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kyburgI’m not sure if this is going to answer your question or not, but my brain kind of does what it does, so here we go:
The examples you’ve given here for “Nazi aesthetics” are all quite different. Indiana Jones uses actual, literal Nazis as bad guys: this is unambiguous, as the films are ostensibly set in our world despite the magical/occult underpinnings of the various historical McGuffins. Hydra is simultaneously a Nazi analogue while being Nazi-adjacent: this is also unambiguous, especially given that the comics/films are set in WWII, albeit in Marvel’s alternate version of history. Of the three, it’s Star Wars which relies on Nazi aesthetics - uniforms, empire, soldiers in lockstep, genocidal rhetoric - to evoke the spectre of Nazism and fascism in a different narrative context. That being established, I don’t think any of these examples really qualify as a failure to portray said ideologies in an “appropriate way”, as in all three instances, Nazism/fascism are clearly depicted as monstrous. Whether these are subtle, nuanced or historically detailed depictions of Nazism is a different question, but I don’t think it’s really possible to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Captain America or Star Wars: The Force Awakens and come away with the idea that Nazism is a Good Idea or that Nazis are Good Guys unless you already thought that to begin with, which is a different sort of problem altogether.
When I talked recently about the cutsefying of Nazis, I was doing so in response to a specific fandom example. I don’t think there’s been a recent narrative shift towards portraying Nazism as harmless or misunderstood otherwise, but I do think that stories have had an impact on how many people are reacting to current politics.
Namely: by virtue of having been in constant use as a narrative shorthand for These Guys Are Evil pretty much since WWII, Nazism has become, not so much diluted in the public consciousness as reduced to a form of background noise. The Nazis were - and are - genuinely horrifying, but for so many of us, that horror was never personal; it was something we learned about in school or saw portrayed cartoonishly in films and on TV at least as often as it was played straight, and somewhat paradoxically, this ubiquity has negatively impacted our collective understanding of it as a real threat in the actual real world. Saying, “The Nazis are rising!” in 2017, even if it happens to be true, sounds a lot like saying, “They’re taking the Hobbits to Isengard!”, because the first example many of us think of when we hear the word Nazi isn’t personal or historical, but narrative. They’ve turned into storybook monsters, and I think that makes a lot of people worry that the threat can’t really be as bad as all that, because Nazis are gone, aren’t they? Didn’t we already slay that particular dragon?
It is, I think, a similar phenomenon to how decades of stories about corrupt democratic governments and behind-the-scenes political conspiracies have normalised the idea that this sort of thing is just what happens. You see enough movies about shady backroom political deals being carried on for The Good Of The Nation, and even though such stories are meant to horrify us, they also serve as an emotional dry run for acceptance without action: generally speaking, you don’t go out and protest the real government because of something that happened in a fictional narrative.
Which is why, in counterpoint, stories about resistance - about revolution, about fighting back, about building new worlds and relearning the old lessons of history; which is to say, stories that are overwhelmingly filed under YA and SFF - are so very, very important. Narratives set in the real world, playing by real world rules, don’t tend to end with the world itself materially changed even when their plots are concerned with grand political conspiracies. There might be a great revelation of truth at the climax, but we don’t get to see the reconstruction or systematic upheaval that follows this pronouncement, because as soon as that happens, the genre changes from political thriller to dystopia, literary fiction to spec fic. As soon as you speculate a mechanism by which the current political defaults no longer exist, you’ve gone beyond the bounds of political thrillers and into a new realm entirely, and as such, I’m inclined to think there’s a material overlap between people who devalue SFF, comics and the like for not being “real enough” and people who lack the imagination to understand that their world can indeed be altered beyond recognition.
The problem with Nazis in modern literature isn’t that we’re failing to portray them as bad guys; it’s that too many of us have forgotten that they aren’t just fictional villains. We’ve looked the spectre of Nazism right in the face and declined to call it what it is, because the whole point of bogeymen is that they don’t really exist. Except that, in this instance, they do, and now we’ve jumped genres yet again. If we’re not careful, global politics won’t turn back into a bad thriller or veer off into spec fic.
It’ll be a horror story.
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The examples you’ve given here for “Nazi aesthetics” are all quite different. Indiana Jones uses actual, literal Nazis as bad guys: this is unambiguous, as the films are ostensibly set in our world despite the magical/occult underpinnings of the various historical McGuffins. Hydra is simultaneously a Nazi analogue while being Nazi-adjacent: this is also unambiguous, especially given that the comics/films are set in WWII, albeit in Marvel’s alternate version of history. Of the three, it’s Star Wars which relies on Nazi aesthetics - uniforms, empire, soldiers in lockstep, genocidal rhetoric - to evoke the spectre of Nazism and fascism in a different narrative context. That being established, I don’t think any of these examples really qualify as a failure to portray said ideologies in an “appropriate way”, as in all three instances, Nazism/fascism are clearly depicted as monstrous. Whether these are subtle, nuanced or historically detailed depictions of Nazism is a different question, but I don’t think it’s really possible to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Captain America or Star Wars: The Force Awakens and come away with the idea that Nazism is a Good Idea or that Nazis are Good Guys unless you already thought that to begin with, which is a different sort of problem altogether.
When I talked recently about the cutsefying of Nazis, I was doing so in response to a specific fandom example. I don’t think there’s been a recent narrative shift towards portraying Nazism as harmless or misunderstood otherwise, but I do think that stories have had an impact on how many people are reacting to current politics.
Namely: by virtue of having been in constant use as a narrative shorthand for These Guys Are Evil pretty much since WWII, Nazism has become, not so much diluted in the public consciousness as reduced to a form of background noise. The Nazis were - and are - genuinely horrifying, but for so many of us, that horror was never personal; it was something we learned about in school or saw portrayed cartoonishly in films and on TV at least as often as it was played straight, and somewhat paradoxically, this ubiquity has negatively impacted our collective understanding of it as a real threat in the actual real world. Saying, “The Nazis are rising!” in 2017, even if it happens to be true, sounds a lot like saying, “They’re taking the Hobbits to Isengard!”, because the first example many of us think of when we hear the word Nazi isn’t personal or historical, but narrative. They’ve turned into storybook monsters, and I think that makes a lot of people worry that the threat can’t really be as bad as all that, because Nazis are gone, aren’t they? Didn’t we already slay that particular dragon?
It is, I think, a similar phenomenon to how decades of stories about corrupt democratic governments and behind-the-scenes political conspiracies have normalised the idea that this sort of thing is just what happens. You see enough movies about shady backroom political deals being carried on for The Good Of The Nation, and even though such stories are meant to horrify us, they also serve as an emotional dry run for acceptance without action: generally speaking, you don’t go out and protest the real government because of something that happened in a fictional narrative.
Which is why, in counterpoint, stories about resistance - about revolution, about fighting back, about building new worlds and relearning the old lessons of history; which is to say, stories that are overwhelmingly filed under YA and SFF - are so very, very important. Narratives set in the real world, playing by real world rules, don’t tend to end with the world itself materially changed even when their plots are concerned with grand political conspiracies. There might be a great revelation of truth at the climax, but we don’t get to see the reconstruction or systematic upheaval that follows this pronouncement, because as soon as that happens, the genre changes from political thriller to dystopia, literary fiction to spec fic. As soon as you speculate a mechanism by which the current political defaults no longer exist, you’ve gone beyond the bounds of political thrillers and into a new realm entirely, and as such, I’m inclined to think there’s a material overlap between people who devalue SFF, comics and the like for not being “real enough” and people who lack the imagination to understand that their world can indeed be altered beyond recognition.
The problem with Nazis in modern literature isn’t that we’re failing to portray them as bad guys; it’s that too many of us have forgotten that they aren’t just fictional villains. We’ve looked the spectre of Nazism right in the face and declined to call it what it is, because the whole point of bogeymen is that they don’t really exist. Except that, in this instance, they do, and now we’ve jumped genres yet again. If we’re not careful, global politics won’t turn back into a bad thriller or veer off into spec fic.
It’ll be a horror story.
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