Disney Starts Its Promotional Campaign for Its... Coming-of-Age Hitler Comedy

They're branding it as a Fox Searchlight movie but we know who owns Fox now.

This is... pretty uncomfortable and cringey.

So, I mean, you can do a comedy involving Nazis and fascism. The Producers managed it, as did Charlie Chapin in The Great Dictator.

But...

Here's a conceptual problem the movie has: They show Hitler as a silly cartoon character. Fine -- they would say, this is actually not Hitler -- he's an imaginary friend of the boy who takes the form of Hitler, because Nazi propaganda has taught the boy that Hitler is a great man to have as a friend.

Fine.

But then, the imaginary friend Hitler says, "We can set flame to the building and then blame Winston Churchill."

But... the boy would not know Hitler engieered the Reichstag fire, so how is the boy's imaginary projection saying that? The imaginary version of Hitler can only say things that the boy would imagine Hitler saying; he certainly wouldn't imagine Hitler being behind the Reichstag fire, or of blaming his own action on others.

So which is he? Is he Actually Hitler or not? If he's not Actually Hitler, I guess people can go along with the funny imaginary friend clowning.

But if he is Actually Hitler -- or Actually Hitler whenever the movie decides to toss its premise away for the sake of a gag -- then it's pretty uncomfortable watching Hitler teach a boy life lessons.

I don't know how they square that circle. It seems unsquarable.

Taika Waititi got a lot of people to sign up for this -- Scarlett Johanson, Sam Rockwell, Steven Merchant, Rebel Wilson. I guess he convinced them not to worry, it would all make sense on screen.

But I don't know who the audience for this is.

#Woke Rotten Tomatoes critics, I guess.

Here's a possibly-interesting controversy: A lot of SJW movie critics are saying the Joker movie may very well encourage "incel losers" to pick up guns and get vengeance on society, as Joker does in this movie.

These SJWs are fucking monsters -- conceded. But this worries me too. It's one thing to have a psychopathic mass-murderer like the Joker in a movie, presenting him as the clear villain.

Now, The Dark Knight presented him as a clear villain, but that still wasn't enough protection from a psychopath dressing up in Joker make-up and shooting up a movie theater in Colorado.

What happens when you present Joker as a hero? Okay, the filmmakers would say he's not a hero.

But I cannot think of any way in which the main character of a movie or book, whose pains and failures you're supposed to empathize with, will not come off as some kind of hero (or, at least: "Point-of-View Protagonist").

And we all know Joker is going to kill a bunch of his persecutors, real or imagined, at the end, right?

People might say, "But you haven't seen it, you don't know how they present it." Yes, true, but I'm racking my brain trying to think of a way you could simultaneously present this guy's descent into murderous insanity as relatable and understandable, and yet not also spark empathy in the audience; or how you could possibly present a mass murder or act of terror as the culmination of the protagonist's character arc, and yet not have that come off as a bloody Rudy- like tale of an underdog finally making good.

Maybe the film manages this. If so, I'll praise them for their brilliance in doing what I thought was, as a matter of near-mathematics, strictly impossible.

But I don't think they will. I think the movie will largely present the Joker as a sympathetic underdog, and his act of violence as a liberation, and then I think they'll insert some ham-handed message that "Violence is still bad, mm-kay?" which any troubled person will ignore, seeing it for the tacked-on disclaimer that it is.

I don't know. What do you say?

By the way: Is this something?

Seems scary. I think fairy tales, especially in their dark, gory original versions, are creepy.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:05 PM

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