The fascist dreams aesthetic
Benjamin, Sontag, Hamrah
"Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.
Such art is hardly confined to works labeled as fascist or produced under fascist governments. (To cite films only: Walt Disney's Fantasia, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, and Kubrick's 2001 also strikingly exemplify certain formal structures and themes of fascist art.)... The tastes for the monumental and for mass obeisance to the hero are common to both fascist and communist art, reflecting the view of all totalitarian regimes that art has the function of "immortalizing" its leaders and doctrines
- Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism"
Fascinating Fascism | Susan Sontag
I First Exhibit. Here is a book of 126 splendid color photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, certainly the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere
Sontag was writing in the 1970s. We might now add the glut of superhero films, particularly the endless Batman and The Avengers franchises, to her list of films with fascist themes. A.S. Hamrah touches on the Marvelification of American cinema, along with the loss of the American critical faculty, which has followed from the "Spielberg-Lucas reimagining of the American cinema as family entertainment" (Hamrah, "Depiction is Not Endorsement", The Earth Dies Streaming):
The studios expend enormous effort endowing this kind of lightweight, childish entertainment with heft, mostly in the form of expensive, repetitive special effects, but also in the form of pseudopolitical subtext used to mask militarized, fascistic tendencies and themes. When critics and others write think pieces about whether, say, The Last Jedi is anti-Trump or Avengers: Infinity War is about immigration or something, they are playing into the con... The actual political content of these movies lies there, in this cynical desire to leverage ambiguous, implanted meaning. The blockbusters made by the Hollywood studios reflect a period of US-sanctioned war, in which the police have been militarized at home while death and destruction (and torture) continue overseas, with no end in sight.
- A.S. Hamrah, "Remember Me on This Computer", introduction to The Earth Dies Streaming
The Earth Dies Streaming, by A. S. Hamrah
“A. S. Hamrah’s criticism is hilarious, irreverent, full of passionate and ingeniously defended judgments.” —Dana Spiotta
