PRIMETIME AND HITLER

A new age of new villains with new motives, reactions to 9/11, and how it all connects to Primetime.

All movies, when they come out, are met with the curse of the internet. Everybody has a critique; everybody makes it into a meme. Then the movie, which in the past would just be a personal experience between the audience and the movie, falls into this loop of digital fetishism, where aspects that may not even appear in the movie circulate online, to the point that a mythology forms, for better or worse.

When Primetime came out, people claimed it was “pro-Epstein slop.” However, this is far from the truth. Before every global crisis, the anxieties of humans can be visible through art, and movies are a great example of this, since music, for instance, is more heavily fetishized and commodified.

Before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, many movies, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Nosferatu, came out, all with a similar theme of having a strong man go against an outsider. The villain was not a serial killer or a comic-book-type supervillain; it was the outsider.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920, is a story about a tyrant and a slave. The story begins with Dr. Caligari at a fair, where he showcases a pale creature named Cesare, who murders people on the orders of Dr. Caligari. The protagonist who goes after the tyrant is hospitalized and deemed insane, and the doctor who visits him at the end is Dr. Caligari.

“Whether intentionally or not, Caligari exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos and facing a desperate situation: any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of utter confusion. Quite logically, the film spreads an all-pervading atmosphere of HORROR.” These are the words of Siegfried Kracauer in 1947 on the connection between the Third Reich and cinema.

Kracauer’s criticism is simple to understand: films are driven by what the masses want. A blockbuster will only be successful if it connects with the zeitgeist of society at a specific time. According to a friend of Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, art in the era of mechanical production no longer holds the connection to the human element that gave birth to the art, as it is mass-produced and fetishized.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe this process as a precursor to fascism, as a mass deletion of subjectivity would lead to the standardization of culture and identity through a machinery they called the culture industry.

Caligari was not the only movie with this tone. Nosferatu, M, Doctor Mabuse, and many other movies in the German Expressionist era included themes of glorification of the past, the simple rural life, German masculinity, and themes that would later be visible in Nazi politics. Weimar Germany was anxious about the outsider, the shadows, the ones who did not look like them.

Even the most famous Expressionist film, Metropolis, also included similar themes of a tyrant-like figure creating a slave to carry out his dirty work from the shadows. Though Metropolis was optimistic, as it ends with the bond between the capitalist and the proletariat once they realize their shared value in the fictional utopia, M, Fritz Lang’s next masterpiece, is something similar to the other movies mentioned.

An undertone of fascism is always fearmongering about children, for instance, claiming that the LGBTQ+ community wants to go after the children, or “they” are going to teach Sharia law in schools. Even though none of this happens, fascism always relies upon a fear among parents about the future of their children. Then it blends with conservatism: the old ways were much better, so we should stick to tradition. M, by Fritz Lang, also had this type of theme, with a killer going after children because he is enslaved to his desire.

In the movie M, the authorities seem unable to catch the killer, so the criminal underworld goes after him. They label him with an M. Kracauer asks: how far is a white M from a yellow Star of David label?

These directors were not Nazis. They were simply reflecting a societal fear that the Weimar Republic was going through after the First World War and after realizing that they were villainized by other nations. But instead of solving the issues, they blamed them on minorities.

However, many of the actors and production crews of these movies remained in Germany and played a role in Nazi propaganda films during their reign. The rabbi in this Nazi propaganda movie was played by the same actor who played the tyrant Doctor Mabuse.

Kracauer did not blame individual groups or minorities, but the masses: how their unrealistic fears, instead of prompting them to solve the issues, led to those fears being weaponized by the Nazis.

America has always been a weird society, claiming to be the pioneer of freedom, yet implementing the most inhumane tactics worldwide and on its own citizens. America is the most paradoxical project in human history.

After World War II, war became a part of the American zeitgeist, as Americans believed that they were the good guys. Movies before the Second World War usually showcased how the greed of men corrupted societies. America back then was rebuilding a society after the Great Depression. There was more emphasis on humanity. Look at the works of Charlie Chaplin, all movies having a tone of lightheartedness. The same way the German Expressionists reflected the anxiety toward authority after World War I, pre-World War II American cinema reflected an anxiety toward people who exploit others or go after capital their whole lives. They lose their humanity, and they lose.

After World War II, American society was anxious about the nation, the atomic bomb, or how evil could triumph. In this era, from the 1950s to the 1980s, we get movies that usually have a sci-fi or fantasy element to them as well. The 1950s had The Ten Commandments and Cinderella, the 1960s had Cleopatra, and the 1970s had The Godfather, Star Wars, The Exorcist, and much more.

These are reflections of a need that was so deep in American society for lore or fantasy, as Americans were becoming the new empire and wanted to be the offspring and descendants of fantastical heroes like Moses or Christ. These are, of course, another result of the Cold War. On one side, you had the godless USSR, and America wanted to distance itself from their way of life to avoid another mass destruction and death.

However, the Cold War would result in so many actual wars for the Americans, specifically in Vietnam and Korea. This made the need for America to be a land of exceptional greatness necessary, paving the way for the first Hollywood propaganda movies, such as Top Gun.

In this era, you had the rise of neoliberalism, as opposed to the masses going against war and capitalism. Therefore, Hollywood reflected the anxieties of Americans at the time about their way of life being corrupted by a madman or a group of tyrants, making classic heroes-versus-villains stories, such as Burton’s Batman, Star Wars: Episode V, and many more, which had the themes of a clear superhero versus a clear villain.

Then, after the Reagan administration, America began its motion toward demise. Reagan created most of the problems the USA has today through neoliberalism, creating the drug problem, instability in the Middle East, and much more.

The movies in the late 1980s and 1990s were more about the lie sold by the neoliberals: the American dream. You have movies about underdogs making it in the USA: Forrest Gump, Scarface, Goodfellas, and American Beauty.

The 1990s also had a surge in serial-killer and anarchist movies due to backlash from the never-ending wars, CIA manipulations, and actual serial killers. Movies began a theme that would remain to this day: the outsider, the lone-wolf killer who is very smart, like Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, the movie Zodiac, Se7en, American Psycho, and much more.

Hollywood was also impacted by two events in the 2000s that would change the American zeitgeist forever. One was the 9/11 attacks: the idea that the enemy can strike very close to home. The other was the 2008 financial crisis: the idea that safety in American society is something for the exploiters.

After 9/11, a new genre of movies and shows came out: the white-saviour trope, in movies like Argo, 300, The Blind Side, The Help, Avatar, and much more.

America was still holding on to the idea that Americans were the good guys, that they needed someone to come and save them: the white traditional hero trope, someone who was not like other politicians, the true American who would go after all the other nationalities that were corrupting American society. They were also tired of wars. Themes showcased in a lot of movies were war veterans undergoing massive turmoil in their lives as a result of war.

This leads us to today. The world fears apocalypse, the elites, and politicians. People fear greed and are very pessimistic toward the establishment.

This year, for instance, we had The Odyssey, a movie where it was more about the greed of the new generation than the journey itself: the corruption greed brings about. Or the horror movie Backrooms, with undertones that are anti-corporation and have unwanted themes of AI slop.

Another shift in narratives has been in superhero movies. Superman was a political masterpiece about greed and capitalism’s role in global conflicts, where the wealthy Lex Luthor can change the destiny of a whole group of people.

Primetime is no different. It is a movie about a crucial aspect of the post-9/11 era, when Americans wanted punishment to be televised. Chris Hansen was himself a form of escapism offered to the masses to see a surface-level resolution to a deeper problem.

Just like many other things in the United States, resolutions to issues are only surface-level. That is how the entire system is framed: a two-party pseudo-democracy where you “vote” for superficial resolutions to real problems. For example, arrests, busts, and punishing drug lords do not necessarily solve the drug-lord problem. They only make room for worse criminals with new schemes to rise up, since, in a system where even the police only care about capital, solutions are superficial.

Solving the drug problem should not be about increasing the budget of the police system or more crackdowns, but about preventing it from happening.

This is the issue with Hansen. He is not solving any issue; he is just monetizing a process that is barbaric in itself. The same way executions do not solve any issue, Chris Hansen becomes the new public executioner, who is not solving any issues but providing more entertainment rather than solving the issue.

Primetime is about this problem: that Chris Hansen and shows like his only go after the surface level rather than what the problem actually is. Hansen is haunted by an ancient entity that violates children. He goes after an equally mysterious entity, the whale.

The whale is the DA, William Coradt Jr. Primetime does not make Hansen the villain for going after him; it showcases a more dystopian outcome: that Hansen, or the regular person, cannot simply go after politicians who bring about pain in society.

Through this, Primetime showcases the anxiety of the masses about the elites: how the people are helpless against these forces that are the modern version of ancient demonic entities.

If Primetime had been made in the 1990s, it would have had a clear predator as the villain, rather than being a metanarrative on the issues of the legal system and fetishizing stories about Epstein or other human scum.

For a while now, the villains in movies have no longer been individual serial killers or supervillains, but institutions, politicians, and the elite.