In an Industry of the Blind
December 20th, 2008Guess Who Leads?
This morning, while enjoying my delicious end-of-week McDonald’s breakfast, I saw a trailer for the new Tom Cruise movie. I have to tell you, I think this guy has finally lost the last fragment of his ability to perceive himself as others do. I mean, he’s in a trailer for a movie, and we are supposed to sympathize with him as the hero, and he’s a NAZI. I just can’t buy it.
I guess he was one of the NICE Nazis. The GOOD ones.
????
I think when you notice your boss shipping trainloads of Jews and gypsies and gays off to be gassed and turned into lampshades, and your big concern is that he may lose a war and cause problems for your country, you can be said to have completely lost sight of the high moral ground. Maybe I’m being unfair to Claus von Stauffenberg–the man Cruise plays–but judging from this quotation about Poland, I sort of doubt it:
The population here are unbelievable rabble; a great many Jews and a lot of mixed race. A people that is only comfortable under the lash. The thousands of prisoners will serve our agriculture well.
Oooookay.
Let’s take away Edward Teller’s house and make him spread manure for a living. Because he’s a JEW.
I am not seeing the warm and fuzzy side of this character.
Maybe Cruise is the Titanic, and destiny created this iceberg for him. Take a look at a bust of von Stauffenberg:
Come on. The resemblance is incredible. It would even fool L. Ron Hubbard. You can almost hear him yelling, “SP? PTSSP!!! I have CANCELLED that in my AREA!!!!!!”
This is the second “nice Nazi” movie in a decade, to my knowledge. The first was The Pianist. I guess you could throw in “Max,” because Hitler was so pathetic and wimpy in that one. I hope we don’t reach a point where confused Hollywood hipsters decide we have been unfair to the Thousand Year Reich and start issuing torrents of films with lovable Nazi protagonists.
Maybe we were asking for this when we laughed at Hogan’s Heroes.
December 20th, 2008 at 10:44 AM
The bust is the same height as Cruise.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:24 PM
The bust is the same height as Cruise.
And just as smart.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:35 PM
The real VonS was well over six feet.
Cruise was cast because they needed a German officer who could run under Hitler’s table with the bomb without stooping unphotogenically…
December 20th, 2008 at 2:05 PM
I’ve cancelled Tom Cruise in my area.
December 20th, 2008 at 2:08 PM
The generation that actually had to deal with the Nazis is dying off. It becomes much easier for Hollyweird to make fantasy films when they no longer have to deal with the historical reality of the situation. In other words, we forget.
Therefore, since Jews are the only people that seem to have much of a sense of history, we need MORE Jews!!! That’s right, Jewish folks need to have lots and lots of kids. They seem to be the only people that haven’t gotten so comfortable that they sit in front of the TV all day.
That is only partially a joke. Perhaps the reason so many Jews are successful is that they actually are doing stuff, while the rest of the Western world is watching “Dancing with the Stars”.
December 20th, 2008 at 2:22 PM
The German people seem to need a war-time hero (maybe to sooth the conscience if nothing else) and today that hero is von Stauffenberg (polls seem to place him at or near the top for Germany’s choice for a WWII hero). As you’ve already pointed out, he has his warts (and an abundance of them as well). My own opinion is that he saw Hitler’s regime crumbling and wanted to set up a golden parachute or leader-ship role for himself after the war (I don’t think ethics played any role in his decision; he was simply trying to bet on the winning side).
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IMO, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be a much better hero figure, but he was a Christian and modern Germans seem to have no tolerance for that (a trait they share with Hollywood). So it makes sense that Cruise/Hollywood would choose von Stauffenberg.
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Next up from Hollywood, a film about Göring’s unfair tratment at the Nuremberg trials and his subsequent self-sacrificing suicide…(Before anyone gets their hackles up, that was a macabre joke. I hope such a film never happens, but given today’s moral equivalency in Hollywood, who knows).
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BTW, Steve, I just finished two more Cheesecakes for family and friends for Christmas…I still have six more to go however. My next task is to see if I can find some of those clear plastic snap-together cake-boxes at Sam’s so that I can deliver all these Cheesecakes. Buy stock in Lucerne Cream Cheese…
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Merry Christmas to you and your Family!
December 20th, 2008 at 3:49 PM
How about all the nice Nazis singing “Springtime for Hitler”?
December 20th, 2008 at 3:59 PM
There’s another film out about WW2 that I’ve seen incessant ads for during the kid’s show Doctor Who. It’s about a cute German boy who makes friends with a cute Jewish kid who happens to be living in the concentration camp next to the cute German boy’s house. I think it’s one of those “Germans were people too because look, there’s this cute little kid!” films. Periodically these World War 2 “sympathy for the devil” films come out in gobs, kind of like an intermittent rash.
My father frowned on Hogan’s Heroes. He let us watch it, but he made it clear that he disapproved of movies that made light of Nazis. I love how they are advertising the Tom Cruise Nazi movie as some kind of thriller too — I mean, unless this is some science-fictional alternate-world movie, we know how it ends! [SPOILER!!!] They didn’t kill Hitler!
December 20th, 2008 at 4:02 PM
The weird thing is, the cast of Hogan’s Heroes featured Jews who were all too familiar with the Holocaust.
December 20th, 2008 at 4:20 PM
i had a slug of relatives who actually fought in WW II, fought being different than served, and none of them had a beef with Hogans Heroes. they laughed, if i recall correctly.
they had a real beef with those war-time propoganda movies, most of them anyhow, where one bullet kills five Germans, that sort of thing.
i cant imagine they’d have given a toss about this movie…most of them were happy to hear about the July 20 plot. at least a couple of Jerries tried to kill Hitler….no Soviets got that organized with Stalin.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:03 PM
Klemperer and Banner both had clauses in their contracts that specified that the Nazis would never be shown to win at anything. Banner actually said that he played Schultz to show how nice people can be coerced into evil by not standing up to it.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:48 PM
“The weird thing is, the cast of Hogan’s Heroes featured Jews who were all too familiar with the Holocaust.”
Yeah and I think some of them had been in camps? I can’t remember now. (I could look it up on this internet thing, couldn’t I…) Anyway, maybe it made them feel better to make fun of Nazis. It’s certainly better than the “ooh, but they had such cool uniforms, designed by Hugo Boss and everything, too bad about the racist genocidal stuff” theme underlying a lot of the fascination with Nazi Germany that Hollywood has.
One more thing: I just saw yet another commercial for Risky Business: the War Years — I mean Valkyrie — and I think that it might have been a good movie if not for Tom Cruise, because even now he is totally unbelievable as a German officer with an eyepatch and a dueling scar. He looks like a little kid dressing up in Grandpa’s army uniform. And that California accent he has makes him sound like a Valley Guy.
December 20th, 2008 at 7:15 PM
[…] rips Tom Cruise In an Industry of the Blind I think when you notice your boss shipping trainloads of Jews and gypsies and gays off to be gassed […]
December 21st, 2008 at 12:56 AM
Hogan’s Heroes is overdue for a crappy remake. I think Bruce Campbell is the man for the job.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:07 AM
When you notice that Tom has a tooth centered in the middle of his upper jaw it becomes impossible to not look at it, or be trying to look at it. And yeah, he does look like a kid. Heck, Jude Law would have been better!
December 21st, 2008 at 8:46 AM
There is another “nice nazi” movie: Amen, about Kurt Gerstein. But he is the only nice one in it.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:58 PM
I don’t think it has anything to do with laughing at Hogan’s Heroes – a silly show, but it didn’t try to excuse the Holocaust – but with Hollywood’s inability to see evil for what it is. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s failure is become endemic among those who rely on it for their tenuous grasp of events, an ever-increasing segment of the populace.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:22 PM
They shot this dog of a movie two years ago, and have been trying to fix it since.
Zero interest in the movie for a variety of reasons. One of which is Tom Cruise in an eyepatch and Jodhpurs.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:35 PM
I have a few dogs in this fight. My familly is German , French and Scotch-Irish. My favorite great aunt was Jewish and my one Grandmother(Grossmutter) was Catholic.My father and uncle fought in WWII. What can be learn form Hitler is how a people can let themselves be seduced by a demigogue.In the end do you stand with the light or with the darkness? Each of us must decide.