Wednesday Open Thread: The Shock Of "Saltburn", Ernst Röhm's Guide To Punchin' Nazis

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well, everyone responded to sheena easton’s 1985 hit “sugar walls” in different ways

“It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

Reader, I know how he feels. Maybe it was reading Curtis Yarvin’s musings on how the system that lab-leaked COVID-19 is now making much stronger, and more dangerous, stuff. A Chinese lab has now gain-of-functioned a coronavirus that results in brain death within eight days, every single time. Why’d they do it? For the same reason the Rolling Stones keep touring: it pays pretty well, and the alternative would be working at the iPhone factory with the suicide nets. At this point, actually, it’s critical that they keep making the virus more powerful. I hope they get it down to 24 hours. Because a virus that kills its host in 24 hours has a mild statistical possibility of not wiping humanity off the face of the earth.

I hope all of you can forgive me for mentioning the lab-leak, which was considered far-right Nazi claptrap right up to the point that it was determined to be true. Scratch that. They said it was Nazi claptrap after it was determined to be true. We’ll get back to that in a few minutes — but first, everyone’s going to the movies!

The pure heroin of stunting on normies

(Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”.)

there are two wolves inside you, and they both want to lick the bathtub

In one of history’s finest critical essays, Clive James notes that “it takes bad art to teach us how good art gets done.” He was referring to a Judith Krantz novel, Princess Daisy, that absolutely crackled with effort and vigor. “To be a really lousy writer,” James tells us, “takes energy.” The directorial debut of “The Crown” actress Emerald Fennell, “Promising Young Woman”, demonstrated that the same is true of filmmaking. It was a beautifully shot, claustrophobic-feeling effort featuring some workmanlike acting from Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, and The Kurgan Himself — but the whole thing was in service of a plot so deeply stupid that one can’t help but feel a little insulted.

Let’s spell it out, just to make the point: In order for “Promising” to work, the heroine has to know all of the following things:

• the man she is getting ready to kill will be strong enough to break his handcuffs at exactly the right time;

• that he will kill her, rather than just beating her ass and calling the cops;

• that he and his friend will decide to burn her in the woods, and when;

• exactly how long it will take the cops to get to a wedding from the police station;

• and about five other points of timing that all happen to the second, based on texts that she has scheduled two days prior, and letters she sent three days prior, to her death.

I blame Christopher Nolan for how often films like this have appeared lately, because his best work relies a bit too much on perfect-timing master plans. When you watch “The Dark Knight”, however, you fundamentally understand that it’s a comic book and therefore reality is off the menu. “Promising Young Woman” initially looks like an art film; it doesn’t turn into capeshit until 20 minutes before the end.

Since today’s media critics are usually midwit dopes who, like some insects, have little eye for anything but the shine on a particular surface, “Promising Young Woman” was widely praised, leading Miss Fennel to think Huh, I could probably go a little farther with this. Which leads us to “Saltburn”.

Your humble author watched the first half of the movie because I would watch Rosamund Pike read the phone book. But she wasn’t in it very much so I lost interest, quit halfway through, then read a plot summary on Wikipedia — at which point I had to go back and at least skim through the second half. Along the way, I came to see “Saltburn” as more than merely a bad film. Those, like the poor, will be with us always. This is something more. It’s a genuine cultural document. It has everything that is unpleasant about THEE CURRENT YEAR in a single neat package.

The plot is very simple, and very stupid: A scholarship student, Oliver Quick, appears to fall in love with Felix Catton, another, much wealthier, fellow at his posh college, then spends the summer at the rich kid’s estate. The rest of it is stolen pretty much wholesale from “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, ending with everybody else dead or banished and Oliver in possession of the Saltburn estate. It’s astoundingly improbable and self-contradictory, but as with Miss Fennell’s previous film this has been overlooked in the breathless critical rush to praise the visual language, and raw perversion, of the film. The latter includes, in about this order:

• Oliver performing outdoor oral sex on Felix’s sister, who is menstruating;

• Oliver watching Felix masturbate in a tub, waiting for Felix to leave, then licking up the visible remains of Felix’s semen from the tub’s bottom, putting his tongue in the drain during the process;

• A bunch of random scenes in which everybody has to be naked for “house rules” and there’s a strong suggestion of incest;

• Oliver straddling a dying, intubated Rosamund Pike and ripping out her tube to kill her with a single joyous, orgasmic motion;

• The much discussed final scene, where Oliver dances full-frontal naked through Saltburn while snorting coke and listening to the excellent “Murder On The Dance Floor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, a brilliant track from twenty years ago attached to a music video so charming I’ll put it here. One wonders why it didn’t chart in the USA. Probably because "Sophie Ellis-Bextor” sounds like someone who should live in Downton Abbey, rather than the child of two neurotic TV people who hyphenated their names into hers.

The critical adoration lavished on “Saltburn” appears to be the result of two unpleasant trends. The first, previously discussed, is that we no longer have critics who are capable of understanding or evaluating plot. We all live in YouTube World now, where production values and visual appeal are all that really matters. Our bathyscaphe descent into shallowness, so to speak, can be readily observed by the fact that a music video from 2002 has a more logical plot than the film it now soundtracks.

(Apropos of nothing, and since this is a car blog of sorts, I should note that I am heartily sick of watching people judge automotive review videos by how nice they look. This would be like judging a Consumer Reports dishwasher test on the sheen of its paper.)

The second trend is the big one: stunting on the normies. Judging by what I’ve read online, the “Saltburn” audience largely enjoys the film because of the emotions they think it generates in flyover-country Trump voters. Never mind that they aren’t watching “Saltburn” and won’t watch it in the future. There’s apparently real pleasure to be had in imagining how shocked your grandparents and their fellow parishioners would be if they could just see Barry Keoghan’s dick bouncing around a country estate.

Which reminds me. “Saltburn”, like many recent films, is so pornography-informed that it would be indistinguishable from porn to anyone living in the previous century. It is slightly more explicit than Emmanuelle, which was the defining X-rated of a generation; in both cases the primary absence is what Ali G memorably called “the dong goin’ in.” That taboo was already broken in the art-house film “9 Songs” a while back, and how, and there have been a few European theater releases with full intercourse. I suspect it will eventually become a feature of “hard R” films shown at the local AMC, at which point we’re basically living in “Idiocracy”.

How much of this is the same kind of hedonic treadmill that has college kids in 2024 unironically re-enacting the most degrading porn possible like it’s all instructional video, and how much of it is the surfacing spout of a blue-whale-sized Kulturkampf in which it is imperative to churn out progressively more unpleasant and shocking mass media, the same way we keep raising the stakes on our fringe-wacko “progressive” issues until even an old lecher like Bill Clinton is visibly disturbed by the current catechism?

Having seen the same process play out in literature, I’d say we are about at the “Last Exit To Brooklyn” stage. Maybe the “Portnoy’s Complaint” stage. We won’t get to “Tropic Of Cancer” until you can walk into a theater and see Barry Keoghan actually blowing Jacob Elordi. At which point even your putatively sophisticated and open-minded author is going to call it a day. You can all move the goalposts without my help. Which reminds me…

We can’t defeat the Nazis unless we burn books and lock people up and unite both industry and government into a seamless whole with the unchecked power to destroy the people who threaten the State

it’s cool when we do it, it’s a problem when they do it, fuck ‘em

I probably haven’t said it enough, but I genuinely like and respect former Jalopnik supremo Patrick George. He’s very far from being a Brownell/Alanis smoothbrain and I think he puts a lot of thought into making society better for everyone. Most importantly, I don’t think he’s any kind of a hypocrite. So I was very interested in his public announcement yesterday that he is leaving Substack in favor of “Ghost”, which is to Substack like “Bluesky” is to “X”, namely: far more of a left-wing echo chamber. This won’t affect him financially, because his Substack had basically zero traffic. It’s about sending a message, as the kids say.

Patrick cited Platformer’s decision to leave Substack as being influential. So I read what Casey Newton, the founder of Platformer, had to say about it — and I found it be almost too depressing for words.

[Substack’s founder] stated that Substack would remove accounts if they made credible threats of violence but otherwise would not intervene. “We don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse,” he wrote. “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”

This was the moment where I started to think Platformer would need to leave Substack. I’m not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions. 

Go back and read that again. Substack is taking a position considerably less strident than, say, that of the ACLU when they defended a “Nazi” march in Skokie — but this mild statement of intent, which would be as natural to our Founding Fathers as breathing or having wooden teeth, upset Casey Newton to the point where he wanted to take his ball and go home.

I don’t think Casey is stupid — he’d probably ring a 115 on the WAIS, no sweat — but I now know he is not a serious person. Or if he is a serious person, he is an explicitly dangerous and worrisome one, because he thinks he can use the tools of fascism without becoming a fascist himself, and that’s delusional.

The men who designed this country had an insight of singular and historic proportions, namely: that any system of government powerful enough to enforce “good” would also be powerful enough to enforce “evil”. To illustrate, I’ll use a cause near and dear to the hearts of my progressive friends: gerrymandering. I personally loathe the process of gerrymandering, as do they — but I have a sneaking suspicion that their opposition to it not on ground of principle but rather because Republicans have control of more local government than they do. And it turns out that when Democrats have the upper hand, they’re just as willing to make Escher-esque districts. Because they’re doing it for the right reasons! They’re not racist, and they’re not “not racist” — they are anti-racist!

Similarly, Casey Newton would likely be appalled if Substack decided to censor Matt Stoller’s outstanding anti-monopolist publication simply because it is calling for the forcible — meaning “at gunpoint, if you resist” nationalization of Boeing. Don’t get me wrong. I think Stoller has a point, but he is advocating something that could turn really nasty in a hurry. If Stoller can argue that the government should march into Seattle and simply… take a massive corporation, shouldn’t someone else be free to argue that every illegal alien in America should be returned to their home countries with the same level of force that Stoller would be willing to use against Boeing if they had their corporate security bar the Feds from entering their property?

One of those ideas might be “right” and the other might be “wrong”, I’ll let you pick — but until recently, America was the only country in the world that deemed both ideas worthy of equal protection. That’s what makes us unique. Otherwise, we’re just Middle Europe with fatter people and a lot of Mexicans.

It apparently takes a disciplined and powerful mind to understand that there are two components to successful “Nazi” or “Communist” systems: the belief that animates those systems, and the framework that makes them powerful. Lenin succeeded because he took over the Tsar’s framework, which was powerful no matter who was at the controls.

By contrast, America is a country where I am free to hold the belief that Jews should run the country as an ethnic aristocracy, and you’re free to hold the belief that Jews should be slaughtered out of hand, and it doesn’t matter if I’m just a Substack writer and you’re on the faculty at Harvard — neither of us will get what we want, because the American systems of Constitutional protection will prevent either outcome with identical force.

Take the LinkedIn comment by the deeply stupid person “Kara Snow” at the top of this article. Kara is certain that all “Nazis” need to be censored, as do their supporters. What is a Nazi? Don’t you worry your little head about that, pal. Kara will tell you. She knows it when she sees it.

Kara is apparently willing to use the full power of the State against Nazis. If Nazis write books, she will ban them. If Nazis have guns, she will take them away. If Nazis have storefronts where they do their Nazi stuff, she will destroy those storefronts in a “Crystal Night” of shattered glass and ruined buildings. She could conceivably make all this easier by creating an organization called the “Steadfast Antiracists” — we’ll call it “The SA” for short. They could wear brown shirts, to reflect solidarity with people of color. Under her leadership, the SA would eradicate Nazis with whatever street violence was necessary. Eventually, you might see a competing and even more progressive organization arise, the “Steadfast Superantiracists” — again, to save space, we’ll just say “The SS”. They could wear black shirts, in solidarity with BLM. And when the SA proved to be insufficiently antiracist, the SS could purge the SA in a “Night Of The Long Knives”.

Kara won’t get the point, but you will.

What makes America great is the fact that we could elect “Nazis” to every position of power in this country, and they wouldn’t have the power to murder or even imprison a single Jew.

(Expect that previous sentence to be quoted up to the comma by Car Twitter within five minutes of this article’s publication.)

Germany wasn’t set up that way. Their system of government was naively designed around the idea that only “good” people could be elected. So it gave those “good” people all the power they could conceivably need. Guess what happened when “bad” people were elected? They had the same power.

Alright, now I’m just beating the dead horse of something we all should have learned in eighth-grade civics class. But before I close up shop for today, I want to examine one more thing, namely:

Why are Casey Newton and his friends so afraid of Nazi ideology?

I suspect that if you asked them outright, you’d get a little lecture about how stupid “they” are, “they” being everybody who doesn’t see the value in paying two million bucks for property on a shit-smeared San Francisco sidewalk, and how “they” shouldn’t be exposed to Nazi ideas lest “they”, in their infinite stupidity, adopt those ideas. But that just leads to another question:

What about the Nazi ideology could possibly be attractive to everyday Americans in 2024?

Here’s one potential, and highly unpleasant, answer: Go back and look at the conditions in Germany that led to the actual Nazis assuming power. The economy was in shambles. Citizens couldn’t find work or buy basic necessities. And the “flyover” Germans, the ones who didn’t live in Berlin, were disgusted by what they saw as the public acceptance of homosexuality and other sexually diverse practices. Finally, there was a massive amount of “street action” and violence fomented by left-wing political groups, some of whom would eventually define themselves as explicitly “antifascist” and whose allegiance was always to Soviet Russia.

How’s the meme go? And then one day, for no reason at all, people voted Hitler into power.

Here’s the good news. In the next paragraph, I will tell all of you how to prevent Nazis from destroying America. It doesn’t involve any “punching Nazis”, even though I know that a whole nation full of noodle-armed people who have never punched anything besides their own dicks are yearning to do just that. I apologize in advance. You’ll just have to be satisfied with not having the next Hitler running the show. Is that alright?

All we need to do in order to prevent America becoming a Nazi country is…

wait for it…

to uphold the Constitution as designed and intended. That means free speech. It means restricting governmental power, especially in collaboration with industry, because that is literally the definition of fascism. It means being actively anti-censor the way people claim to be anti-racist now. It means strengthening our system of checks and balances to what it was before the Imperial Presidencies of Bush and Obama. It means avoiding foreign adventurism. It means using the military in its primary purpose of honoring and enforcing our borders, to protect our citizenry.

All that “Nazi” stuff that Trump supposedly did that you didn’t like? He was using unconstitutional powers granted to, or stolen by, his predecessors. Take those away. All the corporate malfeasance that sickens you? It’s enabled by laws written during the past fifty years with lobbying money. Take those away, too.

What if you don’t want to do any of that? What if you want to continue in the mad amphetamine rush of Biden and the “Magnificent Seven” riding in the same mine cart, unlimited power and our modern progressive religion in lockstep like Frank Herbert warned us about? What if you want to keep outsourcing the “punch Nazis” stuff to unemployed street armies and millions of “approved” protestors, even as the stores are forcibly emptied and the traffic is blocked and billions of dollars are sent overseas to facilitate more killing by proxy?

What if you think you have your hands on the levers of power and do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law and your conviction that you are on the right side of history means that no barrier may be placed between your political desires and their immediate bloody fulfillment?

In that case, my friend, I hope you’re serious about punching Nazis. Because you’re literally creating them out of thin air. Right now, as we speak. And you can’t censor your way out of the problem. How could you, when you are deliberately duplicating the conditions that led people to imagine these ideas in the first place?

You know what? Forget everything I said. It’s not going to happen. We probably won’t live that long. Here’s the hot tip: That eight-day brain-killer virus is supposedly derived from pangolin coronaviruses. Here’s a pangolin, for those of you who don’t know what it looks like:

There are no “wet markets” for pangolins. But they are highly trafficked. That will be the official story of COVID-27. Not a lab-leak from the super-pangolin-virus lab, but an accidental jump to humans from a black-market pangolin. You’d have to be an idiot to believe it, but it doesn’t matter; you probably won’t live to read it. Have a great week, everyone!