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What’s your favorite genre of book? Some people like thrillers, some prefer romance. I know people who love a good cozy mystery and others who enjoy bleak horror. Some are sworn to a specific genre, like high fantasy or sci-fi, others would rather take in a good old slice-of-life narrative from that vast and varied garden of delights broadly dubbed “literary fiction.” Others may still take pleasure in the boy-wizards and sparkling vampire literature of their youth. Well—there is no judgment here.

What’s my favorite genre of book? How nice of you to ask! (You did ask, didn’t you? Of course you did!) Personally, while I have enjoyed books of many and sundry types, I would have to say that my favorite is the kind of book that has multiple layers of meaning to it which must peeled back slowly, like a really thick onion, until at last the different dimensions of the story leave me with a blurred sense of the line between fiction and reality itself.

Of course, it’s hard to fit all that on a sign in Barnes & Noble, so I generally find works of my favorite genre quite by accident. And so much the better; the unexpected nature of finding one makes it more fun.

I am glad to report that the book we discuss today is just such a tale! It is actually a book-within-a-book. It’s best if I start from the inside and work my way out, so we’ll begin by examining the inner book, which is a pulp sci-fi adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world infested by mutants, the result of a great nuclear war.

Into this dystopia steps Feric Jaggar, a man driven by a desire to save non-contaminated humanity from annihilation by the mutant hordes and the monstrous telepathic creatures controlling them, the “Dominators” or “Doms” for short; monstrous, deceptive beings from the evil empire of Zind.

Jaggar relentlessly works his way into the leadership of the human-controlled country of Heldon, most dramatically by winning the right to wield the “Steel Commander”, a fabled ancient weapon only worthy of the greatest of men according to legend. Like Mjölnir, in other words. He wins control of it during a fiery initiation rite into a motorcycle gang known as the Black Avengers. After his victory, Jaggar changes their name and sweeps to control of Heldon, winning the respect of all true humans and the fear of the mutants in the process.

Once in command of the human nation, he quickly raises an army and mounts a furious attack on the Empire of Zind, himself at the helm, fighting tremendous battles against innumerable hordes of monsters.

The battle scenes in this book are bound to be polarizing. Some may find them tedious and repetitive. Personally, I thought they were enjoyable in a campy sort of way. The prose is absurdly overwrought, and probably sets the record for most uses of the word “protoplasm” in a work of fiction. However, it’s also nothing that won’t feel familiar to a regular reader of Lovecraft. HPL rarely wrote extended battle scenes, but if he had, they would read like this.

Jaggar’s quest sends him hurtling from one cataclysmic battle to the next, each time proclaiming, in gloriously hyperbolic terms, how this one is really the great, finally struggle for the future of the universe. Okay, now that’s done with. Oh, but wait! Seriously, now, this one is the big one. Really, no kidding, this is for all the marbles…

It’s so over-the-top it’s almost funny, and indeed, on its own, it works as a fast-paced, violent sci-fi epic. If this appeals to you, I encourage you to stop reading this review right now and go pick up the book. You can come back after you’ve finished reading it. Get the Kindle version, because it automatically skips the introduction, which is an excellent thing. Much like listeners in the 1930s missed the intro to Orson Welles’ adaptation of War of the Worlds, and thought they were hearing a live news report of an alien invasion, this is one where it’s best to get the full context later.

From this point forward, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are never going to, so from here on out spoilers will abound. Think carefully before proceeding.

To begin with, the book-within-the-book is titled “Lord of the Swastika.” Also, the cover above is the one for the Kindle edition. I opted to use it instead of the more colorful, but also more shocking, paperback edition or the appropriately pulpy first edition as seen on Wikipedia. (There are many different covers; this one is probably the best.)

You see, the framing device for this story is that it’s an alternate universe in which, after briefly dabbling in politics, Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and made a career as a sci-fi pulp novelist and illustrator, with “Lord of the Swastika” being his most popular book.

I left out some important details in my plot summary above. The motorcycle gang Jaggar takes over is renamed the “Sons of the Swastika,” or “SS” for short. They wear black uniforms with red swastika armbands, hold torchlight parades, and chant “Hail Jaggar!” at every opportunity.

Also, except for the ending, the entire career of Jaggar is beat-for-beat a thinly-veiled retelling of Hitler’s actual biography, from his elimination of the old gang leader once he’s outlived his usefulness to invading the Zind empire to seize their oil fields.

Of course, in this alternative history, none of that actually happened, and Hitler was just another eccentric writer alongside Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein, and perhaps most pointedly, L. Ron Hubbard.

This is brought home in the afterword, by fictional critic “Homer Whipple,” who proceeds to deconstruct “Lord of the Swastika,” and in so doing reveals more facts about this alternate world, most significantly that, by 1959, the Soviet Union has conquered most of the planet except for the USA and Japan.

Whipple harshly critiques the novel’s poor writing and ridiculously simplistic characters, before turning to a Freudian analysis of the imagery the author chose, as well as adding a few words about what this suggests about the man’s psyche. This Hitler, he ultimately concludes, was a deeply disturbed individual, and it’s lucky that he only channeled his unhealthy desires and fixations into his fiction. Whipple figuratively shakes his head at the idea of such a psychologically abnormal man actually leading a political movement.

Okay, so… what exactly are we to make of all this? We’ve got our book-within-the-book, we’ve got the (apparently dystopian) “real” world, and a fictional literary critic telling us why the book we just read is not very good and in fact kind of disturbing. What does it all add up to?

Well, let’s back up yet another level in this weird metafictional matryoshka, and think about what the actual author, Norman Spinrad, was trying to do here.

To some degree of course, it’s a satire of Nazism. But that’s not really the main goal. After all, mocking Hitler in, say, 1936 took a lot of courage; mocking him in 1972 took rather less. No, Spinrad is after something else.

I think he had in mind two targets: the first is pulp science-fiction generally. With relative ease, he spins a perfectly serviceable sci-fi yarn that also happens to function as Nazi propaganda. Which has to be disquieting to any fan of sci-fi. Some of the messianic speeches Feric Jaggar gives feel not too far off from stuff Paul Atreides says in Dune . (Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a line about Paul’s awakening race consciousness. I remember thinking it odd at the time.)

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not saying Dune is veiled Nazi propaganda. If you go beyond the first book, that series is itself also clearly intended as a criticism of messianic political movements. At the same time, almost everyone who goes beyond the first Dune book agrees that the subsequent books are boring and weird, whereas the first (and most Nazi-ish, or at least fascistic) one is a rollicking adventure. Is this more than just a coincidence?

Well… not when we remember that history did not start in the 1930s. The deficiencies in our system of historical education have led several generations to forget this fact, but in reality, the Nazi movement, despite its overall reactionary character, was in certain respects unusually modern in its technique.

By that, I mean they liked to use what Peggy Noonan once called “political bullshit about narratives.” (Every time someone says “narrative” in a political context, I think of this quote.) The idea of a legendary hero on a quest to save the nation is obviously way older than Nazism. The Nazi propaganda department was extremely adept at casting Hitler into this role, but the role had been written in the minds of the population literally millennia before. Again, the Kwisatz Haderach vibes!

Basically, Nazi propaganda and popular sci-fi were both drawing from the same well of ancient folkloric patterns encoded deeply in human memory to craft their respective stories. So, don’t worry too much that liking old school sci-fi adventure means you are secretly a Nazi. Just be careful about joining any cult-like political movements. I have developed this one weird trick to make sure I don’t do that on accident, which is to never join anything. Cultists hate me!

Speaking of cults, this brings me to Spinrad’s second target, which is much more speculative on my part, but I think I’ve got a sound case.

I mentioned above that the fictionalized Hitler of this book would have been a contemporary of L. Ron Hubbard, who, in addition to founding the Church of Scientology, was a pulp sci-fi author, and achieved some notable success with his fiction.

Spinrad, who in other works criticized Scientology in much less veiled terms, seems here to be suggesting that a man who achieved cult success as an author of sci-fi might be able to start another, much more dangerous movement. Beware of eccentric sci-fi authors, The Iron Dream implies; you never know what else they might be capable of doing.

Of course, this subtle satirical intent was almost certainly lost on most readers, especially in the pre-internet days. As sometimes happens with satirical works, here the author may have succeeded too well in imitating his intended target, to the point where it actually serves the very goal it is supposed to be undermining. As in, some neo-Nazi groups actually endorsed The Iron Dream, despite Spinrad’s best efforts to prevent this misreading. Let this be a caution to all writers who try to get cute and insert subtle messages into their texts; sometimes the readers are just gonna read it how they want to read it.

Most people read a book once, get a vague idea of the gist, and then move on. It takes a special kind of nutcase to, for example, spend almost 2,000 words analyzing the hidden depths and meanings of a book from more than 50 years ago. But hey, that’s why we have to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” right?

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jojoLet me start by saying I’m pretty tired of World War II films. There have been a lot of good ones, but there have been so many that at a certain point, I became exhausted with the period. It feels sometimes like the movie industry is barely aware of other times in history.

It’s understandable, of course; the period is full of drama, tragedy and fascinating stories. And the Nazis, with their horrific atrocities, cruel ideology, sinister iconography, and reputation for machine-like efficiency, are the perfect villains.

But all the same, I’ve seen so many movies about WWII that it takes a lot to convince me another one will contain something I haven’t seen before.

Jojo Rabbit is a film about a ten-year-old German boy named Johannes Betzler. Johannes is a fanatical believer in the Nazi party, even as the tide of war is turning against them. He is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, and his joy at learning how to fight for the Fatherland is only momentarily dampened when two older boys taunt him for his refusal to kill a rabbit in order to prove his devotion, which earns him the mocking nickname “Jojo Rabbit.”

He is consoled at this moment by his imaginary friend, to whom he often turns for encouragement: his ten-year-old mind’s idealized version of Adolf Hitler.

Imaginary Hitler is played primarily as a goofy, comical slapstick character, egging on Jojo’s fantasies of fighting glorious battles in a jovial, often nonsensical way. He seems like a lovable if rather silly father figure–something which Jojo craves since his own father is away in the war.

Unfortunately, taking his imaginary friend’s advice leads Jojo to an accident with a grenade, from which he needs a lengthy rehabilitation period. During this time, his mother Rosie more or less demands that the Hitler Youth leader now demoted to office work find odd jobs for her son while she is out working.

Jojo is assigned menial tasks such as distributing propaganda posters. One day, on coming home, he hears a noise from the bedroom that belonged to his now-deceased older sister and goes to investigate. He discovers a hidden panel in the wall, where there is a small nook concealing a teenaged Jewish girl named Elsa.

Jojo is terrified, and Elsa commands him not to tell his mother that he knows about her, threatening him with his own Hitler Youth dagger. Jojo retreats to his bedroom, to discuss with imaginary Hitler what to do about this existential threat.

Jojo, of course, believes completely in every anti-Semitic trope Nazi propaganda ever employed. And of course he would–it’s all he’s ever heard in his whole young life. However, since Elsa is older and stronger than he is, and since revealing that his mother is sheltering her would get her into trouble as well, Jojo is left with only one choice: to negotiate.

The result is a series of cautious interviews with Elsa, during which Jojo asks her various questions in an effort to learn the secrets of the people he so fears. Elsa at first is annoyed by his absurd, bigoted questions, and gives facetious answers, but slowly, the two form an almost sibling-like relationship.

Meanwhile, Jojo’s mother tries to manage things as best she can. In one touching scene, she and Jojo argue during dinner–she is gladdened by news of the Allies’ advance, Jojo is outraged at her disloyalty to the Reich. Jojo says he wishes his father were there, and, incensed, Rosie puts on his father’s Wehrmacht jacket, smears soot on her face like a beard, and gives a stern-but-loving impression of her husband.

This scene was fantastic. If you want a taste, you can see the beginning of it here. Prior to this, I’ve only seen Scarlett Johansson in action movies and one dreadful period drama. I was really impressed by her performance in this film, and this scene was the best example.

As the situation deteriorates further for Germany, things become more and more desperate. The film’s comedy mixes with horrific tragedy. The horrors of war, and of the Nazi government in particular, are not sugarcoated despite many of the film’s lighter elements. There is death and destruction and more than one heroic sacrifice. And at the end of the horror, Jojo and Elsa are faced with a very different world than either of them grew up in.

I’ve skipped over quite a lot in this review–there are some extremely interesting supporting characters in this film, such as the Hitler Youth leader Captain Klenzendorf and Jojo’s friend Yorki. Every performance in the film is terrific, but it would take quite a while to describe exactly why.

Normally, I would try to give them all their due, but this is another one of “those” reviews, where I need to go on at length and build up my case, so I’m not going to give you an analysis of every character on top of that. I’m sorry to do this to you twice in one week, but I just had to post this on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day.

Jojo Rabbit is a very polarizing film. Carrie Rubin, whose opinion I value extremely highly, called it her favorite film of the year. On the other hand, CineMuseFilms, one of my favorite film blogs, considered it one of the worst movies of the year.

What’s up with that? (If you’re expecting me to answer this straightforwardly like a normal person; I’m very sorry. You must be new here.)

Let’s start with the most basic question: what kind of film is it? It’s usually listed as a comedy-drama. Sometimes words like “war” or “dark comedy” or “satire” get thrown in as well.

So what’s the comedy part? Well, as I said, imaginary Hitler does a lot of silly, goofy, slapstick stuff. Many of Jojo’s lines are humorous, in the way they depict a naive child trying to seem mature and wise despite having been brainwashed with propaganda all his life. And the supporting characters do some comical things–such as Captain Klenzendorf’s ludicrously flamboyant redesign of the German uniform.

What’s the drama part? Well… it’s World War II. People get killed. Including–I’ll try not to spoil too much–good people. People we like, who don’t deserve it. This ain’t Hogan’s Heroes–the stakes feel real.

This definitely qualifies it as “dark comedy,” in the sense that the humor revolves around very non-humorous subjects. And most dark comedies are also usually satires.

For example, take the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. It’s a slapstick comedy about the political struggle in the Soviet Union during the power vacuum created by… well, you’re smart; you can probably work out what event they were dealing with.

The point of mixing grim subjects like state-sanctioned murder and blatant propaganda with vulgar comedy in Death of Stalin is to underscore how fundamentally absurd the Soviet government was. The situation was bleak, but also laughable in the sheer illogical madness the lunatics in charge had created in their relentless pursuit of power.

There is something similar going on at times in Jojo Rabbit–maybe most obviously in the scene where the gestapo raids Jojo’s house, in which, despite the deadly seriousness of the situation, there is a bit of comic business where everyone must greet everyone else with a “Heil Hitler!”

But there’s more to the story here. After all, slapstick satires of Nazi Germany and its leadership are not exactly ground-breaking. For example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator or The Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (both released in 1940) covered that concept pretty well.

The key lies in the opening credits, when we see footage of cheering crowds saluting the real Adolf Hitler, set to a German version of The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This segues to a scene of young children frolicking at the Hitler Youth camp. It looks almost pleasant; kids having a good time at summer camp–except for the extremely unsettling presence of swastika banners and SS lightning bolts.

I remember seeing a documentary once about Hitler’s rise to power, and the way his speeches and events attracted throngs of cheering supporters. From what I gather, during his ascent he really did have an almost rock star-like following, complete with groupies.

Hitler-as-lovable-imaginary-pal/celebrity… young children playing amid symbols that every modern audience instantly associates with death camps and bodies piled in ditches… what on Earth is this film saying? If it’s out to satirize Nazism, why make it look so benign; like some sort of fan club?

One of the most interesting aspects of crowd psychology is the observation that people in large groups are not as smart as any one of them is individually. The old saying about groupthink “none of us is as stupid as all of us” summarizes it well. Large groups of people are roughly as intelligent as children–naive, easily-swayed, and in search of a leader (parent) to guide them.

Understanding group psychology is critical to understanding Nazism and the other authoritarian movements of the early 20th century. Once you realize that while 1930s Germany may have been composed of many brilliant individual scientists, doctors, artists, designers, soldiers, thinkers, tradespeople, businesspersons etc., their collective psychology was about as easy to manipulate as a ten-year-old boy’s: anyone who seemed confident and strong and promised them grand adventures of glorious conquest while wearing cool, scary-looking uniforms could get plenty of buy-in from the people.

Obviously, that didn’t work on everyone. But it worked on enough people. Tragically.

We all know, now, that the Nazi upper-echelon was composed of people who were evil psychopaths. Armed with this knowledge, it is unsurprising that the policies they implemented were evil and insane. The student of history looks back and wonders, “Why didn’t the German people see what was happening?”

The answer is that the evil psychopaths were handed the levers of power with the consent of enough of the people. This is not because all of these people were as evil or insane as the men they ushered into power, but because they, in the child-like state induced by mob psychology, were all too eager to be deceived by the implausible ethno-nationalist fairy-tale they had been told.

The German philosopher Oswald Spengler said of Hitler, “We need a real hero, not a heroic tenor,” implying that Hitler was merely play-acting at being the kind of leader the country truly needed. Despite this, Spengler voted for him anyway–because he too, despite being a man of learning, was susceptible to ethno-nationalist flights of fancy. So it goes.

Put in patriarchal terms, Hitler was playing at the role of father to a nation that collectively wanted just such a figure. Hitler tried to present himself as following in the tradition of beloved strong leaders from Germany’s past, like Otto von Bismarck and especially Frederick the Great. But he wasn’t. Both Frederick and Bismarck were pragmatic administrators, not single-minded zealots willing to destroy their own nation in a doomed bid for martial glory.

I dislike allegorical interpretations as a rule, but I think it’s reasonable to read Jojo and the imaginary Hitler he creates to stand in for his absent father as a representation of the German national psyche at the time–believing in comforting lies rather than admitting the awful truth, until the appalling costs become too great and too personal to ignore.

My interpretation of the film is that it’s a dramatization of how a collective mental disease progresses. But collective anything is difficult to portray, and so young Jojo is the substitute for “the people”–a malleable mind representing herd psychology.

I said before the film was polarizing, and so you may well ask, did I love it or hate it?

Well, I loved it. I thought it was one of the best World War II films I’ve seen, because it offers an insight into just how such a horrific event could have happened. Usually Nazis in film are portrayed as nothing more than cardboard villains, but in this film, the truly sinister thing about Nazism is made apparent: the awful seductiveness of it. How it could so easily become normalized, especially among young people who knew nothing else.

But if you were expecting a true satirical comedy, I can see you would be disappointed. Even offended, perhaps. Because the objective of the film isn’t to satirize Nazism. It’s more of an examination of how Nazism took root, which is a very dark and uncomfortable subject, and it’s frankly not very much fun to think about, so they sprinkled in some jokes. Otherwise it would just get too damn dispiriting.

And whatever else may be said about Jojo Rabbit, it isn’t dispiriting. It ends on a hopeful, if bittersweet, note. The fever has broken, the film implies, and the children have a chance to build a better future.

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I’ve long wondered who one compared people one didn’t like to before Hitler, and Brian Palmer of Slate has provided the answer:

 “In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, many Americans and Europeans had a firmer grasp of the bible than of the history of genocidal dictators. Orators in search of a universal symbol for evil typically turned to figures like Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, or, most frequently, the Pharaoh of Exodus.”

Makes sense, I guess. But, as I’ve said before, if the Bible was their reference point, why would they not have used the Devil himself?

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan)

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A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog wrote in to him to complain about the Triumph of the Will/Undefeated line that I objected to last week. Sullivan’s response: “It was meant to be a joke.”

Well, I mean, I assumed that. What else could it have been? My point is I don’t really see how it’s a funny joke. I mean the joke is: This movie about a current politician is like another famous movie about a historical politician–who, incidentally, became infamous for committing innumerable hideous crimes against humanity.

This isn’t really that good, if I understand it right. There’s nothing particularly humorous about it as far as I can tell. If not for the fact that Nazis are involved, it would be an obvious statement: political propaganda films are like other political propaganda films. The only reason to bring it up that I can see is to compare Palin to the Nazis.

I have a confession to make: For some reason, I used to have trouble remembering the title of Barack Obama’s first book, which is Dreams from My Father. Jokingly, when I couldn’t recall it, I would call it “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Barack”, alluding to this. This isn’t terribly funny, but I submit that it is funnier than Sullivan’s joke, because it’s sort of bizarre comparing a fantasy/horror novella with a memoir, but it also has a funny near-coherence–the word “dreams” and the fact that Obama’s book is a sort of “quest” to find out about Barack Obama Sr.

So, not the stuff of great comedy, I freely admit. (But remember: I like Obama, so I wasn’t trying really hard to make something funny out of his book.)

At any rate, maybe I’m just too stupid to understand Sullivan’s joke here. I really can’t see it to save my life. Can someone enlighten me?

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I enjoy Andrew Sullivan’s blog, but I wish he wouldn’t do things like this:

“Palin has been airbrushed out of the GOP race by the entire scene – from Politico to National Review. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, she has secretly put together an hour long “Triumph Of The Will“ “Evita” “Undefeated” documentary that will attempt to do what Josh Green tried: to reframe her as a visionary reformer.”

I, along with many others, have repeatedly expressed my dislike for the Nazi comparison rhetorical device. Now, of course, a great many movies were influenced by that film. (I have even heard it said that the ending scene of Star Wars: A New Hope was influenced by a scene from it!) Maybe it will turn out the Palin film has some technical similarities, although so far I know of no reason to think it will. Such comparisons are very interesting from the point of view of a film student, but I don’t think that’s how Sullivan meant it.

My Conservative friends used to tell me, with an air of someone revealing esoteric and terrifying knowledge, that the Obama “Hope” poster was based, in some way, on the famous photo of Che Guevara. Well, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. What poster designer wouldn’t mimic one of the most iconic pictures in the world? But it seems to me it doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the ideology of the figures depicted. Same logic applies here.

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So, Congressman Steve Cohen said of the Republicans:

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels…You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.”

One of the countless reasons I find the Nazi-comparisons that are used so much in political debate to be so damned irritating is that often, in order to make them, people like to draw upon true, but purely superficial, similarities between whoever they are attacking and the Nazis.

Goebbels was not the first guy to ever use propaganda. The only reason to pick Goebbels, out of all of the other propagandists throughout history, seems to me to be to evoke a subtle association in people’s minds with the horrible atrocities he and the Nazi government he spoke for committed.

If Congressman Cohen had substituted “Bernays” for “Goebbels” in his claim, he would’ve been about as accurate, less disrespectful, and shown himself to be a man of learning beyond what we generally expect of our elected officials, besides.

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Rob Reiner compares the Tea Party to the Nazis, and brings up the possibility of them having a charismatic leader. He says:

“My fear is that the tea party gets a charismatic leader… Because all they’re selling is fear and anger. And that’s all Hitler sold. ‘I’m angry and I’m frightened and you should hate that guy over there.’ And that’s what they’re doing.” 

Our Nazi-comparison-based political discourse and the importance of charisma are two of my favorite topics. So, with that in mind, I have to say first of all that Reiner is very wrong to make this comparison. The Tea Party is many things, all of which I believe to be wrong, but I really don’t think they want to commit genocide. The Nazi comparisons are uncalled for and foolish, in my opinion.

Now, as to the possibility of the Tea Party getting a charismatic leader: they already have at least one, possibly two. For a long time, I’ve thought that Sarah Palin is charismatic. And, more recently, it seems like Glenn Beck has emerged as their leader; and if you can think of some reason for that other than charisma, you’ve got me beat.

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Michael C. Moynihan has an excellent piece that addresses one of the ongoing fallacies of the “everyone but us is a Nazi” school of debating. I was on the point of writing something similar in response to that Ebert article; but Mr. Moynihan has done better than I could have.

Incidentally, regular readers of this blog must be getting the impression that I hate Roger Ebert or something. I don’t. I actually enjoy reading his film criticism, and agree with him more often than not. I just take exception to some of his statements regarding Art and Politics.