Imagine
that Hitler and his cohorts did not commit suicide as Germany
went down to defeat. Instead, he stayed in his bunker with
his close cohorts and plenty of food, undiscovered by the
victorious allies; alternatively, he was tried and sentenced
to life imprisonment in the same bunker with his friends cohorts;
or perhaps, even more likely, he is in hell with his associates.
Wherever he is, and Sigmund Freud is there with him, Hitler
is impelled to review his life and put his afterthoughts on
paper. Such is the film noir premise of The Empty Mirror,
directed and cowritten by Barry J. Hershey and starring Norman
Rodway, a Hitler with an English accent. As most audiences
go to the cinema for entertainment, not as an occasion to
provoke thought, the film is destined to be reviewed badly;
the ordinary film critics are especially unhappy when they
have to sit through something too deep for them. Throughout
the film we observe snipets of his autobiography, intermingled
with film footage of the Nazi era, music of Wagner and Handel,
Hitler’s self-portrait as well as art work that disgusted
him, and the symbolism of blood. What do we conclude? Not
that Hitler was a profound thinker, though he was acquainted
with Friedrich Nietzsche. Not that he was a monster, though
he committed monstrous acts. Not that he planned his rise
to power with care, though we know that he became Chancellor
by accident. But that we can never understand him and have
no way to prevent future Hitlers other than to learn that
he mobilized millions of Germans to follow his strange path
appealing to the alienated masses in modern society through
esthetics and myth. Hershey feeds us snipets so that we can
draw our own conclusions, though few will be capable of doing
so because the film assumes the unfamiliar post-modern premise
that meaning is derived from conversation and intuition, not
experience or rationality; in other words, the meaning of
words is controlled by "spin" artists, who seek to disguise
a reality that is inherently unknowable. Indeed, Hitler’s
understanding of the modern world and his contempt for modernity
made him a post-modernist in the Nietzchean tradition, albeit
an incoherent post-modernist. Thus, the film depicts a very
different Hitler for us in a world that now has many Hitlers—advertisers
who sell products by appealing to imagery, politicians who
prefer to talk in code in order to cover up their foibles,
and filmviewers (no less than most film critics) who want
pure entertainment in order to escape from assuming responsibility
over their daily lives. The Empty Mirror suggests
that Hitler would probably have done things differently if
given a second chance, but Hitler’s methods of thought control
live on. MH
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