Er
Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back): Written and directed by David
Wnendt. Starring: Oliver Masucci, Fabian Busch, Katja Riemann, Christoph
Maria Herbst, Franziska Wulf. Running Time: 116 minutes. Based on the novel of the same name by Timur
Vermes.
Rating: 3/4
We
all know who Adolf Hitler is (or at least we should know, and if any of you
reading this don’t, get off my lawn). We
know about World War II, the Holocaust, the genesis of the Cold War, etc.
etc. We have memorials about the war and
the victims, museums, and an entire country created expressly because of the
targeted genocide of Jews. And we have
movies. So, so, so, SO many movies, all
together summing up a single, statement of purpose; this cannot happen again. It WILL not happen again. We know how bad it can get now. We know how far off-kilter an entire country
can go, and we know what all the warning signs look like, Hitler’s dead, and
Jews have their own country, so now we’re good.
We know what we know, so all this shit can’t possible come about
again.
But
do we really know? For all the lip service
people (German especially) pay to these past events, all memories dim with time
and death, so how can we be sure the mistakes that allowed Hitler to rise can’t
possibly come about again? And….wait,
aren’t a lot of them happening again already?
These questions are the backbone of Timur Vermes’ 2011 bestseller, Er Ist Wieder Da, and now, 4 years
later, it has come back to us in movie form.
It
is 2014. Adolf Hitler suddenly wakes up
in the middle of Berlin. Perfectly
healthy and unwounded, but somehow a good 7 decades in the future, long after
the end of the war and his presumed death.
The why is not addressed in the book, and it’s not addressed here, so
don’t let that question stick in your head too long- he is simply here, and
incredibly disoriented and confused. He
wanders the streets, unable to understand why no one can recognize him as their
beloved Führer, until he happens across a small coffee stand run by an average
Joe. Thinking Hitler to just be a really
extreme method actor, he puts him up for a few nights until one of his frequent
customers, a recently-fired employee of the nearby television production
company MyTV named Fabian Sawatzki, comes along and meets him as well. He also thinks Hitler is just a really
dedicated method-comedian, doing Hitler totally straight-faced to be
“ironic.” He and the stand manager both
find it hilarious, and he hatches a scheme to use this person as his ticket
back into the big house.
On
his end, Hitler figures out very quickly he’s experienced some strange form of
time travel and is most definitely not in Aryan Kansas anymore. He is shocked and disheartened by how far
back his goals and plans have been set (and more than offended when he uncovers
the many attempts by actors to portray him over the years), but never one to
give up, he decides to start from scratch, and decides to follow along with
Sawatzki so as to use TV as the medium through which he will rebuild his
following, taking each opportunity to rise further as it presents itself.
They
start small, but things snowball quickly- a few scenes shot around the Germany
with him just chatting with regular people are enough to get them a spot on one
of MyTV’s premier shows, under the ever-watchful eyes of the company’s head
producers (and mutual rivals) Katja Bellini and Christoph Sensenbrink, and
aided by a gothic secretary named Krömeier, who may or may not have a crush on
Sawatzki. From there, through sheer dint
of personality and his refusal to follow any of the shallow scripts the company
writers provide for him, Hitler and his overt, outlandish style become a
Youtube sensation, rapidly eclipsing the more established performers alongside
him, and setting off one controversy after another with everything he says and
does (including barging into the official HQ of a far-right German political
party). As his fanbase and popularity
grows, the only question is how far things will go before someone- anyone-
realizes the truth about who he is.
It’s
hard to pin down precisely what kind of story this is. It’s part satire of our modern,
click-obsessed culture, where the more outlandish, graphic, or terrible
something is, the better, part fish-out-of-water tale, part pitch-black comedy
about how the worst elements in human nature rear their ugly heads again and
again. It’s also part TV-documentary,
since large stretches of the film consist of raw-looking, handheld footage of
Hitler just driving around Germany and talking to people, whose reactions to a
Hitler-lookalike appearing in their midst vary widely (it’s clear some of these
were made without the people knowing they were in an actual movie). Most, like Sawatzki and his colleagues, just
laugh it off or dismiss it as a crude publicity stunt, and happily sit down for
him to sketch them. It can’t be anything
serious, because after all, they (and we) all know what we know- the REAL Hitler’s
dead, and the lessons have been learned, so no harm, right?
On
the surface, this may strike one as a major weakness with the whole plot- how
can no one figure out that it really IS Hitler they are talking with? Why does no one think to stop him? Well…..would you? We have become so skeptical as a society, and
so ready to assume there must be a rational, logical reason for something we
see or experience that, in a way, this movie works BECAUSE it fully copies our
expectations of a wholly rational world where all can be known and explained,
and then tosses in a simple fact diametrically opposed to it. The clash between our 21st century
mindset and the very existence of Hitler, back again against all possible
explanation, are the meeting of an unstoppable force and an immovable object,
and it’s the backbone of both most of the comedy and the more serious messages
of the tale.
Since
the movie is entirely driven by Hitler’s own perspective, this is the sort of
film that lives or dies by the performance of its lead actor. Fortunately, Oliver Masucci commits himself
entirely to the role (something many people would not be remotely willing to
consider), and it’s hypnotic to watch him go to town on hapless comedians,
pedestrians, and politicians who literally haven’t the foggiest clue with whom
they are speaking. And like in the book,
he’s really the only figure worth taking note of; the other characters above
are present, but don’t really play any major role in the story other than to
reflect aspects of its broad themes.
That said, there are some notable changes from the book, particularly
where Sensenbrink and Sawatzki are concerned.
Sawatzki is a bit more of a pathetic, hapless figure with a much broader
story arc (although revealing more than that would be a huge spoiler). Sensenbrink is inexplicably made into a side
villain, doing all sorts of petty things to derail Hitler and Sawatzki’s ascent
into primetime, and failing spectacularly.
While it does lead to a direct and fantastically funny reference to Der Untergang (Downfall in English, which featured possibly the best-known film
rendition of Hitler to date, excluding Chaplin’s), it also fails to be of any
real relevance to the rest of the film, and is dropped entirely by the
end.
Strangely
enough, I found the movie to be at its best during the moments (especially
during the mind-bending third act) when it deviated from the book entirely,
even directly breaking the fourth wall on a few occasions. The sections following the other characters
and tracking Hitler’s rise as a TV/internet star, which hew very closely to the
book, are certainly well-made, but also by the numbers, and they don’t gel well
with the nuttier and more direct-messaging stuff in the rest of the running
time. It’s a dissonance that is, in my
view, the film’s greatest weakness, but thankfully it’s never a fatal one.
Another
key difference that will ultimately boil down to taste is how it takes the
passive or latent themes and messages in the book and makes them much more obvious
and front-and-center. Even though it’s
never stated (since we only ever hear Hitler’s perspective, and no others), the
warning it’s trying to send is clear- the whole way we’ve gone about “learning”
from events like WWII is all wrong. We
so often try to push the Holocaust and everything associated off onto the
shoulders of Hitler and a few cohorts of his, making it out to be something unique
to that person and time. So as long as
Hitler himself is around, it won’t happen again. We know what we know, remember?
This
is, of course, disingenuous at best and a bald-faced lie at worst. Hitler was a product of his time, and as he himself
reminds characters in the book and movie, he had (at least at first) legitimate
popular sovereignty behind him. His
guilt is our guilt. And yet, as he himself
also points out, since he openly declared his plans and the people chose him
anyway, “not EVERYTHING could have been so bad.” How to reconcile this with our immediate
moral revulsion to what really happened is the primary question the book and
film present us with, and neither provide an answer. You’ll be left chewing on it for a long time
afterwards, with an uncomfortable aftertaste lingering at the back of the mouth. If this is not the case, then you weren’t
really paying attention the whole time, or you’re keeping yourself deliberately
ignorant. While the movie making this
more explicit and in-your-face than the book certainly removes some of the
novel’s brilliant subtlety, it also lends its powerful ending a more forceful
urgency, which I did not find to be inappropriate given many recent world
events.
But
then again, maybe I’m overblowing the seriousness of this. People suffered then, but it’s time to move
on, right? As Bellini points out herself in a
final interview, hasn’t the shadow of the past been hanging over German spirits
long enough? Haven’t they earned the
right to move forward? We’ve recorded
and memorialized everything, and we’ve stopped telling Jewish jokes, so time to
strike out for the future. It’s not like
things that extreme could ever happen again, at least not here.
After
all, we know what we know. You
know?
-Noah Franc
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