Horror movies have a strange fascination: part of the joy is walking out of the theater, into the light of day, safe.
Of course, some, like "Jaws" stay with you because you look out at the surface of the ocean and now you see it differently; you know what monster and danger could well be, is certainly, under that calm surface.
A woman won a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the hospital and doctors which had removed a benign tumor (a meningioma) from inside her skull, claiming the surgery had destroyed her clairvoyant powers. She had made her living as a psychic. Of course, the argument went, if she had such powers to see the future, she would have foreseen the loss of her powers and not submitted to surgery. But, then again, she would not have got that $10 million, more than she could ever have earned as a psychic in her entire lifetime. So, maybe...
Seeing the future from the present; seeing the present from the past. All possible.
Watching the 2004 movie "Downfall," the unease grows and grows because what you are seeing becomes more and more familiar, more current as things progress.
The power comes from the familiarity.
Hitler, is so kind in the opening scenes, as he selects from a line up of seven starstruck twenty year old women a willowy lass from Munich, who he selects, perhaps, because she is from Munich which seems to resonate in some happy place in memory for him.
She is pretty and she is terribly nervous as he brings her into his office and begins dictating a speech which she is supposed to type as he is speaking. Of course, she should be taking shorthand and then transcribing it; shorthand was developed because even the fastest typist cannot keep pace with the spoken voice. She falls behind and slumps, defeated, at her typewriter, but Hitler says, "We all make mistakes. I make so many. Let's just try again."
She is forgiven, hired, dazzled, instantly loyal to be selected from among the seven women. We see she has been given an impossible task, failed but he likes her enough to say, well, we'll work it out.
Hitler loves in the abstract: he loves the looks of the children brought before him, if they have the right looks. He loves the freshness of the women who work in his bunkers.
Surrounding him are a rogues' gallery of unappetizing scoundrels, but also some ostensibly decent folks--Albert Speer is reticent, but stolid, standing by Hitler as Hitler lovingly touches the room size, white model of the thousand year Berlin, the best capital in the world, the best city ever to be built on earth. It is a wall against mortality and the mongrel hordes.
Little by little, you see it, the slipping away from reality, the delusions of grandeur, as Hitler cannot see what everyone around him can see--that city will never be built and, in fact, Berlin, far from being the grandest, most spectacular city on earth, the anchor for a thousand year Reich, is collapsing around them.
The relentless optimist, Hitler orders armies which exist only on paper, on his map, against the overwhelming hordes closing in around Berlin. He clutches a red and a blue pencil he uses to draw on his maps, showing where he thinks his armies are and then should be to crush the Russians encircling him.
The power of positive thinking starts to crumble, but he cannot see it. If he says it, it will happen.
The triumph of the Will!
He dismisses his top generals, one by one, as effete products of the academy where they only learned to hold a drink or to eat with fine silverware, and when any one of these generals fails to cleave to his plan to never take a step backward, he turns on him as a betrayer.
The generals keep pointing to where Berlin is--so close to the Russian border, and advise him to withdraw West, where it would make more sense to regroup and where they would have a smaller border to defend. He will have none of it.
Slowly, it dawns on them, one by one: He has become detached from reality.
The men in the bunker talk about a way out: try to cut a deal with Eisenhower and the Americans; surely the Americans must fear the Reds as much as the Germans, and they will join in an attack to repulse the Russians.
So, even the generals are consumed by wishful thinking, but at least their wishful thinking has some basis in reality: Patton, in fact, talked about exactly that, sweeping across Germany and defeating the Russians.
There are the true believers, the ancestral counterparts to Rush, Sean and Ann. The wife of Goebbels brings her six beautiful children ages 5 to 12 with her into the bunker. Speer urges her to save her children, if not herself. They can be spirited away, but she says if Hitler dies and if National Socialism dies, she does not want her darling children growing up in the nasty world which would replace the golden blond Germany they had built. So she pushes a cyanide capsule into each of her children's mouths and has them bite down to crush it and release its poison, one by one.
She wants no dark hordes crossing the border to mix with her pure Aryan children. Maybe if the invaders were from Norway... but these are Slavs!
Hitler rejects measures to save the million civilians from the on rushing Red Army. If the German people are not worthy, they don't deserve to survive; besides the best are already dead.
Why does he fight on? "He has nothing to lose," one of the officers observes.
He is already dead, the walking dead, why should he care about taking steps to save others?
The eternal optimism in the face of all contrary evidence; the centrality of this man in his own thinking, and up to a very late point, in the mind of so many others, is so current, it's jarring.
The ideal world Hitler constructed, gleaming, white, grandiose, all of which is threatened by outside dark hordes, and undermined by betrayal from disloyal enemies from within, it's all there in what we see on Twitter every morning. Hitler's detractors are enemies, not just of Hitler, but enemies of "the people."
And he had accomplished so much! "I have conquered Europe! By myself. Not the generals. Me."
From the 21st century, one sees a plan. If there is a God, who intervenes in the affairs of men, then you must see Him, in that extraordinary bomb blast from a briefcase set down under a table, at Hitler's feet, which leveled the building and killed every other person in that room, but left Hitler unharmed, with shredded trousers.
Even Lincoln looked for an other worldly explanation for why the Civil War had been as devastating as it had: perhaps God wanted every drop of blood drawn from the slave under lash to be paid for by a drop drawn by the sword. Had the war ended early, with an easy Union victory, the people of the South would not have been ready to accept defeat.
Had Hitler conceded defeat soon after D Day, come to an arrangement with America, England and France, then negotiated peace with Russia, his Reich might have continued for another 40 years, and nobody outside Germany and Poland would ever have known about the concentration camps or the reality of life inside Germany.
Cities in ruins, the leveling to rubble of all those old German buildings and institutions had to happen to start anew.
Hitler tells Speer the war is a blessing in disguise: To have cleared Berlin for construction of his new gleaming, white walled city would have taken 20 years. The Russian artillery and bombs were accomplishing the demolition for them in weeks.
The power of positive thinking and where it can lead.
Of course, some, like "Jaws" stay with you because you look out at the surface of the ocean and now you see it differently; you know what monster and danger could well be, is certainly, under that calm surface.
A woman won a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the hospital and doctors which had removed a benign tumor (a meningioma) from inside her skull, claiming the surgery had destroyed her clairvoyant powers. She had made her living as a psychic. Of course, the argument went, if she had such powers to see the future, she would have foreseen the loss of her powers and not submitted to surgery. But, then again, she would not have got that $10 million, more than she could ever have earned as a psychic in her entire lifetime. So, maybe...
Seeing the future from the present; seeing the present from the past. All possible.
Watching the 2004 movie "Downfall," the unease grows and grows because what you are seeing becomes more and more familiar, more current as things progress.
The power comes from the familiarity.
Hitler, is so kind in the opening scenes, as he selects from a line up of seven starstruck twenty year old women a willowy lass from Munich, who he selects, perhaps, because she is from Munich which seems to resonate in some happy place in memory for him.
She is pretty and she is terribly nervous as he brings her into his office and begins dictating a speech which she is supposed to type as he is speaking. Of course, she should be taking shorthand and then transcribing it; shorthand was developed because even the fastest typist cannot keep pace with the spoken voice. She falls behind and slumps, defeated, at her typewriter, but Hitler says, "We all make mistakes. I make so many. Let's just try again."
She is forgiven, hired, dazzled, instantly loyal to be selected from among the seven women. We see she has been given an impossible task, failed but he likes her enough to say, well, we'll work it out.
Hitler loves in the abstract: he loves the looks of the children brought before him, if they have the right looks. He loves the freshness of the women who work in his bunkers.
Surrounding him are a rogues' gallery of unappetizing scoundrels, but also some ostensibly decent folks--Albert Speer is reticent, but stolid, standing by Hitler as Hitler lovingly touches the room size, white model of the thousand year Berlin, the best capital in the world, the best city ever to be built on earth. It is a wall against mortality and the mongrel hordes.
Little by little, you see it, the slipping away from reality, the delusions of grandeur, as Hitler cannot see what everyone around him can see--that city will never be built and, in fact, Berlin, far from being the grandest, most spectacular city on earth, the anchor for a thousand year Reich, is collapsing around them.
The relentless optimist, Hitler orders armies which exist only on paper, on his map, against the overwhelming hordes closing in around Berlin. He clutches a red and a blue pencil he uses to draw on his maps, showing where he thinks his armies are and then should be to crush the Russians encircling him.
The power of positive thinking starts to crumble, but he cannot see it. If he says it, it will happen.
The triumph of the Will!
He dismisses his top generals, one by one, as effete products of the academy where they only learned to hold a drink or to eat with fine silverware, and when any one of these generals fails to cleave to his plan to never take a step backward, he turns on him as a betrayer.
The generals keep pointing to where Berlin is--so close to the Russian border, and advise him to withdraw West, where it would make more sense to regroup and where they would have a smaller border to defend. He will have none of it.
Slowly, it dawns on them, one by one: He has become detached from reality.
 |
| He loves the children, who he will send to their deaths |
The men in the bunker talk about a way out: try to cut a deal with Eisenhower and the Americans; surely the Americans must fear the Reds as much as the Germans, and they will join in an attack to repulse the Russians.
So, even the generals are consumed by wishful thinking, but at least their wishful thinking has some basis in reality: Patton, in fact, talked about exactly that, sweeping across Germany and defeating the Russians.
There are the true believers, the ancestral counterparts to Rush, Sean and Ann. The wife of Goebbels brings her six beautiful children ages 5 to 12 with her into the bunker. Speer urges her to save her children, if not herself. They can be spirited away, but she says if Hitler dies and if National Socialism dies, she does not want her darling children growing up in the nasty world which would replace the golden blond Germany they had built. So she pushes a cyanide capsule into each of her children's mouths and has them bite down to crush it and release its poison, one by one.
She wants no dark hordes crossing the border to mix with her pure Aryan children. Maybe if the invaders were from Norway... but these are Slavs!
Hitler rejects measures to save the million civilians from the on rushing Red Army. If the German people are not worthy, they don't deserve to survive; besides the best are already dead.
Why does he fight on? "He has nothing to lose," one of the officers observes.
He is already dead, the walking dead, why should he care about taking steps to save others?
The eternal optimism in the face of all contrary evidence; the centrality of this man in his own thinking, and up to a very late point, in the mind of so many others, is so current, it's jarring.
The ideal world Hitler constructed, gleaming, white, grandiose, all of which is threatened by outside dark hordes, and undermined by betrayal from disloyal enemies from within, it's all there in what we see on Twitter every morning. Hitler's detractors are enemies, not just of Hitler, but enemies of "the people."
And he had accomplished so much! "I have conquered Europe! By myself. Not the generals. Me."
From the 21st century, one sees a plan. If there is a God, who intervenes in the affairs of men, then you must see Him, in that extraordinary bomb blast from a briefcase set down under a table, at Hitler's feet, which leveled the building and killed every other person in that room, but left Hitler unharmed, with shredded trousers.
Even Lincoln looked for an other worldly explanation for why the Civil War had been as devastating as it had: perhaps God wanted every drop of blood drawn from the slave under lash to be paid for by a drop drawn by the sword. Had the war ended early, with an easy Union victory, the people of the South would not have been ready to accept defeat.
Had Hitler conceded defeat soon after D Day, come to an arrangement with America, England and France, then negotiated peace with Russia, his Reich might have continued for another 40 years, and nobody outside Germany and Poland would ever have known about the concentration camps or the reality of life inside Germany.
Cities in ruins, the leveling to rubble of all those old German buildings and institutions had to happen to start anew.
Hitler tells Speer the war is a blessing in disguise: To have cleared Berlin for construction of his new gleaming, white walled city would have taken 20 years. The Russian artillery and bombs were accomplishing the demolition for them in weeks.
The power of positive thinking and where it can lead.
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