Category Archives: maunderings

Two blog posts ago I went on at length about gremlins—both in general, and specific to The Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” That episode comprised my most terrifying fictional experience, something that stuck with me for years. My students’ first assignment in my weird fiction class this summer is to write a piece of creative non-fiction describing their most terrifying fictional experience. As I said in that post, I was planning to write my own, by way of example and in the name of fairness—given that we’ll be sharing everyone’s pieces. And I said I would post it here.

So here we are. As might have been obvious from my last gremlins post, this is has become something of a very interesting and serendipitous rabbit hole for me, at once touching on a handful of my current research interests as well as jogging a lot of memories that I want to explore. Possibly this turns into a larger project, possibly it becomes an avenue of self-exploration, possibly both.

So what I’m saying is, don’t be surprised to see more posts here vectoring off from this line of inquiry.

One caveat: I made a point of not consulting with my parents as I wrote this. What I’ve related in this essay is purely based on my memory of the summer of 1984, and as such might be wildly off base. I’ll be interested to see what my Mom and Dad have to say and whether their own memories are at all consonant with mine. If not, I will write a follow-up.

Meanwhile, without further ado …

A man sees something on the wing of the airplane, a vague shape in the rain and lightning. It’s impossible that anything alive could be out there, at this speed and altitude. But he sees it again. He’s a nervous flyer; perhaps his mind is playing tricks. But then he sees it again: person-shaped but inhuman, its intent obviously malevolent as it tears into the wing.

He is the only one who sees it. He cries out to the flight attendants, to his fellow passengers in panic, but they think he’s crazy. He wonders himself if he’s losing his mind. He lets himself be calmed down, he closes the window shade, he tries to sleep. But soon enough, he can’t help himself. He opens the shade, and there is the thing, a creature that looks like a demonic goblin, inches from his face on the other side of the window, staring back at him with something like sadistic glee.

It’s a gremlin, of course, a folkloric imp that emerged in the age of flight, invented by RAF aviators in the years before WWII. Heir to a long lineage of mischievous pixies and fey folk, the gremlin is nevertheless a modern creation, blamed for the frequent and seemingly random malfunctions that bedeviled airplanes during the frantic steeplechase of flight technology between the wars. Gremlins weren’t just the comic antagonists of tall tales told by pilots and crew on airbases between missions—enough airmen were genuinely convinced that gremlins were real, swearing up and down that they’d seen the little bastards on their wings, that concerned psychological papers were written.

Roald Dahl’s first novel was about gremlins. Bugs Bunny tangled with one in the Looney Tunes short “Falling Hare.” Like their folkloric predecessors, gremlins were given to mischief and occasional cruelty, but were mostly depicted as annoyances and not threats.

For a time in my childhood, gremlins were a source of abject terror for me.

***

When I think of gremlins, I think of the summer of 1984. The movie Gremlins was released that June, but I never saw it. I still haven’t. By the time it hit theatres, I’d already been terrified beyond what was strictly reasonable by the gremlin in The Twilight Zone: The Movie, which my father rented for us to watch some time after its release in 1983 and before Gremlins came out. The fourth of the anthology film’s four segments was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which a nervous flyer sees a gremlin on the wing of his plane. The moment when he opens the shade to see the demonic creature staring back at him haunted me for years. When I lay in bed at night and the scene came to mind, I hid my head under the covers—trapping myself, for suddenly I couldn’t shake the idea that the gremlin would be perched there, staring at me, if I lowered them.

Lest you assume these were the infantile fears of a young boy, let me clarify: these were the infantile fears of a twelve-year-old.

***

A vicious heat wave hit our Toronto suburb in 1984. It coincided with the Olympics, which ran from the last week of July into August. It was the kind heat that pervades my childhood memories of summer: a baking sun in a clear sky, air that was somehow stifling and humid while also drying the grass to brittle blades that abraded bare feet. Even basements were no refuge.

Our house had no air conditioning, so my father brought the television set outside onto the side deck where there was at least some shade and, occasionally, a breeze. This arrangement appealed to my mother: puritanical about not spending summer days indoors watching the tube, she also hated missing even a moment of Olympic coverage. Because the 1984 Games were held in Los Angeles, the time difference meant our Olympics viewing stretched into the darkening evening. We ate dinner on the deck and watched athletes run, swim, hurl, and paddle. Neighbours came over, bringing beer and wine and snacks. An ongoing PG-13 bacchanal took up residence on our deck and spilled out onto the yellowing grass of our corner lot as the neighbourhood kids staged our own Games.

***

The 1984 Games were notable for the absence of the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern Bloc. They boycotted Los Angeles in retaliation for the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, which had been in protest over Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

It was petulance, said one neighbour. Hypocritical, said another. Someone made an off-colour joke I didn’t understand about women’s weightlifting being fair this time. I didn’t grasp the nuances of the politics, but I knew that the Soviet absence tinged everything with vague unease. The 1984 summer Olympics marked the precise midpoint of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the renewed belligerence of the Cold War. Fears of nuclear conflict that had smouldered like banked coals during the détente years of the 1970s leapt again into open flame. Pious sages of geopolitics kept inching the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. I was in some ways a literal-minded child and did not quite understand that the clock was metaphorical. Every time its minute hand crept forward, I could not sleep for days afterward.

The Day After, a terrifying depiction of a nuclear exchange, aired in late 1983. It showed the effects of multiple warheads striking in the American heartland, and the immediate aftermath as people suffering from severe radiation poisoning struggle and fight over food and water. The images of the mushroom clouds and their devastation were the most graphic ever portrayed at the time. A disclaimer at the end told the audience that, however ghastly the film’s depiction had been, it was mild in comparison to what the reality would be. With over one hundred million viewers, it was the most-watched television event in history.

I did not see it. I didn’t even know it existed until I heard about it at school from classmates who had watched it. It had been recommended that parents watch it with their children; guides were made available to help with the discussions afterward. But it was not mentioned in my house and I was somehow smart enough not to ask why.

Whatever sleep I lost worrying about the Bomb, my mother’s nuclear anxieties contained multitudes.

***

Because serendipity is like gravity, that summer one of the television channels aired old episodes of The Twilight Zone. Every night when Olympics coverage ended, when most of the neighbours had gone home, while the lawn and the hedges and the asphalt of the street sighed the stored heat of the day into the darkness, we switched over to the slow cascading fall of the theme music and the studied portent in Rod Serling’s voice.

With one exception, I don’t remember which episodes we watched. I do remember my parents waxing on about episodes we didn’t see. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was a favourite of theirs. To this day I haven’t seen it, but the plot as they related it stuck in my mind: a quiet suburban neighbourhood like ours suffers an inexplicable blackout on a summer night; the neighbours congregate in the street, anxious but not concerned until the lights go on at one house. Suspicion starts to set in: what’s special about that person’s house? Other houses get power, then lose it, until the previously friendly neighbours descend into paranoid warring factions. The episode ends with aliens in a ship overhead, who have been manipulating the power grid, saying, Look, we don’t have to attack them, these humans will turn on each other.

But because serendipity is the gravity of my life, we did see “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I can’t help but think that if I’d seen the original episode first, the spectre of a gremlin on a wing wouldn’t have stuck so deep in my brain’s fear centers. It featured a pre-Star Trek William Shatner as the nervous flyer, demonstrating that scenery-chewing was always his first and best talent. The gremlin itself looked like a man in a monkey suit, less a demon than an ugly teddy bear. Creepy but hardly terrifying.

But in the context of that uncanny summer fortnight, with the memory of the movie gremlin colouring its black and white predecessor with shades of fear out of space, what was otherwise risible had the effect of driving my original horror deeper into my mind. It became existential. Each night when we changed the channel over and the theme music played I felt ill, and yet could not look away. Then one night, the show began with Serling’s narration: “Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father and salesman,” showing William Shatner (whom I did not then recognize as Captain Kirk) slouched in his airplane seat. We learned he had recently spent time in a sanitarium—that he had been there because he had a nervous breakdown on a flight “on an evening not dissimilar to this one.” On this night, however, Serling tells us, “his appointed destination … happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone.”

I could not look away, even as part of me knew just how much this campy earlier iteration was about to make the lingering effects of the later one indelible. I have little memory of the actual episode. What I have is sense memory: the night’s heavy, suffocating humidity, the creak of crickets in the hedge, the smell of the grass, the bilious weight in my belly, and the dread of knowing I would soon have to try and sleep in my dark and stuffy room.

***

In German, “uncanny” is unheimlich, literally unhomely, that which makes you feel not at home. Those two weeks that summer were dislocating: I was not at home in my home, and my home itself felt adrift, untethered. Or perhaps what I felt was the dread certainty that it was always untethered on the world’s currents, and that the feeling of safety remote from the larger world was the illusion—that there was always a gremlin on the wing, marking time in missile silos and in the minds of world leaders. RAF airmen invented gremlins in part to resolve a contradiction: flight technology was advancing by leaps and bounds but left them uniquely vulnerable while aloft. What more unthinkable technology has existed than nuclear weapons? Perhaps for me the gremlin was not a narrative comfort as it was for the aviators, but the certainty of the technology’s malevolence.

***

The Twilight Zone was in many ways the quintessential Cold War TV show, as it embodied the nagging, unhomely sense of something being not quite right, which was the constant undercurrent of the bland suburban order that America was so desperate to convey to itself. It is no surprise that so many of the show’s episodes are set in such innocuous suburbs as Maple Street.

My father, who grew up in just such a suburb, loved The Twilight Zone when he was my age; he told me that he watched the episodes eagerly when they first aired. He was twelve when the show premiered in autumn 1959. He was a different twelve-year-old than me, apparently—I tried to imagine actually enjoying something that unsettling, actually looking forward to seeing what each new episode would bring, but that sensibility was still alien to me. In a few short years I would learn to love horror when I discovered Stephen King and tore through his novels at breakneck speed. But at twelve I had not yet grown out of the nausea the uncanny inspired in me. That two-week stretch of an otherwise idyllic summer was a perfect storm of subtle dislocations: the heat wave, the outdoor television viewing, the constant low-grade party atmosphere, the hours and hours of Olympic coverage, all with the Soviet absence drawing attention to the Cold War’s constant menacing background hum.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

—Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I had drafted the first two installments of this three-part series of posts and was working on this one when the news of the discovery of the remains of 215 indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in BC broke. I paused for a day or two, uncertain of whether I wanted to talk about it here, in the context of my broader theme of history, memory, and forgetting. Part of my hesitation is I honestly lack the words for what is a shocking but utterly unsurprising revelation.

I must also confess that, to my shame, one of my first thoughts was the dread certainty that we’d soon be treated to some tone-deaf and historically ignorant column from the likes of Rex Murphy or Conrad Black or any one of the coterie of residential school apologists. So far however the usual suspects seem to be steering clear of this particular story; possibly the concrete evidence of so much death and suffering perpetrated by white turnkeys in the name of “civilizing” Native children is a bridge too far even for Murphy and Black et al’s paeans to Western civilization and white Canada’s munificence.

What I’m talking about in this third post of three is remembering as a political act: more specifically, of making others remember aspects of our history that they may not want to accept or believe. Scouting as I did for anything trying to ameliorate or excuse or explain away this evidence of the residential schools’ inhumanity,[1] I found my way to a 2013 Rex Murphy column that might just be the epitome of the genre, as one gleans from its title: “A Rude Dismissal of Canada’s Generosity.” In Murphy’s telling, in this column as in other of his rants and writings, conditions for Native Canadians in the present day are a vast improvement over historical circumstances, but the largesse of white Canadians and the government is something our indigenous populations perversely deny at every turn. He writes: “At what can be called the harder edges of native activism, there is a disturbing turn toward ugly language, a kind of razor rhetoric that seeks to cut a straight line between the attitudes of a century or a century and a half ago and the extraordinarily different attitudes that prevail today.”

“Attitudes” is the slippery word there: outside of unapologetically anti-indigenous and racist enclaves, I doubt you’d have difficulty finding white Canadians who did not piously agree that the exploitation and abuse of our indigenous peoples was a terrible thing. You’d have a much harder time finding anyone willing to do anything concrete about it, such as restoring the land we cite in land acknowledgments to its ancestral people. Attitudes, on the balance, have indeed improved, but that has had little effect on Native peoples’ material circumstances. And in his next paragraph, Murphy seems intent on demonstrating that not all attitudes have, in fact, improved:

From native protestors and spokespeople there is a vigorous resort to current radical jargon—referring to Canadians as colonialist, as settlers, as having a settler’s mentality. Though it is awkward to note, there is a play to race in this, a conscious effort to ground all issues in the allegedly unrepentant racism of the “settler community.” This is an effort to force-frame every dispute in the tendentious framework of the dubious “oppression studies” and “colonial theory” of latter-day universities.

And there it is—the “radical jargon” that seeks to remember. Referring to Canadians as colonialist settlers isn’t radical, nor is it jargon, but is a simple point of fact—and indeed, for decades history textbooks referred to settlers as brave individuals and the colonizing of Canada as a proud endeavour, necessarily eliding the genocidal impact on the peoples already inhabiting the “new world.” Murphy’s vitriol is, essentially, denialism: denying that our racist and oppressive history doesn’t linger on in a racist present. He speaks for an unfortunately large demographic of white Canada that is deeply invested in a whitewashed history, and reacts belligerently when asked to remember things otherwise.

This is a phenomenon we see playing out on a larger scale to the south, most recently with a substantial number of Republican-controlled state legislatures introducing bills that would forbid schools from teaching any curricula suggesting that the U.S. is a racist country, that it has had a racist history, or really anything that suggests racism is systemic and institutional rather than an individual failing. The bogeyman in much of the proposed legislation is “critical race theory.” Like Rex Murphy’s sneering characterization of “latter-day universities” offering degrees in “oppression studies” (not actually a thing), critical race theory is stigmatized as emerging from the university faculty lounge as part and parcel of “cultural Marxism’s” sustained assault on the edifices of Western civilization.[2] While critical race theory did indeed emerge from the academy, it was (and is) a legal concept developed by legal scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw[3] in the 1970s and 80s. As Christine Emba notes, “It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.” As she further observes, it has a clear and quite simple definition, “one its critics have chosen not to rationally engage with.”

Instead, critical race theory is deployed by its critics to connote militant, illiberal wokeism in a manner, to again quote Emba, that is “a psychological defense, not a rational one”—which is to say, something meant to evoke suspicion and fear rather than thought. The first and third words of the phrase, after all, associate it with elite liberal professors maundering in obscurantist jargon, with which they indoctrinate their students into shrill social justice warriors. (The slightly more sophisticated attacks will invoke such bêtes noir of critical theory as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida[4]).

But again, the actual concept is quite simple and straightforward: racism is systemic, which should not be such a difficult concept to grasp when you consider, for example, how much of the wealth produced in the antebellum U.S. was predicated on slave labour, especially in the production of cotton—something that also hugely benefited the northern free states, whose textile mills profitably transformed the raw cotton into cloth. Such historical realities, indeed, were the basis for the 1619 Project, the New York Times’ ambitious attempt to reframe American history through the lens of race—arguing that the true starting-point of America was not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but when the first African slaves set foot on American soil in 1619.

The premise is polemical by design, and while some historians took issue with some of the claims made, the point of the project was an exercise in remembering aspects of a national history that have too frequently been elided, glossed over, or euphemized. In my previous post, I suggested that the forgetting of the history of Nazism and the Holocaust—and its neutering through the overdeterminations of popular culture—has facilitated the return of authoritarian and fascistic attitudes. Simultaneously, however, it’s just as clear that this revanchist backsliding in the United States has as much to do with remembering. The reactionary crouch inspired by the tearing down of Confederate monuments isn’t about “erasing history,” but remembering it properly: remembering that Robert E. Lee et al were traitors to the United States and were fighting first and foremost to maintain the institution of slavery. Apologists for the Confederacy aren’t wrong when they say that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights,” they’re just eliding the fact that the principal “right” being fought for above all others was the right to enslave Black people. All one needs to do to clarify this particular point is to read the charters and constitutions of the secessionist states, all of which make the supremacy of the white race and the inferiority of Africans their central tenet. The Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy was that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Bringing down Confederate monuments isn’t erasure—it’s not as if Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest disappear from the history books because people no longer see their bronze effigies in parks and town squares—but the active engagement with history. That was also the case with the erection of such monuments, albeit in a more pernicious manner: the vast majority were put up in the 1920s and 1950s, both of which were periods when white Americans felt compelled to remind Black Americans of their subordinate place by memorializing those who had fought so bloodily to retain chattel slavery. Like the Confederate battle flag, these monuments were always already signifiers of white supremacy, though that fact has been systematically euphemized with references to “southern tradition,” and of course the mantra of states’ rights.

Once when I was still in grad school and had gone home to visit my parents for a weekend, I was up late watching TV, thinking about going to bed, and while flipping channels happened across a film set during the Civil War. It was about halfway through, but I stayed up watching until it was done. The story was compelling, the acting was really good, and the battle scenes were extremely well executed. The film was Gettysburg, which had been released in 1993. It had a huge cast, including Jeff Daniels and Sam Elliott, and Martin Sheen as General Robert E. Lee. Because I’d only seen the second half, I made a point of renting it so I could watch the entire thing.

Gettysburg is a well-made film with some great performances, and is very good at pushing emotional buttons. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain’s (Jeff Daniels) bayonet charge down Little Round Top is a case in point:

I’m citing Gettysburg here because it is one of the most perfect examples of how deeply the narrative of the Lost Cause became rooted in the American imagination. The Lost Cause, for the uninitiated, is the ongoing project, begun just after the end of the Civil War, to recuperate and whitewash (pun intended) the Confederacy and the antebellum South. Its keynotes include the aforementioned insistence that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery but states’ rights; its foregrounding of cultured and genteel Southern gentlemen and women; depictions of slaves (when depicted at all) as happy spiritual-singing fieldhands under the benevolent supervision of the mastah; Northerners as rapacious carpetbaggers who proceeded to despoil everything good and noble about the South in the years following the war; and the war itself as a tragic but honourable dispute between sad but dutiful officer classes prosecuting their respective sides’ goals not in anger but sorrow.

This last element is Gettysburg’s connective tissue. Let’s be clear: the film isn’t Southern propaganda like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It is, indeed, high-minded and even-handed. Martin Sheen—Martin fuckin’ Jed Bartlett Sheen!—plays Robert E. Lee, one of the prime targets of statue removers. But the film is propagandistic: there is, to the best of my recollection, not a single Black character in the film, and slavery as the cause of the conflict is alluded to (again, to the best of my recollection) only once—and then only obliquely.

My point in using this example—I could just as easily have cited Gone With the Wind or Ken Burns’ docuseries The Civil War—is how invidiously the Lost Cause narrative has wormed its way into the American imaginary. It is of a piece with everything else I’ve been talking about in this thee-part series of posts. What novels like The Underground Railroad and historical reckonings like the 1619 Project—as well as the campaign to tear down Confederate monuments—attempt is a kind of radical remembering. And as we see from the ongoing backlash, to remember things differently can be threatening to one’s sense of self and nation.

NOTES

[1] As I said, none of the usual suspects seems to have advanced an opinion, but there was—not unpredictably—an awful lot of such attempts in the comments sections on articles about the grisly discovery. They ranged from the usual vile racist sentiments one always finds in these digital cesspools, to one person who argued at length that the child mortality rates in residential schools were consonant with child mortality rates in the population at large, nineteenth century hygiene and medicine being what it was. This individual was not undeterred from their thesis in spite of a long-suffering interlocutor who provided stats and links showing that (a) what the person was referencing was infant mortality rates, which is not the same thing; (b) that the death rates in residential schools were actually more egregious in the 1930s and 40s, and (c) that mass burials in unmarked graves without proper records and death certificates spoke to the dehumanization of the Native children on one hand, and the likelihood on the other hand that this indicated that the “teachers” at these schools were reluctant to leave evidence of their abusive treatment.

[2] I will have a lot more to say on this particular misapprehension of “the university faculty lounge” in a future post on the more general misapprehensions of what comprises a humanities degree.

[3] Crenshaw also developed that other concept that triggers conservatives, “intersectionality.”

[4] Stay tuned for my forthcoming post, “The Conspiracy Theory of Postmodernism.”

“We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

—Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

In my first year at Memorial, I taught one of our first-year fiction courses. I ended the term with Martin Amis’ novel Time’s Arrow—a narrative told from the perspective of a parasitic consciousness that experiences time backwards. The person to whom the consciousness is attached turns out to be a Nazi war criminal hiding in America, who was a physician working with Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Just as we get back there, after seeing this man’s life played in reverse to the bafflement of our narrator, the novel promises that things will start to make sense … now. And indeed, the conceit of Amis’ novel is that the Holocaust can only make sense if played in reverse. Then, it is not the extermination of a people, but an act of benevolent creation—in which ashes and smoke are called down out of the sky into the chimneys of Auschwitz’s ovens and formed into naked, inert bodies. These bodies then have life breathed into them, are clothed, and sent out into the world. “We were creating a race of people,” the narrative consciousness says in wonder.

Time’s Arrow, I told my class, is an exercise of defamiliarization: it wants to resist us becoming inured to the oft-repeated story of the Holocaust, and so requires us to view it from a different perspective. Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, I added, worked to much the same end, by (mostly) leaving the explicit brutalities of the Holocaust offstage (as it were), as a father clowns his way through the horror in order to spare his son the reality of their circumstances. As I spoke, however, and looked around the classroom at my students’ uncomprehending expressions, I felt a dread settle in my stomach. Breaking off from my prepared lecture notes, I asked the class: OK, be honest here—what can you tell me about the Holocaust?

As it turned out, not much. They knew it happened in World War II? And the Germans were the bad guys? And the Jews didn’t come out of it well …? (I’m honestly not exaggerating here). I glanced at my notes, and put them aside—my lecture had been predicated on the assumption that my students would have a substantive understanding of the Holocaust. This was not, to my mind, an unreasonable assumption—I had grown up learning about it in school by way of books like Elie Wiesel’s Night, but also seeing movies depicting its horrors. But perhaps I misremembered: I was from a young age an avid reader of WWII history (and remain so to this day), so I might have assumed your average high school education would have covered these bases in a more thorough manner.[1]

The upshot was that I abandoned my lecture notes and spent the remaining forty minutes of class delivering an off-the-cuff brief history of the Holocaust that left my students looking as if I’d strangled puppies in front of them, and me deeply desiring a hot shower and a stiff drink.

In pretty much every single class I’ve ever taught since, I will reliably harangue my students that they need to read more history. To be fair, I’d probably do that even without having had this particular experience; but I remember thinking of Amis’ brilliant narrative conceit that defamiliarization only works if there has first been familiarization, and it depressed me to think that the passage of time brings with it unfamiliarization—i.e. the memory-holing of crucial history that, previously, was more or less fresh in the collective consciousness. The newfound tolerance for alt-right perspectives and the resurgence of authoritarian and fascist-curious perspectives (to which the Republican Party is currently in thrall) proceeds from a number of causes, but one of them is the erosion of memory that comes with time’s passage. The injunctions against fascism that were so powerful in the decades following WWII, when the memory of the Holocaust was still fresh and both the survivors and the liberators were still ubiquitous, have eroded—those whose first-hand testimonials gave substance to that history have largely passed away. Soon none will remain.

What happens with a novel like Time’s Arrow or a film like Life is Beautiful when you have audiences who are effectively ignorant of the history informing their narrative gambits? Life is Beautiful, not unpredictably, evoked controversy because it was a funny movie about the Holocaust. While it was largely acclaimed by critics, there were a significant number who thought comedy was egregiously inappropriate in a depiction of the Holocaust,[2] as was using the Holocaust as a backdrop for a story focused on a father and his young son. As Italian film critic Paolo Mereghetti observes, “In keeping with Theodor Adorno’s idea that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, critics argued that telling a story of love and hope against the backdrop of the biggest tragedy in modern history trivialized and ultimately denied the essence of the Holocaust.” I understand the spirit of such critiques, given that humour—especially Roberto Benigni’s particular brand of manic clowning—is jarring and dissonant in such a context, but then again, that’s the entire point. The film wants us to feel that dissonance, and to interrogate it. And not for nothing, but for all of the hilarity Benigni generates, the film is among one of the most heartbreaking I’ve seen, as it is about a father’s love and his desperate need to spare his son from the cruel reality of their circumstances. Because we’re so focused on the father’s clownish distractions, we do not witness—except for one haunting and devastating scene—the horrors that surround them.

In this respect, Life is Beautiful is predicated on its audience being aware of those unseen horrors, just as Time’s Arrow is predicated on its readers knowing the fateful trajectory of Jews rounded up and transported in boxcars to their torture and death in the camps, to say nothing of the grotesque medical “experiments” conducted by Mengele. The underlying assumption of such defamiliarization is that an oft-told history such as the Holocaust’s runs the risk of inuring people to its genuinely unthinkable proportions.[3] It is that very unthinkability, fresher in the collective memory several decades ago, that drove Holocaust denial among neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups—because even such blinkered, hateful, ignorant bigots understood that the genocide of six million people was a morally problematic onion in their racial purity ointment.[4]

They say that tragedy plus time begets comedy. It did not take long for Nazis to become clownish figures on one hand—Hogan’s Heroes first aired in 1965, and The Producers was released in 1967—and one-dimensional distillations of evil on the other. It has become something of a self-perpetuating process: Nazis make the best villains because (like racist Southerners, viz. my last post) you don’t need to spend any time explaining why they’re villainous. How many Stephen Spielberg films embody this principle? Think of Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, looking through a window into a room swarming with people in a certain recognizable uniform: “Nazis. I hate these guys.” It’s an inadvertently meta- moment, as well as a throwback to Indy’s other phobia in Raiders of the Lost Ark: “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” Snakes, Nazis, tomato, tomahto. Though I personally consider that a slander against snakes, the parallel is really about an overdetermined signifier of evil and revulsion, one that functions to erase nuance.

Unfortunately, if tragedy plus time begets comedy, it also begets a certain cultural amnesia when historically-based signifiers become divorced from a substantive understanding of the history they’re referencing. Which is really just a professorial way of saying that the use of such terms as “Nazi” or “fascist,” or comparing people to Hitler has become ubiquitous in a problematic way, especially in the age of social media. Case in point, Godwin’s Law, which was formulated by Michael Godwin in the infancy of the internet (1990). Godwin’s Law declares that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” This tendency has been added to the catalogue of logical fallacies as the “Reduction ad Hitlerum,” which entails “an attempt to invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.”

Perhaps the most egregious recent example of this historical signification was Congresswoman and QAnon enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comparison of Nancy Pelosi’s decision to continue requiring masks to be worn in the House of Representatives (because so many Republicans have declared their intention to not get vaccinated) to the Nazi law requiring Jews to wear a gold Star of David on their chests. She said, “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

To be certain, Greene was roundly condemned by almost everybody, including by many in her own party—even the craven and spineless Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had some stern words for her—but what she said was different not in kind but in degree from the broader practice of alluding to Nazism and the Holocaust in glib and unreflective ways.[5]

Though this tendency is hardly new—Godwin’s Law is thirty-one years old—it has been amplified and exacerbated by social media, to the point where it made it difficult to find terms to usefully describe and define Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. The ubiquity of Nazi allusions has made them necessarily diffuse, and so any attempt to characterize Trumpism as fascist in character could be easily ridiculed as alarmist and hysterical; and to be fair, there were voices crying “fascist!” from the moment he made that initial descent on his golden escalator to announce his candidacy. That those voices proved prescient rather than alarmist doesn’t obviate the fact that they muddied the rhetorical waters.[6] As the contours of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies came into focus, the fascistic qualities of the Trumpian Right became harder and harder to ignore; bizarrely, they’ve become even more clearly delineated since Trump left office, as the republicans still kowtow to the Mar-A-Lago strongman and move to consolidate minoritarian power.

Historians and political philosophers and a host of other thinkers of all stripes will be years in unravelling the historical and cultural strands of Trump’s rise and the previously unthinkable hold that Trumpism has over a stubborn rump of the electorate; but I do think that one of the most basic elements is our distressing tendency toward cultural amnesia. It makes me think we’re less in need of defamiliarizing history than defamiliarizing all the clichés of history that have become this inchoate jumble of floating signifiers, which allow neo-Nazis and white supremacists to refashion themselves as clean cut khaki-clad young men bearing tiki-torches, or to disingenuously euphemize their racism as “Western chauvinism” and meme their way out of accusations of ideological hatefulness—“It’s just about the lulz, dude.”

There is also, as I will discuss in the third of these three posts, the fact that remembering is itself a politically provocative act. On one hand, the diminution in the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust has facilitated the re-embracing of its key tropes; on the other, the active process of remembering the depredations of Western imperialism and the myriad ways in which slavery in the U.S. wasn’t incidental to the American experiment but integral gives rise to this backlash that takes refuge in such delusions as the pervasiveness of anti-white racism.

NOTES

[1] To be clear, this is not to castigate my students; as I’ll be expanding on as I go, historical amnesia is hardly limited to a handful of first-year university students in a class I taught fifteen years ago.

[2] One can only speculate on what such critics make of Mel Brooks’ career.

[3] Martin Amis attempts something similar in his 1985 short story collection Einstein’s Monsters, which is about nuclear war. His lengthy introductory essay “Thinkability” (to my mind, the best part of the book) addresses precisely the way in which military jargon euphemizes the scope and scale of a nuclear exchange, precisely to render the unthinkable thinkable. 

And speaking of humour used to defamiliarize horror: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Finally Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, and General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott)’s own “thinkability” regarding the deaths in a nuclear war: “Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth, both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-war environments: one where you got 20 million people killed, and the other where you got 150 million people killed! … Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.”

[4] Which always rested on a tacit contradiction in their logic: it didn’t happen, but it should have.

[5] We see the same tendency, specifically among conservatives, to depict any attempt at raising taxes or expanding social programs as “socialism,” often raising the spectre of “Soviet Russia”—which is about as coherent as one of my favourite lines from Community, when Britta cries, “It’s just like Stalin back in Russia times!”

[6] I don’t say so to castigate any such voices, nor to suggest that they were premature—the contours of Trump’s authoritarian, nativist style were apparent from before he announced his candidacy to anyone who looked closely enough.