Fascism and Contemporary Cinema: From Fantasy-Space to the Real

(Figure 1.1 The Blind Side)

The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock; 2009) tells the true story of Michael Oher

(Quinton Aaron), a near-mute, acquiescent black teenager from a broken home and family,

who is taken in by a white Christian family in Tennessee. Despite his rotund and powerful

figure, Oher is a very gentle human being, and in lieu of this fact, he is induced by his new

family to try out for the private school football team as an offensive lineman. At first, Oher’s

passiveness is too much; he is beaten often at the line of scrimmage by opposing defenders.

But no worry: the white mother (Sandra Bullock; Figure 1.1) instructs her ‘son’ to imagine

the quarterback “as [their] family in the backfield.” And sure enough he does so—becoming

such a great offensive tackle (and wonderful human being) that he now plays pro football for

the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL1.

The film so far has been largely celebrated for its “irresistible emotional appeal”

(Variety) and its being about “simple human decency and economic disadvantage than it is

about racial inequality” (James Berardinelli). Sandra Bullock has also been touted as a

sure-lock for an Oscar nomination. The film has struck with popular audiences, as well,

grossing $100,238,841 as of November 29th . In its third weekend, with a gross of $20.4

million in sales, the film re-claimed the number one spot over the recently-crowned Twilight:
New Moon, a rare feat for any contemporary release, let alone over a record-breaking teenage

vampire romance. All of this isn’t puzzling given the lucrative nature of “family” sports

pictures and, perhaps, the well-timed release of an inspirational, conservative movie amidst

an economic crisis and a purportedly socialist President with unpopular fiscal policies.

Our question is not why now is this film possible; but, instead, why at all? Specifically, why

is it that a film like The Blind Side is able to capture popular imagination by any means? I

will not attempt to answer this question entirely—it lies beyond critical method, a sort of

farrago of intricate philosophy and human behavior. Instead, I will answer it through an

appeal to a kind of fascism (in cinema) that is little understood, recognized. Fascism has

historically been positioned as a kind of ‘response to crisis’ associated with terrorizing

regimes (Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet2) that sought to convert depreciated national spirit into

something horrific, but nonetheless perceivable and real. I will argue against such a limited

reading, not so much denying the realities of those fascisms but opening discussion to what

Foucault (describing Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus) has called “the fascism of the

everyday.”3

Fascist Cinema: Triumph of the Will

First, a quick audit of Fascist cinema as-we-know-it:

(Figure 2.1 Triumph of the Will)

 This still (Figure 2.1) is from Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Nazi propaganda film

Triumph of the Will. The film depicts the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg and

excerpts of speeches from Adolph Hitler and various high-ranking Nazi leaders. Hitler

commissioned the film and served as an unofficial executive producer; his name appears in

the opening titles. The overriding theme of the film is the return of Germany as a great

power, with Hitler as the True German Leader who will bring glory to the nation. I will now

break down the film in too separate categories: content and form. The two categories are

not exclusive, nor are they impermissible to readings that incorporate both to determine the

collective weight of fascism within Riefenstahl’s motion picture.

I have defined the content in Triumph of the Will through evident themes that are

universally recognized as fascist and therefore, as per popular opinion, disgusting and

reprehensible3. The idea here is that individual content that capture the distinct milieu of

German Fascism (re: the exact transcription of Hitler’s address, the plot of the Congress

taking place, etc.) are less useful than detecting widespread motifs and calculable imagery for

all of fascisms that seem to exist. As follows:

(i.) Decadent appeals to transcendence; a force or realm beyond us

(ii.) Notions of wholeness and unity; a noble turn away from individualism for the sake of the Party

(iii.) The inauthenticity of the Other; the disgust of “those against us, who are not with us”

(iv.)The incessant, undeniable need and desire to be led; a sole figure who will administrate/ calibrate

the national imaginary

(v.) The unfinished ‘great’ history of the Romans fused with Nazi essentialism; the privileged nexus of

“the national situation” (Jameson) to the world-spirit.

This fascist content in Triumph of the Will alerts the viewer in obvious and

manipulative manners. I’m thinking of the opening shot of the Hitler’s plane gallantly flying

over the marching masses to Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (we will
discuss this form—the use of powerful and evocative music—in the next section). Or

Hitler’s speech about the continuance of a unique task bestowed on the German people to

carry out to the world. These contents always seem to point to something beyond

themselves, packaged and loaded with meaning that escapes proper sublimation to the

masses. Here words and images are merely potent and seductive signifiers; their insertion

(and consequence) in a exceptionally German ‘langue’ is only mediated by those who carry

out the speaking and deciphering.

Next, form. Riefenstahl accomplished the dramatic representation of power (and,

really, power deferred to an instrumental authority: the Führer) through a fetishization of

power-structures and power-images. Obviously, there is the omnipresence of Speer’s neo-

classicist architecture, such as the Zeppelinfeld (Figure 2.2) stadium and the Volkhshalle;

Speer, moreover, was listed as the architect of the film, collaborating with Riefenstahl to

design a majority of the sets used in the movie. These architectural marvels were Roman-

inspired, large rotundas and prominent columns that adorned enormous halls and gather areas

that looked much like the Pantheon and the Coliseum. Encapsulated in these buildings were

direct lines to a political imaginary that established itself in ancient Rome: the immaculate

formation of the modern individual and the demonstrative participation in a Nation-Empire

by all its people. Riefenstahl, understanding the force of such images, positions her camera

to capture the illustrious heights of the buildings and architecture; skillful montage creates

what I call ‘uneven affection-images’ by drawing inherently understood juxtaposition

between crowd and ‘affection-object’: cheering masses—building; overwhelmed soldiers—

Hitler; and so on. The idea here is that rather that despite the fact that many times the

‘affection-object’ is unnatural (re: it does not draw a causal relation to the crowd, even the
images of Hitler), it is nonetheless naturalized by the commanding influence of the political

imaginary. Is this not precisely what is accomplished with the Nazis use of Wagner and

other classical composers in the propaganda films? First, we have the grandeur of Die

Meistersinger von Nürnberg transition into Wessel’s Die Fahne hoch (Horst-Wessel-Lied);

and as opposed to drawing out the unnatural connection between these tunes, image

supersedes difference, fusing the two pieces into something greater than the whole.

(Figure 2.2 Triumph of the Will)

Another operative move by Riefenstahl is her foreclosing of fiction by the treating entire

feature as documentary. But let’s remember the contradiction with this feature in propaganda

films: while the documentary does have an element of bias and persuasion, this is

fundamentally confined, by the filmmaker, to an assembly of images and narrative as

opposed to deliberate manipulation towards the a central message or theme. Susan Sontag’s

points out the elaborate fantasy of Triumph of the Will and it’s innumerable seduction as a

documentary in her article “Fascinating Fascism”; however, whereas Sontag thinks that

anyone who suggests the film is such is being “ingenuous,” I would argue that this is the

ingenious temptation of Triumph of the Will, which situates Fantasy, after all, as the sublime

—that which, even when we are fully aware of its absurdity, does not relinquish its hold on

us and its ‘reality effects.’

 These are, so far, very limited and cursory observations of content and form in

Triumph of the Will. What they should point to is a central strategy of fascism that takes on a

territorializing logic of the cinematic process and cinema-image. While Riefenstahl’s film is

composed of images and formal applications that are certainly Nazi-laden and Nazi inspired,

the essential properties of the work, as I have emphasized, are applicable to a wide-range of

applications, not only endorsement by other nation-states but by incorporative paradigms that

necessitate the reproduction of its ‘wholeness’ and ‘goodness.’ A further point before we

move on—this in order to anticipate the jump from stringent propaganda to the development

of narrative forms of fascism. The fascist elements of, let’s say, a film like Triumph of the

Will appropriate a singular cause: Nazism. But with the disentanglement of late capitalism

from historical enterprises (as such seemed impossible through early renditions), this cause is

one of flux; it escapes categorization. Let us be clear, instead, that while something such as

The Blind Side sanctions and inculcates the white paternalism/capitalism/heterosexuality it

does so not through any singular and exclusive contribution of imagery. Instead it seems to

be a limitation of perspective, a reversal of fortunes; whereas I will argue that it discourages

alternative, not only of what Mark Fisher describes (invoking Margaret Thatcher’s famous

saying) of capitalist realism but also cinematic language and form itself. We should instead

envision the transcendence of fascism as something that limits function, that suggests reality

as something prescribed and knowable to a limited minority of exclusive interest and class.
 Unquelled by geographical or historical singularities, Truth and Unity are inculcated

through what Habermas has called “common sense” (literally, ‘sense held in common’). One

of the presuppositions of neoliberalism is by its exposure—really, fostering—to

postmodernism and consumer society that it effectively destroys the possibilities of Fascism,

which is historically understood as a Modernist project. But consider the narrative described

by David Harvey:

“By the end of the 1960s embedded liberalism [the economic model of post-

WWII founded on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, namely strong ties to

stable currency and large-scale social services, government projects] began to

break down[…]Signs of a serious crisis of capital accumulation were

everywhere apparent.

Endnotes:

[1] Consider the bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) discussion of the film Hoop Dream, which
was unanimously celebrated for its stark look at black poverty and disenfranchisement. And
while hooks celebrates the film’s initial ‘progressiveness’ what is elided, in the end, is a
proper and necessary endorsement of the black individual who is shunned from the game of
basketball, because of limited skill and opportunity. Rather than championing his ability to
work through the educational system, the film performs a move of reducing his upward
narrative, documenting it as essential failure by a individual with dreams beyond the reach of
ordinary hard-working African-Americans.

[2] The fascism of Pinochet was, of course, supported by U.S.-driven liberalization interests.

[3] “Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Anti-Oedipus.” Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Anti-Oedipus. University of Minnesota Press. 1983.