The movies sustain me. Always have.
It’s never clear why something clicks when you’re young, but click movies did. And now – for better or worse – I find myself processing joy and grief and everything in between through a multitude of cherished movie lenses.
I am in a state of grief over the recent election. If you’re not, well, good on you, I guess. But for those genuinely mournful, there’s not much to celebrate.
And then there’s the threat to democracy. That precious, it turns out, impossibly fragile dream of a world where collective needs are addressed by a plurality of citizens engaged in a forward-thinking pursuit of the public good.
But at least I have the movies. Here are the ones I’m turning to for help easing this particular pain.
Comforting fantasy
Weaned as I was on Indiana Jones and the pre-MCU Captain America, the idea of simply punching Nazis as path to righteousness are the first images to come to mind. (Sadly, my age means the first live-action Cap I experienced was made-for-TV Reb Brown hurling a flimsy transparent plastic shield, but it still got the job done.)
But, even in a world where we didn’t constantly have to defend the idea that “Nazis = bad guys” to some, this simplistic problem-solving isn’t really feasible, even if heroic fantasies thereof maintain their cathartic appeal.
Fascists were a punch line for a suburban white kid watching “The Blues Brothers” (“Illinois Nazis – I hate Illinois Nazis”). A ready-made cadre of sneering villains whose throwback ignorance and un-American plots could always be thwarted by Indy’s right hook, or Cap’s unerringly tossed shield.
As the MCU’s Cap acknowledged more realistic darkness, we saw Chris Evans’ Captain stand up to a preening, Hitler-like Norse god (in Berlin, no less). The perfect blonde, blue-eyed American yet stood firm, protecting a similarly defiant elderly Holocaust survivor as he stated unequivocally, “You know the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing.”
Clang!
And look, it’s tempting to retreat into big-screen fantasies of quick and decisive vanquishment. Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” took that idea to its bloody apotheosis, literally rewriting reality so that Tarantino’s squad of brutish, vengeance-bent Jewish G.I.s actually machine-gun a cowering Hitler to bloody chunks. (The movie theater around them bursting into cleansing flames for good measure.)
Quiet defiance
But, as beholden to my own arrested love of superheroes, two-fisted action heroes and exploitation justice as I am (as long as their targets are suitably fascist and evil), there’s room for nuance. Animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s “Porco Rosso” sees its hog-headed WWI flying ace hero (it all makes sort-of sense when you watch it) retorting simply when accosted by the secret police, “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” Voiced as it is in the American dub of the Japanese film by our own hard-punching Batman himself, Michael Keaton, the line is pure adrenaline for weary post-election viewers.
In the “real” world of the movies, fighting dictators, bullies and violent bigots becomes a more dangerous – but no less inspiring – proposition. Paul Lukas, the German-born protagonist of the 1943 WWII drama “Watch on the Rhine,” might be overshadowed by American wife Bette Davis, but he, like Porco Rosso, stops everyone in their tracks when asked what he does back in the Nazi-dominated home country. “I fight against fascism,” he notes matter-of-factly, “That is my trade.” The Hays code demanded Muller be punished for acting on that code in the climax, but even that’s inspiring. The fight against Nazis at home or abroad is no joke.
Paul Henried, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.” Shutterstock
Then there’s “Casablanca’s” Rick, of course. Humphrey Bogart’s reluctant hero challenges then-waffling America to get up and fight the Nazis in Europe, his own weariness at his beleaguered past as freedom fighter against fascists in Spain and Africa delaying his re-entry to the fight nearly as much as the luminous Ingrid Bergman. And while Paul Henreid is no Bogart as escaped anti-fascist leader Victor Laszlo, he faces down Condrad Veidt’s sneering Nazi with a speech I hear in my dreams.
“And what if you track down these men and kill them, what if you killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can’t kill that fast.”
Damn, Victor Laszlo.
History teaches
There are the biopics of WWII heroes both sung and unsung, like “Schindler’s List,” “Defiance” and “Army of Shadows,” where, once more, living under a genocidal racist regime brings out the hero in people. There’s Gillo Pontecorvo’s still-controversial “The Battle of Algiers,” which looks unflinchingly at the guerrilla tactics used by rebels against the occupying French government in Algeria.
“Black Book” is Nazi resistance as high intrigue and kinky thrills, as befits the master of same, director Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven took fascism spaceward in his sly monster movie “Starship Troopers,” stripping as he did author Robert Heinlein’s pro-militaristic sci-fi novel of its fascist leanings to present a vicious takedown of gung-ho xenophobia in the guise of a giant bug movie.
I’ve written before about John Sayles’ “Matewan,” the staunchly socialist director’s retelling of an Appalachian coal miner’s strike that shows how corporate profits trump human lives – and what those humans choose to do about it. Then there’s the similarly themed “Salt of the Earth,” where the wives of imprisoned striking miners take up the picket lines in defiance of those forces maintaining that human rights mean nothing when it comes to rich, old, white guys lining their pockets.
I take inspiration – and hope – where I can find it these days. And if some celluloid heroes can inspire actual action in the face of evil, well that’s a plot twist I can get behind.
All the Indiana Jones movies are on Amazon Prime or Apple TV+. Captain America is now property of Disney. “Watch on the Rhine,” “Black Book,” “Starship Troopers,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Army of Shadows,” “Schindler’s List,” “The Battle of Algiers,” and “Matewan” are on Apple TV+. “Casablanca” is on Max and Apple. “Inglourious Basterds” is on Apple and Fubo. “Defiance” is on Apple and Paramount Plus.
This post was originally published on here
