The only mashup of Der Untergang worth watching. As funny as it is to see Hitler blowing his top about being banned from Xbox Live or something in that grand tradition of Web 2.0 creativity, there was always a tension between the humour and its vehicle. But Chris Applegate’s re-imagination of him as a BNP supporter shitting himself the neighbours might find out is sheer brilliance. In his own words:
In writing the script (slightly shonkily, I admit), my aim was to portray Hitler as a typical BNP supporter: frustrated, sensing something “is not qute right”, feeling rejected and as an outsider, but without the wit to direct it at anything beyond the “immigrants” bogeymen conjured before their eyes. Believing themselves to be the ordinary man in the street, they are desperate to seek strength (or rather the illusion of strength) to compensate for their weakness. So they fall in with the fascists and become part of their gang. They’re not your skinhead darkie-bashing thug who make up the party hardline, but the ones who stand a few yards back happy to cheer him on while he’s doing it, all the better to drown out their sense of unease and rejection. That’s the aspect of the BNP’s support that’s almost as sad as the ideology they fawn over.
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The entire point of why it’s funny (and slightly shocking) is the contrast between the banality of the subject matter and the gravity of Hitler’s situation. We recognise the man in front of us as Hitler but the comic lines printed beneath it are so far removed they might as well be in on a different planet. Once the real Hitler becomes everyman then the contrast and thus the joke is lost.
On a more serious note, but in the same web 2.0 tradition, Alex has put together a series of post analysing the membership data. First he provided a a graph showing the number of BNP activists per 100 people per region, then he proved that the swamping myth of people turning to the BNP because of being “swamped” with migrants, isn’t true and finally he attempted to relate BNP membership with various other metrics only to find no correlation whatsoever. Alex’s tentative conclusion is that “a gratifyingly small percentage of people are completely fucking stupid and pig-ignorant, that this is normally distributed in the population, and it’s essentially a matter of chance what pig-ignorant fucking stupidity they get up to“. Some people are numpties and some numpties are racist idiots and join the BNP.