Category: culture wars

Germany banning films… again

We all know the history surrounding Nazi Germany and its authoritarian controls on popular culture. The Third Reich aggressively banned art that the Nazi Party deemed substandard, degenerate, or subversive.

But that was 90 years ago, right? Today Germany is a modern, democratic nation that isn’t afraid of free expression. Right?

Not exactly. The old authoritarian impulses still hold sway in Berlin. Last month German movie regulators refused to assign a rating to director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Since it is illegal to distribute films in Germany that have not been rated, this effectively banned Citizen Vigilante from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Citizen Vigilante stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down rapists and violent criminals, many of whom are migrants from Islamic countries.

The movie is an unsubtle statement on government policies that have tolerated—and perhaps even encouraged—mass migration from the Middle East to destinations in the European Union and (to a lesser extent) North America. (Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker.)

By all accounts, Citizen Vigilante is not a pleasant film, and perhaps you could argue that it is not even a particularly good one. But if present headlines are any indication, this is a debate that is not going away anytime soon. The backlash against mass migration is not limited to the Trump-voting sectors of America. The same backlash has been building in Europe for quite some time now. The immigration issue is the primary reason for the recent successes of Germany’s right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

In the internet age, you simply cannot stamp out ideas. After the movie was suppressed in Germany, Elon Musk made it available for 48 hours, free of charge, on his X platform.

I didn’t hear about the movie because of Elon Musk, however. I learned of Citizen Vigilante when I read a finger-wagging article decrying the film’s very existence. It probably would have escaped my notice otherwise. That’s the irony of cancel culture: the very act of denouncing something has the unintended consequence of amplifying it.

I haven’t seen Citizen Vigilante, though I’ve seen clips of some of its most controversial scenes. By all indications, the movie is boilerplate vigilante spectacle. That’s an old genre in entertainment. It goes all the way back to the Race Williams detective stories published in Black Mask in the 1920s, when large numbers of Americans were anxious about rising crime rates. In the 1970s, it was manifest in the Death Wish vigilante films starring the already fifty-something Charles Bronson.

The notion of citizens taking the law into their own hands is an uncomfortable topic for a film. But when such movies become popular, it is usually because of some genuine grassroots frustration with the status quo. Perhaps this is the issue that the German government should really be paying attention to, rather than trying to ban what is, by all accounts, a rather mediocre movie.

Although the Third Reich ended more than eighty years ago, German authorities are still uncomfortable with the concept of unregulated speech. They are also, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of reverse psychology.

Never before have so many movies, videos, and whatnot competed for our attention. The best way to convince people to seek out an otherwise obscure movie is for a government to declare its director a pariah and his movie verboten. Citizen Vigilante received over 10.5 million views, from all over the world, during its 48-hour free run on X.

-ET

The last acceptable prejudice? Age discrimination goes both ways.

I will never be accused of age discrimination. I find that people of various ages get on my nerves more or less equally, albeit in different ways.

The twenty-somethings with their neurotic cell phone obsessions… the aging Baby Boomers who dawdle and shuffle about… the now-forty-something Millennials who are still trying to be hipsters, as if the calendar had been pushed back to 2005.

And we haven’t even gotten to children and teenagers yet.

The point here is that people of all ages can be annoying, so there is no reason to discriminate against any of them, in a knee-jerk, automated manner.

Bethany Michel, who is now 28, moved to a retirement community in Florida in 2020 to take care of her terminally ill father. This was obviously during the COVID pandemic. Her father subsequently passed away and she inherited the house from him in 2023.

The HOA in Michel’s neighborhood is now trying to force her out, apparently, because she is under the age of 55. The campaign to oust her began three months after her father’s death, when she received a letter informing her that she did not meet the requirements for residency. (Although she was an adult, she was too young for the 55+ community.) The HOA is now trying to evict her with formal legal measures.

Age discrimination is one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination. Often it is directed at those of us who are older.

I will soon turn 58. Every now and then I’ll see the term “creepy old man” tossed about on the internet, on social media or elsewhere. What’s the deal with that? Does anyone seriously believe that a 30-year-old man can’t be creepy? I can show you a lot of evidence to the contrary.

A more systematic, though carefully hidden, form of age discrimination is used in job interview situations. There are some hiring managers in corporate America who don’t believe that people over 50 are capable of learning newfangled things. (Once again, I could provide plenty of evidence to the contrary.)

But there is also an ilk of people over 55 who seek to discriminate against younger adults—especially those younger adults with children.

Many of them live in age-restricted 55+ communities. Such communities are legal under the Housing for Older Persons Act (HOPA) of 1995.

Many of these communities provide exemptions for live-in caregivers. For example, The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida, will allow the under-55 to reside within their hoary confines so long as:

“at least one member of your household is 55 and you are not younger than 19 years old.”

And they’re serious about those under-19-year-olds. The Villages “absolutely” does “welcome children and grandchildren”… to a point. “Please note,” the community’s website informs us, “visitors under the age of 18 are limited to 30 days in the calendar year.”

Unless, that is, the under-18-year-old is a pit bull or a Rottweiler. The Villages is aggressively pet-friendly. The community has many dog-walking paths and parks.

Certain forms of “age discrimination” are both commonsense and unavoidable. We have all been exasperated by the twenty-something who purports to have all the answers to all the world’s problems. Romantic relationships with vast age gaps—even among consenting adults—will always raise eyebrows.

But where ordinary social interaction is concerned, we are becoming a bit too precious as a society if we now demand the right to only associate with those who were born in the same decade as us. On the contrary, this is an area where we could all benefit from a little more diversity.

One of my friends at my local gym is a guy named Bob. Bob, who is exactly 30 years my senior, will turn 88 this year. Bob was a well-known college basketball player in the early 1960s. I love listening to his sports stories. I also enjoy talking with him about the way America was during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.

This doesn’t mean that I now want to restrict my company to people on the verge of 90. I also enjoy interactions with twenty-somethings, much as they sometimes frustrate me. I occasionally get ideas from my twenty-something acquaintances that I simply wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

At the same time, I enjoy interacting with my fellow Gen Xers, now mostly fifty-something adults who fondly remember what it was like to come of age in the 1980s and early 1990s.

If you spend too much time talking to only Gen Xers, though, you’ll develop a worldview that is a little too cynical and sarcastic. I find that I benefit from deliberately pulling myself out of the Gen X bubble at regular intervals.

This was true even when I was a teen and twenty-something myself. At that time, everyone who was significantly younger than me was literally a child. Most of my age-disparate interactions, therefore, took place with older adults. I enjoyed listening to the Baby Boomers’ stories about Vietnam and the 1960s. I enjoyed listening to my World War II generation grandparents tell me about the 1930s and 1940s. I never wanted to live in an age-restricted bubble.

Back to Bethany Michel and her housing fight. There are photos of the 28-year-old online. She’s blonde and very easy on the eyes. And while I’m perfectly happy with my current next-door neighbors, I would not shriek in horror if Ms. Michel were to purchase their home.

So who, exactly, is so offended by her presence? And why? And why would The Villages want to severely restrict the presence of younger people, as if anyone under the age of 19 will turn into a flesh-eating zombie after 30 days?

As for me, I’d be a lot more annoyed by all the dogs.

-ET

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988

Not autobiographical–but inspired by my own experiences during the late 1980s in Cincinnati, Ohio.

View it on Amazon

‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today

I was just turning 15 when Risky Business—the movie that launched Tom Cruise’s acting career—hit the theaters in August 1983. I was too young to get into an R-rated movie without an adult; and this wasn’t a film that either of my parents would have been interested in seeing with me.

I neglected to see Risky Business for more than 40 years, partly because I was put off by the much-played clip of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear. Call me homophobic if you’d like; but that isn’t the way to get me to see a movie. And there were just so many other movies to see.

I finally got around to watching Risky Business a few days ago. (Better late than never!) The movie was quite well done for a film that was originally conceived as a throwaway flick for Reagan-era young adults. (Moreover, despite the ubiquity of that clip with Tom Cruise in his underwear, that scene is a minuscule portion of the 95-minute movie.) Continue reading “‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today”

Angel: scandalous action films of the 1980s

The 1980s have acquired a reputation for being hopelessly conservative, fuddy-duddy times. On the contrary, many of the movies, songs, and jokes that were commonplace back then wouldn’t pass muster in today’s environment.

Consider Exhibit A: the Angel series of thriller films. The tagline of the initial 1984 movie was:

“High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night.”

The movie starred Donna Wilkes (then in her twenties) as the 15-year-old Molly Stewart, a prep school honor student who, for whatever reason, moonlights as a sex worker each night. And of course, she solves a crime or two along the way, as well!

Now, I’m not saying this is a laudable film concept. But people barely batted an eye at it in the 1980s. If such a film were released today, social conservatives on the right would go ballistic. (Jesse Watters and the rest of the Fox News crew would have a field day.) On the dour, humorous left, meanwhile, there would be wailing and shrieking about “exploitation”.

To be sure, there was an element of exploitation in the movie. (This is why a twenty-something actress was cast in the lead role.) But in the 1980s, most folks seemed capable of realizing that a movie was just a movie.

I was fifteen when Angel came out. I never saw the movie, but it was heavily advertised. Many people did see the film, apparently. There were two sequels: Avenging Angel (1985) and Angel III: the Final Chapter (1988).

-ET

Get Angel (1984) on Amazon