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13. The Joker is both Strong and Weak
84 Plays1 month ago
In this "theory and practice" episode, Sarah and Helen read Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism," then see how it applies to Frank Miller's 1986 Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns.
Check out our Patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium and our website at https://www.odiumsymposium.com.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Fascism in 'The Dark Knight Returns'
00:00:00
Speaker
For this episode, I wanted to examine a remarkable example of fascist art, Frank Miller's comic The Dark Knight Returns. To pair with it, like a fine wine with a moldy cheese, I chose Ur-Fascism, an influential essay by author and semiotician Umberto Eco.
00:00:16
Speaker
Echo describes 14 traits of a society that fascism can grow from. It turns out we had mixed feelings about Echo's essay, but the applicability to Miller's Batman was undeniable.
00:00:28
Speaker
Listen on if you'd like to understand how The Dark Knight Returns hit pop culture like a water balloon full of Mussolini. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:00:55
Speaker
Do it live! Now listen, you the right, I'll suck you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:08
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Introduction to 'odium symposium' podcast
00:01:12
Speaker
hi i'm sarah i'm helen and this is odium' symposium a podcast about the production of bigotry helen we're friends right i hope so well do you know that i care about your well-being yeah well i thought so and then you were like Yeah, it did kind of fill me with delight when I realized how much you were absolutely hating the contents of this episode.
00:01:37
Speaker
I really didn't have a good time prepping for this one. and So we're doing a theory and practice episode. That means that we read some text about the production of bigotry, and then we try to apply it to another text that is an example of that bigotry.
00:01:53
Speaker
In this case, what we've got lined up is we've got an essay about ur-fascism from Umberto Eco, and we're going to be applying that to the movie version of the comic book The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.
00:02:07
Speaker
All week, you have been messaging me like, I hate this shit. I hate this shit. You're messaging me like 2 a.m. I hate Eco, which to be fair, you did have mixed up with Eco the Dolphin, but it turns out you hate Umberto Eco too. and then telling me how much you hate The Dark Knight Returns.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was a bad movie.
Patreon promotion
00:02:26
Speaker
We should mention we have a Patreon, patreon.com slash odium symposium, and you can subscribe to get episodes early and support us. And ideally, we would like to have enough subscribers that it makes sense for us to do all kinds of like bonus episodes, that sort of thing. But right now, it's mostly just to be nice to us.
00:02:46
Speaker
We actually have a new subscriber to thank. Thank you to Dan for subscribing. Thank you so much, Dan. If you feel like it when you subscribe, you can leave us a message and we'll read it on the podcast. But of course, it's not mandatory.
00:02:58
Speaker
Dan actually does have a message that he wants us to share, which is that we slandered Andrea Dworkin on the last episode by saying that she said that all sex is rape, which isn't a thing she actually believed, or this is what Dan claims. We'll maybe get into it in a later episode, but...
00:03:14
Speaker
that's That's Dan's message for the audience, that this was Andrea Dworkin's slander. We'll get to that on a future episode, definitely.
Umberto Eco's 'Ur-Fascism'
00:03:21
Speaker
Let's get into Umberto Eco. Umberto Eco was an Italian author and philosopher born in 1932 in Italy. He did the rough equivalent of his master's degree in the theology of Thomas Aquinas and the rough equivalent of his PhD in aesthetics.
00:03:37
Speaker
He spent his long and illustrious career writing novels, essays, papers, etc. Usually he's described as semiotician, but he wore a lot of hats. And in 1995, he wrote this essay, Ur-Fascism, which Helen hates with a fiery passion. Let's start off with an excerpt that shows how this text has kind of an autobiographical flavor, even though it's a work more or less of political philosophy.
00:04:06
Speaker
In 1942, at the age of 10, I received the first provincial award of Ludi Juveniles, a voluntary compulsory competition for young Italian fascists, that is, for every young Italian.
00:04:17
Speaker
I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject, should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy? My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.
00:04:28
Speaker
I spent two of my early years among the SS fascist Republicans and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise. In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan.
00:04:40
Speaker
Two days later, they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of the area.
00:04:52
Speaker
A former Maraschialo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Bedoglio, Mussolini's successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini's remaining forces.
00:05:02
Speaker
Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school.
00:05:18
Speaker
Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said, citizens, friends, after so many painful sacrifices, here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.
00:05:30
Speaker
And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled. The partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
00:05:44
Speaker
So there's two things going on here, I would say. The first is that it establishes his bona fides. He personally experienced fascism and the transition away from fascism. It's not just a theoretical word.
00:05:57
Speaker
The second thing is that I think the thing he's trying to do with this is to express that the examination of fascism can be a personal experience and something that you undergo on a day-to-day basis as you see society evolve around you.
00:06:15
Speaker
at this time, a lot of discussion of fascism is sort of purely historicized in the sense that fascism is always described strictly in terms of its historical context as a historical phenomenon. And he really wants to talk to the reader and tell them that this is something that you can potentially see around you and recognize and understand as an aspect that is developing or falling apart within your society.
00:06:45
Speaker
The year understanding fascism as something which is historical was maybe the main kind of writing with an asterisk that, and this is, you know, hinting at part of the reasons why i I'll say that I don't like this work.
00:07:00
Speaker
There are plenty of communists and like, dialectical materialist thinkers who think about fascism in this way and think about looking around in society and echo largely ignores a lot of that and I think it's not only not historical but I think a lot of his analysis and this is not material and i think there is a difficult tightrope to walk between thinking of things like purely historically in this kind of completely depersonalized way versus this like intense individualized personalization of his analysis.
00:07:33
Speaker
And I think he very, very much goes in that second direction. He's interested in the varieties of fascism. because even though he wants recognizing fascism to be this very personal thing, he also realizes that in different states it actually looks significantly different. So he's asking this question, what makes a fascism a fascism?
00:07:56
Speaker
And some of what he does and doesn't describe as fascism, I would say will come across as a little strange to us. Here's an excerpt from near the beginning.
00:08:07
Speaker
Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art and Tarte Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Übermensch.
00:08:20
Speaker
Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin's Diomat, the official version of Soviet Marxism, was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes. Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness, but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology.
00:08:48
Speaker
Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. Yeah, so he makes this interesting observation, i think a little bit earlier, which is that fascism is somehow the name one uses for all these different movements.
00:09:06
Speaker
You know, when an American protester is is, know, spitting at a cop, it's fascist pig that they call the cop, even though fascist is this, you know, particular Italian party. he wants to understand why is it that fascist as a word has grown to be the kind of umbrella term for all these movements and And so here he's saying, well, there's something interesting about fascism, which is its kind of lack of philosophy. Now, first of all, I think you can really see his position as like a semiotician in this, right? He he really, he has even, I think he expressly says like, you know, words are everything. Let's let's talk about words, right? Which is like the one, you know, Umberto Eco, of course, he wants to talk about words. That's his like special interest.
00:09:41
Speaker
And so it's funny that he zeroes in on this question of like, why fascism? Why the word fascism, right? But he wants to say here like, okay, there's something about a lack of a political philosophy. And, you know, his claim here, pretty straightforwardly, Nazism is like a whole system of thought.
00:09:59
Speaker
Dialectical materialism, which is what's abbreviated here as Diamant, is like another system of thought. These are both totalitarian. I think I would... you know, whatever you want to say about Stalin, putting, you know, Soviet Stalinism and Hitler's Nazism as like two different flavors of the same thing.
00:10:18
Speaker
Like your understanding of politics, of ideology and a material analysis is pretty bad if it can't distinguish between those two things. Yeah, we talked on a previous episode about totalitarianism as part of this intellectual project to locate communism specifically in the USSR and its oppressive state structures within the same theoretical framework as fascism.
00:10:45
Speaker
And to understand there as being some sort of like structural similarities between the two beyond the oppressiveness, which... It's not at all clear that that actually exists as opposed to just being something of a phantom of the liberal mind. Let's put it that way.
00:11:01
Speaker
One of the things that I think also is revealing about this passage is he's making this claim that, you know, people call other people fascists, but they don't really call them Nazis and like...
00:11:12
Speaker
this fascism and fascism as a movement, and this is one of his big claims, fascism as a movement will return, but like Nazism, not so much. And okay, he's writing in this 95. I think he was already wrong at this point, but like certainly he's wrong, right? and And there are people who are directly reclaiming both this word Nazi, doing this movement again, calling themselves Nazis and being called Nazis. And so I think there's a certain way in which he's just incorrect about this. And this thesis that like, oh,
00:11:41
Speaker
you know, it's a lack of a political ideology in and is just wrong. Yeah, I think there's various
Eco's 14 traits of Ur-Fascism
00:11:49
Speaker
contradictions and inaccuracies in the text that I was able to pick out.
00:11:56
Speaker
At one point, he indicates that it's notable that Hemingway referred to the Spanish phalangist as fascist. And then like at two other points, he unambiguously does so himself, for example.
00:12:07
Speaker
And I think on a more intellectual level, there's I don't know if it's really fair to call this a contradiction, but he's trying to make fascism into this like very personal thing that you can see around you, as it previously indicated. But also by trying to take it out of the historical context, he's trying to abstract it.
00:12:28
Speaker
and turn it into a set of rules. And to some extent, I think those goals are in conflict. The idea here arrives at is that different manifestations of fascism have what's called in philosophy a family resemblance.
00:12:43
Speaker
That is, there's a collection of traits that we consider fascist, and a country that embodies many of those traits is fascist, even though the overlap in particular traits from country to country might be minimal.
00:12:57
Speaker
Because of the fuzziness of what he's describing, instead of directly saying, this is a trait of fascism, he describes 14 different kernels that he calls ur-fascism that fascism can coalesce around.
00:13:12
Speaker
What exactly ur-fascism is, is to me a little unclear. Perhaps it's the platonic ideal of fascism, but that's his wording. I think actually, again, he has a kind of intellectual history here that he doesn't want to acknowledge, where quite a lot of work was done in the 20th century to talk about, and it's something people are still, i think, talking about today, and it's still an interesting question, and it's still not completely answered, which is, why do these movements come to be? What is it that causes these things to surge?
00:13:46
Speaker
What is it about people's impulses that creates these regimes, right? Like there is something to say there. And there's quite a lot of 20th century critical theory that is about this, whether it's like Wilhelm Reich's like Mass Psychology of Fascism or Adorno's like huge study on the authoritarian personality. These are more, you know, psychologized texts. There's more historical texts you can look at, again, you know, a lot of Frankfurt School stuff that is trying to to address this kind of general trend, he doesn't really want to talk about these guys. And in fact, at one point, he is talking about the resistance and he says the communists, he he's explicitly anti-communist at various points various points in the essay. I mean, that's pretty clear yeah he's against Stalin, but he's more generally against communism. And he he tries to dunk on communists and he accused communists of using the resistance as their own personal property,
00:14:43
Speaker
just because they had a prime role in it. And it's like, well, first of all, what you're describing is communists correctly saying that they were a big part of the organized resistance against fascism. And this little like dunk you're doing where you're saying, oh, they're using it as their personal property where you're trying to be like, oh, isn't it ironic that you're trying to declare ownership? And It just is really annoying. Like, he's really twee in his anti-communism in a way that just rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, part of why I think he doesn't want to acknowledge the prior scholarship is that a lot of it, especially the first kind of wave of scholarship around fascism, was done by leftists.
00:15:21
Speaker
Trotsky wrote about fascism. Gramsci wrote about fascism. And I don't think he wants to acknowledge that intellectual history. So that's one thing is you you could say this essay that was written for popular readership doesn't cite all these scholarly works. That's okay. That's part of the genre of essay for popular readership. I'm not expecting you to have academic citations, but it's beyond not citing scholarly works. There feels like a particular avoidance of your intellectual history here because you don't want to acknowledge that really if you took these ideas to their logical conclusions you would have to be a communist.
00:15:57
Speaker
I it's a little bit of an exaggeration but not entirely. What I did from here is I just took excerpts of most of the 14 traits that he talks about, and I thought we could just go through them one by one.
00:16:10
Speaker
The first one is the Cult of Tradition. This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, the combination of different forms of belief or practice. Such a combination must tolerate contradiction.
00:16:24
Speaker
doesn't talk about theosophy in essay.
00:16:41
Speaker
he doesn't talk about theosy in this essay But this is a core aspect of the theosophical tradition, which indeed played a significant role in the advancement of Nazism.
00:16:57
Speaker
And we'll see some more like oblique references to that in the second rule. He also explicitly mentions that the sort of New Age thinking that you might see by the time of the 90s is itself closely allied with fascism.
00:17:14
Speaker
Being myself someone who has a lot of personal history with new agey types who ended up as wellness fascists and getting into QAnon, I found that pretty resonant.
00:17:25
Speaker
A lot of his specific observations I don't necessarily disagree with as things which coincide with fascism. And I think he's he's correct here that there's this...
00:17:37
Speaker
sense of tradition, but it's, he's, you know, he's he wants to draw a distinction between this and what we might think of as conservatism more broadly. and i think he's correctly making this observation. It's not actually about like an actual veneration of conservative values. It's this like explicitly something which is claiming to be like a culture of tradition, right? Something which is claiming to support tradition, but really you're sort of allowed to have any kind of contradiction because really you're trying to pretend that there's some true thing that is behind all of the stuff you're saying.
00:18:15
Speaker
And that's really what you're venerating here. We can see some unacknowledged agreement with how they're writing about fascism here, because other people have written about fascism as having very little, strictly speaking, ideological content, and being more about the experience of being a fascist.
00:18:35
Speaker
That experience doesn't require you to examine contradictions because you're going out and you're doing the thing.
Rejection of modernism and enlightenment in fascism
00:18:42
Speaker
You're doing the deed. And that's what's important is the word being made deed.
00:18:48
Speaker
Trait number two. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth, Blut und Boden. The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the reduction of the spirit of 1789, 1776, course.
00:19:19
Speaker
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, ur-fascism can be defined as irrationalism. So I do think this like end of 1776, of course This was one of the things I underlined and I was like, okay Let's not let's ignore the extent to which Hitler explicitly cited American society as inspiration for Nazism. Yeah, and we're specifically talking about American racial segregation the history of slavery Etc. All that stuff. That's but even more specific things like American history
00:19:56
Speaker
Right, even things like the use of the word ghetto for, you know, the Warsaw Ghetto, places where Jews were being corralled in Nazi Germany before being sent to extermination camps.
00:20:09
Speaker
Sure, it has the history of the European neighborhoods, like the ghetto in Venice was the oldest one that were sort of the only places Jews were allowed to live.
00:20:20
Speaker
But any real historical look at this understands it as like not being directly from this European sense of ghetto, but actually through the American use of this term. You know, you can read there's lots of different historical analysis of these, this understanding that Hitler took Jim Crow segregation as hugely inspirational towards his vision of like how to get rid of the Jews in Germany or how to handle the Jews in Germany.
00:20:47
Speaker
He can't quite get away with saying like the spirit of 1776 because the spirit of 1789 was something people were sort of talking about in this understanding And so he wants to kind of bring in 1776, but i'm sorry dude like no um And to be clear with spirit of 1789 we're talking about the french revolution I think it's kind of interesting that today's american fascists I think there certainly is a rejection of quote unquote, enlightenment values implicit in a lot of what they do.
00:21:15
Speaker
But what they're really more interested in undermining and attacking is the sort of leftism that grew up before and after World War II.
00:21:27
Speaker
which they describe in terms of postmodernism, in terms of imported values from the Islamic world and from German Jews.
00:21:40
Speaker
I think the rhetoric of our current crop of fascists like has shifted a little bit from this, but the rejection of modernism is still there. you know the The thing i said at the beginning aside, which is you know you could you could talk a lot about the contradictions of the American Revolution and You know, there's there's readings of how much of it was actually, you know, Britain was talking about. I mean, I've seen historians claim like one of the big forces was the UK. You know, Britain, that we're talking about abolishing slavery and America didn't want to do that. Like, you know, there's all these these contradictions inherent in 1776, of course.
00:22:17
Speaker
I think he's correct that, yeah, there is this rejection of modernism, there's this rejection of modernity, and we very much see that today. And we've even talked about, I think in the past, when like Tucker Carlson has come up and Carlson is again getting support from some people and supposedly on the left for talking about, oh, we should question this narrative of whether Israel has a right to exist. And again, people are like, aha, like even Tucker Carlson is saying it and look like you really don't have to hand it to Tucker Carlson.
00:22:41
Speaker
he is falling into these positions because he understands modernity as something bad and he is including kind of a lot of the things we don't like about capitalism in that but his critique isn't like we should have the anti-capitalist utopia it's reject modernity and go back to this exactly this kind of traditionalist thing that Umberto Eco is talking about Yeah, he understands that capitalism and modernity undermine certain values in American society, but those values are fascist ones.
00:23:17
Speaker
You would rather have segregation that isn't influenced or watered down by interest in things like Israel, for example. Yeah, exactly.
00:23:28
Speaker
Like the society he wants to build is worse, so don't please don't hand it to him, right?
00:23:35
Speaker
Item three.
00:23:38
Speaker
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before or without any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation, therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.
00:23:55
Speaker
This Cult of Irrationalism point was super interesting for me to read because around the time we're recording this, we have the like clip of Marc Andreessen talking about how like introspection is a modern invention.
00:24:09
Speaker
and he just does stuff without thinking about it. And actually the idea of thinking about stuff, like he's basically exactly said this, like it's emasculating and but and stupid and really you should just do stuff without thinking.
00:24:21
Speaker
We absolutely see this. Now I do think I will, you know, dock Echo points again a little bit unfairly for not anticipating rationalism as a movement today, which would very much go, like, I think is an example of an ur-fascist, you know, not explicitly fascist, but an ur-fascist movement that is not what he's talking about. Now, Echo would say, ah but I didn't say you have to hit all the points, right? These are just, these are just guidelines, right? There's family resemblance, you know, sometimes you can do the opposite and that's that's also fascism and then i would question the utility of this entire project but yeah he he a little bit falls for this like rational discourse as actual ideal that maybe he he plays that up a little bit too much and maybe it's because of his background as a semiotician who loves thinking and words and all these things and things that they have the power to save you fucking word cells Let's read that Andreessen interview segment. I'm going to be the interviewer and you be Andreessen, okay? i'm going to imagine what it would be like if my head were perfectly egg-shaped.
00:25:24
Speaker
We should say who Andreessen is. He's the most powerful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He is noted tech fascist who regularly writes these sort of manifestos about how technology is the future. He's incredibly powerful. Okay, I'll be the interviewer, David. Your mark.
00:25:44
Speaker
You don't have any levels of introspection? Yes, zero. As little as possible. Why?
Contemporary fascism and irrationalism
00:25:50
Speaker
Move forward. Go. I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem, and it's a problem at work, and it's a problem at home. So I've read 400 biographies of history.
00:26:02
Speaker
400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, and someone one asked me what the most surprising thing I've learned from this was. And I answered, they have little or zero introspection.
00:26:13
Speaker
Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like, I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.
00:26:31
Speaker
All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are a kind of manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of guilt-based whammy kind of showed up from Europe, a lot of it in Vienna.
00:26:55
Speaker
In 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.
00:27:15
Speaker
There's so much wild shit in here. It's really funny. I do want to put it. Also, that was not at all a credible impression of Andreessen, and I wasn't trying to do one. So don't get in the comments and say that's a bad Andreessen impression. I was just trying to do a voice that sounded stupid. I actually pulled an audio clip of this, and then I listened to it a few times, and Andreessen's voice is so annoying, and he mumbles so severely that I was like, I just don't want to use this on the podcast. We're just going to read the interview.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't even see this whole thing. So I had seen the short clip of like 400 years ago. Like I had seen basically he said 400 years ago, no one did introspection. I'm pretty sure he picks out the number 400 because the other guy says he read 400 biographies, by the way. Yeah.
00:27:59
Speaker
So let's just take this like a little bit at a time because there's so much to talk about here, even though this is really not what this episode is about, but it's so funny. I've read 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Like, who are history's greatest entrepreneurs? What the fuck are you talking about?
00:28:14
Speaker
Like, because I'm wondering who he counts as like history's greatest entrepreneur. Yeah, implicit in this, I'm pretty sure that like Genghis Khan is considered an entrepreneur. Like, it's gotta That's what I'm wondering. Like, because would he include... Right, but but there are certain figures that, like, if you included, then it wouldn't make any sense to make this claim, right? Like, Alexander the Great was maybe one of history's greatest entrepreneurs, right? But he was, like... He he was tutored by Aristotle. Like, he was famously, like, introspective, right? Like... Yeah, he famously got moody when his boyfriend died, like... Exactly, right? Like, he was a... He was a...
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah, he was he was a degenerate like us. So... what i it reminds me of this one of my favorite books that I read some of, and it's it's a huge doorstopper, and there's it's it's kind of stupid, but it's it's really funny.
00:29:11
Speaker
There is a really famous literary critic, Harold Bloom, who wrote a book about Shakespeare called Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human.
00:29:23
Speaker
And this, if I had any faith that Marc Andreessen was like somewhat well-read, then,
00:29:35
Speaker
I would say 400 years is because he's like referencing this concept. And it is the case that early modern historians talk about the late 1500s and the early 1600s is this like big period of change and of change in the understanding of what the individual is.
00:29:53
Speaker
I would agree with like that being the closest thing to trying to make sense of this you could, you could make Harold Bloom's claim in the invention of the in Shakespeare, the invention of the human is that Shakespeare invented what it means to be a human for us today.
00:30:09
Speaker
And the book basically just goes through all of Shakespeare's plays and says like, oh, every time you know ah time you're in love, really you're copying romeo and juliet right and you're doing the things that like shakespeare invented right and it's it's it's kind of charming in how absurd it is as a claim like i i do find something charming about this analysis because i too would love to believe that like literature has this huge transformative power to change the world but it's obviously ridiculous right shakespeare did not invent what it means to be a human get fucking real but even in that most like
00:30:46
Speaker
even in the most extreme, you know, yes, Harold Bloom is correct. Shakespeare invented what it means to be a human. That is still nothing compared to the absurdity of claiming that 400 years ago, no one was introspective. Like, because that claim also exists, right? Like there's a famous, there's a famous book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, where he claims that Consciousness, human consciousness evolved sometime after the Bronze Age.
00:31:20
Speaker
And you can prove this by reading the Iliad because the characters in the Iliad weren't conscious. They didn't have any sense of like interiority.
00:31:31
Speaker
They experienced their like bicameral mind as like gods talking to them. And that's why the characters talk to the gods in the Iliad because the characters in the Iliad, the people that they're based on, like didn't actually have consciousness.
00:31:45
Speaker
Which is like a crazy claim for a book that is like one of the most introspective. I don't know. The Iliad is so incredibly introspective, like all the time.
00:31:59
Speaker
Anyway, there's all these claims like exist and it's like, Shocking to me like he's he's managing to blow all of those out of the water with like not only did interiority not exist Not only did like it not exist before you know the Iliad or it didn't exist before Shakespeare. It actually didn't exist before 1910 Like no one had interiority before 1910. That's crazy Did you know nobody felt guilt before 1910 or at least they weren't pressured to ever do you think he's heard of Catholicism?
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, like, Catholicism. Like, this is after, like, all of romantic literature. Like, Goethe and, like, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like, all these books which are fundamentally just about, like, people moping around and being introspective.
00:32:43
Speaker
Like, all of those were at a time when introspection didn't exist. Like, even in the dumb guy version of the thing he wants to say, like, he's managing to be dumber. Like, he's... It's so...
00:32:54
Speaker
wild I don't know. This is so funny. And it's all because he wants to complain about Freud. I mean... Yeah, I mean, he wants to complain he wants to complain about the Jews who are making him feel bad for being fascist.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, this is ah this is like crypto-fascism, but like really light on the crypto part. It's like the thinnest veneer over anti-Semitism, right? He wants to talk about like degenerate Jewish science, basically. Yeah, he's putting some rice paper over it. Yeah, like...
00:33:22
Speaker
By the way, let me highlight the thing where he says that thinking causes problems at home. I've met this guy's wife, Laura Arriaga Andreessen, came to my class as a guest speaker while I was an undergrad at Stanford. And she spent almost the whole time talking about how when you are the daughter of one billionaire and married to another, people don't take you seriously.
00:33:46
Speaker
And just whining about that shit. That was a formative experience for me. I understood so much more about rich people after that. I bet he's fucking miserable at home. And that makes me happy to think about.
00:33:59
Speaker
I've got no sympathy for this. Like, oh my god, it's so hard being a billionaire.
00:34:06
Speaker
I couldn't imagine a bigger skill issue. like First of all, you don't have to be one Second of all, like you have no imagination. like You literally are one of the few people on Earth with the power to genuinely transform like your material situation into whatever you want.
00:34:25
Speaker
How are you so stupid? i don't know. I have seen this claim. I mean, there's like that famous post that's like being wealthy is like the cognitive equivalent of like being kicked in the hole being kicked in the head by a horse every day.
00:34:37
Speaker
It's one of those things where like to some extent I guess I have to believe it because it's so obviously like empirically true, but I just like there's a part of me that doesn't understand it. Like how how is it causing that? Like how come you can't like you're a billionaire you can do whatever you want. Okay, would you say this is a good example of action for action's sake and the cult of irrationalism? Yeah, absolutely. i think he is broadly correct in that point.
00:35:00
Speaker
Four and five are redundant, so we're just going to skip to five. Disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference.
00:35:12
Speaker
The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus, ur-fascism is racist by definition.
Racism and identity in fascist ideologies
00:35:22
Speaker
I think this is broadly true, and I think his thing, ur-fascism is racist by definition, is is a good way of putting it.
00:35:28
Speaker
It's not that, oh, you look at fascist movements and you... notice that they become racist in this way, it's like that is one of the things we think of as defining this kind of movement, right? Like this kind of reactionary right-wing movement that we want to call fascist. It is usually, this is sort of the cons of constitutive thing that we usually think of as what makes people fascist is is this hatred of foreigners or different races or whatever that group is. Yeah. I can't imagine trying to describe fascism and not putting this more or less at the center.
00:35:59
Speaker
Number six. Ur-fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.
00:36:16
Speaker
In our time, when the old, quote, proletarians are becoming petty bourgeois, and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene, the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
00:36:28
Speaker
I think this is an interesting one, and especially he makes this claim about the future, and here we 30 years later, we can kind of... say, you know, is the fascism of the future finding its audience in this new majority?
00:36:41
Speaker
i think the answer to this one is complicated. i think the, like, I don't know that I agree with this analysis of where the fascism is finding its audience. I do think there is something to be said about a kind of frustrated middle class and a certain amount of fascism emerging from a failure to have class solidarity that a certain group of people who want to be middle class are because they don't want to recognize their role as proletarian, if that makes sense.
00:37:14
Speaker
I think fascism as we see it in the U.S. today is very much a cross-class phenomenon. It's mostly along racial lines, and it's successfully incorporated these extraordinarily wealthy elites and lower-class people and middle-class people, and especially it's targeted a group that he doesn't quite talk about, which is the sort of petty lords of the American economy these days, people who own a bunch of car dealerships, that sort of thing.
00:37:51
Speaker
There were analyses of the average income of people who were January 6th rioters. It was like really high. That is kind of who he's talking about, I think, when he talks about like a petty bourgeois that is excluding, that wants to exclude the proletariat. I just don't think this one quite hit.
00:38:10
Speaker
And I think it's partly for reasons that it's where he needs to do a class analysis and where he is kind of ideologically opposed from seriously engaging with the class analysis he puts proletarians here in quotes which is a little strange because he does just mean proletarians it's not clear to me why he wants to put the kind of safety gloves around the word proletarians i do think there's something to be said about like individual frustration but yeah this is just not you need a little more explanation i think we come back to a variation on this individual frustration concept in number seven
00:38:45
Speaker
To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus, at the root of the Ur-fascist psychology, there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.
00:39:08
Speaker
The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is to is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside. Jews are usually the best target because they have advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.
00:39:23
Speaker
I do want to pick out... There's, to me, some really suspect sentiments buried in the phrase he uses. People who feel deprived of a clear social identity.
00:39:34
Speaker
I don't know what that yeah means. Yeah. Like he doesn't want to do class analysis, which makes me think that it's it's probably not an economic issue that he's really describing there. It sounds like he's talking about people who are, you know, just racist and feel threatened by the presence of people who are not of their race.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little strange. He doesn't want to really investigate the origins of that feeling of deprivation, right? What causes someone to feel deprived of a social identity?
00:40:08
Speaker
i think there's there's something, there's some truth to this. He's saying to a certain subset of people who are looking for this kind of community, this might appeal because it is offering this kind of shared cultural identity.
00:40:20
Speaker
And I think this is kind of a correct analysis that like, offering a cultural identity being defined in opposition to a usually racial outgroup is part of what we're how we're seeing fascism working today and and how it's worked historically. And we've seen it in actually a couple examples. Like this was one of the main points we wanted we talked about with Enoch Powell, for example, where he was really invested in this kind of Britishness and like British cultural identity. And this is why he became obsessed with quote unquote immigrants.
00:40:56
Speaker
It's also a little suspect, this claim like Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. That also leaves some questions open. Jews aren't really outside. Like yeah you're kind of taking this like fascist analysis at its word a little bit too much.
00:41:11
Speaker
I think we could easily amend this to say that Jews are portrayed at being at the same time inside or outside. The way it's like yeah on the page is just an endorsement of the dual loyalty trope, which is ah whoops. yeah And it's a little ambiguous. Like, I think if we could we could be a little generous and say, oh, he does mean, like, in the fascist mind, there's the dual loyalty trope. But he's a little clumsy.
00:41:37
Speaker
And I don't know. I'm not feeling particularly generous towards him. So I'm goingnna i'm going to point it out I do like the takeaway that fascism is just... inherently conspiratorial and in particular it's obsessed with the backstabbing plot yeah it's conspiratorial and it's like aggrieved like it is focused on this kind of sense of grievance and loss number eight is by far the most famous part of this essay you will see this part quoted all the time The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
00:42:11
Speaker
When I was a boy, I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of the rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. me You'll very, very often hear like the enemy is both weak and strong as a crib of this point and as a point of saying, look, this is this is fascist.
00:42:49
Speaker
I think he's kind of correct here. Yeah, i agree. I think there's been a lot of discussion and probably a lot of academic scholarship that I did not look at focused around this last sentence here. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they're constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. Is that in a literal sense true?
00:43:11
Speaker
i don't know.
Fascist regimes and military failures
00:43:13
Speaker
Can we see that play out sometimes? Definitely. Our fascist government just invaded Iran with no clear conception of what Iran was actually capable of doing.
00:43:25
Speaker
And the result has been a complete fucking catastrophe. I think we're seeing that part illustrated quite vividly right now. Like, part of what is happening is, like, the U.S. military needs to simultaneously project the sense that we're, like, undefeatable and able to do anything while, like, understanding that that's not the case.
00:43:50
Speaker
There definitely is this, if what feels like a sea change from, like, yeah, we forgot that that part was rhetoric and part of the, like... part of the military stance and we forgot that we actually also have to do this other part which is like a genuine analysis of what we can do and like hegseth and like the military leadership seem to genuinely believe that we were losing things because we were too woke absolutely and i think there was a generation of leadership that was projecting that sense that we're losing because we're too woke i mean
00:44:24
Speaker
going back to like Vietnam, right? Like I've talked before on this podcast about my elite might sort of favorite slash least favorite line in Rambo 2 where he looks directly at the camera and says, do we get to win this time? Are we going to stop being in such pussies?
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, or like, you know, Jingle Smells about the dad who's a vet but cool, and then the son who's a woke vet, like ah a vet who is like, has PTSD because he went to the woke war where he wasn't allowed to win, right? like Like, this has been part of the imagination for a long time, but I think that the people calling the shots understood that that was rhetoric, and I think now...
00:44:57
Speaker
that's over. And so I don't know if it's really true that fascist governments are contended to lose wars for these reasons. I think there's something there, but yeah, I don't know if I'm totally buying this claim that like fascists are destined to lose wars. I think, I think our military leadership is stupid, but, but I don't know. We'll see.
00:45:16
Speaker
Number nine. For Ur-fascism, there is no struggle for life, but rather life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
00:45:28
Speaker
It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a final solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age which contradicts the principle of permanent war.
00:45:43
Speaker
No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament. This part really didn't hit for me. Yeah, Sam. I do think he's correct that fascism is characterized by a state of perpetual war and perpetual struggle.
00:45:57
Speaker
They're big believers in social Darwinism. That's how they frame the existence of nations. I think this claim that this somehow is an internal contradiction. Oh, the you know, no fascist, like a fascist leader should try to solve this predicament. I don't think it's a predicament that needs to be solved or that fascists are interested in solving. Why would they want to? They can dangle the golden age carrot forever. He's he's hitting on this idea that is a very like dialectical materialist idea of like the internal contradiction in the system that will undo the system and like be a historically progressive force.
00:46:31
Speaker
but he can't actually engage in the like rich tradition of people doing this kind of analysis. So he's just kind of doing it badly and kind of not really working. like There is something to be said about an internal contradiction of if you're constantly or you're constantly viewing life as a struggle...
00:46:49
Speaker
Like this will tear your society apart. But it's not really for the reasons he's explaining that like, oh, people are going realize that like the golden age isn't coming or whatever. Like I just, it's just not true. like i will say, i do think he is correct that the rhetoric always promises a golden age, at least as far as I'm aware of. There's an image I think of sometimes. It's this Nazi meme where there's this happy family having a picnic on top of the grass. And you see at the bottom of the frame, there's a view under the ground. And at the bottom of that is a bunch of bones buried in the dirt.
00:47:26
Speaker
With some glasses on them. Yeah, like the mass graves. Yeah, it's the mass grave of the enemies that have finally been conquered. And I think a lot of political movements have this kind of, I'm going to say, eschatological thinking where you imagine this like final victorious moment.
Eschatological thinking in politics
00:47:41
Speaker
I think this isn't even just a right-wing thing. Like I think people do tend to engage in this kind of thinking about, oh, there's going to be the...
00:47:50
Speaker
I mean, leftists do this with like the revolution, right? The revolution is going to come and then everything's going wonderful. Right. We're always immunitizing the Eschaton. Yeah, exactly. so and you know, it's very different. And and you could you could talk about what what are the differences between that kind of thinking and this more explicitly fascist kind of golden era thinking? you know that would be an interesting essay, but he he doesn't really have the the juice to do that.
00:48:12
Speaker
Number 10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
00:48:26
Speaker
Ur-fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can or ought to become a member of the party, but there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses. They are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.
00:48:51
Speaker
Since the group is hierarchically organized, according to a military model, every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.
00:49:03
Speaker
Okay, I think there's something interesting here. I was actually thinking a lot about our Nick Fuentes episode when I read this, that I think he's missing something here, which is there is a kind of elitism, but it's not necessarily, like, there is a sense in which it's like, we're better than everyone else.
00:49:22
Speaker
But there's also this like huge negative affect to it very often that I think he's missing of the like, Nick doesn't say like, you're better than everyone. He actually hates his audience.
00:49:34
Speaker
But in that contempt is teaching them to be contemptuous of the rest of society and like everyone, any adults of the left. You know, he's kind of getting at that a little bit here. Like, this okay, the leader knows the power was not delegated democratically, but conquered by force.
00:49:49
Speaker
So he's got this, like, he understands that his position is based on the weakness of his followers, but he he doesn't quite push that idea enough, I think. I think he's missing, like, how much kind of negative affect and hatred is actually really a motor here. I think we can make this both more general and more accurate by describing it as a love of hierarchy and a love of enforcing and abusing the structure of that hierarchy.
00:50:18
Speaker
It's not just we're contempt for the weak. We're like contempt for the people who are more weak than us. And like we understand ourselves as weak. and like and And there's a pleasure in that. There's a pleasure in submission to the hierarchy. I also think that these hierarchies proceed along more diverse lines than what he's laying out here.
00:50:39
Speaker
He's talking about aristocraticness, which is, i don't know, maybe a very European take on what kind of hierarchy fascism has to be obsessed with. There's racial hierarchy. There's gender hierarchy. yeah There's just the hierarchy of listening to the Nick Fuentes podcast versus being some rando chud. These are all hierarchies that these people can enjoy.
00:51:05
Speaker
Yeah, the hierarchy of do you grope? yeah Yeah. 11. In such a perspective, everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology, the hero is an exceptional being, but in ur-fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.
00:51:24
Speaker
It is not by chance that a motto of the phalangists was Viva la muerte. In English, it should be translated as long live death. In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity. Believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the ur-fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The ur-fascist hero is impatient to die.
00:51:50
Speaker
Putting aside what we think about his cult of heroism and cult of death characterization. I do think it's interesting to point out that he says in non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant, but must be faced with dignity.
00:52:04
Speaker
He's talking about Christian theology, like there's all sorts of different religious reactions to the notion of death or just ways people process death. There's plenty of examples of non-fascian societies where that's not how they approach death, that you know death is understood in all sorts of different ways. And it's, I think, again, you know you're saying the lay public is told this and believers are told it's the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness, but it's like believers of Christianity. And I think there's a narrowness to Echo's vision here.
00:52:38
Speaker
I do think there's something to be said about this notion of like fascism being characterized by a heroic vision of death or like needing to die in a heroic way. I think it's interesting that, right, like I'm thinking a now again of remember Enoch Powell saying that he always regretted not dying in the war, that anyone who went off to war and who came, who didn't die, like has a regret.
00:53:01
Speaker
And, you know, certainly Enoch Powell was not. Not a fascist in the sense that he he didn't agree with the fascists, right? he He didn't. He wasn't a member of the fascist. He went to war to fight the fascists, and he actually he had like a a spiritual disillusionment with his prior fascination for German culture. I mean, there was a lot of stuff in there, and and so I don't want to say straightforwardly he was a fascist. I mean, he was certainly a racist. Yeah.
00:53:27
Speaker
But also I'm thinking of fascist obsession with the contemporary understanding of like Norse mythology and religious practice.
00:53:38
Speaker
Part of what they love about it is like, oh yeah, that's so cool. Like I'm gonna go to Valhalla when I die, because I'm gonna die in battle. Like there definitely is this fascination with the heroic death. When he says like, you know, by contrast, this is what non-fascists believe, and then basically just explains Catholicism is kind of funny.
00:53:57
Speaker
12. I think this is where things... They start getting shakier here. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo, which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of non-standard sexual habits from chastity to homosexuality. Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons.
00:54:25
Speaker
Doing so becomes an Ur-Satz phallic exercise. I think he's got this exactly backwards. agree. Like, I think he's saying, oh, there's these like fascist impulses and then they're getting frustrated by the fact that, you know, permanent war and heroism are difficult. And so they're being channeled into homophobia and misogyny. And I actually think the homophobia and misogyny are prior, right? Like even going back to like enemy is weak and strong kind of stuff and this conspiratorial nature notion of like the intruder. We've seen all of this in misogynist texts.
00:55:00
Speaker
Like it's not, oh, there's this conspiratorial thing happening and then it's getting channeled into misogyny. It's like... It's misogynists who become fascists, it's not the other way around. Exactly what I was going to say.
00:55:14
Speaker
I think he's he's going like straight up backwards. He's reversing the car at 100 miles per hour. He's got a finished dish and he's uncooking it. He's like, get the garnish off this thing. ah Like, yeah.
00:55:27
Speaker
I mean, I think he's correct that misogyny is, you know, ho misogyny and homophobia are things you can look for to help identify fascism. But... Just the causal chain is in the other direction.
00:55:40
Speaker
Yeah, the pipeline is incel to fascist, and not the other way around. It's not that you have all these neo-Nazis going around and then there's forums where they're all talking about hating women, right? It's it's the other way around. 13. thirteen Ur-fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view.
00:56:05
Speaker
One follows the decisions of the majority. For ur-fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the people is conceived of as equality, a monolithic entity expressing the common will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the leader pretends to be their interpreter.
00:56:22
Speaker
Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act. They are only called on to play the role of the people. Thus, the people is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism, we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or internet populism in which the emotional response of a select group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.
00:56:46
Speaker
This one's a fucking mess, man. Yeah, he's like, at times, it's like, oh, if you kind of pulled that out, like, you could be cooking, but I don't know. Like, there's parts here where it's like, there is something interesting in this, like,
00:57:04
Speaker
mass media, but this is also, he's so late with this observation. Like if he had written this in the 50s, he'd be cooking. But to write in 1995, like mass media is going to enable a new kind of populism that's going to make these large rallies unnecessary.
00:57:23
Speaker
Like this has already been noticed. Not that that's necessarily makes it wrong, but I think it's also interesting that like a lot of the rise of Trump, at least for instance, like is actually centered around these like in-person rallies that he had, right? like He's kind of wrong. I mean, it is true that like the TV and the internet did enable this kind of populism, and the role of the internet in Trump's rise, for instance, is has been talked about to death.
00:57:51
Speaker
I don't know. What do you think about this claim about fascism being characterized as like no longer having individuals with rights, that the people is replaced by this fiction of the people? like what What's your take on this? I think that's reasonable.
00:58:04
Speaker
The part I really have an issue with is when he describes how things work in democracy. It talks about the citizens ass having individual rights, but they only have a political impact from a quantitative point of view. You just follow along with the majority.
00:58:19
Speaker
i mean, that's the classical Greek character of democracy. Rule by the mob. Like, this is lip slop. Like... This is the ideology that leads you to say you got to vote blue no matter who and then watch as your country gets more and more and more fascist every election cycle, because you don't think of actually having a movement and actually having a leader with like ideas leading people as being.
00:58:46
Speaker
ever potentially good. this is the This is the political analysis that allows you to say Hitler and Stalin are exactly the same. Even worse, this ideology doesn't require you to, in fact, requires you not to, protect the rights of minorities.
00:59:00
Speaker
Like, this is the kind of thinking that lets you talk about how, oh, I support trans rights, I just think they went a little too fast and we got to be more culturally normal, right? Yeah, this, I don't know.
00:59:12
Speaker
I don't think this is cooking. No. And so I guess actually, like, that's where I do think there's a problem with saying, oh, fascism is then characterized by conceiving the people as having this, like,
00:59:27
Speaker
monolithic entity like that's sort of always going to happen like it is just the case that there's this conception of the people that is not exactly the same as what everyone thinks in any democracy i don't really think that that's like a fascist thing like i do think i mean there's sort of a connection he could be drawing here which is the people as an embodiment of the national spirit And the national spirit is an embodiment of the people. I think that would sharpen this. If he describes the fascist leader as representing those two intermingled things, then we're getting
Language manipulation in fascism
01:00:04
Speaker
somewhere.
01:00:04
Speaker
Yeah, but he kind of misses that. And I think what he's describing is a little bit too general and is just like... how a democracy has to work like there is going to be this construction of the people you're going to have these political movements that have an idea of who their people like who they are for and there's going to be like an actual battle of ideologies and you can't say oh the truly democratic thing is just like taking the average because that doesn't really exist 14.
01:00:36
Speaker
fourteen Er-fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell in 1984 as the official language of Ingsoc, English socialism, but elements of er-fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship.
01:00:50
Speaker
All the Nazi or fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
01:01:08
Speaker
I genuinely think I'm going to do an episode later on Orwell at some point. Even, I don't know if I can, I've been trying to figure out how to do it. i fucking hate 1984 so much. It's one of the stupidest books ever written. It's so fucking stupid.
01:01:20
Speaker
It's, okay, this is not what this episode is about. so I'm going to boil down my critique to this idea of like, oh, you're using language in this impoverished vocabulary. I think it's just really dumb and it's completely missing the mark. And I've never seen it used in a way that ever made me intrigued by what the person using this analysis was saying. It just feels really lazy.
01:01:42
Speaker
What are you talking about? i think what he's doing here is he's not quite explicitly, but in practice, citing political correctness.
01:01:53
Speaker
which, you know, is the 90s equivalent of talking about wokeness. 1984 is a book about how, like, people who are evil or whatever, like, they're setting out to go and do evil, and they, like, understand that that's what their project is, and that's such a narrow understanding of, like, any of these movements, right? Like, the line from, right, when you're reading the, like, manifesto of, like, Big Brother or whatever, and it's like, you know, imagine a boot stamping on a face forever, right? Like that's the vision of the future.
01:02:26
Speaker
The people who are enacting fascism, like they genuinely don't conceive of themselves as doing that, right? It's an accurate description of what they are doing. It's not accurate description of their self-description. And it's like, they're not imagining a boot stamping on a human face. They're imagining a boot stamping on a degenerate or like, right? Like there's something missing from your analysis here, which is like actually understanding that like protecting human dignity is part of their rhetoric too. Like you need to, oh my God. Okay. I'm not gonna rant about 1984, but i hate it so much.
01:03:00
Speaker
I will say i went and I just looked up what historians had to say about this. And they were like, yeah, I'm not aware of any studies that have like verified this claim about fascists using impoverished vocabulary in their school books.
01:03:20
Speaker
Like, that's just made up. It is true that fascists are targeting certain words in school books, but it's not the words.
01:03:35
Speaker
It's the concepts and it's not this generic, like we're publishing vocabulary, right? Well, the claim of Orwell is that the primary way that dictatorships will attack ideas in the future is to attack the words that those ideas represent.
01:03:51
Speaker
And that's just not true. Echo loves this idea. Echo loves this idea because he's like obsessed with semiotics, but it's not the case. Words don't have no value, but they're not like the thing that Echo thinks they are throughout this essay.
01:04:08
Speaker
This just is a really weak point to me. so I think before we move on, I want to just sort of summarize you know what my sort of big problems with this essay are and why I was like, oh my god, I hate this so much. And I think there's like basically two different chunks that I think really elucidate this. So at the end, he says, we must keep alert so the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-fascism is still around us, sometimes in plain clothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world seeing somebody saying, I want to reopen Auschwitz. I want the black shirts to parade again in the Italian squares. Life is not that simple.
01:04:43
Speaker
Ur-fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances every day in every part of the world. I find that really funny because it turns out it is that simple.
01:04:55
Speaker
First of all, it is that simple. People are... just saying I want to reopen Auschwitz. And how is it that, you know, liberals are everywhere failing to do anything about this because their response begins and ends with pointing at it and saying, I have identified this as fascism.
01:05:16
Speaker
So fucking what, Umberto Eco? Here you have a way of identifying fascism. What are you going to do about it, right? I think this is a huge flaw with this text, is it's all about understanding fascism as this kind of, this kind of like thing you can identify, and then the extent of your response to it should be to point it out.
01:05:37
Speaker
And there's a ah couple writers writing about fascism, like, much earlier that I was thinking about a lot while reading this. So there's a another Italian, I forget how to pronounce his name, Benedetto Croce or something. Yeah, I think his name is Benedetto Croce.
01:05:55
Speaker
and In the 1930s, he wrote an article that I think about all the time, where he called, it's called like the future of democracy. it was published in the New Republic. And he basically says, look, people are talking about like democracy and where is democracy going and what's going to happen with democracy. And I think I've even used this analogy on the podcast and I was thinking about this guy's work. And he says, look, you're talking about these like they're meteorological questions. You're talking about this like, is it going to rain tomorrow?
01:06:19
Speaker
And you have to understand you have something to do with that. Like, you're talking about the direction of society, but, like, you have a responsibility to go and change that. And so to say, like, oh, are we going to have a democracy in the future? It's, like, that's kind of up to you. And, like, not necessarily you the individual, because, like, you the one individual don't have the power to, like, transform society. But...
01:06:42
Speaker
To take this approach where you're just like noticing things and then pointing them out is really weak. Yeah, I think already towards the beginning, we see this failure. He's talking about his sort of history, his childhood, and how he's learning about these things. And he says...
01:06:56
Speaker
In my country today, there are people who are wondering if the resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation, this question is irrelevant. We immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the resistance. For us, it was a point of pride to know that the Europeans did not wait passively for a liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for a restored freedom, it meant something to know that but behind the firing lines, there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.
01:07:20
Speaker
First of all, understanding World War II as something that was primarily won by the Americans and not also the Red Army is profoundly ahistorical. But also for his generation, the question of whether resistance had a real impact is irrelevant.
01:07:36
Speaker
You are talking about a very specific subset of the generation that does not include like the Jewish people who were targeted, right? like I don't think it's an irrelevant question what the actual material impact of the resistance was. And the idea that for your generation, the main impact of the resistance was like your own psychological comfort.
01:07:56
Speaker
That's kind of fascist. Like you're kind of being fascist here when you're saying the most important thing is my own psychological comfort and not like the material lives of the people around me who are being oppressed.
01:08:07
Speaker
I will also say that it's very easy for him to talk about and being irrelevant whether the Resistance helped because he wasn't involved with it. He was a little kid. He literally didn't know that the Resistance existed until after the war was over. He talks about that in the essay.
01:08:24
Speaker
What Echo's essay really is just about is the ability to point at something and say, that's fascist. And I think his call to action at the end, which is like, you need to throughout history be able to identify, is this fascist and point at it and say, that's fascist, is kind of weak as a work of like political theory or whatever.
01:08:41
Speaker
But as a work of media analysis, great. Like we want we watched a movie. We want to talk about how the movie is fascist. So now we're going to be able to identify like, is this movie fascist? And like, spoiler, oh my God, it's incredibly fascist. It's possibly the most fascist media I have ever consumed. Yeah, it was so uncomfortable watch.
01:09:04
Speaker
But before we talk about the movie, let's talk about Frank Miller. Who is Frank Miller? He was a celebrated comics creator. And I want to thank comic critic Helen Chazen at Hecubon Blue Sky for giving me some pointers on research about Miller. She also publishes and distributes scenes.
01:09:21
Speaker
Miller was born in 1957. He grew up in Vermont, and he started out in comics as strictly an illustrator. Secretly, he really wanted to do gangster fiction, but to make a living he had to draw superheroes, and eventually he managed to take over writing for an unpopular series Daredevil. He turned it into the sort of dark crime drama that he was interested in, and within a few months it went from being on the brink of cancellation to being a huge hit.
01:09:49
Speaker
I wasn't able to pin down the exact timeline, but at about this time in the early 80s, he gets mugged in New York. And this has a huge effect on his work and on his professed beliefs.
01:10:03
Speaker
Here's a bit from an interview he did in 1985. Sorry, I just saw the first four words of this and i immediately want to end it all. I think Clint Eastwood is more in touch with what we should do with superheroes than virtually anybody in comics.
01:10:19
Speaker
Dirty Harry is clearly larger than life. His behavior would certainly land him in jail, but that's irrelevant. What is relevant is that through all his hostility and despite his dirty language, Harry is a profoundly consistently moral force administering the wrath of God on murderers whose society treats as victims.
01:10:39
Speaker
The sudden critical acclaim for Eastwood is, I think, less a sign of a political shift to the right than a reluctant acknowledgement by critics who really can't understand what he's doing, that his is a major talent and presence,
01:10:52
Speaker
that his work has more to do with what's happening in society than any dozen of the more hip filmmakers, even though he's making heroic adventure movies, something that neither Hollywood nor Hollywood critics can understand.
01:11:03
Speaker
What makes me nuts is that we in comics have the opportunity, if we can drop our bad habits, our concessions to the 60s generation, along with the no longer appropriate view of the world, the view of the 30s and 40s that gave birth to the superhero, if we can redefine the superhero and make him a response to the insanity of our own times we will have something to offer the world and incidentally our chance at selling millions of comics oh my god that's so bad i will tell you i have not seen the dirty harry movies that he references but my understanding of them is that dirty harry is a cop who goes rogue and kills a bunch of criminals and
01:11:40
Speaker
and that this is very heroic. It is a very interesting connection, I think, to the Andreessen interview that we excerpted earlier. The way he talks about the concessions to the 60s generation and the problematic views of the 30s and 40s that gave birth to the superhero.
01:11:58
Speaker
I think what he's referencing there is exactly that importation of what is just barely subtextually in the Andreessen interview, Jewish points of view.
01:12:09
Speaker
Miller is talking about kind of the same stuff here, I think. I was thinking about this when you said like this is maybe the most fascist movie I've ever seen when we're talking about the movie. And it's possible. Like it's definitely up there.
01:12:20
Speaker
But there are plenty of other older American Hollywood movies. Like the thing Clint Eastwood is doing in Dirty Harry is very much a nod to like the Western.
01:12:31
Speaker
i was thinking a lot about like John Wayne. So there's the John Wayne movie The Searchers, which is definitely up there with most fascist movie I've ever seen. the searchers is this like beautifully shot western that's basically this woman gets kidnapped by comanche indians and they get heroic john ford to go try to save this white woman but he takes too long to find her and she's she's gone native and then it's oh no it's extremely racist it's
01:13:03
Speaker
It's a horrible movie about racist sexual obsession. But that's the kind of movie he's talking about. So he's saying Hollywood doesn't understand this, but he's talking about a Hollywood movie, right? So like Hollywood and Hollywood critics, like you're right. He means a certain Jewish element, right? Like...
01:13:23
Speaker
In 1986, he releases The Dark Knight Returns, which effectively kills the Adam West campy Batman era and turns him into the dark character we have today.
Frank Miller's influence on Batman
01:13:34
Speaker
But since we'll be discussing that at length, I want to skim the rest of his career first and then circle back to The Dark Knight. In the 90s, he's largely occupied with Sin City, which is a famously visually experimental hard-boiled crime series.
01:13:49
Speaker
Usually it's described as noir because it uses noir aesthetic techniques, but i feel like if I talk about it that way I'm going to give you the false impression that it's a descendant of like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and it's much more a descendant of Mickey Spillane.
01:14:06
Speaker
It's all about pulpy orgasms of unrepressed violence, sex, Miller cranks the misogyny way up with this work, even from the movie we watched today, in a way that is inflected with what you might call badass victim feminism.
01:14:21
Speaker
So the women are all sex workers. They're all dangerous and smart, but also constantly victimized by men and bragging about how tough that makes them. The idea that you could crank up the misogyny from Dark Knight Returns, which to me is already like misogyny out 10, like you're breaking the dial off the machine at that point. like Sin City ends up getting turned into a massive hit movie, which is followed by a flop sequel.
01:14:48
Speaker
In 1998, he releases 300, which I would say has a pretty high probability of turning into its own theory and practice episodes someday, but we'll see about that.
'Holy Terror' and anti-Islamic themes
01:15:00
Speaker
300 is about a mythologized version of the ancient Greek Spartans, whom Miller takes to be hyper-rhodicized, hyper-masculine Adonises in their battle against effeminate Persians.
01:15:15
Speaker
300 ends up getting turned into a massive hit movie and then has a flopsy. The last thing he does professionally that I want to bring up is his 2011 series, Holy Terror, which is a look at the status of Islam in the US.
01:15:32
Speaker
Here's how he described Holy Terror in a post from the time. Oh, you're visibly wincing. I haven't even sent you the excerpt and you're like visibly in pain. Well, because I understand his level of cultural analysis.
01:15:46
Speaker
Because I watched three hours of a movie. I watched a hundred years of a movie. I watched a thousand years. And so imagining, like, what he has to say about Islam.
01:16:00
Speaker
Here's a post you put up. My new comic book, or a graphic novel, I suppose it should be called, because it's square-bound, is Naked Propaganda. Propaganda.
01:16:14
Speaker
Propaganda has, over time, become a pejorative term. This is curious, since most of our mainstream media is precisely that, propaganda. One need only read the front page of the sacred New York Times, that gray, senile old lady.
01:16:29
Speaker
let alone explore the serpentine chasm that is its editorial page to renew so slanted as to be beyond recognition of the facts. Okay, cooking so far. Okay, so far, so far cooking, but I kind of think he means the opposite of what we mean when that. Well, read on. Let's find hesitant to hand it to him.
01:16:47
Speaker
So when I say that my new book, Holy Terrorist Propaganda, I mean so in all the ways that the vir ah the virtuous works of Thomas Paine practiced it, through to the ways that the current shameless MSNBC practice it. I employ propaganda in Holy Terror as such without apology.
01:17:06
Speaker
Let's keep in mind that back in the 40s, Superman punched out Adolf Hitler. The O'Neill Adams Green Lantern Green Arrow series in the 70s was a left-wing screed that climaxed with Jesus strung up on the head of a jumbo jet.
01:17:20
Speaker
Subtle stuff, all of it. Come on. Propaganda is rampant. News objectivity is a 20th century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it. Three thousand of my neighbors were murdered. My country was utterly unprovoked, savagely attacked.
01:17:39
Speaker
I wish all those responsible for the atrocity of 9-11 to burn in hell. I'm too old to serve my country in any other way, otherwise I'd gladly be pulling the trigger myself.
01:17:53
Speaker
Wow. Okay, I did not read Holy Terror for this episode, but there is a consensus around what the content is. Here's an excerpt from Wired's review of it. Holy Terror, the inaugural offering from Legendary Comics, starts out with the Fixer, an Ursot's Batman, enjoying a tryst with an Ursot's Catwoman when they're interrupted by a nail bomb.
01:18:14
Speaker
The culprit, a humanities major named Amina, an Islamist version of the psychopathic Rorschach from Watchmen, who sneers that the haughty skyline of Empire City is like sharpened sticks aimed at the eyes of God.
01:18:27
Speaker
The fixer's response is to go to war, indiscriminately. We give them what they want, minus the innocent victims, the fixer thinks as he opens fire. To bring the point home, Miller draws 14 stereotypical Muslim faces around the righteous antihero.
01:18:41
Speaker
Naturally, the only way to learn about the next attack is to torture a surviving terrorist, which Miller illustrates pornographically, even though the scary Muslim says pain means nothing to me, so it's not like the fixer is torturing, you know, a human being. So Muhammad, the fixer says, pardon me for guessing your name, but you've got to admit the odds are pretty good that it's Muhammad. Naturally, the terrorists are amassing an army in a mosque against whose walls, quote, the night winds blow away seven centuries. My sense is that this work, Holy Terror, might be problematic.
01:19:10
Speaker
I am really intrigued by this use of the word anti-hero. i kind of don't want to get into Dark Knight Returns until we're kind of there, but I think it doesn't sound like he's an anti-hero to me.
01:19:25
Speaker
It sounds like he's straightforwardly a hero. Like, I think this is something we'll have to talk about. What does it mean to be an anti-hero? i i just, it doesn't sound like the fixer here is being described as an anti-hero. The things he's doing are horrible from our perspective, but pretty clearly to to Miller, they're not. he's He's being heroic. And this is, I think, one of the things that Dark Knight Returns is also about.
01:19:49
Speaker
I can really clearly picture this as being by the same guy who watched who who made the comic the movie we watched is based on. Also in 2011, he writes the following post about Occupy Wall Street. Oh no.
01:20:03
Speaker
Everybody's been too damn polite about this nonsense. The Occupy movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland, which has with unspeakable cowardice embraced it, is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. Occupy is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.
01:20:25
Speaker
These clowns can do nothing but harm America. Occupy is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly expressed attempt at anarchy to the extent that the movement, ha, some movement, except if the word bowel is attached,
01:20:37
Speaker
is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad-wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves. This is no popular uprising.
01:20:49
Speaker
This is garbage. And goodness knows they're spewing their garbage, both politically and physically, every which way they can find. Wake up, pawn scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like Al-Qaeda and Islamism.
01:21:11
Speaker
And this enemy of mine, not of yours apparently, must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horse laugh, out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle. In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mama's basement and play with your Lords of Warcraft. Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape. They might not let you babies keep your iPhones, though. Try to soldier on, schmucks.
Criticism of Occupy Movement and Obama's promises
01:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, this guy sucks. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty bog-standard stuff for, I don't know, cat turd 2. Yeah, these these ideas keep getting jumbled around, right? Like, oh, Occupy. Like, I remember a lot of the sneering at Occupy that was happening at the time. Like, I knew watching the Occupy movement and then the response and the way people talked about it was...
01:22:02
Speaker
kind of a radicalizing moment for me in some ways because there were all these like objections like it was really popular and like a lot of liberal circles and I remember like people I knew and and family members and stuff you know talking about this oh these occupy idiots and blah blah and like but all of their objections like made no sense I don't know, that this idea of like, oh, you have an iPhone, and so therefore you are like excluded from making any critique of society is just such a weird claim.
01:22:30
Speaker
Why are these people you know occupying these things? like Well, because they don't have jobs, right? like The economy collapsed, and then Obama was like, okay, you know vote for me. I'm going to give you a future you can believe in. And then he immediately put like...
01:22:43
Speaker
All these, you know, he he immediately betrayed that. There were obvious reasons people were out in the streets saying we need to change society because we're all being exploited and we're being like robbed of our livelihoods and like our ability to live.
01:22:55
Speaker
The fact that they have iPhones doesn't fucking matter. And, like, you still see all this idea today that, like, oh, these people are in league with, like, the Islamicists or they must be getting a dark chuckle because you are doing self-destructive things. Those ideas have kind of accelerated. You saw a lot of people saying this about a lot of the pro-Palestine protests that were across college campuses, like, particular groups that were actually, like, somehow in communication with Hamas that, like, they were doing... Right,
01:23:21
Speaker
Hamas's bidding. Like, we see these claims a lot. We see claims that, like, they're doing Iran's bidding, that there was some, like, Iranian cell that was either, like, infiltrated these groups online and they didn't know they were stooges of Iran or they were directly taking orders of Iran. We've seen more recently, like, the funny reverse thing. Like, there was that guy who was, like, Iran is actually a client state of the Brooklyn left.
01:23:42
Speaker
which is hilarious. But yeah, it's so obvious that like one of the functions of these like imperialist racist wars is to try to like squash any class solidarity growing domestically.
01:23:56
Speaker
And he is absolutely embodying that strategy. Okay, I'm going to complicate things a little bit. So first off, Miller has zero conception of himself as a fascist.
Miller's interpretation of Batman and political views
01:24:11
Speaker
which is a little different from the two previous people that we talked about as just straight up fascists. Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes, they're very aware that they're fascists.
01:24:24
Speaker
On the contrary, it's important actually to Miller that he not understand himself or his work to be fascist. And when he realizes he's veering into that territory, he recoils. Here he is in 2015, and I'll be the interviewer and you be Miller.
01:24:41
Speaker
Question. One of the things that led you to create Dark Knight Returns was a series of muggings. What happened? There's something demeaning about the first time you're knocked to the ground and punched in the stomach and have a gun waved in your face, and you realize that you're completely at somebody's mercy, and they can take your life, and at that point, you'll do anything.
01:25:00
Speaker
There's something so humiliating about that. And to me, that made me realize that Batman was the most potent symbol DC had in its hands. Sure, Superman can fly, but Batman turns me back into that guy who was scared, and at the same time, the guy who can come and save him. It's a perfect myth.
01:25:18
Speaker
What makes him so mythic? Batman isn't interesting because he has a cool car. It's great that he has a cool car, but he's interesting because he straightens the world out, and he brings order to a very chaotic world, especially when you're a child. You need somebody, even if it's a fictional character, to tell you that the world makes sense and that the good guys can win.
01:25:37
Speaker
That's what these heroes are for. Politics has shaped the Dark Knight Returns and informed a lot of your work. Any thoughts about the presidential campaigns? Are you following them? Only for humor's sake. It's a little early to take it seriously. I think it's going to be a great time to be a cartoonist. You can't come up with a greater buffoon than Donald Trump. The fact that he thinks he can be president of the United States is one of the best jokes I've read in a long time, at least I hope. Some have said you turned Batman into a fascist. Agree?
01:26:05
Speaker
Anybody who thinks Batman was fascist should study their politics. The Dark Knight, if anything, would be a libertarian. The fascists tell people how to live. Batman just tells criminals to stop.
01:26:17
Speaker
I believe that this is a very sincere expression of his politics. I agree with that too. And it's, I think something we're going to get into with the movie, the movie itself addresses at various points, the question of whether Batman is a fascist and has a lot to say about whether Batman is a fascist.
01:26:37
Speaker
And I think it jives with this idea that he doesn't think of himself as fascist. And I think that, you know, is related to what I was saying above about this vision of like the Occupy movement is playing into,
01:26:51
Speaker
the hands of the Islamicists or whatever. I think this expression, the way he's put this is like, he genuinely believes that he's not cynically trying to say, I'm going to use this racialized enemy as a way to crush, you know, any kind of domestic rise, you know, political, whatever political movement.
01:27:15
Speaker
He genuinely thinks that that's what's happening. he Like he genuinely thinks that like 9-11 happened for no reason which I you know, I think is incorrect like Not to say it was good or whatever but to say that 9-11 happened was an utterly unprovoked event is just like a historical But yeah, i totally buy this vision of who he is ever since Trump came onto the scene Miller has been kind of walking his fascism and Islamophobia back and I think this is easy to overstate, and I saw a lot of people doing research for this episode who, in my opinion, were overstating it, but there has definitely been a change in how he presents his politics, and it appears in his politics.
01:27:58
Speaker
He now describes Holy Terror as unbelievably bloodthirsty and something he wouldn't be capable of creating today. He votes for Democrats. I couldn't find a direct statement by him on Black Lives Matter, but one of his recent works, a sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, includes a scene where Batman rescues a Black teen from some cops who were are about to kill him for being Black.
01:28:20
Speaker
All of this coincides with his well-publicized recovery from alcoholism. He was frequently extremely trashed during the period that he wrote those posts I had you read.
01:28:32
Speaker
In a lot of commentary, people basically blame the severity of Miller's alcoholism in 2011 for holy terror, and by extension his Islamophobia, and I want to make absolutely clear that that is not accurate.
01:28:45
Speaker
The views on Islam we saw earlier were represented earlier in his life. That's really funny. People love this idea that like it's substances somehow which are responsible for this. Like I've definitely seen there's been a lot of scholarly work in the last, you know, decade or a little bit more about like the role of drugs and stimulants in like the Nazi regime, for instance. And while I definitely think there's, you know, something to talk about there and like they did use heavily used stimulants, I've definitely seen people dramatically overstate this into the claim that like
01:29:17
Speaker
you know, the use of drugs and like benzos and all these other things is like almost entirely responsible for like the Nazi regime. And it's like, no, that's not really how drugs work. I'm sorry. Like you actually do have to pay a little bit more attention to other things. You see can't, you just all blame it on alcohol or on stimulants or, you know, whatever it is. I really want to substantiate my claim. So I'm going to send you an excerpt from a paper titled Drinking His Own Kool-Aid by Daryl Ty Engen.
01:29:46
Speaker
In an interview on National Public Radio in 2007, Miller states that, quote, our country and the entire Western world is up against an existential foe, yet, quote, a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats, end quote.
01:29:59
Speaker
Because we are taught that, quote, all cultures are equal, Miller went on to characterize the enemy as representative of a 6th century barbarism. Since they saw people's heads off, they enslave women, they genetically mutilate their daughters, and do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us.
01:30:16
Speaker
When asked how he explains the situation to others, Miller states, mainly in historical terms. I hear people say, well, you know, why did we attack Iraq, for instance? Nobody questions why we, after Pearl Harbor, attacked Nazi Germany.
01:30:30
Speaker
It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism. We're doing the same thing now. When the interviewer says they, Nazi Germany, did declare war on us, but Miller cuts him off and says, yeah, but what I mean is, so did Iraq.
01:30:45
Speaker
To be clear, Iraq did not attack the U.S. This vague connection between nine eleven and Iraq and, oh you know. Well, the connection is Islam.
01:30:57
Speaker
Exactly. It's just like this scary Muslim enemy. Yeah, Islam attacked us, so now we're attacking Islam. And what is Islam? Well, I mean, it's basically the same thing as Iraq, right? Like a lot of a lot of Arabs live there. So I just want to be careful not to portray Miller as having like completely done 180, even though i it does appear that he's changed somewhat.
01:31:24
Speaker
He does seem to me like someone who, since entering recovery, has become very conscious of and very interested in controlling his image.
01:31:35
Speaker
For example, the things he said, walking back holy terror, to me, that statement read as very carefully written and very PR tested.
01:31:47
Speaker
Interesting, i okay. That's the current state of Miller. He made Batman
'The Dark Knight Returns': Plot and ideological themes
01:31:52
Speaker
woke. Batman's woke now. We're finally ready to talk about The Dark Knight Returns. So we watched the movie version.
01:31:59
Speaker
The comic is much more visually interesting, I think. Does some interesting things with the form, and it makes some of the subtext text. There's at least one point where I'll definitely be calling out a difference between the comic and the movie, but substantially the movie version and the comic are the same. Although if you want to appreciate this as a work of art, I would definitely go look at the comic.
01:32:21
Speaker
Let's start recapping the plot. We'll try and be pretty quick, but so much shit happens in this movie. It is such a rollercoaster.
01:32:33
Speaker
Also, it's two and a half hours long. Yeah, so it's really like two movies kind of stapled together, and the two movies are an adaptation of four comics. The first part is kind of a coherent narrative.
01:32:46
Speaker
The second part, even on its own, is a pretty incoherent narrative, I would say. And certainly both of them taken together is just like... a mess You were saying that like a third of the way through you just were unable to take notes anymore because it was so overwhelming.
01:33:04
Speaker
I had the same experience halfway through and I had to stop and then go back and rewind and like start taking notes again. But we'll we'll do our best. So we open on Bruce Wayne, racing cars down the highway like a Chad. It's like part of an organized race.
01:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's an organized race. He's wearing like... i was like, wait, do they know he's Batman? Or like, is he being Batman right now? Because he's wearing like a helmet in the car that has bat ears. Like, he looks like Batman. Yeah.
01:33:37
Speaker
So he pushes his car but too far and he's warned by some offscreen like assistant or something like you're pushing the car too fast. It's going to fuck up and you're woman tells him he's going too fast. A woman tells him he's going too fast. And he smashes out the panel to prevent it from like overriding his driving and shutting down.
01:33:59
Speaker
And as a result, the car smashes and he seemingly dies, but not really. And there's this definite implication that he was like yearning for death and he decided not to go for it at the last moment because you know it turned out he actually, i don't know escaped somehow, parachuted.
01:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, my notes for this part say cargo fast, reckless disregard for own life. Yes. This is kind of like two big themes. Cargo fast, man cool, cargo fast, and I like i yearn for death are like kind of the the big themes we're setting up at the beginning here. Yeah, which right away calls back to one of the points in Umberto Eco's essay about the fascist as someone who yearns for heroic death.
01:34:48
Speaker
We get a crime montage featuring a gang called the Mutants. The Mutants are kind of their ball, although they have a bunch of skin ornamentation on their head that keeps them from just looking straight up like skinheads. And they're very lanky and weird looking in contrast to the sort of like bulky presentation of the other characters as we see them. And the Mutants really hate Commissioner Gordon.
01:35:16
Speaker
And Gordon is like, oh, I want to fight these motherfuckers. The mutants want to come for me? They should do it. He says that on television. And then we see him having dinner with Bruce Wayne. Yeah, he's retiring soon. Yeah, yeah. Bruce is long retired from being hero. He's been retired for 10 years, the movie tells us many times. And Gordon is retiring soon. This is very much about the twilight of our heroes.
01:35:40
Speaker
Yeah, and there's like this important thing where Batman has like made this promise. or right Bruce Wayne has made this promise that like Batman is done. That like there's not going to be any more Batman. One of his sidekicks, like a Robin, 10 years ten years ago And he's he's been refusing to be Batman ever since, despite the dark urges inside his head.
01:36:01
Speaker
Yeah. And so then I also wrote here self-annihilation as excitement because he's explaining, like, Gordon is like, why did you do that with your car, man? Like, you could have died. And he's like, well, i got to keep things exciting somehow. And Gordon's like, you're going to be Batman again, aren't you? You said you weren't going to be Batman again. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm not going to be Batman again. it's like Yeah, dude, I'm not going to be Batman again. I promise. This time i'm not going to be Batman again.
01:36:26
Speaker
so he sees a headline about a family being murdered there's a mugging attempt and bruce scares them off by just being like fucking bring it like he clearly wants to fight them there's like a certain i mean i don't know if this was me reading too much into it to me that scene had like a very like sexual undertone no absolutely most of the movie had a sexual undertone to it Yeah. Because the movie is sexualized in really bizarre ways, but there's this like, he seems excited. Like he's not just saying like, oh, you know, they're like, oh, we're going to, they're threatening to attack him. And he's not just like, yeah, bring it. It's like, yeah, please, like, come on, like, like, let's do this. Like, you know. Yeah. And that scares them off less because they're afraid of getting beaten up by this guy who is an old man.
01:37:15
Speaker
The movie makes very clear that he's old. They're more scared off by the fact that they, quote, can't do it when they're into it. Yeah. Yeah. They don't like that Bruce is into the experience of being mugged, which is subtextually sexual violation.
01:37:31
Speaker
We go to Arkham Asylum, although it has a woke name now. It's like the Arkham Home for Rehabilitation or something like that. And we see Harvey Dent, a.k.a. Two-Face, who just had his face repaired,
01:37:45
Speaker
and we meet his vaguely Jewish cuck psychiatrist, Wolper, who is a big media figure. Harvey is released after being declared cured by Wolper, and he immediately disappears. I think Wolper is one of the interesting characters because he is one of the main places where you can see Miller really dislikes this idea of, like,
01:38:14
Speaker
Miller dislikes the idea of Batman as any kind of like fascist figure and the the character of Wolper is one of the places where he really cashes this out. The things that Wolper is saying are not psychology or psychiatry, they are media criticism.
01:38:30
Speaker
He's got all this stuff about like doing a kind of analysis of like the mythology of Batman or you know Two-Face or all these things and and it very much feels this all these scenes feel like frank miller like getting his grievance out on people who would like dare criticize the batman as like this purely moral force yes absolutely wolper goes on tv throughout the movie and talks in psychobabble about the batman inflicting a blow on the membrane of society or some shit like that yeah and then some other character will be like
01:39:07
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about? He's representing the Volksgeist, man. Like, don't you get this? You can feel that what Frank Miller is trying to criticize is people who might look at Batman and say, okay, in this mythology of Batman, Batman is this figure which needs this particular kind of criminality and this particular kind of vision of society. And so, you know, it sort of creates this...
01:39:29
Speaker
this vision of society and Miller wants to say that this analysis of Batman is wrong and stupid and so he makes a character in Batman say that about Batman the guy and then makes you know makes him sound dumb he just wants to talk about like how people who think fat Batman is fascist are dumb I think it's a little more toxic than that.
01:39:52
Speaker
I think Wolper is definitely representing some sort of like Jewish degeneracy that's undermining society. Yeah, I mean, it's it's Hollywood and the Hollywood critics is what I'm trying to get at when he's talking about you know Dirty Harry earlier. like Wolper is not... right It is sort of in Psychobabble, but it a lot more sounds like a...
01:40:12
Speaker
Cultural critic and so you can really see Wolper is the embodiment of Hollywood and the Hollywood critics, you know with three parentheses around those words, you know It's definitely so these events compound in Bruce's mind and he loses his shit and decides to go back to being Batman The first thing he does is he rescues two women who are being attacked and One of them he rescues from a black pimp, which as far as I can remember is one of two black characters that have lines on screen.
01:40:46
Speaker
The other one is praising Batman later on in like a TV spot. He also rescues two girl children, one of whom is Carrie Kelly, a nerdy looking girl with what I would call major character hair.
01:41:02
Speaker
It's weird enough to be distinctive, but not weird enough to like interfere with her movements. She is the much more androgynous of the two characters. She's a very androgynous character, and actually...
01:41:16
Speaker
I think if you didn't have like the voice and you didn't, if you just saw the picture, you would not know, is this supposed to be like a male or a female character versus the other girl, Michelle, who is like very stereotypically feminine.
01:41:30
Speaker
And I think this is one of the places where you can really see how much this movie will continue to hate femininity. like this movie hates femininity femininity is always a sign of like weakness and degeneracy and so this woman who is going to be a major character you can tell she's like good and going to be a major character because she kind of looks mannish And this will continue to happen. That like all of the good women look kind of masculine.
01:41:58
Speaker
There's a striking resemblance between her and the next police commissioner who we'll meet later on in the movie. Like enough so that it's it's weird. I was like, are these guys supposed to be related? They're not. They just share the similar trait of like having that male badass element in them.
01:42:17
Speaker
Batman cripples a bank robber while an old cop looks on approvingly. Oh, yeah, I actually have two notes here. So one, the cops are like chasing these bank robbers. And then one of them sees Batman and immediately goes, we're in for a show.
01:42:32
Speaker
Yes. Like there's this enjoyment of oh Batman's going to do this. And then I just wrote here, Batman declares a no go zone. Look. Batman explicitly tells the cops, like, you're not allowed past this point.
01:42:47
Speaker
And one of the cops is like, oh, that's wrong. Like, I'm a cop, like, I'm going to continue to do my job as a cop. And this, like, billionaire in a weird costume who is, like, flying around and, like, beating people up isn't my commanding officer. So I'm not going to listen to with the things he says.
01:43:10
Speaker
And then the other cop is like, no, you don't get it, man. Like, fuck off. Let him do his thing. Yeah, he even says to him, he's being patient with you. Like, the guy's like, hey, I just watched you cripple that man.
01:43:22
Speaker
You're under arrest. And the other cop goes, dude, like, he's being patient with you. Like, subtextually, like, stop embarrassing us in front of that man.
01:43:36
Speaker
Batman finds a coin defaced on both sides on the robber. Yeah, so this is like, for those who are familiar with the Batman lore, Two-Face had the coin that was defaced on one side. So this is like, Two-Face you know, wholly integrated but in the bad side. Absolutely, yeah.
01:43:54
Speaker
The mutants get on TV and they say, Gotham City belongs to the mutants. Like, we're we're in charge now. Yeah, and so we get this kind of like little montage scene of like mixed reactions to Batman's return.
01:44:10
Speaker
This is one of the other places where you can really tell Frank Miller wants to, it's not just that he wants to portray Batman as heroic, he wants to explicitly criticize anyone who would think otherwise. So there's like these like drugged out hippies who are saying like, no man, like Batman is a fascist, you know past that I need another hit right those are Carrie Kelly's parents it develops yeah and they're like yeah oh we did so much good shit in the 60s I can't believe it's this way it's not only that he thinks Batman is a hero like he thinks the people who think Batman isn't a hero are degenerates that's right
01:44:52
Speaker
Degenerate, worthless hippies. and there's various kinds of degenerates. There's the druggy hippie. There's the the cuck Jewish psychiatrist. right That's right. There's a whole gallery of degenerates here.
01:45:04
Speaker
Carrie looks out the window and finds the bat signal very inspiring while her parents are, you know, being degenerate. Dent turns out to be on a kamikaze mission to blow up part of the city.
01:45:19
Speaker
and there's this action sequence where Dent has these bombs set up in a skyscraper and Batman goes after him and eventually beats him in single combat.
01:45:32
Speaker
Dent has his whole head wrapped in bandages, suggesting that in a mirror of the coin defaced on both sides, he's taken his repaired face and disfigured the whole thing.
01:45:44
Speaker
Batman rips the bandages off his face and finds out that Dent actually just has severe body dysmorphia and is convinced that everyone sees him as monstrous, that they were mocking him, that they never repaired his face, that his rotten insides have just spilled out onto his exterior.
01:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is one of the other places where... Miller has a really nihilist political vision. i don't know if this is something so directly... i don't know if this is something which so directly compares to, like, a fascist analog in in this Echo essay, but the story here, like...
01:46:29
Speaker
is completely foreclosed on like the idea that like something like redemption might exist like one of batman's biggest mistakes in the plot happens early on when he's like we gotta you know bruce wayne is like we gotta to give harvey dent another chance you know he can redeem himself this is shown to be like a huge mistake redemption is impossible like criminality is something that like infects you and can never be gotten rid of and you know that's a huge part of this plot i also wrote in this scene a thesis in my notes that i was gonna like make as my thesis for the the movie i don't know what the hell i meant by this i just wrote thesis batman equals israel i don't know what i meant by that i don't know why i thought that
01:47:20
Speaker
I mean, it's obvious.
Batman as a symbol of societal critique
01:47:21
Speaker
There are really too many reasons for us to even talk about. I was, I'm just saying this now to explain to you, like, I was losing my mind at this point already. And we're pretty early in the movie.
01:47:34
Speaker
There's also this strong implication that Batman and Dent are kind of the same. But Batman channels his impulses into a less destructive form of violence.
01:47:50
Speaker
or a form of violence that, I don't know, protects society or something? Yeah, it's just morally good. I think this is like a big part of Miller's vision of Batman is it's And it's weird because, again, we've already had like Wolper talking about how Batman creates his own rogues gallery, which again is like something that somebody would say analyzing the character of Batman, not somebody in-universe saying about the character. Like if you make it somebody in the universe talking about the person, and then it doesn't make any sense, but it's like a completely coherent description of the arc of the story. Wait, it's actually in-universe, in-narrative, validated.
01:48:30
Speaker
directly. We'll get to that later with the Joker. Right, but it's still supposed to be taken as stupid. This is one of the things that's like maddening about this film.
01:48:43
Speaker
i think Miller's vision of Batman is he's this kind of like maniacal figure. He's got he's gripped by this mania. And it's just like we're lucky that he's a good guy. And I think anybody else writing this or anybody sensible like looking at it would have to say, oh, this is fundamentally.
01:49:00
Speaker
an ambiguous figure. But he does not want Batman to be ambiguous. It's very clear. And it's one of the interesting things about, you know, saying like, oh, he has this sort of noir vision. I think he does aesthetically really create a noir Batman. But whereas noir as a genre is often interested in this kind of moral ambiguity,
01:49:20
Speaker
Miller just wants to reject it but still holds on to like all these genre elements of like oh, yeah He's like this damaged figure. he you know, he can't help himself. He's trapped in this mania But if you think that that has anything to say about like whether he's a good guy or not like you're fucking stupid and actually gay and Jewish Yeah, this very much connects with what I was talking about earlier with Sin City being influenced not by the noir of Chandler and Hammett but by the hard-boiled detective fiction of mickey spillane there's talking heads on tv this happens frequently batman is a symbolic resurgence of the common man's will to resist that's a verbatim quote from one of the from one of the talking heads on tv ah this movie is not subtle and
01:50:10
Speaker
No. There's this bit where they talk to two men on the street, one of whom is the second... And last black character who gets a line. And he's like, Batman has beaten up all the right people. And I hope next he goes for the bankers. And the next guy is kind of like another liberal cuck who's like, ah, I don't like it. And oh, I would never live in the city, by the way. I'm not like, I live out there in the nice places.
01:50:43
Speaker
Okay, this is a change from the comic book. In the comic book, we have these same two guys, except the first guy doesn't say, I hope they go after the bankers next. He says, I hope they go after the homos next.
01:50:59
Speaker
Now, it is my opinion that actually this is not Miller being homophobic. There is so much homophobia in this movie. But I think what's actually happening here is that he doesn't want either of these characters to be representing quite the right point of view.
01:51:20
Speaker
And to him, this represents the urge to take the fascism too far. Are you okay? I'm just... This movie is so bad. I gotta say, i really enjoyed watching it. it's It's so wild. It's so fucking wild.
01:51:44
Speaker
Batman starts going after the mutant gang and the first thing he does is he finds out a general is selling them military equipment. And the general is doing this because his wife is sick and his health insurance won't cover her illness.
01:51:59
Speaker
The general's wife here is like not, like, I don't necessarily want to say like masculine looking woman. Part of the thing is that everyone in this is just like really masculinized.
01:52:10
Speaker
I just kept noticing Batman is so wide. Yes, And so like all these other characters, like even the sort of normal characters, right? The normal citizens are all kind of like wider framed. There's this like, and I looked at some of the images of the comic and...
01:52:32
Speaker
it's toned down a lot from the comic. Like, the comic is even more, like, all these characters are masculinized. Yeah, they all look like barrels. There's a few characters who aren't. Like, Carrie Kelly is not shown in this kind of, like, wide frame thing so much.
01:52:48
Speaker
There's a couple other characters. Wolper is also, like, kind of thin. And this might not register normally, but in the context of this movie, like, that registers as part of the, like, hatred of femininity like he is kind of like sort of feminized because he's being drawn as like a normal looking person instead of this like weird masculinized figure yes absolutely it's there's like a whole bizarre gender politics here that we could spend hours on but i just want to like it shows up in this scene yeah one other way you can see that emerging is
01:53:21
Speaker
Miller does have his own peculiar art style, but you know he can do a variety of things. And if you read the comic, the characters actually become more grotesque and more caricatured as they go on.
01:53:34
Speaker
It looks quite different at the beginning from at the end. And I take that to mean that the characters are inhabiting their mythological selves more and becoming idealized and thereby becoming more of these grotesqueries of masculinism as they go on.
01:53:49
Speaker
Okay, this is when Batman goes after the mutant gang. He does this, like, announcement that he's going to attack them and gives them, like, time to evacuate technically before he then, like, opens fire with this tank.
01:54:04
Speaker
and Yes, he attacks their hideout with a fucking tank. But then there's, like, a lot made of the fact that he's using, like, rubber bullets. Well, they call them they call them less lethals today because, in fact, the injury and death rate is almost exactly 50% of what you get with regular ammunition. Yeah, like, he's still attacking them with a tank, and so it's this weird, like, exactly that contradiction that shows up, continues to show up today between this, like, oh, we're using these, like, non-lethal things and now less lethal things...
01:54:43
Speaker
Like, on the one hand, it's like, oh, Batman, like, you're like, it's like a little, and it's a problem, sort of, for, like, Miller's whole ethos here. Like, Batman is a little bit soy for not being willing to kill anyone, and we're going to get to that later as well.
01:54:58
Speaker
But you have to reconcile that with the fact that he, like, is charging this crowd with a tank. So he's not that soy, but he's, like, a little bit soy. But there's, like, you know, there' this, like, taint of soyness to him. Yeah. You can tell that Miller doesn't know how rubber bullets work because the mutant leader, who looks like an orc, by the way, he looks totally inhuman, picks up one of the bullets and bends it like into a little U. And he's like, oh, rubber bullets. What a rubber bullet actually is, is a metal core. In other words, essentially a regular bullet with a layer of rubber around it.
01:55:36
Speaker
That's really nitpicky, but I'm just trying to emphasize here that what Miller is really romanticizing is this totally disconnected vision of how violence works.
01:55:48
Speaker
The mutant leader comes up to the tank and taunts Batman's manhood. And in fact, he explicitly cites the use of rubber bullets when he's doing this.
01:55:59
Speaker
Right. And Batman leaves the tank to fight him hand to hand because, quote, it's the only way I'll know. And you know that it's like a serious challenge because the mutant leader is actually wider than Batman. This is the first character going see. That's right. Look, the widest man we've ever seen meets someone wider and he's like, can't have this. We gotta fight him. I need to avenge my wideness.
01:56:24
Speaker
yeah The mutant leader easily wrecks his shit. Like, this is a total curb stomp. Like, Batman gets some good hits in, but it's not close. Carrie saves him, and he knocks out the leader with a gadget. And I guess he didn't just do this in the first place, because the thing he needed to know was, am I a real man?
01:56:46
Speaker
Have I been demasculinized? Yeah. And he kind of is demasculinized. Absolutely. The mayor appoints a new character, Ellen Yindle, as the new police commissioner. This will be ineffective in a few days, so for now, Gordon is still police commissioner.
01:57:03
Speaker
The mutants are pissed that their leader has been captured, and they threaten war. The mayor visits the mutant leader to negotiate, and the mutant leader just kills him.
01:57:14
Speaker
Again, more Frank Miller trying to say anyone who isn't... who is at all skeptical of Batman is stupid, right? the The mayor goes to visit the mutant leader and is like, oh I'm here to negotiate. And the mutant leader just kills him.
01:57:31
Speaker
And then the new mayor who was until just then the deputy mayor is like, oh, you know, please, like we're willing to negotiate. Like we want to negotiate. And so, right, like this, this you know, there's obviously there's no negotiating with terrorists and any attempt to kind of,
01:57:49
Speaker
do anything other than this hyper masculinized rampage of violence is not only like woke and soy but actually suicidal and doomed to failure oh we have another body type with the city bureaucrats by the way they're all like super jally it's really it's strange they look like they're melting yeah we also have uh sort of some like around you know kind of intercut with some of this is carrie kelly is like basically allowed to become robin like right and uh alfred alfred doesn't want this to happen is like clearly disapproving and there's like again the subtextual like remember what happened to your last sidekick and like he died and 10 years ago and that was the start of this whole thing and
01:58:30
Speaker
um but Batman is like, no, like we're going to take her to the cave. We're gonna like you know we're going to let her join. And so like Batman now has his his team. The Bat team is is assembling. There is a wild conversation between Yindal and Gordon on the topic of Batman.
01:58:47
Speaker
Yindal does not like Batman. Gordon says, look, if Roosevelt had let Pearl Harbor happen, Maybe that would be good.
01:58:58
Speaker
it's what This is one of the most, like, this was that this was the moment when I put my notes down. this is the last thing I have notes about because I was like, okay, i'm just going to absorb this movie. Like, I don't even know what's happening anymore.
01:59:10
Speaker
The conversation is, I heard a story that Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen because he needed people to be ready to go to war. And I was really on the fence. Was that good?
01:59:23
Speaker
And on the one hand, I could see that he needed the war effort. He needed people to be rallied behind. as so This was a sacrifice he made. On the other hand, obviously letting Pearl Harbor happen be bad.
01:59:35
Speaker
But then I came to a conclusion, which is that I'm too small to make that judgment. It is not my place to make that judgment, right?
01:59:47
Speaker
He is bigger than me. Yes. He says Roosevelt is too big to judge that way. And so Yindal says, what does that have to do with Batman? And he's like, you'll figure it out.
02:00:00
Speaker
And that's the end of the scene. It's so hard to even know where to start with that. That's one of the wildest things I've seen in fiction.
02:00:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's really hard to know what to say about this scene. i mean, it other than, yeah this is exactly, i think, our better version of Echo's point about this love of power, really fascism is a love of hierarchy,
02:00:32
Speaker
Right. This is exactly that phenomenon. You're too weak to judge Batman. Right. Batman is the hero. Batman is the leader that's going to save us all.
02:00:44
Speaker
The reason it's stupid to call Batman any kind of fascist or is is just because. you are not morally strong enough to to make that claim. Yeah, it's it's a general fact, actually, that you can't criticize Batman in any way at all, and fascism just happens to be a criticism of Batman, therefore, you're not allowed to do that.
02:01:05
Speaker
You're a normie. Batman engineers a big mutant gathering, which that occurs in a way that is so stupid I don't even want to discuss it. And has Gordon released the mutant leader at the gathering?
02:01:20
Speaker
The idea is to beat up the mutant leader this time and do it in front of everyone to humiliate him. And somehow this will quell the gang problem, it'll break up the gang.
02:01:31
Speaker
Batman wins this time. There's a weird and big ambiguity to me to this explanation. He says he tried to meet he tried to match the mutant leader's savagery. And failed. So he's got to do something different this time. He's got to outthink him. So he's got he's gotta to use his... Yeah, he's got to outthink him.
02:01:48
Speaker
But there is this kind of suggestion of like...
02:01:53
Speaker
weakness to the thought, right? Like it's sort of bad that he has to use trickery instead of using brute strength.
02:02:05
Speaker
But then the trickery takes the form of understanding how to use his brute strength more, so it's kind of okay. Yeah, like he beats him up in a more specific way. And he's got this line that you can tell, like Frank Miller and then a lot of the comics fans must have thought went so I know exactly is the line you're talking about, and absolutely they did. This is an operating table, and I'm a surgeon. So fucking cringe.
02:02:33
Speaker
Oh my god, that was painful. He wins, and now the mutants are the sons of Batman, self-proclaimed, his own crime gang. And he's not actually in charge of them at this point, this is just how they're describing themselves, but it's pretty clear that now Batman has potential brown shirts, if later in the movie he should happen to avail himself of that.
02:02:59
Speaker
Yindal takes over, so now Batman no longer has the cops on his side. Batman has talked about a bunch on the news, and the Joker, who has been essentially comatose in Arkham Asylum, wakes up upon hearing Batman being discussed.
02:03:17
Speaker
And he's like, Batman, darling. Now, I have seen a lot of discussion around things like Disney queer-coding villains.
02:03:30
Speaker
Guys, if you are not familiar with the story we are discussing, you have no fucking idea what queer quoting a villain is. Joker is so fucking queer it is so on the surface it's for ridiculous it's such an essential s it's such an essential aspect of his villainy this is where like i struggle to try to just say like directly right there's the you know kind of women who have been more masculinized or androgynized and then there's the more feminine women like or the feminine characters it's not necessarily good or bad but there is a lot going on with
02:04:11
Speaker
The Joker is simultaneously like also very large and like buff, but also like feminized in his frame. Like it's it's he's like a very feminized character while also being like way more muscular than like a normal person could ever hope to be.
02:04:30
Speaker
It's this very weird thing. And it gets... That just continues to get more amped up. Yeah, I think you or the viewer are supposed to experience some discomfort with that. And you're specifically supposed to experience that discomfort right in your masculinity.
02:04:45
Speaker
A friend of mine who is really into comics and Batman said, you can tell Miller thinks about the gay menace a lot. Absolutely. Joker is the gay menace. Like, yeah.
02:04:57
Speaker
So we time skip ahead three months.
Political metaphors in 'The Dark Knight Returns'
02:05:00
Speaker
And Joker has his claws in Wolper at this point and is making progress towards getting himself declared cured.
02:05:12
Speaker
And he asks for a media appearance because Wolper is always, you know, going out, appearing on talk shows, that sort of thing. And Joker's like, I just never get to make my case. Sob, sob, sob, sob, sob. And Wolper's like, okay, I'm going to get you booked on a talk show, the Dave Endocrine show.
02:05:30
Speaker
This three-month jump from like Joker waking up and then you know trying to convince Wolpert is exactly the break between part one and two. And I do think the movie gets less coherent at this point. like I do think part two is worse, and we're going to see like it is weirder, and it's going to be more difficult to like describe what happened and really like understand what's going on.
02:05:54
Speaker
I can tell you that the deadlines were crushing in on Miller. much harder and faster the farther he goes on in this so i think that's a significant factor you also get this moment with joker where he's given mind controlling lipstick so wild and we'll get back to that but it's set up that he has this like magic i mean it's not magic but he's got this suit like you know technological he's got this guy who's going to help him with these weird inventions that are essentially magical and so one of them is this like this mind controlling lipstick and And so this is this is another like, okay, there's a theme happening here. And when he we we'll talk more about it when he uses it. But this is this is the introduction of another big element of this homophobia.
02:06:42
Speaker
God, I'm losing my mind just thinking about this. Okay, so now we get Reagan. Who turns out to be a major villain in this movie. And I'm not going to lie, the portrayal of Reagan here slaps. I think it is so fucking funny. Reagan meets with Superman.
02:06:58
Speaker
and says, son, you know i like to keep you out of domestic affairs, what with all the ruckus it kicks up. And what he's suggesting is that Later on, he might have Superman go deal with the now reactivated Batman.
02:07:16
Speaker
Superman here is pretty obviously an analog for the US security apparatus. Could be the intelligence apparatus, could be like, i don't know, special forces, that sort of thing. But he's not supposed to operate on American soil against Americans.
02:07:34
Speaker
but he does they just you know try and keep it on the down low there's also so that's kind of explicitly textual and then there's also the sort of thematic thing which is like superman represents a kind of outdated heroism like i think i you know i really started trying to think about this after we read the quote about dirty 30s and 40s and getting rid of that spirit yeah superman is the spirit of the 30s and 40s which it's not that it's evil it's just it's too naive it's too weak it's not strong enough to face up to the threats that we're facing and it's been it's been cucked by the sort of soy capitalist conservatism of the time that this comic is being released
02:08:24
Speaker
I don't even know if it's the soy capitalist conservatism as much as it is the open triple parentheses capitalist conservatism, close triple parentheses, right? Yeah, possibly. i mean, Reagan makes very clear that, well, the phrase he uses when he's talking about Batman is he says, if a Bronco kicks over the fence, well, it's bad for business.
02:08:47
Speaker
he's He's really interested in like moneyed interests. as opposed so it So it is this conspiratorial vision of politics that's not so much feminized as some of the other enemies in this movie. So I think it's there's a lot of overlap, and it's hard to really give like a typology here, but I definitely got more, you know, Reagan is the globalist kind of depiction.
02:09:11
Speaker
But he does show Regan as like a completely cynical, craven nihilist who only cares about like his own personal wealth. And so I got to say like, yeah. Yeah. Also, Regan looks like shit. He looks like a mummy. It's, i don't know. I think it's a really good portrayal. Yeah, it's so cool.
02:09:28
Speaker
It's so cool. I think with that we're also kind of seeing a callback to Sartre where Batman is constantly accused of breaking the law, but really he's serving a higher law, the law of the ideal state, which does not currently exist exactly, and yet has a greater and more real existence than the actual laws of the actual state.
02:09:51
Speaker
This is the point where we see a liquor store getting robbed by Joker's new ally on the outside, a gang leader named Bruno. And would you like to describe Bruno? my god.
02:10:02
Speaker
Bruno is... i just think it's really unfortunate that so many trans women had a Nazi phase, you know? Let me tell you, that girl is boofing a fistful of progesterone every day. yeah like, holy shit.
02:10:20
Speaker
Bruto is so introduced as Joker's girlfriend, although it's like... She's really only in this one scene, by the way. Yeah, it's ambiguous whether that's, like, meant to be derisive, that, like, Joker would go for someone so mannish, or whether they actually are, like, to some extent romantically involved. It sort of fell flat as a joke, and so i was like, oh, maybe this is just who she is, but then she kind of goes away. She's just, like, extremely...
02:10:49
Speaker
buff woman with like a blonde buzz cut who like runs around with huge tits topless with like swastika nipple tape massive massive tits what is she doing in this movie i have no idea batman is going to interrogate her to get information about the joker but it kind of just feels like miller was like i got a shoehorn in a tranny i have to do it She's here for a moment and then disappears and we never hear about her again. Yeah, it kind of feels like at some point working on this, Miller became like sexually aroused. And so then this like character sort of shows up and then is you know Miller sort of has this like orgasmic moment. And then, okay, we're good. Let's go back to the story, right? It's just it's this weird, like very sexual, really uncomfortable scene.
02:11:40
Speaker
that's like simultaneously about making fun of this mannish woman while at the same time like hyper sexualizing her and then it's just ah it's just kind of over like the arc just kind of ends and she's just gone i'm uh kind of glad that he didn't develop that concept more oh, I'm so glad. i was really worried she was going to be a bigger part of part two.
02:12:02
Speaker
As Batman is about to interrogate her, he gets interrupted by Superman showing up to be like, we need to have a chat. And Batman's like, okay, meet me tomorrow at my estate and we'll talk.
02:12:14
Speaker
And Superman tries to intimidate Batman on the palatial grounds of Wayne Manor. i have my notes, absolutely ridiculous scene. Batman is like hugging some kind of wolf.
02:12:27
Speaker
I don't know why he has that fucking thing. And Superman is like falconing. Like he's got a bald fucking eagle that is just like landing on his arm and then flying off and attacking mice as Superman talks about how he attacked one of their old friends 10 years ago when they all made this deal to stop being superheroes.
02:12:50
Speaker
But we just saw him talking to Reagan and Reagan's talking about... Oh, everybody else agreed not to be superheroes. Superman agreed to be a weapon for the US. Oh, that's right, that's right, that's right, okay. So the status quo is superheroes have effectively banned themselves except for Superman, who is Reagan's puppet.
02:13:11
Speaker
And Superman is like, did we have an arrangement, like... Yeah. Yeah, it kind of implies that they were given the choice of stopping or working for the government and like Superman took working for the government. I definitely got the sense that like Batman was given the option of also doing that maybe and it was like no, because like that's not... He's he's his way too cool for that. Yeah.
02:13:35
Speaker
It's kind of interesting. So they have a conversation about this character, oliver who Superman pretty clearly did something nasty to 10 years ago, although we don't find out what it is, because Oliver wasn't interested in the deal and didn't abide by it.
02:13:55
Speaker
As Superman is in the middle of unsuccessfully trying to intimidate Batman, he has to fly off real quick because Reagan has managed to get the US into a war with the Soviet Union on the fictional island of Corto Maltese, and Superman, this is made very explicit, needs to go serve capitalist imperialist interests by blowing up tanks and destroying aircraft carriers.
02:14:20
Speaker
We see him do that for a bit. And then Alfred picks up Kelly from school. And the scene is so uncomfortable because it could not more clearly be a grooming situation.
02:14:34
Speaker
That is what is being portrayed on the screen. It's bizarre because you see again Carrie and the girl she was with when they got attacked. But again, you have like Michelle being like, where are you going? Like, do you want to hang out? And she's like, no I don't have time for you. Like, I have to go like do my cool job. And Michelle's like, what's your cool job? And she's like, oh no, don't worry about it.
02:14:53
Speaker
It's not actually that cool. And then a limo shows up and this like dude comes out and like opens the door of the limo. You know, Alfred comes out and opens the of the limo and Carrie's like, okay, gotta go, bye. And it's like, I'm off to Little St. James right now. Exactly. It reads real bad in our like post-Epstein understanding of the world, but it's like, yeah, this is weird.
02:15:13
Speaker
Joker and Wolper show up at the studio of for the David Endocrine show. Joker displays total contempt for everyone he meets in this scene.
02:15:23
Speaker
They sit down and Wolper does a psychobabble bit and the Joker is like, hey, can I take this coffee mug? And David Endocrine is like, yeah, sure. but got a ton of them. And Joker smashes the mug on the table and uses it to murder Wolper. And then he kills everyone in the studio with toxic gas. It's a pretty horrifying and, I think, effective scene. In the green room, they're like doing his like makeup or whatever. And they're like oh should we add lipstick? And he's like, oh, no, I brought my own. And there's this really menacing shot of him like putting lipstick. It's so scary and queer.
02:15:58
Speaker
It couldn't be more like, now I'm going to show you the the scariest thing you could ever imagine. i That's right. let He's putting it on himself. He flees the studio and he uses the magic hypnotizing lipstick on Selina Kyle, who is Catwoman, who is now old and runs an escort agency,
02:16:20
Speaker
Everyone comments on how fucking utterly Selina Kyle is now. It's extremely grotesque a misogynist. There's this convoluted thing where his mind control lipstick convinces one of Selina's employees to mind control a congressman, to call for war with Corto Maltese, which is not actually related to what's going to happen Corto Maltese. and somehow this all has the upshot of baiting Batman to the fairgrounds where Joker has a plan for their final confrontation. Joker brings him into a pink and notably vaginal tunnel of love, and the two consummate their relationship, by which I mean Joker stabs the Batman.
02:17:08
Speaker
The Batman breaks Joker's neck, killing him. There is a notable difference with the comic here. The Joker is stabbing Batman and Batman just like loses his shit and twists his neck around and it's made pretty clear in the comic that this actually just straight up kills the Joker and that there's some dialogue back and forth with him after that and that it's hallucinated.
02:17:34
Speaker
And that Joker is like dead at this point. And that Batman hallucinates the Joker, killing himself by twisting his own neck further around. But in the movie, it's like, it kind of looks like the Joker actually does kill himself. A couple interesting things. So kind of parallel to all of this, the new police commissioner has been trying to like set up a sting to catch both Batman and the Joker.
02:17:59
Speaker
And so Batman has also been fighting cops, like sort of as part of this whole thing, like the cops are also after Batman now. And so there's this like confrontation, but there's limited time because the cops are like also found their way to this tunnel of love and they're also going to descend on them. There's this really important line, I think, though, before Batman actually kills the Joker, where he says like, the number of people I've murdered because I like didn't kill you before.
02:18:23
Speaker
It's part of the whole Batman ethos, right? And the Batman like mythology that he doesn't kill people. And so there's like, of course, Frank Miller wants like Batman to kill someone. He's got to like heroically kill the Joker. So there's got to be this kind of like, I can't let my like woke opposition to killing people like actually result in like real people dying. Right. that But there's this like this big line that's just so fucking annoying where he's like, oh, that, you know, I'm responsible for so many deaths because I didn't kill you sooner. And like the implication is like, so I've got to kill you now before I'm responsible for even more deaths.
02:18:56
Speaker
again that could be played for some kind of moral ambiguity in another comic it's really not here it really is intended to be like just straightforwardly correct and heroic of batman to to kill yeah and there are consequences for the batman killing joker at least briefly but those are not moral consequences those are practical consequences And there's even like moments in the dialogue where they're trying to, like you could pick up, right? Like at one point the Joker is like, oh, you killed me, but I beat you. I made you lose control.
02:19:28
Speaker
And that could be developed into something interesting. It's not. That's just completely left on the table. Of course, Batman had to kill Joker. Joker's a fucking criminal. What are you, an idiot? What you, some kind of Jewish druggie that you might think it's bad for Batman to kill? Right. It's it's yeah, I don't want to praise Nolan too much But he does pick up on a lot of these threads and use them in a more interesting and more coherent way Not a coherent way just a more coherent way. Yeah, I think it's interesting like Nolan is picking up on a lot of the nor elements and like when we say like Frank Miller was hugely influential with this kind of gritty norish Batman like Nolan's Batman is definitely in that tradition but
02:20:11
Speaker
Nolan's Batman you could understand as more of an anti-hero even though Nolan's Batman is also pretty straightforwardly heroic but like This is one of the things I was saying. I don't think it's proper to call Batman an antihero here. There's a lot of the like genre accoutrement of like an antihero, but Batman is just pretty straightforwardly heroic. He's just doing the right thing. So it's not really an antihero because they're not really... There's no anti. Yeah, there's no anti. He's just a hero, even though he should be an antihero with like the things he's doing are pretty bad ah in lots of cases. But... After killing the Joker, Batman passes out in the Tunnel of Love, and when he revives, the cops have closed in on him, and he's in big trouble. He manages to squeeze out and...
02:20:57
Speaker
Kelly rescues him, which this is something that happens constantly throughout the movie. Kelly Kelly's main role is to rescue Batman when he has gotten into an impossible scrape, usually involving the cops. Reagan shows up on TV and it's not a good look.
02:21:15
Speaker
He's wearing a radiation suit and he's visibly in a bunker. And he says, the good news is that our mighty American troops were victorious in Corto Maltese. The bad news is that, well, looks like those Russians were some mighty sore losers.
02:21:31
Speaker
And then we just cut to a missile flying through the air. oh I think this shit is so good, honestly. Yeah, this was really funny. Like... Like, yeah, you're depicting Reagan as, like, completely... Reagan is someone who doesn't care about, like, the American people or, like, any kind of, you know, democratic norm of well-being for the average person is entirely and interested in, like, his own power, his own image, and protecting well the interests. And it's, like...
02:22:04
Speaker
yeah i agree with you miller it's just like you think that that's like also because of some jewish conspiracy i don't agree by the way miller is going to use this depiction of reagan as a counterpoint against the claims that he's like some far-right guy for you know the rest of his life yeah and of course when i say like as a jewish conspiracy like miller would completely dispute that and i don't know if he's ever said anything explicitly like you know it's swift plot clearly the subtext though whether he understands it or not Yeah, it's it's the structure of this kind of like conspiracy of globalists is always on some level, even though maybe not like explicitly understood to be like a Jewish conspiracy.
02:22:46
Speaker
So the Soviets have launched a nuke. Superman intercepts it and tries to haul it away, but it blows up near Gotham. which nearly kills Superman.
02:22:57
Speaker
He's like gravely injured. And the electromagnetic pulse from the explosion knocks out power to the city. And just in such an absurd sequence, everything immediately goes to shit in Gotham.
02:23:11
Speaker
Planes are falling out of the sky. Every store is being looted. Every criminal runs out of jail at the same time. They all form an army which marches down the streets. And the normies form an army of their own for some reason, which also marches down the streets and the two armies come into conflict.
02:23:29
Speaker
All the buildings are on fire. It's absolutely wild. The sons of Batman are about to attack the city, but instead, Batman rides up on a horse and says, okay, you guys are going to be my force in the city to keep order.
02:23:47
Speaker
couple things about this first off batman on a horse is so antithetical to his whole aesthetic like he's he's basically a ninja like this is so this is very this is a notable departure and i think we have to take that as aesthetically meaningful and to me this appearance very much yeah is reminiscent of like statues of confederate generals or like ah self-depictions of the KKK, something like that.
Batman vs Superman: Ideological showdown
02:24:18
Speaker
It's also like, it's the echo rejection of technology, right? Like Batman loves technology and like technological prowess, like the Batmobile is this like technological force, but like somehow this is all all secondary to like the true Batman who like, when it comes down to it, will like ride up on a horse and command his army to restore order, right? Like it's a very fascist image. Yeah, I think that's an excellent connection to draw to the horse represents, like that rejection of modernity here.
02:24:51
Speaker
Second thing, this is the culmination of the earlier promise for the Sons of Batman to act as Batman's brown shirts. And it works, like Gotham becomes such a safe city that it embarrasses. Like...
02:25:08
Speaker
Like, the sort of the engine for the conflict that is, like, then going to be what the rest of the movie is about is, like, America is in disarray because of this nuke, but Gotham becomes so safe because of, like, Batman and the sons of Batman that, like, the federal government and Reagan are, like, embarrassed that Batman was able to, like, do this. Yindel's not embarrassed. Yindel is like, oh, Gordon was right.
02:25:34
Speaker
This guy's too big. And she's on his side now. Yindal recognizes like, oh, that's what the allegory about Roosevelt was about. By the way, the mechanism by which Batman maintains order is so fucking absurd. He comes upon the fighting armies and he beats the shit out of people from both sides on them and stabs a bunch of people with batarangs. And then he literally says, I'm here to appeal to your community spirit from the top of the horse.
02:26:03
Speaker
And this works. Everyone's like, okay, I'm in. I'm going to work with you. That's right. We jump ahead one week and Gotham is in perpetual night due to the fallout from the nuke.
02:26:15
Speaker
Reagan is so embarrassed that he says to Superman, okay, this is the time for you to go and deal with Batman. And, you know, if you have to kill him, you have to kill him. There's a real dissonance here between kind of the aesthetic symbolism and like what is actually happening.
02:26:32
Speaker
The notion of a city in perpetual night would suggest that like the threat of some kind of chaos, it's completely at odds with everything is actually great now because like the sons of Batman are in charge. And you could see that as being ambiguity thematically, but Miller absolutely does not. Like Miller actually the sons of Batman being in charge is cool. The problem is not like the chaos that is, you know, threatening things or what or some kind of ambiguity that it might be symbolized by night.
02:27:03
Speaker
The only threat now is Reagan. Like, Reagan is the villain, and, like, the Reagan administration is the only villain. and if if they actually stopped at this point and just, like, let Batman and his brown shirts be in charge, like, that would be a happy ending.
02:27:16
Speaker
Superman shows up to arrest him, expecting to have to kill him. And Batman fights back with a power suit and all these little tricks, none of which really have that much impact on Superman. Superman is kind of like fighting Batman, but really he's just, I don't know, I feel like he's maybe trying to tire him out or something.
02:27:38
Speaker
and it's It's not working. And finally... Batman gets Oliver to shoot a kryptonite arrow at Superman, and that works.
02:27:49
Speaker
Batman wins. But just as Batman is delivering his big monologue about, the I'm the one man who beat you, it's terrifically fucking cheesy. Yeah, i actually, I have the line here.
02:28:04
Speaker
i want you to remember, Clark, in all your years and waking moments to come, I want you to remember the one man who beat you. And then he has a heart attack. And then he has a heart attack.
02:28:18
Speaker
We see him take a pill earlier in his cave and then set a one-hour timer, and that timer is for the heart attack. Okay, but still, like, you know, i want you to remember, like, I could have beaten you, and then he fucking dies. I know, it's really quite funny.
02:28:36
Speaker
Like, you're not gonna leave the impression on Superman that you think. you're Like, from Superman's point of view, right, he now has just, like... Batman is this like pitiful figure.
02:28:50
Speaker
At the funeral, Superman detects Batman's heartbeat from within the coffin, indicating that that Batman is actually alive. Instead of blowing Batman's cover or just like jumping into the ground and instantly killing him, he winks at Carrie.
02:29:06
Speaker
He's like, okay, I've got the message. I'm not going to fuck with your boss anymore. And he heads off. Batman then becomes the leader of a secret underground army to indeterminate purpose consisting of the sons of Batman.
02:29:22
Speaker
Well, I think the purpose is, I mean, we've seen it would have been a happy ending if Reagan had left things alone. So what's the purpose? It's... We're going to do Sons of Batman, but we just got to be more covert about it because we need the government to leave us alone, right? Like, he he wants to do the thing of using the Sons of Batman to maintain order, but he's got to be more secretive about it so that the the government doesn't Yeah, it kind of fits into the long tradition of far-right terror cells slash compounds. Yeah, like, these are the proud boys. All right, so that's the movie. What do you think of it overall, Helen?
02:29:55
Speaker
You were a big fan, I take it. i I hated this movie so much. People just love these movies. And like a lot of people, it seems like the letterboxed reviews, like on average were higher for the second part, maybe like they were certainly comparable. i I found it pretty effective and I really enjoyed it.
02:30:15
Speaker
And also I'm kind of amazed when I read about this movie and people's reactions to it, that they generally view there as being ambiguity about the movie being fascist, or they view the movie as flatly not fascist.
Critique and cultural impact of 'The Dark Knight Returns'
02:30:31
Speaker
I think this is one of the most unambiguously fascist pieces of media I've ever seen, in addition to being one of the most intensely fascist pieces of media I've ever seen. I think so much of it was obviously just Miller venting his own grievance.
02:30:47
Speaker
about various things. Maybe to some extent I was trying to consume it too much on some kind of metatextual level, but yeah, the amount of obvious, like, hate that is just, like, dripping out of, like, every frame of this movie for whether it's women or queers or anyone who thinks that actually it might be bad to like trust for one billionaire vigilante to uphold like society and like a sense of justice don't know it's just i just found it really boring in that way like it didn't have anything interesting to say about those themes it was just like you're a fucking idiot if you don't see that like obviously this guy is a good guy
02:31:29
Speaker
It's definitely notable that it's the gap between like the self-conception understanding as a fascist versus the actual level of fascism like is notable. So I found it like you know it's interesting from that point of view. But like as a movie, i just hated watching it. I was just really bored for so much of it. I kept checking the time to see how much was left, and it was like...
02:31:49
Speaker
Okay, there's an hour left. Okay, and then I waited like 50 minutes. How much left? There's 55 minutes left. I kept checking the timestamp too. Even though I was actually enjoying the wild ride of watching. It is so long.
02:32:05
Speaker
It's possible that I would have gotten a little more enjoyment out of it if I didn't have an active migraine. But it also somehow felt fitting for the movie to be watching it like with a migraine. Because like the movie is a kind of migraine.
02:32:20
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to give this movie five bags of popcorn. ah I'm going to give it one mind-controlling lipstick. Okay, do you want to do FHU ratings? Okay.
02:32:32
Speaker
Okay, so we don't have to resort to these subjective, you know, bags of popcorn or, you know, these joke
Conclusion and thematic evaluation
02:32:39
Speaker
ratings. We have ah a very systematic, thorough scientific system for rating our subjects on this podcast. It is a three bullet point system.
02:32:48
Speaker
Bullet points are F, A, and G, F for ferocity, A for arrogance, and G for gullibility. One to five for all of these. So the first one's pretty straightforward, just how ferocious was our subject towards, you know, whatever the target of bigotry was.
02:33:06
Speaker
I would say i'm not totally sure yet, but I'm hovering it around a three. He seemed kind of like an average bigot to me in a lot of ways. Like, we've seen talked in the past, like, in order to really get up into the higher ratings, like, those figures usually have some kind of, like, more explicit program of bigotry that they, like, are...
02:33:32
Speaker
advocating to enact. Now, you could say, okay, Miller is describing like explicitly this like program of violence towards these people, but it is kind of in the this form of this like superhero mythos. I don't know. I don't think he really rises to like a, certainly not a five,
02:33:49
Speaker
um Because the people who we give five are people who say things like the Holocaust was good. And I don't think anything he said gets on that level. I'm sort of between a three and a four. I'm tempted to bump him up toward a four because of the vileness of his views on Islam and on real world wars that actually occurred and killed a bunch of people.
02:34:15
Speaker
But we are comparing him out of five to straight up Nazis who are like, let's do genocide again. it feels a little weird to like put him one point away from that.
02:34:30
Speaker
I would say like Anglin and Fuentes, we gave a six. That's true. i had forgotten that. Out of four, he would still be two points away. Then I think I'm going to go with a four. Okay, I'm going to go with a four as well.
02:34:42
Speaker
Okay, the second point is arrogance. Just how arrogant was he? I can't go lower than a four for this. The sort of drunken screeds of anyone who disagrees with me is a fucking moron who's playing into the Islamicist hands, or the depictions of, like...
02:34:59
Speaker
He's explicitly throughout the movie depicting critics of Batman as variously, you know, druggie or gay or whatever. Like he's constantly obsessed with saying like people who disagree with me are stupid.
02:35:15
Speaker
In this just like really annoying way that I think definitely puts him at least of at least. I was going to go lower, but you have absolutely swayed me on that. Let's give him a four. Gullibility is interesting. So, okay, so the third point is gullibility.
02:35:31
Speaker
This one I think needs a little explanation. What is the point of gullibility? Each of these people, you know, as we talk about the production of bigotry, each of these people has a role in that production.
02:35:41
Speaker
And sometimes people are very cognizant of that role. And that would be somebody with a low gullibility. And these people are totally blind as to their place in the production of bigotry.
02:35:53
Speaker
And that would be like a very high point in gullibility. So for example, you know, last episode we gave Janice Raymond pretty low gullibility score. She seemed to understand her role in producing transphobia or, you know, Leecock, our first ever subject, pretty low in gullibility because he seems to understand like he is creating, you know, he is writing misogynist texts as a way to,
02:36:16
Speaker
gain access and and power. High gullibility, Enoch Powell, because we understood that his role was to be a kind of guy who says the thing you're not supposed to say, whereas he definitely conceived himself as like the principled maverick leader.
02:36:31
Speaker
Where do we think Miller stands on this scale? I think we have to say like, what is his role in the production of bigotry? Well, I can tell you what he says his role is, which is his role is to be a propagandist.
02:36:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. A temptation I've had in the past is like, okay, gullibility, like, I think he is very gullible in the sense that he falls for, you know, he clearly falls for like American fascist rhetoric about...
02:36:59
Speaker
islamicists for example in the in the quote we read about occupy right like he's saying like oh you're playing into their hands they're they're they're laughing at you right like the the radical islamic terrorists are laughing at you that's a very gullible position but of course like on that scale everybody is we're talking about is gullible because like none of them are correct in their bigotry right we haven't covered any of the correct bigotries yet give it time He understands that his role is, yeah, to create propaganda, and he did it.
02:37:30
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think he really has illusions about the use of that propaganda. He has illusions about the nature of his own belief, but like there's a reason that we decided to describe gullibility in the terms you just indicated. It keeps us away from sort of trying to evaluate the soul of the man.
02:37:49
Speaker
actually think I have a pretty good read on the soul of the man in this case, but like in general, like I don't think that's what the metric should be about. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, despite earlier in the episode having called him really gullible, I think those are sort of different.
02:38:03
Speaker
So we've given him a nine. We also gave a nine to Rousseau. Frank Miller and Rousseau, basically the same people. And I gave a nine to Louis Althusser, but that's because I contrarianly gave Althusser a three in ferocity, even though he was literal murderer.
02:38:23
Speaker
To try to make some high-minded point about that something or other. That's Frank Miller, you've reached French philosopher levels of odiousness, so you should think about what you've done here.
02:38:35
Speaker
Frank Miller, if you're listening, please feel free to write in with some contrition. It'll be good for your soul. Now, Frank Miller, if you want to come on the podcast to talk about Holy Terror, you can contact us at patreon.com slash odium symposium.
02:38:51
Speaker
If you are or are not Frank Miller, you can always come to patreon.com slash odium symposium. You can subscribe for $5 a month. You can get early access to episodes and you can help support us making this podcast.
02:39:04
Speaker
Bye, guys. Thanks for listening. Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:39:22
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you can write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:39:40
Speaker
some level of masochism.