Keating encourages his yawping barbarians to live by the maxim 'Seize the day!' in a glorious cult of action. Following his example, the truly 'free' students join a secret society where they adopt pagan names and meet in an old Indian cave to 'suck the marrow out of life,' make new gods, and read Romantic poetry.
Neil, another student, is awakened by Mr. Keating and rebels against his bourgeois father's pressure to become a doctor. He wants to live a life of passion as an actor. 'For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do!' he shouts. 'And for the first time, I'm going to do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem!' The boy finds his true calling playing the pagan fairy of the forest Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. When his father forbids him to indulge his passions any further, Neil chooses suicide over compromise — a similar ending to Hitler's favorite play, Der Konig (as mentioned earlier, Hitler saw the play seventeen times in three years). Neil is depicted as Christlike, despite his selfishness.
The tragedy of Neil's suicide shatters the school, and Mr. Keating is fired. The surviving members of the Dead Poets Society risk expulsion if they even look at Mr. Keating; yet they cannot resist his charisma. One by one, they stand on their desks, defiant of their new teacher. These beautiful young overmen, united in their will, look to their 'captain' and away from traditional authority. All that was missing were the Nazi salutes.
In The Matrix, a thoroughly fascistic allegory (with some Marxist notes as well), Keanu Reeves plays a trapped, bourgeois cubicle dweller. His 'handle' as a computer hacker, Neo, not only represents his truer party name, as it were, but also encapsulates his status as a New Man, an Ubermensch who can bend the world to his will and eventually even fly. The falseness of his worker-drone lifestyle is revealed to him when he awakes, as if from a dream, and realizes that what he thought was his real life was a prison, a cage, where parasitic and manipulative forces literally fed on him. Instead of bloodsucking Jews, the enemy is what nineteenth-and twentieth-century New Agers called the Machine, or das System. What awakes him from his nightmare is his authentic choice, which he makes solely so he can be true to himself. Afterward, he joins a pagan secret society, Zion, where the only authentic vestiges of mankind live in Dionysian glory in the warm bowels of Mother Earth, wholly dedicated to awakening the worthy few among their slumbering brethren. The parasitic, puppet-string-pulling 'agents' of the system may look human, but are anything but. Colorless, austere white men dressed in dark business suits, they reject the authenticity of human life for cold logic and mechanistic priorities. They are literally rootless, not merely prone to abstraction but actual abstractions. There seem to be few of them, but they're everywhere, can take human form, and run everything. In short, they are comic-book versions of everything the Nazis said about the Jews.
It's important to recognize that we are talking not so much about left-wing culture or liberal culture as about American culture. In many respects, Hollywood's addiction to fascist aesthetics is nonideological. Gladiator used fascistic imagery because that was the best way to tell the story. In other cases, Hollywood exhibits a deeper fascination with fascism. In films like V for Vendetta, the envy for the cool aesthetics of well-dressed cruelty and violence is palpable. The villains and the hero alike are all fascists.
Conservatives are hardly immune to the allure of fascism. Left-wing cultural critics were not wrong to spot fascistic themes in the vigilante films of the 1970s. In the Death Wish and Dirty Harry movies, for example, unlawful violence was glorified on the grounds that 'the system' was irredeemably corrupt, swamped by the usually dark-skinned criminal classes and the clever lawyers who protected them. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker dubbed Dirty Harry a brand of 'fascist medievalism.'18 And if you look at the evolving themes in Clint Eastwood's work, you can tease out a thread of nihilism culminating in the bleakness of Unforgiven and his ode to euthanasia in Million Dollar Baby (both Academy Award-winning films).
Just because I am noting the fascistic themes in these films doesn't necessarily mean they are bad. Triumph of the Will was a masterpiece (so the critics tell us). Similarly, I am a fan of the Dirty Harry films (as well as many others discussed in this chapter). I would even argue that as a form of artistic protest, those vigilante films had many redeeming qualities. But there's no denying that conservatives are just as willing to embrace fascistic films if they come from the right. Consider such popular films as Braveheart, The Last Samurai, and 300. Many conservatives loved them because they depicted resistance to tyranny and celebrated 'freedom.' But the 'liberty' of these films was not individual liberty per se so much as the freedom of the tribe to behave according to its own relativistic values. The clans of the Scottish Highlands were hardly constitutional republics. Tom Cruise portrays the proto-fascist culture of the Meiji-era samurai as morally superior to that of the decadent West, echoing the German fascination with the Orient. And the Spartans of 300 are a eugenic (and vaguely homoerotic) warrior caste that would have had Hitler applauding in the aisle, despite valiant efforts to Americanize them.
There are defenses to be made of all these films, in that they represent forward progress in the unfolding Western tradition of liberty — and are also good fun. But the simple fact is that fascism is good box office and conservatives, with a few exceptions, are powerless to combat it because they don't even know what they are seeing. Liberals, for their part, are quick to label any 'glorification' of war or battle as fascistic, but they cheer nihilism and relativism in the name of individual freedom and rebellion at every turn. This is where conservatives should mount their counterattack, on the prevalent notion that we are all our own priests, and so long as we are faithful to our inner gods, we are authentic and good. Nonetheless, there's no avoiding the fact that in terms of what we like on both big screens and small, we are all fascists now.
THE POLITICS OF SEX
Almost inexplicably, the popular perception these days is that Nazism was a kind of prudery run amok. Ken Starr, John Ashcroft, Laura Schlessinger, and Rick Santorum are just the latest symbols of a supposedly fascistic judgmentalism and hypocritical piety on the American right. In order to make these arguments stick, the debate is skewed so as to paint the champions of traditional morality as crypto-fascists, incapable of thinking maturely about sex.
Arthur Miller's propagandistic play The Crucible has become a classic statement of the left's obsession with the 'sex panic' of the right. Originally a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism, the story is now seen as one of puritanical Comstockery leading to an outbreak of murderous political paranoia. Powerful men who can't handle sexually autonomous women use the tools of the state to launch a witch hunt. This tiresome meme has conquered the liberal imagination. J. Edgar Hoover is now universally depicted as a drag queen despite the flimsiest of evidence. Sidney Blumenthal has argued that anti-communism in the United States was little more than an example of homophobic panic by closeted gay right-wingers. Tim Robbins echoes a similar idea in his film The Cradle Will Rock, in which anti-communists and New Deal opponents are little more than sexually repressed fascists. Advocates of family values are now associated with fascism across the international left. 'To favor the traditional family over here is to open oneself to the charge of being a Nazi,' explains a member of the Swedish parliament.
There's only one problem: none of this has anything to do with Nazism or fascism.
The idea that 'family values' are philosophically linked to fascism actually has a long pedigree, going back, again, to the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer argued that the root of Nazi totalitarianism was the family. But the truth is as close to the opposite as one can get. While Nazi rhetoric often paid homage to the family, the actual practice of Nazism was consonant with the progressive effort to invade the family, to breach its walls and shatter its autonomy. The traditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianisms because it is a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell.
Let us start with the obvious. It would be funny were it not tragically necessary to note that the Nazis were not 'pro-life.' Long before the Final Solution, the Nazis cast the aged, the infirm, and the handicapped onto the proverbial Spartan hillside. It is true that women were second-class citizens in the Nazi worldview, relegated to the status of breeders of the master race. But prudery and Judeo-Christian morality were hardly the justification for these policies.
Nazi attitudes toward sexuality were grounded in unremitting hostility to Christianity and Judaism, both of which rejected the pagan view of sex as gratification, imbuing it instead with deep moral significance. Indeed, if you read Hitler's Table Talk, it is almost impossible not to see him as an open-minded
