Funny Memes Funny Memes About Hitler
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The Hitler Meme
On YouTube, we're in a bunker, and the enemies are always, always closing in. The ceilings are low. The air is stifling. A disheveled leader is delusional.
This is the premise of more than 100 videos on the Web — the work of satirists who for years have been snatching video and audio from "Downfall," the 2004 German movie of Hitler's demise, and doctoring it to tell a range of stories about personal travails and world politics. By adding new English-language subtitles, they transform the movie's climactic scene, in which Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) rails against his enemies and reluctantly faces his defeat, into the generic story of a rabid blowhard brought low.
In the original scene, Hitler is told that his reign of power is over; he then deafens himself to reality, eloquently savages everyone who cost him his dreams, vows revenge and finally resigns himself to private grief. The homemade spoofs plug into this transformation just about any hubristic entity that might come undone: the subtitles speak to the plight of governments, soccer teams, football teams, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Adam Sandler.
The meme of the parodies — the cultural kernel of them, the part that's contagious and transmissible — has proved surprisingly hardy, almost unnervingly so. It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis.
Fire up YouTube. There you can see the Hitler figure erupt in frustration over his Xbox. He flips out because his friends aren't going to Burning Man. And, recently, he loses it because Sarah Palin isn't working out as a running mate. Something in the spectacle of an autocrat falling to pieces evidently has widespread appeal.
When "Downfall" first appeared in German and Austrian theaters, critics charged that it humanized Hitler beyond recognition and sapped the historical horror by turning Hitler and his henchmen into soap-operatic archetypes, transforming their undoing into an ordinary human tragedy.
In fact, the lesson of the parodies seems to be that "Downfall" was a closeted Hitler comedy. Having seen the spoofs before seeing the movie, I find it virtually impossible now to watch the film with a straight face. Ganz, the Swiss actor, takes his performance seriously. But something in the character name "Adolf Hitler" also seems to have liberated Ganz to play flat-out melodrama. His goofy, trembling, hopeless rage — in which is wedged a vituperative aria aimed at the traitors he perceives everywhere — recalls nothing so much as Jeremy Piven's raving meltdowns as the jerk agent Ari on the HBO comedy "Entourage."
While Americans might prefer the spoof "Downfall" videos that have American themes, the ones with foreign subjects have somewhat more bite. Last month, a blogger scripted a loyalist to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, in the Hitler role. The loyalist is told that Badawi has turned to martial law and suppression of the press, and he freaks out at the thought that Badawi has gone too far. Like all the "Downfall" parodies, this one is filled with regional jargon, but you don't have to know much about Malaysian party politics to imagine the exasperation of an adviser whose champ keeps making missteps. "Doesn't he know the rakyat are sick of his shenanigans?" read the subtitles, as Ganz raves. "He thinks the I.S.A. will wipe out his problem? Perhaps all that sleep has put too much drool in his brain!" And later, "The whole world will laugh at that idiotic chromedome!"
Interestingly, many of the "Downfall" parodies choose not to have Ganz-as-Hitler directly ventriloquize another politician or figure of derision. Instead, as with the Malaysian parody, the spoofs often make the new speaker a disappointed supporter of a public figure. This move may be an attempt to sidestep the moral issues that should dog any satirist who draws a Hitler mustache on anyone but Hitler himself. Or it's possible that by not making the central character in the parodies Hitler or anyone like him, the parodists free up their protagonist to be (in good conscience) as funny, raw and sympathetic as he comes across in Ganz's performance.
For those of us who grew up in America with the word "Hitler" having a meaning as fixed as that of a black hole and the epithet "Hitler" being used only by sloppy teenagers and overheated ideologues, this slippery appropriation of Hitler's image for satirical purposes can be hard to take. In a video called "Barack Obama Downfall Satire," Hitler is just Hitler (in the program notes), but he's also a foe of Obama and ultimately someone like Dreyfus in the original "Pink Panther" comedies — a lone debunker who loses his mind trying to bring down a nitwit. The new subtitles are also presumably not written by an American, as the Hitler in this parody dismisses (initially) the participants in an Obama rally as "a gathering for a few student mingers in Che Guevara T-shirts." Mingers?
In any case, like nearly every one of the overwritten Hitlers, this one builds up a rhetorical head of steam. "He's still wearing his Senate diapers!" Hitler shouts. "Hillary Clinton should have been breast-feeding him!" One henchman robotically volunteers that, no, Obama will bring peace and prosperity. That's where I paused. I know that the enemy of Obama in this parody is no less than Hitler himself. But when Hitler gets all the good lines — like Milton's Satan — it seems fair to ask, Is this video for Obama or against him?
Since the advent of online video, people have made remixes and mashups by bolting together spare digital parts and soldering on freshly forged ones. In 2006, the soundtrack, shutter speed and graphic scheme of the "Brokeback Mountain" trailer, for example, were superimposed on old film from "Back to the Future" to create a video that suggested a gay love story between the characters Marty and Doc.
Taken together, the anthology of "Brokeback" spoofs made a larger point about American mythmaking and Hollywood clichés. It turns out you could play make-out music, show slow-mo clips of any two male actors interacting, throw up suggestive title cards ("a truth they couldn't deny") and — presto — any American blockbuster could be shown to chronicle love between two men.
But what's the larger point of the "Downfall" remixes? "Hillary's Downfall," from May, has Ganz in his Hitler garb speak for Hillary Clinton. Desperately denying that Obama will be the Democratic nominee, she says: "These little state primaries are not important. The superdelegates will secure my victory."
That's when Ganz takes off his glasses, his left hand shaking. In the best parodies — and "Hillary's Downfall" is a good one — Ganz embodies the role assigned him by the parodist by the time his glasses come off. This is the moment in the original film after Hitler has been informed that he cannot win; as he eases up on denial, he's coming down on fury. In "Hillary's Downfall," you can't believe how quickly the haircut and costume recede and the Hitler factor fades, eclipsed by Ganz's tough old fork-tongued grandpa performance. Hitler becomes not the author of the Holocaust but a salty dog who, though all is lost, doesn't stop piercing pretense and speaking in slangy, heartfelt language, expressing the most deeply felt needs of the human id. We may have repressed that speak-for-the-people Hitler, the one he decided to be in "Mein Kampf"; but in the form of these videos, he has returned.
Isn't that the outcome that Adolf Hitler, the historical figure, sought? Didn't he see himself as the brute voice of the everyman unconscious?
How grim — how perplexing, how unsettling — that after more than 60 years of trying to cast and recast Hitler to make sense of him, we may have arrived at a version of Hitler that takes him exactly at his word.
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DOWNFALL OF THE UPLOADS: The "Downfall" production company — constantin-film.de — hasn't exactly stood up and cheered to see its film's great bunker scene spoofed all over YouTube. Pursue a link to one, and you're likely to learn, "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Constantin Film Produktion GmbH." Copyright claims are serious business, but if you happen to do some creative searching on YouTube itself, you might stumble onto some of the versions that have made their way back to the site.
GANZ MESHUGENEH: Forget Al Pacino in "Scarface" or Jeremy Piven on "Entourage." Bruno Ganz tears it up in "Downfall." If you watch it as a fiction film and stop worrying that it pretends to comment on history, "Downfall" is memorable camp. The DVD is cheap on Amazon.
SPOOF THE SPOOFS: It had to happen: a meta-take on the Hitler parodies. In the video " Hitler Is a Meme ," Hitler learns that he's an Internet laughingstock. As in, he's the new "Star Wars" kid or Sarah Palin. He doesn't take it well. (To a henchman: "I can't believe I ever friended you!") Watch at the invaluable Break.com. (This superb parodist, a Web developer in Philadelphia, can be found at sean-o.com.)
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26wwln-medium-t.html
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