mass murder of millions of people in, you know, a country that was just invaded. And then you have the relentless carpet-bombing of a country where most of the people are peasants – completely defenseless. To the point where they dropped more shells than they dropped during Wold War II, and you still have shells going off now, and you still got people – babies being born with deformities because of the chemicals they dropped. 104
Yeah, absolutely, we should have stories about how bad it was for the young men who were sent there because it was. It was dreadful. And what a bad time they had when they came back. Absolutely. It shouldn't be all we talk about. There shouldn't be an entire population of people who were subjected to a historic war crime who were just almost completely written out of the conversation. 105
But the the crop of Iraq movies, War on Terror movies that came along after Iraq and Afghanistan and everything – the same thing happened again. We have this orthodoxy, that we had this whole raft of very critical and thoughtful and questioning American movies about the War on Terror. And if you actually look at these movies, you know, The Green Zone and The Hurt Locker and stuff like this, they're really not very good at all. Like, there's a couple that – funnily enough I think it's Brian de Palma again – Redacted. He made a movie called Redacted, which is probably the strongest of the crop of movies. But again – not of them really get at the – 106
Daniel:
And even then it's like one kind of bad guy. Yeah. 107
Jack:
Yeah. Like in Platoon, you know, the two – the good soldier and the bad soldier, they're like Charlie Sheen's shoulder demon and shoulder angel. And it's about, you know, the battle for the soul of the young American man. Which, yeah, okay, that's a story we can tell. But it shouldn't be the only one. 108
Daniel:
The thing with The Green Zone – it was based on this book, which I really loved – I'd want to probably revisit it. I read it back when it was new. This book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which was this sort of systemic critique of the way that war – the way that the occupation of Afghanistan was – even accepting the basic logic of the invasion, it was just completely mishandled. 109
And [the book was a critique of] how [the invasion] set the stage for the extended later conflict. Obviously the book was written long before the rise of ISIS, but ultimately ISIS lies in the – waiting in the wings, based on things that happened in the first months of this occupation, ultimately. And it was – I remember being quite a systemic and sympathetic book. I would, again, want to revisit that. 110
But then it gets turned into, like, Matt Damon's star vehicle. 111
And, you know, any kind of, again, any kind of real critique then just kind of comes into Matt Damon running around and, like, solving the crimes of, like, [whoever] is doing the terrible things in Afghanistan. There's this one guy, it's almost like a Scooby Doo villain, right? We're going to unmask him and then the war is going to be okay, because we found the one guy who was the bad guy, who fucked all this up for us. 112
Jack:
...and would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that meddling Matt Damon. 113
Daniel:
And I hear from these right-wing guys – when they do talk about this sort of pop culture element, when they do kind of talk about war movies, it's like – even sort of the history curriculum. 114
Like, from my perspective, these films, even the critical ones, are incredibly jingoistic and incredibly looking at American imperialism and American exceptionalism as – maybe kind of like poorly run but ultimately a positive for the world. 115
I mean, there's in no critique of that. 116
But they see these kinds of films as being like, where is the American heroism in this? I mean, literally we're talking about a movie called Captain America: The First Avenger. You've got a superhero wearing the American fucking flag or, you know, some approximation thereof. Literally a member of the US armed services. That was made in 2011. Which is the one of the bases of this giant film franchise, this much beloved character, an Aryan superhero. And it's like, you know, where's the pro-Americanism? [laughs] What the fuck are you talking about. 117
Jack:
Well, you know, Cap assembles his team, doesn't he? And they're carefully demographically selected to be multi-ethnic, you know. There you go, right there. That just ruins the whole thing. 118
Daniel:
Yeah, I know. You know, who each have about two lines of dialog in the thing, you know. 119
Jack:
That's right. They're ethnicity and their personalities are essentially the same thing. 120
Daniel:
Right, yeah. You've got the one black guy, the one Asian guy, the one – and they each get like one little quirk. I've seen this referred to as the United Colors of Benetton casting and, you know – from my perspective it's like, this is – and again, the issues of representation in these films, et cetera. This is ultimately – it's a sop. It's a thing you throw in to say, oh look, we got a black guy in the movie, great, you know, et cetera. [sarcastic:]We gave him lines even, what else could you possibly want. 121
But from [the nazis'] perspective it's like, why you got to put the black guy in? Like, you're just, and not him just stupid? You know what these people are like. It's like, it's just, you're just shoving him in my face by having a black guy with two lines of dialog! It just ruins the whole movie for me! 122
Jack:
[sarcastic:] Yeah, why do we have to pretend that any black people fought in the Second World War, for god's sake, when we all know that none of them did. 123
But, you know, it shows that we're looking at it from completely different assumptions, doesn't it. 124
Because to me it just looks like a completely cynical exercise in putting this politically correct gloss on this completely – this ridiculous fantasy version of history where, you know, there's the little bit of sexism that Agent Whatshername has to deal with at training camp, but – 125
Daniel:
Agent Carter 126
Jack:
Yeah, Agent Carter. She does have her sort of badass boss lady thing and they all respect her instantly. And there's – you know, this version of – I hate – this is one of the things I really hate about this film. And it's kind of unfair to pick on this film because almost every pop culture representation of the past now does this. 127
But, I don't know, there's just something about it in this film that just winds me up. This rewriting of the past so that kind of everyone was always liberal and tolerant and wasn't really sexist and wasn't really racist. Weren't they, really. [sarcastic:] I mean there might have been a couple of people here and there that would make a remark, but – all a woman had to do was stand up to him and he'd respect her then. And, you know, maybe there was a little thing were, you know, one guy might say something to the black guy, but the black guy would prove himself in battle and then they'd all be comrades again. 128
It's just this complete sanitization of the past so that there's no racism and there's no sexism and America always stood for this sort of perfect utopia of equality, you know. And this film is an absolutely prime example of that. In action. And it's just – oh, god, it gets right up my nose. It just gets right up my nose. 129
Daniel:
Right. And of course one of the – I mean, the challenges there are, you know, if you do kind of portrait accurately then ultimately you're making women and people and color and people who aren't cis white dudes, you know, sitting in the theater, you're making them wallow in this experience that you don't necessarily want – you know, you do want it to be sort of empowering popcorn entertainment, right? Like, you don't want to suddenly talk about segregated units and the suffering that kind of happened in that situation and, you know – we came in to this to watch Captain America beat some skulls in, that's what we're here for, right? 130
Jack:
If we actually had adequate conversations about this and adequate education about it, elsewhere in society, and elsewhere in culture, then fine, we could do this thing where we put it aside for a couple of hours to have [empowering popcorn entertainment]. 131
But the fact is that, for millions of people, stuff like this is kind of where their views of history and the past and politics and stuff – this is where they're manufactured. And this is the only place where they get sort of normative ideological views of how history works and politics works and so on and so forth. And so that is has this smothering ideological blanket of silence over things like this – that's the problem with it. 132
Daniel:
Right, yeah, I don't at all disagree with that. I mean, ideally we would get real, proper education on these issues in our history classes and in documentaries and it would just be a well-known thing. I mean that is the power of this propaganda. It is the power of this thing. 133
I mean, that's the thing, the nazis aren't wrong that these films have enormous ability to shape public opinion. They're just wrong about everything else. [laughs] They just missed the entire point because they're focused on this perceived Jewish influence subverting white Christian society, gentile society. 134
Jack:
Exactly, they think it's a crude sort of – Jewish paycheck to Hollywood producer, to writer, to the brain of the sheep in the cinema, or at home, watching the television, watching it. They think it's this sort of crude model where Soros pays for a direct ideological message that is just transmitted directly into people's heads. Whereas we're actually talking about very complex issues of, you know, how culture gets reproduced. 135
Daniel:
Exactly. And we're talking about – it becomes this image that just, you know, suddenly you will see real World War II documentaries that will use footage from these things – as sort of background filler. Because it's easily available or it suddenly becomes like the image of the way this stuff kind of gets represented. 136
And then we just kind of smooth over the difficulties in our past and that's something that – like, very much after World War II there was this, you know, kind of explicit desire to sort of like pretend that racism was over and that's – that the baby boomers just kind of – they see their – oh, we passed the civil rights act, and therefore, you know, we're all good now, right? And of course that – again, without looking at the systemic critique, it's wallpapering over – of the nasty bits, as a way of, you know, pretending that everything is good now. And, yeah, the way that this stuff rewrites our past is incredibly disingenuous and dangerous. 137
And ultimately I can say that and then also think, yeah, but I kind of like the film because I like – I just kind of like it for popcorn reasons, you know. 138
Jack:
Well yeah, I want to be clear, you know. I don't draw any sort of direct line between I disapprove of the politics or the ideology in this particular work of art and therefore I don't enjoy it. 139
I love loads of movies, loads of books that I have serious problems with the politics [of], including loads of movies and novels and things where I find the politics actually obnoxious, you know, or sinister. As I've said before, I'm a Lovecraft fan, you know. It's not that I think this is a bad film because I disagree with its politics. It's not a crude thing like that. And I don't think that sort of crude view is any way near as common on the left as a lot of people – sort of have this caricature prejudiced view about the killjoy lefties. I don't think it's that common. 140
Daniel:
Right, I mean, you know, ultimately the conversation around the way that films like this present issues becomes its own discourse. It becomes its own thing. But that doesn't mean, (a), we can't enjoy the product for what it is, or (b) – you know, it's an orthogonal thing to our enjoyment of the product. 141
And also – to be able to sit and to enjoy it – nazis use this term, bugman. It's a very common term they use. If you're interested in – they are making fun of me for being interested in beer. I was tweeting about beer for ten minutes, and suddenly it's like, oh my god, soyboy cuck likes to talk about pilseners and all these things taste like grapefruit. And like, how dare you have an interest that isn't, like, saving the white race, right? 142
They call these things bugman interests. These are things that are supposed to distract you from – you're an ant in an anthill and you're just distracted by video games, you're distracted by movies, you're distracted by sports, you're distracted by fast food and that sort of thing. Instead of focusing on the real things that you should be focused on all the time. 143
And ultimately the stuff gets in your brain and it's just reprogramming you to think the Jews aren't terrible, et cetera et cetera et cetera. It's just such a joyless existence that these guys seem to lead sometimes, you know. 144
And again, you and I have already started to have – we have these conversations all the time, just not on this podcast. We can talk about the real imperialistic agenda at the heart of these things and the real horrors of this war and treat that completely seriously, and still feel like being engaged with that. You can separate the poison from the promise of these things. 145
And that's – it's just something that I see these guys – I've kind of said this before, one of the reasons they produce so much content is just to give people something else to do, as opposed to watching Netflix. You know what I mean. Because Netflix is just poisoning you. It's just the Jews putting poison into your head. So listen to four-hour live streams of us bullshitting and playing Honkler memes instead. 146
And it's just this alternate world. And that's not unique to the nazis, obviously. Evangelical subculture in the United States kind of does the same thing. You make these Kirk Cameron movies and you make these Hallmark movies and all this stuff and it's a replacement for this poison-filled secular entertainment complex. 147
They're not blaming Jews explicitly. They're saying more like – blaming liberals and no-fault divorce and that sort of thing. Which has its own white supremacy coded into that as well. 148
I don't know, I just – I find the psychology – I understand not wanting – like, I don't watch a lot of TV, you know, and in particular I don't like to watch TV with ads in it. When I do sit down, I'm watching something on cable TV or whatever and having an ad-break every seven minutes, I feel like it's just being like a ball-peen hammer hammering a spike into my skull with this stuff. Because I'm just not aware of it anymore. I don't experience it in the same way. When I was a kid I watched – you know, I was a kid of the 80s and 90s, I watched TV, you know, it's a thing. 149
When you're away from it for a while and then you come back to it, suddenly it's just this incredibly painful experience. And so – I don't know, I have sympathy for that – disconnecting – if it's something you feel is toxic. And I'm never going to blame that. But the logic that they use in this sort of – the thing that they're actually trying to protect themselves from is just such an obvious – it's just obvious nonsense and it leads to sort of a healthy impulse of getting away from capitalist subculture, or capitalist culture, capitalist consumerist production. And it becomes a mantra in and of itself. 150
I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but – 151
Jack:
Yeah, no, I mean – like a lot of things these people say, it seems to have a germ of truth in it somewhere. I mean, yes, we live in a consumer capitalist culture. And it does offer endless distractions and endless temptations and, yeah, you do need to just occasionally unplug and just do something that's good for you just because it's fun, just because it's relaxing. 152
We all need that. 153
And if you spend your entire time obsessing over the problems of the world – even if we're talking the real problems of the world, rather than the illusory problems of the world, which is, you know, the Jews are trying to replace us, or the Muslims. Even if it's not that but the real problems, you can't think about that all the time because you just go crazy. 154
And yeah, there are – capitalist, consumer capitalist society does keep a lot of people distracted from more important issues through stuff like that. I mean I'm not exempt from this. I should definitely spend a lot more time thinking about what's going on in the world and devoting more time and energy and effort and money to stuff like climate change, you know. Because the Amazon is on fire at the moment, the environment is – we're approaching an ecological catastrophe, you know. We've got – capitalism is inherently a problem that needs to be gotten rid of and replaced. But even at – you know, even putting that aside, neoliberalism is becoming increasingly fascistic in my opinion. We forgot all these sort of huge problems in the world. I should definitely be devoting more time to them that I do currently. At the expense of, you know, horror movies and science fiction and chips. Definitely. 155
So yeah – a lot of us can say that. So that's a true thing. But it's not a big conspiracy to inculcate you with slave morality. And that's a real crudification and a misunderstanding of a problem that has a reality, but it's a much more complex reality, which is – again, it's to do with how capitalist culture reproduces itself. So yeah, as I so often feel with these guys, it's like – they start from a place where they've noticed that there's something wrong, and then they've just swerved completely off the road into the ditch. 156
Daniel:
[laughs] Right. Yeah, it's absolutely the case and it's just – I don't know, it's tough. 157
Jack:
I like your point about the mirror image in the Evangelical Christian culture industry as well. This sort of bubble culture industry that they've created, with their own replacement movies and replacement stuff for mainstream culture. 158
Because that has a – that actually has a similar thing to the Marvel movies, which is this superficial wokeness, this sort of pseudo-wokeness as an alibi on top of it. Where, you know, you'll have a black character who's treated equally by the white pastor, you know, and – but as you say, because these things are deeply invested in this incredibly conservative, reactionary view of life, they inherently, tacitly reproduce white supremacy and patriarchy and stuff like that. Despite the fact that they will pay this surface lip service to – oh no, women are fantastic, and oh yeah, black people are great as long they're Christians, et cetera et cetera. And, you know, if the Muslim girl reject her stereotypically abusive, domineering father and rejects Islam and comes over and gives her soul to Jesus then she's just as good as any white Christian, you know. 159
But at the same time, it's covering – the Marvel movies have this all well, because – one of the things – and I want to reiterate, I do enjoy quite a few of them, but they do, all the way through them, there's – we talked about Captain America's very carefully selected band of ethnically diverse buddies. 160
I've written about Iron Man in the past, but – Iron Man is absolutely a product of the War on Terror era. For me, it's actually the most acute and telling of all the quote-unquote War on Terror movies. You can ditch the rest of them. It's all there in Iron Man. It goes to great lengths to try to avoid any accusation of Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias, and it does it through this manufactured idea of the Ten Rings as kind of this multi-ethnic, multi-language, multi-faith group. And yet – underneath all that, what is that but Orientalist racism and Islamophobia. In the context of the War on Terror, that absolutely whitewashes American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. 161
It's this – to me, it's just obvious that that's what it's doing. But it does it under this kind of lampshade of politically correct liberalness. And it's like when people like the guys you're talking about – they just see the lampshade. 162
Daniel:
Right. And they don't see the thing buried underneath. They don't see the larger cultural context. I mean this is something that I think we could talk about with the First Avenger, with Captain America, is – Captain America doesn't actually fight the Nazis in this movie. [laughs] 163
Jack:
No. [laughs] 164
Daniel:
One of the questions you run into whenever you depict this era of history – if you're going to put a superhero in it it's, okay, so why can't Captain America prevent the Holocaust? Because if Captain America doesn't do something about – like, we want him to sort of win the day, and we want like – he's supposed to be the hero, and he's supposed to succeed ultimately. Like, that's what he's there do to, is to give us that power fantasy, right? 165
But ultimately, if you portrait him as having intervened in the Holocaust and losing, then you don't get the power fantasy. But if you – otherwise you portrait – history didn't happen the way history happened. And so ultimately the way these films get around that is, they say, well, Cap wasn't really fighting Nazis, there's this other group that was building super-science Nazi weapons, and he was kind of over there dealing with the Red Skull instead of fighting more traditional war. 166
And then suddenly any kind of connection, any kind of real material connection to real history then just gets lost. There is no real – so we're pretending we're punching Nazis but in reality we're punching Hydra. And then in the future films, Hydra becomes this, again, this group of bad actors. This group of just kind of bad people who are subverting the inside of what's otherwise a perfectly fine and good US military establishment. This sort of world – UN superstructure, et cetera. 167
And if it wasn't for those dastardly Hydra guys then everything would have been fine, right? 168
So it becomes again a way of avoiding the systemic critique. It becomes a way of – oh, we're just going to do this thing off to the side, instead of actually answering – asking the questions. Like, why was World War II ultimately fought? 169
And this very superficiality then gets critiqued by the nazis who, again, are sensing something. Like, there's something not being discussed. There's some real history that isn't being – but they don't see that it's sort of a gloss on – like, we're trying to make a billion dollars here. 170
They, again, see it as this sort of – you're just painting the Germans as uniquely bad and, again, it just becomes this whole thing – I just want to shake them sometimes when they talk about this stuff. Like, get your head out of your fucking ass, you know. 171
Jack:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I remember when Winter Soldier, which is the second Captain America movie – when that came out, there was a lot of people saying, oh, this is really interesting, because it takes a skeptical, almost a radical or cynical, paranoid view of the American government and the intelligence services and stuff like that, and it's like – they deliberately evoke All the President's Men by having Robert Redford in the cast, and – yeah, but if you actually watch the film, the actual organs of the American capitalist imperialist state are never mentioned, or only obliquely mentioned. They are completely unimplicated in anything whatsoever. It's all about Shield. 172
And even Shield, which metaphorically is like the instantiation of the American capitalist imperialist machine as an engine of virtue, as heroism – standing up the forces of evil... 173
Daniel:
It's Captain America: World Police, ultimately. 174
Jack:
Yeah, exactly. Even Shield is only this way because it's been infiltrated by Hydra. Hydra being this completely alien, inexplicable, sort of foreign Other, which is characterized by just this completely contentless fanaticism. I mean, Hydra has no ideology. 175
And you can say this about – you said the thing about Captain America: The First Avenger is he doesn't – Cap doesn't fight Nazis. That's true. He doesn't fight Nazis, he fights Hydra. And yet in another sense, he does fight Nazis. Because Hydra are absolutely emblematic of what Nazis and Fascists generally always are in this kind of pop culture. Because they're always represented exactly the way Hydra is represented in Captain America: The First Avenger. Which is as completely stripped of historical context, completely stripped of ideological content, completely stripped of any meaning whatsoever. 176
Except their aesthetics. 177
They're just turned into the uniforms, the swastika or the pseudo-swastika – in this is the sort of skulltopus emblem. The pseudo-swastikas are another question in themselves. There's a whole – I mean I could write an entire essay about pseudo-swastikas belonging to – like, the Ten Rings have a pseudo-swastika, and the Rebel Zygons in the Doctor Who story The Zygon Invasion, they have a peudo-swastika, that's an entire essay to itself. 178
And yeah, this is what nazis and fascists always are in this sort of pop culture. Like the Empire and the First Order in Star Wars. It's absolutely fascistic but it has no ideological content. It has no historical context. The Death Eaters and so on in the Harry Potter films, and so on, and so on, and so on. It's just this completely empty, sort of alien, foreign, inexplicable, fanatical Other that can also be – it can also take in left-wing – things that are superficially left wing. Loads of this sort of pop culture just lumps socialism or communism or the left in with the right as just this alien, fanatical Other that is the Bad. And that's all it is. 179
That's what fascism has been completely reduced to. 180
Daniel:
You know, those extremists are, like, bad people on both sides of that isle, you know. 181
Jack:
Exactly. 182
Daniel:
And it's ultimately in support of kind neoliberal consensus – 183
Jack:
Exactly. 184
Daniel:
This sort of establishment ideal of civility and – we're just going to sit and debate things. Any kind of look at existing power relations or possible power relations or where this comes from – I mean, that's what so insidious about this kind of entertainment. 185
It's not just a lack of looking at the systemic critique. It's the lack of historical context. And that becomes, like, oh, we know Nazis are bad because they're always going to come and they're going to wear swastikas and they're going to be – they're going to look a certain way and they're going to act a certain way and say certain things. 186
But then when they change the swastika to a Kekistan flag or to a Pepe frog or when they say, no, I'm just joking, it's fine, I'm just like you, look at how nice I am, and they wear a dapper suit. And then suddenly the establishment just goes, oh, that can't be a nazi, I don't see a swastika on that guy, come on. 187
Jack:
Well this is another thing, this sort of... 188
Daniel:
Nazis use that as a way of infiltrating this larger culture... sorry, go ahead. 189
Jack:
This is another thing – one other side effect of this pop culture treatment of the Nazis, its complete adoption of the Nazis and the Fascists as just this all-purpose boogieman, completely stripped of context and content and reduced to aesthetics, is that – they're always glamorized. 190
Nazis now, to us, look – loads of people now think of Nazis as kind of – they're either glamorous or they're overtly sinister. So when guys, as you say, wearing Kekistani flags or whatever, gathering at Charlottesville – although a lot of them, as we've talking about before, are kind of cosplaying as the SS – as you say, people don't see it. 191
People don't see it because they think nazis look like Darth Vader stomping around with his shiny helmet. Or they think nazis are – they're going to be wandering around in black robes, like Death Eaters. 192
Daniel:
Right, or that they're going to look uniquely bad. They're not going to have positive qualities. They're not going to be charming, they're not going to be clever. Or if they are it's in this overtly sinister way. 193
Jack:
Yeah. It doesn't help, of course, that – every time the United States has wanted to justify a ferocious act of imperialism in the last half-century, it's picked upon whoever happens to be leading the little state they want to invade and devastate for imperialistic motives, that they were probably in bed with five minutes ago – they've called that guy, whoever it happens to be this week, the new Hitler. That doesn't help either. 194
Daniel:
[laughs] Right. My favorite was the Iraq war, sort of the run-up to the Iraq war. The way that the term Islamofascism just suddenly became the buzzword on everybody's – that's not to say that you can't draw parallels between these far-right repressive regimes in the Middle East and a sort of fascistic ideology. I mean, that's another subject. 195
But the way it's just there is just to tie brown people to history's evilest monster. And therefore – we need to go invade and rescue the – [laughs] you know, liberate the people by killing millions of them, ultimately. 196
Jack:
You can always draw parallels between – 197
Daniel:
That's what the American imperialist structure does. 198
Jack:
Yeah. You can always draw parallels between anything, because political power and political structures always work in certain ways. But Islamofascism was such a ridiculously incoherent, ahistorical term right from the beginning. Because it was meant to lump together al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist party and Iranian regime and these were all – I mean, there is variance within Islam, religious variance, there is political variance, these people all hated each other. They were enemies. 199
The idea that we had to invade Iraq because they were in league with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda – they were enemies. They were rivals. You can't just tie all these completely disparate things together by saying, well, they're all Muslim, so it's Islamo, and they're all bad, so it's fascist. It's so idiotic. 200
Daniel:
Right. And it's just – again, like, I know we really haven't talked much about the movie. I think this was always the way this was going to go. But it does – you know, part of the point of doing this was just to let us talk about something that was interesting to us for a while and use this movie as kind of a lens for it. 201
But it also, like – for me, it's just like – this is – if fascists had a coherent ideology, they would be having these kinds of conversations for themselves. And instead they don't – like, there is no looking at any kind of material history, because fascism isn't about that, you know. It's just this bizarre thing to listen to them talk for four hours and have three sentences' worth of actual content. It's just routinely bizarre. [laughs] 202
Jack:
Well, fascism isn't really an ideology. As it's been said, it's a scavenger ideology. It's like a – it's fundamentally a political reaction that people will find themselves in the mids of and/or aligned with or whatever for various different reasons. It will just scavenge its particular ideology from wherever it can get it, for whatever purposes it needs at any given moment. 203
What really unifies it is an aesthetic. It is aesthetic more than anything else. It's something else we've talked about before. Walter Benjamin talked about how fascism turns politics aesthetic. It empties is of content. It empties is of context. It turns it all into imagery and stuff like that. And the irony for me is that that is precisely what our culture industries – the liberal capitalist culture industries – that is precisely what they've done to fascism in the stories we tell about it. As I was talking about before, we've just turned fascism, in our cultural representations, into an empty aesthetic. With is kind of an inherently fascist thing to do with a political category. 204
Daniel:
Exactly. 205
Jack:
I want to say, I think Hugo Weaving's German accent is excellent. That's probably the finest fake German accent I've ever heard. If – to the point where I think, if I didn't know who Hugo Weaving was, and I'd seen in this and this only, I'd probably think he was German. So I have to give him props for that. 206
Whereas Toby Jones's German accent is terrible. 207
Daniel:
Yeah, well, Toby Jones is... Toby Jones is Toby Jones doing his Toby Jones thing. My favorite actor doing the thing that he was hired to do is Tommy Lee Jones, who – you know, in other films, even made later in his life, like No Country for Old Men – I think he's amazing in them. The Three Burials of – what's his name – 208
Jack:
Melquiades Estrada. 209
Daniel:
Yeah, that one. I think he's really quite good there. I think he's been a perfectly wonderful actor. And here he's just sleepwalking through it, it's just such a – it's just such a, like, give me standard gnarled military guy, you know. 210
Jack:
Yeah. He's just been hired to be Tommy Lee Jones. And he's just turned up on set and been Tommy Lee Jones. And that's fine. 211
Daniel:
Yeah. I mean it's not a bad performance, but it's a sleepwalking performance ultimately. 212
Jack:
Yeah. 213
Daniel:
I do – again, just sort of brief thing about the themes in the film. I do find that – I had someone who was looking to make anti-Fascist memes and was like, looking for superhero characters to use with these – we were just spitballing some ideas and I'm like, well, you know, you should use – I mean, Captain America punches Nazis, that seems kind of an obvious choice. 214
But then, like, from an anti-Fascist and anarchist perspective it becomes really difficult to use those semiotics without also embracing the American – America's own imperialist, oppressive qualities. And so it's very difficult to use Captain America in that way without, in some sense, being a part of this whole racist white supremacist system. Which I thought was impressing – that we kind of ran into that specific – specifically trying to make these memes. 215
It turns out that Spiderman is the easiest character to turn into anti-Fascist memes, for kind of interesting reasons. 216
Jack:
Hm, this is interesting. I was going to say, maybe you could create your own version of Captain America and make him Captain Antifa. But that wouldn't work at all because Antifa is leaderless and non-hierarchical. So, you know, if you have a Captain Antifa that's instantly a betrayal of everything Antifa stands for. 217
Daniel:
Well, there is this thing – and I think one of the things that I really like about these films is – wait for the soyboy cuck thing – I was on Tumblr back in the day, and I really loved the fan conversations around some of these films. 218
I mean in particular what this sort of – Captain America, if you treat it – if you try to read it critically but you're also reading it just as the character he's supposed to be, sort of the good stuff, the actual ideals of truth, justice, the American way, all of those sorts of – all that sort of old hoary 1940s New Deal era rah rah Americanism. Part of the idea is that he gets frozen and comes back and it's – and it is sort of a reaction to the ugly realities that were ultimately buried in it to begin with. 219
And I think that these films do not do a good job of handling that. But I think the fan culture around them really – there is a lot of really neat stuff that fans have created – some fan fiction and, you know, art, memes and that sort of thing, that really do look at – well, okay, if Steve Rogers was woken up today he would absolutely be like this Fight for $15 kind of guy. He would absolutely be in favor of trans rights and all that sort of thing. And there's this – if you want to go google for that, if you google bisexual Steve Rogers, you'll find a lot of really neat stuff that nerds on the internet made a few years ago. That sort of leans into what a kind of inclusive Steve Rogers would be and what – not leaning into explicit anti-capitalism, but at least sort of the progressive, aggressively progressive characters – what should this ideal should be. And this idealized American – I think there's some really nice, gentle but very nice, stuff that came out of that community. 220
And I think it gives me a warmth towards some of these properties that the properties themselves not necessarily justify. 221
But again, that's a way of – little people, individuals making art on the internet, are able to do things that these giant capitalist behemoth corporations trying to make a billion dollars, and that need Department of Defense funding to do that, are simply not going to be able to make. And again, that comes down to the material realities of how these films are made. And so I think there's some really interesting dynamics going on there. 222
Jack:
Yeah, it comes down to issues of political economy that are just outside the ken of the fascists. Because it turns out if you have people creating stories – people creating stories or elaborating on stories that already exist – for the purposes of their own interest and their own delight and their own communication with each other, then you have these stories suddenly unalienated. 223
In the Hollywood system, these stories are alienated by the profit motive. And, as you say, the intervention of the imperialist state and so on. 224
But if you have people take – you know, you've got the issue of the medium they're using – social media, that's corporate et cetera. None of it's unmediated. 225
But even so, we're talking about people taking this and doing something with it, collectively and in a community and for their own reasons, and this is – in a sense, it's a kind of unalienated creative labor. Or it's getting towards that. And some of it has this amazing recuperative power. 226
It's a really good example, you know, bi Steve Rogers. Some of it is daffy and silly but some of it's great. And you can say that about a lot of what people do with these properties. And I think it gives the lie to this incredibly simplistic idea that the nazis have of – from Soros's checkbook directly into your sheeplike brain, you soyboy cuck. Because it's not like that. People do detour and recuperate these sorts of things. And they do it via engaging with them critically. Maybe – I flatter myself, by maybe in the way that we've been trying to do. In just this sort of not be[ing] a passive consumer but, you know, eat it and enjoy it but study the ingredients, as I always say. 227
And even if it's bad for you, if you enjoy it, that's it's own kind of good. But you should know what you're putting into yourself. And I think this sort of resurgence of popular, crowd-sourced, collective criticism from below – it has its problems, but I think it's one of the markers of the way culture is going. And I think there's a lot to be said for it. I really do. 228
And funny, it also gives the lie to the crude left-wing version of that same idea, which is, you know – from the political economy of capitalism straight into your brain, you sheeplike, hoodwinked, false-consciousness proletarian. There is a left version of that which is equally crude and reductive and it gives the lie to that as well. 229
Yeah, I think – 230
Daniel:
Yeah, I think that's a good place to leave it. 231
Jack:
Okay, great. Well that was fun. 232
Daniel:
Yeah, definitely. I have had people send me – I mean I get a lot of messages and I have had people ask us to do – to discuss more movies in this context. I haven't had anybody ask for this particular one. Jack and I just kind of decided to do this. But I have had people request more of these, and I don't want to make the podcast about this, but we might do a couple more of these. As winter comes on, it's – in-the-mood kind of episodes. And if you do have films you'd like to hear us talk about in this context, let us know. 233
Taxi Driver is high up on my list. I've had several people message me and say, you should really talk about Taxi Driver in this context. Maybe we'll do that. I don't know. Jack and I talk off mike about what might be reasonable. But, yeah, we definitely want to know – we're not going to make a habit of this. This isn't going to be a[n] every week sort of thing. But it was really nice a palate cleanser and I hope that the audience has enjoyed this as much as we've enjoyed getting – kind of take our brain off some the real nastiness for a week. So, yeah. 234
Jack:
Yeah, absolutely. I think this one – this episode was originally going to be about The Dark Knight, wasn't it. And somewhere along the line we decided to make it about Captain America instead. And we have had several ideas for films that are kind of relevant, or tangentially relevant, to the main subject of this podcast that we could talk about. 235
I mean, there is Taxi Driver – we've chucked a few ideas around, haven't we. Death Wish was another one. We can talk about Joker. That's an interesting one that's coming up. But do let us know what you think. 236
Daniel:
I want to wait for the cultural discourse around that one to pass us by a little bit. 237
Jack:
[sarcastic:] Oh, is there a cultural discourse around that film? I hadn't realized. 238
Daniel:
I have curated my Twitter feed to the point where I only see the very broad outlines of it, and even then I'm just – that's enough. 239
Jack:
[laughs] 240
Daniel:
I follow nazis, I don't need to the deal with liberals arguing about incel gun violence. That's not a thing – not a thing I need to worry about. 241
But, yeah, let us know if you liked this. Let us know if you want more of them. We can also potentially put them on another feed or something. If people just really don't want this cluttering up their thing. 242
But, yeah, we're going to do kind of a news roundup next week. And I'm looking forward to that. That will be really hardcore. You're going to have to bone back up on a lot of these characters if you haven't listened to the whole catalog. Because we're going to run through a whole bunch of really nasty people and the total bullshit they're doing to each other right now. And it's kind of hilarious and kind of awful. So, yeah, that's what we're doing next week. 243
Jack:
Great. Well, thanks for listening, and see you next week, and good bye. 244
Daniel:
Bye! 245
Outro:
That was I Don't Speak German. Thanks for listening. We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catchers. We try to release something every week, with a regular episode every fortnight. Please come back for more. 246
Check out our back catalog of episodes and tell everyone you've ever met about how great we are. You can find Daniel's twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at @danieleharper. You can find my twitter at @_jack_graham_. Please get in touch if you have any suggestions, tips, information, praise, or anything to say, as long as you're not a nazi of some kind. 247
Daniel and I both have Patreons and any contribution you can make genuinely does help us to do this. Though it also really helps if you just listen and maybe talk about us online to spread the word. If you'd like to give us stars and reviews on iTunes that'd be appreciated too. 248
Bye for now, and ¡No pasarán! 249