Cultural Amnesia (104 page)

Within the parameters of his apoplectic
Weltanschauung
, Hitler
could be ingenious and even brilliant. His ideology depended on extermination, but some kind of ideology it undoubtedly was, and although, as Raymond Aron said many times, no ideology can be
realistic, that does not necessarily mean that an ideologist need be stupid in all areas. Hitler’s abiding fault, indeed, lay in his cleverness. Demonstrably clever in the machinations of
mass politics, he was encouraged by his own success to embrace the delusion that he was omniscient in any field of which he possessed knowledge. Far from being ignorant of what a Russian campaign
had done to Napoleon, Hitler had made a study of the subject, and had seen merit in the general agreement among historians that Napoleon should not have occupied Moscow. Hitler also knew enough
about Germany’s requirements for raw materials to decide that the oil fields in the Caucasus were a more important target. His reasoning was clever on the level of grand strategy. But on
the level of military strategy it ignored a fact which had had no relevance in Napoleon’s time, but was now crucial: Moscow was the Soviet Union’s communications centre. If Hitler had
concentrated his forces and gone all out for Moscow in the autumn of 1941, he could have had all the oil and minerals he wanted not long after. But he was too smart: or, if you like, too stupid,
except that it strains the meaning of the word.

Schnitzler’s point about one of the flights from responsibility being a flight into stupidity looks clearer cut when
we move from Hitler to Stalin. Admirers of Stalin always liked to think that he was never stupid. There was some evidence to back up their faith. Long before the final accounts came in, it should
have been obvious that Stalin’s rule was self-defeating for socialism. But if we can grant that he had nothing like socialism in mind, and thought only of an exercise in pure power, the
regime he perfected looks like a work of genius. So acute an observer as Isaiah Berlin gave him credit for a master plan behind his succession of purges. Aleksandr Zinoviev, in his
The Reality of Commu nism
, overstated the later Soviet regime’s coherence—a coherence
inherited from Stalin—only in suggesting
that it could incorporate, while still remaining stable, all recalcitrant phenomena up to and including dissidence. (If Zinoviev had really believed that, of course, he would not have written his
dissident books; but he felt it, and wrote them from deep pessimism.) While Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, however, his one and only creation, the Party apparat, showed few faults as a mechanism
for preserving a single aim: that he should rule. He even seemed to have heeded Seneca’s warning that you can kill as many people as you like but your successor will be among those who
survive. Stalin acted as if he intended nobody to survive.

Mao Zedong acted the same way. It can be called stupidity only if you think such behavour threatens the
state. But it didn’t threaten
his
state. On that measure, Ho Chi Minh showed Pol Pot the way, and Pol Pot was the stupid one because he failed to pay
heed. Ho’s delayed and selective ruthlessness against his bourgeoisie—actual, potential, or notional—weakened his economy but preserved him in power. Pol Pot’s
instantaneous wholesale massacre of anyone who could read and write destroyed the state he had created before he had a chance to rule it. Attacking with a chainsaw the branch he sat on, he was a
figure from a diabolical cartoon. But few of the longer-lasting Communist despots were so dense. Ceauşescu was a maniac, but so is an ordinary serial killer; an ordinary serial killer
doesn’t run a state. It could be said that Castro is the cleverest person in Cuba because anyone cleverer swam to Miami, but it’s a joke. Castro is not stupid and it is most unlikely
that the material decay of his country has surprised him. He simply preferred personal rule to national prosperity, and stifled the second in order to reinforce the first. As Lenin proved, you
can’t have a socialist economy without the occasional NEP (a New Economic Policy that allows a measure of free enterprise); you can’t continue as a socialist dictator without the
dexterity to dismantle the NEP as soon as it becomes productive; and to balance the resultant hope against the inevitable deprivation is the secret of success. Maintaining yourself in power is
the only thing you succeed at, but the time soon comes when the balancing act becomes your
raison d’être
. Castro had the knack, and remained in
power while his beard grew grey.

If the United States had been able to find a way of burdening Castro’s early socialist aspirations with help, the
Communist regime in
Cuba might never have formed in the first place. But America had committed itself to a foreign policy which viewed any hint of socialism as an invitation
to communism. The policy was stupid, but here again it was not necessarily the product of stupid men: the East Coast foreign policy elite constituted the cleverest collection of political brains
in America. Otherwise known as the Wise Men, after World War II they gave an unwise policy its initial impetus because there was no other way of getting a genuinely beneficial measure—the
Marshall Plan—through Congress. They needed a Red scare as an appeal to the masses: always an uncomfortable position for any intellectual elite to be in. Appeals to the masses are better
managed by big business.

Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity might look like the only explanation for the sort of newspapers, magazines,
television programmes and movies that make us ashamed to be living in the West. At first blush, the mass media seem to offer the ideal chance of examining stupidity in isolation. But once again
the trick is not easily worked. There is a possibility, amounting to a probability when the really big money is involved, that the stupidity is being manufactured by clever people whose
commercial motives put their taste, scope and integrity into abeyance. This non-anomaly becomes most obvious in the case of Hollywood’s blockbuster movies, where the long haul of creative
intelligence takes a spiral route towards the big haul at the box office. Every onlooker who fancies his powers of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening
weekend. But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case.
Where Eagles Dare
has always been my favourite
example: since the day I first saw it, I have taken a sour delight in rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness on screen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the
camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail—and, all right, in order to have a wonderful time. There is something precious
about the intellectual squalor of
Where Eagles Dare
: it is a swamp with a surface of green pulp squeezed from emeralds. You can’t get the same charge
from Delta Force movies, or from the adventures of Jean-Claude Van Damme in the brainless universe where men with guns are helpless against a man fighting with his feet.
Where Eagles Dare
is the apex of a form: it shows that there is somewhere
to go beyond
The Guns of Navarone
,
a numbskull stratosphere in which not even
The Wild Geese
could fly. Where eagles dare, the sense of the ridiculous winks out to a dot, and the vision is
filled with the vaulting pretensions of latterday schoolmen who believe, if only
ad hoc
and
pro tem
, that cinematic
sense can exist
in vacuo
: detached, that is, from any other sense; a voluntary brain-death. The whole complex phenomenon is epitomized by Richard
Burton’s hairstyle.

Schnitzler, let us remember, said that the flight into stupidity is a flight away from responsibility. But soaring beyond
any human absurdity that even Schnitzler could imagine, Richard Burton’s hairstyle in
Where Eagles Dare
is a flight into stupidity and away from the
barber. Burton plays a British agent who is possibly also a German agent, although we can be fairly sure that he will turn out to be a British agent in the end, because Richard Burton’s
agent would never agree to a deal by which his client was shot at dawn. Burton the almost certainly British agent is sent, with Clint Eastwood and other agents—some of whom actually do turn
out to be German agents—on a mission to a castle deep behind German lines, there to rescue, or possibly confirm the credibility of, or perhaps betray the real identity of, an actor
pretending to be an American general in possession of the Plans for a Second Front. The actor playing the actor need not detain us, and considering how he acts it is a wonder that the Germans
have detained him. (There is a lot more to wonder at about the behaviour of the Germans, but we’ll get to that later.) The actors who matter are Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Clint,
already a top box office draw at the time, has been cast as the simple, straight-talking American assassin who helps the fiendishly ingenious British spy: it’s the same relationship as
Felix Leiter to James Bond, but beefed up to equal status to meet the requirements of the American marquee. Apart from saying “hello” so as to make Germans turn around before he
shoots them with his silenced pistol—if he had merely mouthed “hello” before shooting them in the back, it would have been a different kind of movie, i.e., a realistic
one—Clint’s character has nothing anachronistic about him except his cataleptic taciturnity, which we are glad to recognize as a minimally equipped actor’s career-long habit of
overdoing the understatement. Burton’s own style of acting is equally dissonant with the time, but in the opposite direction: he always overdid the overstatement,
and
from the beginning to the end of his career on screen he looked exactly like a stage actor projecting to the upper circle, except when a director with animal-training skills (Martin Ritt in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, to take one of the few examples) either whipped him into submission or else slipped a sedative into his morning triple.
Burton always moved his lips so much when he enunciated that they would stick out past the end of his nose, and there are episodes in
Where Eagles Dare
in
which they practically leave the frame, as if yet another triple were waiting out there, begging to be imbibed.

It isn’t the stuff he does with his face, however, that makes Burton look out of place in this castellated anteroom
of World War II. It’s the stuff on top of his head. It’s his hairstyle. It was probably still all his own hair at that stage, but it’s a hair
style
: an item, that is, which not even women found it easy to obtain during World War II, and which for men was unknown. (In the movie, Mary Ure has obviously taken a
hairstylist into action with her, but we never see him: although if he had wandered into shot holding a crimping iron he would have looked no more futuristic than her miraculously smooth
coiffure, shining with a blonde lustre that Eva Braun, even with her connections, could only dream of.) The high command of the Romanian army did indeed issue an order that no officer below the
rank of major should wear makeup, but the British army and the German army both made a policy of short back and sides for all ranks, and the German army was particularly close-cropped. Yet
Burton, intending to be accepted as a German officer in order to penetrate the enemy redoubt, has gone into action sporting a pageboy hairstyle so fulsome that it spills abundant curls and waves
below the back of his collar. Burton had a big head anyway. I interviewed him once, and found out why he always looked so stocky on screen: it was because his upper works were so broad you had to
lean sideways to see past him. Even if close-shorn he would have had to wear a cap rare for its size in the whole of the Wehrmacht. But with his hairstyle added to his massive cranium, his cap
has to be big enough for a buffalo, and it still does nothing to disguise—does a lot, indeed, to emphasize—the anomalous abundance of hair protruding at the back. On several occasions
in the movie he has to pass a German checkpoint, and you can only deduce that the garrison has been recruited from an institute for the blind. Later in the war, when the
regular German forces were in a state of collapse,
Volkssturm
units were organized from the old, the adolescent, the lame and the sick, but I
can’t remember that very many sightless people were issued with a
Panzerfaust
and asked to shoot in the direction of the noise kicked up by Allied
tanks. Here at the castle there is no discrimination against the optically handicapped.

Whether as a single, double or triple agent (“Triple, please,” you can imagine him saying) the Burton
character would have been barely free of his parachute harness before being placed under arrest. He would have been locked up on the basis of his appearance alone. Every other anachronism is
explicable, within the screenplay’s purely cinematic parameters. In the Geman pub below the castle, Burton, Eastwood and the other agents—the others are notable chiefly for their
expendability—talk very loudly in English. Yes, English is their chosen language when they discuss their plans about fooling the Germans, and they do not lower their voices when members of
the garrison pass by closely behind them. It could be said, however, that a convention is being observed here, and that our agents are really speaking German. (It could also be said that if they
were
speaking German, the closely attendant Germans would be even more likely to notice that plans to fool them were being loudly discussed, but let that
pass.) There is also the consideration that English seems to be the adopted language of every German in the area. Similarly it could be put down to an equally hallowed cinematic convention when
the German commandant arrives in the castle courtyard by helicopter. There were no operational helicopters in World War II, but there were no operational cannon in ancient Rome either, and
Shakespeare still put a few in. Shakespeare pioneered Hollywood’s flexible attitude to temporal authenticity, as any Hollywood mogul with a tertiary education will be glad to tell you. For
every howler in the movie there is a good justification, the principal one being that the people who made the movie must have known it was a howler, but correctly judged that nobody they cared
about would notice. In the majority of big-budget war films since World War II, and in all the small budget ones, the enemy has always fired a special kind of bullet that goes around, instead of
through, the actors on our side, occasionally penetrating only at the shoulder or in a sexually neutral section of the upper thigh. In
Sands of Iwo Jima
John Wayne finally got
killed by a Japanese bullet while he was sitting down, but only after the Japanese machine-gunners had vainly fired thousands of bullets at him when he
was running very slowly. In
Where Eagles Dare
, whole German machine-gun nests equipped with multiple examples of the lethal MG42 (rate of fire: 1200 rounds
per minute) are unable to graze Richard Burton’s hairstyle. Big enough for a slowly moving cow to graze it, for cinematic reasons it is impervious to speeding lead. But there are precedents
for that. There is no precedent for the hairstyle
per se
.