defining hitler
At work it’s all about the forthcoming loyalty card. A list of questions was e-mailed to the manager regarding preparations for it. How are you going to persuade people to give their e-mail addresses? How are you going to achieve your targets? Are your staff aware…? How will you…? On and on it went, relentless as a Nazi interrogation (I’ve been reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler). In the time it took to fill in, some actual work could have been done. Not that I was filling it in - if I had been, I’d have cracked, and started enjoying myself. How are you going to use POS (posters and such) to maximize customer awareness? Please give details. Hm, well I thought we could wrap customers up in posters as they come through the door, set fire to them, then jump up and down on them to put out the flames, all the while shouting: ‘Loyalty card! Loyalty card! Loyalty card!’ Is that sufficiently ‘outside the box’ for you?
To escape all this horror I went to Frightfest, the horror film festival. I saw Joshua, a film about an ‘evil’ child who systematically destroys his mother and father’s lives and then goes to live with his uncle. As you can imagine, I was pretty scared. Then Wrong Turn 2, starring Henry Rollins. Yes, ‘starring’. Not ‘featuring’. The signs were not good. The director, who seemed more like an overexcited fan, was on hand, saying he’d wanted to make a ‘video nasty’. Well, he'd got his wish, because Wrong Turn 2 is pretty nasty, and it’s probably going straight to video. Well OK then, DVD.
I’m still not sure how I feel about watching these films with an audience who cheer and clap every gory demise. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire: kind of fun. But there were times when, watching a hillbilly child with a distinctly Downes-syndrome look slurp the blood of his latest victim, I found myself wondering if political incorrectness hasn’t gone too far. I mean, why not just call it Wrong Turn 2: Attack Of The Killer Mongs? With Rollins as the great white ex-marine slaughtering the genetically ‘inferior’ (depicted as wholly evil) as audiences cheer him on? Of course I’m not saying that this was fascist propaganda. Rollins isn’t like that. But sometimes he was oddly reminiscent of that evil Nazi politician, history’s greatest monster, what’s his name, begins with an A - ? Arnold, is it?
To escape all this horror I went to Frightfest, the horror film festival. I saw Joshua, a film about an ‘evil’ child who systematically destroys his mother and father’s lives and then goes to live with his uncle. As you can imagine, I was pretty scared. Then Wrong Turn 2, starring Henry Rollins. Yes, ‘starring’. Not ‘featuring’. The signs were not good. The director, who seemed more like an overexcited fan, was on hand, saying he’d wanted to make a ‘video nasty’. Well, he'd got his wish, because Wrong Turn 2 is pretty nasty, and it’s probably going straight to video. Well OK then, DVD.
I’m still not sure how I feel about watching these films with an audience who cheer and clap every gory demise. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire: kind of fun. But there were times when, watching a hillbilly child with a distinctly Downes-syndrome look slurp the blood of his latest victim, I found myself wondering if political incorrectness hasn’t gone too far. I mean, why not just call it Wrong Turn 2: Attack Of The Killer Mongs? With Rollins as the great white ex-marine slaughtering the genetically ‘inferior’ (depicted as wholly evil) as audiences cheer him on? Of course I’m not saying that this was fascist propaganda. Rollins isn’t like that. But sometimes he was oddly reminiscent of that evil Nazi politician, history’s greatest monster, what’s his name, begins with an A - ? Arnold, is it?
posted by martin at 12:29 PM
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