Snowflake day 6

[obstinatecondolement]

Challenge #6

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

There are so many pieces of media that I have an enduring fondness for and that are large parts of the loose patchwork of quotations that make up my understanding of myself, so it was hard to pick just one. But, if I am narrowing it down to one then...

Click to expand

The Producers

Edit: The thought belatedly occurs that people might not be familiar with the movie, so I have written a quick summary below. Spoilers ahoy, and content warning for references to Nazis.

Brief plot synopsis

Max Bialystock, a once-great Broadway producer, now reduced to sleeping with his remaining investors, little old ladies, and telling them to make the cheque out to the name of the play (Cash), is visited by a mild-mannered accountant, Leo Bloom, to look over his books. Bloom discovers an irregularity, which Bialystock explains as him spending $500 on a Turkish bath and convinces Bloom to move numbers around to hide the fraud. Bloom, reluctantly, agrees, and concedes that the IRS is hardly going to be interested in auditing a show that flopped. He then is entertained by the hypothetical idea that you could, if you were an unscrupulous man, make more money with a flop than a hit by intentionally raising much more than you needed to stage the play, if you new it was a surefire flop.

Bialystock takes the idea and runs, enlisting Bloom, and they look for the worst play ever written, which they find in Springtime for Hitler.

Despite Bloom's initial hesitation to produce a show written by a former SS-soldier who 'wants to clear the Fuhrer's name,' even with the intention that it will be a catastrophic disaster, they go ahead and buy the rights to the play. They take further pains to ensure their failure by hiring the worst director and actors they can and all seems well, until the play is perceived as a brilliant satire and the show is a huge success, leading to their fraud being discovered.

I saw the 2005 remake of the 1967 original back in the mid-00s and I liked it a lot at the time, but once I got my hands on the original I absolutely never looked back. With all apologies to Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, accept no substitutes: it's Mostel and Wilder or bust for me.

I am incredibly fond of a lot of Mel Brooks' movies, but this one is especially dear to me. I often joke on Tumblr that I have to be sparing with rewatching it, because once I've flipped that switch I am very liable to just watch it every day for weeks and it'll become my entire personality for at minimum a month.

I'm Leo Bloom, I'm an accountant, I'm from Whitehall & Marks, I was sent here to do your books, and I'm terribly sorry I caught you with the old lady.

The main reason that I love this movie so much is Gene Wilder's portrayal of Leo Bloom, which, from the moment I first saw it, seemed like it was ripped from the headlines of my real life. He does such a wonderful job of turning on a dime from being mild-mannered and professional, talking to Max about his accounts, to completely losing it and melting down when he gets overwhelmed and... it's a joke, I know it's a joke, but it's just something that I'd never seen before, and rarely have since, which felt so much like my experience of the world and even though it was supposed to be a joke, and not a flattering one, it has always felt deeply validating to me. Some of us are very good at playing the part of a polite, professional, normal person right up until we get too anxious or overstimulated and then absolutely all the wheels fall off the wagon and we can't do it anymore and it becomes obvious how strange and not the persona we adopt to cope in the world we are, and honestly it means a lot to see that, even in a comedic context, when the character is not just a joke.

And, in this movie, Leo's arc is about letting go of his inhibitions and experiencing joy for what may be the first time in his life.

Bialystock: Having a good time?
Bloom: I don't know. I feel so strange.
Bialystock: Maybe you're happy.
Bloom: That's it, I'm happy. *starts to laugh* Well what do you know about that? I'm happy!

The dream! Is he being manipulated into white collar crime by a scoundrel who, at first, only saw him as a means to make a fortune and exploited his loneliness and the ways he's been alienated by his oddness to do so, by being, perhaps, the first person who's ever been nice to him?

Bialystock, walking through the park arm-in-arm with Bloom: Call me Max. You know I don't let everyone call me Max. Just those people I like.
Bloom: And you can call me Leo.
Bialystock: I already did!
Bloom: Oh! *lifts his hand to touch his forehead in embarrassed delight*
Bialystock: Where would you like to eat?
Bloom: Well, Max. I don’t know, Max. What do you think, Max?

I mean, yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not vicariously liberating to watch him stand on a fountain and shout, "I want everything I've ever seen in the movies! I'm Leo Bloom. I'm me! I can do whatever I want! I'm Leo Bloom!"

And it also doesn't mean that Bialy's fondness for him remains a lie, because very swiftly they are both incredibly fond of each other and not shy about being demonstrative about it.

 

ID: two screencaps where Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom embrace, posted to Tumblr by cherry-flavored-sigh on February 15, 2015.

There is a scene at the end of the movie where they get caught for embezzling and Leo speaks on Bialy's behalf, which goes like this:

I would like to say something your honor, not on my behalf, but in reference to my partner, Mr. Bialystock. Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Max Bialystock is the most selfish man I ever met in my life. Not only is he liar, and a cheat and a scoundrel, and a crook, who has taken money from little old ladies, he has also talked people into doing things, especially me, that they would never in a thousand years had dreamed of doing.

But, your honor, as I understand it the law was created to protect people from being wronged. Your honor, whom has Max Bialystock wronged? I mean, whom has he really hurt? Not me. Not me.

I was... this man... No one ever called me 'Leo' before! I mean, I know it's not a big legal point, but even in kindergarten they used to call me 'Bloom!' I never sang a song before! I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before. This man, this man, this is a wonderful man. He made me what I am today... he did.

And what of the dear ladies? What would their lives have been without Max Bialystock? Max Bialystock, who made them feel young, and attractive, and wanted again. That's all I have to say.

I cry on at least a monthly basis when the words "I never sang a song before! I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before" and, again, maybe it's a joke but "Nobody ever called me 'Leo' before (...) even in kindgarten they used to call me 'Bloom!'" will never fail to produce at least a little mistiness, including now as I write this. It is also kind of the basis for my trans headcanon of Leo Bloom, but that is besides the point. Anyway...

You know who I used to be? Max Bialystock! King of Broadway! Six shows running at once! Lunch at Delmonico's. $200 suits. You see this? This once held a pearl as big as your eye! Look at me now. LOOK AT ME NOW! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!

So, having spoken at great length about Leo Bloom, you might get the impression that I'm not that pushed about Max Bialystock. And, oh, how wrong you would be.

I have, for years, made jokes on Tumblr about The Type, alluding to my penchant for sleazy, dapper (but often slovenly and/or shabby) crooks with poorly concealed hearts of gold and soft spots for certain people. Your Bernard Blacks, your Grunkle Stans, your Quarks, your Norman Stanley Fletchers, and, very, very much in keeping with that, your Max Bialystocks.

He just is... this man. This is a wonderful man.

Also, while a movie with Mr. "Don't touch my blue blanket!" in it was always going to have me identifying more with Leo Bloom, Bialy himself is not exactly... um, unrelatable. I mean:

Bloom, look at me. Look at me, Bloom. Bloom, I'm drowning. Other men sail through life. Bialystock has struck a reef. Bloom, I'm going under. I'm being sunk by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure.

I just... when will a dishonest man come and manipulate me into commiting white collar crime for him? When will an earnest and profoundly weird little man come and change my life by merely posing a little accounting theory and falling in love with me?

Because, in a move that could not be more on-brand for me, I do very much ship this. How could you not, honestly?

GIF posted by giantmonster to Tumblr here on April 7, 2017

The movie is also, when it's not being the beautiful love story of an unscrupulous down-on-his-luck producer and a lonely autistic accountant, an irreverant anti-fascist satire (i.e. a satire that is anti-fascist, not a satire of anti-fascism) that was highly controversial when it was released, and has been, to varying degrees, ever since.

Content warning: discussion of Nazis and fascism, and allusions to, although not detailed discussion or descriptions of, the Holocaust

I do certainly think that over the years there have been fictional depictions of Nazis as inept villains used for comedy that insensitively diminished the horror of what the Nazis did, but for my money, that's not what's happening with The Producers. And, frankly, if anyone gets to make this particular movie, it's a Jewish WWII veteran. I also think that there is a distinct line between diminishing the Holocaust through comedy and in deflating the glamour of fascism by exposing it as ridiculous through comedy, and I think the latter can be a very effective means of making fascists seem less admirable. Which, unfortunately seems to be a trap even people who would never consider Nazism to be something that should be emulated can fall into: this idea that the Nazis really were extraordinary ubermenschen who were dazzlingly competent and even stylish, in a way, in their pagentry and their self-invented mythos of themselves.

No. They were buffoons. They were evil genocidal murderers and, as the meme goes, you do not, under any circumstances, 'have to give it to them.'

This is not just an idealogical objection that it's in bad taste to do this either, although it certainly is in extremely poor taste at best, I also feel that it's factually wrong. Hitler, and other people in leadership positions in Nazi Germany, made stupid strategic decisions all the time, and things like the idea that they made the public infrastructure much better are largely myths from what I understand,^* because for some reason there is this desire among some on the left to see fascist governments as more effective. They're not. They were buffoons and they were evil genocidal murderers. You don't have to be a genius tactitian to be evil.

Lindsay Ellis made a video essay about the use of satire in The Producers a few years ago, which I think is very good and certainly a lot better expressed and researched and more convincing than anything I just shot off the hip.

Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis

Watch on YouTube

*This impression is based on what I remember having read elsewhere from sources I believed to be trustworthy at the time, but I can't quite remember where and I am not a WWII expert or an academic, and I didn't rigorously fact-check myself on this when I was writing this post, or find sources to include that support my claim here, so, TL;DR citation needed (and if anyone does have a good source debunking this oft-repeated trope, I would greatly appreciate it). Just a quick note here though: I'm not interested in debating whether or not the Nazis were in any way admirable. I think I've made where I stand clear and I will be screening comments to avoid giving a platform to that sentiment, so I wouldn't bother if I were you.
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