Parodieën Hitler groeiend internetfenomeen

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Parodieën Hitler groeiend internetfenomeen



LONDEN - Een serie parodieën op een fragment uit de film Der Untergang over de voormalige Duitse dictator Adolf Hitler is het jongste internetfenomeen, meldt de Britse krant Sunday Times zondag.

De ongeveer 150 parodieën zijn allemaal gebaseerd op een scène waarin de Führer in woede ontsteekt na te hebben vernomen dat Berlijn is omsingeld. Internetters van allerlei nationaliteiten plakken hun eigen ondertitels onder het fragment.

Zo bekritiseert de besnorde dictator bijvoorbeeld de voormalige Amerikaanse vicepresidentskandidate Sarah Palin, worstelt hij met Windows Vista of probeert hij een pizza te bestellen.

Hits

Een filmpje op de website YouTube waarin Hitler doordraait na te hebben vernomen dat hij het populaire computerspel World Of Warcraft niet langer kan spelen is goed voor bijna een miljoen hits.

Ongeveer evenveel internetters bekeken de reactie van Hitler op het nieuws dat voetballer Cristiano Ronaldo overstapt naar Real Madrid.

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Hitler and the You Tube Downfall mash-ups
Hitler - and his raging at Ronaldo, Wii or Sarah Palin - has become an online phenomenon thanks to comic subtitling of a scene from Downfall



The Führer, in the bunker with all his top brass, awaits news from the outside world. When it arrives, it is good. They’ve managed to get him online, with a good connection and a Yahoo! account. He now plans to visit YouTube. “I hear they got some funny shit on there,” he says. But two generals are quaking. “A YouTube search with your name,” explains the braver one, “brings up hundreds of videos about you. Anything from Xbox Live to waffles getting stolen.” Quivering with Parkinson’s, the leader of the Third Reich slowly removes his glasses and, keeping a rein on his emotions, mutters an order. “Anybody who has made a video about me, please. . . leave. . . this .. . room.” The place all but empties. Then he goes ballistic.

In 2004, I flew to Berlin to interview Hitler. All right, not Hitler, but the closest anyone has come to impersonating him. The Swiss actor Bruno Ganz landed the lead role in the first German-language drama to place Hitler at the heart of the narrative. It was the ne plus ultra of commanding performances, which drew deep on Ganz’s phenomenal resources. I saw Downfall three times without tiring of its sheer relentless force. It has its detractors, of course. An Oxford historian of the second world war recently told me that the film promulgates a dangerous myth: that the German people were Hitler’s final victims. To less rarefied viewers, it’s simply a masterpiece. Yet however many times you could be mesmerised by the three hours’ traffic of its story, you couldn’t possibly have predicted, four years ago, that its most iconic scene would be turned into a four-minute sketch, destined to be recycled in an apparently limitless set of variations.

Ganz’s Führer is an unwitting star of the internet. Want to see Hitler expatiating on the disastrous impact of Sarah Palin or the meltdown of the property market? Want to see him ordering a pizza or struggling with Windows Vista or responding to the news that Newcastle United is for sale? It’s all there on YouTube. The scene in Downfall in which Hitler goes doolally after learning of the encirclement of Berlin has spawned more than 150 parodies, and counting. At the time of writing, the most recent - a fairly lame skit in which Hitler goes ballistic on hearing that a junior Nazi has stolen his trademark combover as a seduction aid - had been added four hours previously.

In terms of subject matter, it’s open season. There are versions in which the Führer reacts badly to matters sporting, sexual and technological. The parodies can be hugely popular - “Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft” has so far had 950,000 hits - or intended, like “Hitler hears news of Pete’s wedding” (80 hits), solely as a private joke. For those who have read the restaurant critic Giles Coren’s leaked letter of foul-mouthed complaint to the Times subeditors over some micro-edits to his copy, there is a particularly funny one in which Hitler berates his underlings for provoking such a thin-skinned writer. “You’ve removed the letter A?!?”

Many of the films poke fun at Hitler’s sexual misfortunes. He variously discovers that he can’t find the G-spot, is gay, has Aids, is banned from using pornography. “Your mum put a website tracker on your computer,” he is advised, “and cancelled all your subscriptions.” Nor is he best pleased to learn that the entire top brass of the Reich, apart from a few who remain in the room, have had their way with his wife.

The dramatic weighting of the scene itself makes it endlessly versatile. Hitler is given bad news, dismisses it with a counter-suggestion, is told why that won’t be happening, then pauses before dismissing most of the room in order to blow his top, while outside in the corridor everyone eavesdrops in terrified silence, apart from a weeping secretary who is comforted by a comment from her colleague. “It works well,” explains Paul Blackburn, who posts under the nom de guerre of animukfilms, “because it fits within the parameters of sketch comedy. We have conflict, a high level of tension and an emotional, over-the-top character, who is also safe to ridicule, due to him being such a despicable person. The structure is already in place, it’s just a case of making the dialogue fit and timing it right.” Since July, Blackburn has posted seven Downfall mash-ups, in which Hitler reacts, inter alia, to bad news concerning Gordon Brown, Adam Sandler comedies and the Australian Olympic team.

“It could be applied to any circumstance where people get brought down by hubris. It’s the same theme for every other parody video, and as long as great people fall victim to hubris, there will be parodies.” This from 7boon, who is, in reality, a 19-year-old Canadian whose mash-up finds Hitler as John McCain, responding to the breaking news of his defeat (“I want to speak to only those who thought I had a chance,” says Hitler/McCain, and the room empties). His film illustrates the way in which the democracy of the internet allows parodists to respond to unfolding events with the nimbleness of bloggers.

The Downfall mash-up in which news reaches Hitler that Cristiano Ronaldo wants to move to Real Madrid has had more than 1m hits. “We did it thinking it would be viewed more than a dozen or so times,” says darylsblog, which is the composite name for a group of eight football fans who count among their number two video FX artists and three comedy writers. “In fact, the success of the first one still leaves us shaking our heads in shock. The humour is base, coarse and offensive. Apparently, that is what appeals.”

There is something in that. Films in which the Führer explodes with frustration at events in the sporting world over which he has no control are funny because they locate the ranting, screaming, infantile little Hitler in all of us. They are the comedy of identification. This applies even more to the hilarious series of mash-ups in which Hitler, like the rest of us, has problems with his software. He can’t get Windows Vista to work, his Wii is malfunctioning and then he tries his hand with a Mac. The joke here is that our inner Luddite is on Hitler’s side. And there are other computer-linked meltdowns: Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live and MySpace for using foul language, and from Wikipedia for falsifying information about Berlin. He also gets scammed on eBay.

The satire can be redirected more intelligently back towards Nazi history, and a joke goes to another level. “He’s a f***ing snakeoil salesman!” Hitler screams when Obama comes to Berlin. It takes one to know one. And, being stung by the overconfidence of the property market, the Führer’s defence is the same as every other Nazi killer’s: “I was only obeying orders.”

The oldest clip I retrieved in a search of “Hitler+Downfall” dates to the start of last year. The only previous film to provoke such an avalanche of parodists is Brokeback Mountain, but there the subject matter remained strictly local to American culture. With Downfall, the phenomenon of the mash-up, as this subgenre is known, has gone global. Apart, of course, from in Germany. Part of the reason for its viral success is the language, which allows parodists to lob in their own subtitling with impunity.

Thus, Hitler can plausibly respond to new Labour’s meltdown in recent by-elections, or go ballistic when he hears about the delay of the latest Harry Potter release, without anyone being any the wiser. “If you can understand German and are unable to mute the sound,” advises a pop-up panel on one mash-up, “please GTFO off this video with your NOT FUNNY I CAN UNDERSTAND GERMAN comments.” “As a large number of English-speaking viewers cannot speak German, they are totally detached from the scene,” darylsblog says. “We got a few messages from people who could speak German, and they said they had to turn the volume down to concentrate on the text.”

Eventually, the Downfall mash-up was always going to turn self-referential. “It would seem some people who are German have been missing the point entirely,” Hitler is advised when he learns that they’re putting alternative subtitles on his dialogue. In a further development, the subtitler has “got a really shit font CD off eBay”. One or two parodists have tried to call time on the whole phenomenon. Darylsblog has even attempted a “final parody”, in which “we poke fun at ourselves as parody-makers and add a message to tell people to go buy the film and watch it”.

This one is mostly unquotable, but, in a brief respite from turning the air blue, Hitler is full of regrets: “I was supposed to be the timeless evil dictator portrayed brilliantly by Ganz in the classic Downfall movie. Now look at me.” Trouble is, only 843 have looked at him in this one. The message has not got through.

Adolf Hitler - Vista Problems!