Downfall

On Bryan Caplan’s recommendation, I just watched the movie Downfall. To me, it depicts an extremely repulsive and reprehensible group of people, certainly compared to any real people I’ve ever met. So much so that I wonder about its realism, though the sources I’ve found all seem to praise its realism. Thus I was quite surprised to hear that critics complained the movie didn’t portray its subjects as evil enough!:

Downfall was the subject of dispute … with many concerned of Hitler’s role in the film as a human being with emotions in spite of his actions and ideologies. … The German tabloid Bild asked, “Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?” in their newspaper. … Cristina Nord from Die Tageszeitung criticized the portrayal, and said that though it was important to make films about perpetrators, “seeing Hitler cry” had not informed her on the last days of the Third Reich. Some … felt the time was right to “paint a realistic portrait” of Hitler. Eichinger replied to the response from the film by stating that the “terrifying thing” about Hitler was that he was human and “not an elephant or a monster from Mars”. Ganz said that he was proud of the film; though he said people had accused him of “humanizing” Hitler. (more)

For example, the New Yorker:

But I have doubts about the way [the makers’] virtuosity has been put to use. By emphasizing the painfulness of Hitler’s defeat Ganz has certainly carried out the stated ambition … he has made the dictator into a plausible human being. Considered as biography, the achievement (if that’s the right word) of “Downfall” is to insist that the monster was not invariably monstrous—that he was kind to his cook and his young female secretaries, loved his German shepherd, Blondi, and was surrounded by loyal subordinates. We get the point: Hitler was not a supernatural being; he was common clay raised to power by the desire of his followers. But is this observation a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did? (more)

The conclusion I have to draw here is that no remotely realistic depiction of real bad people would satisfy these critics. Most people insist on having cartoonish mental images of their exemplars of evil, images that would be contradicted by any remotely realistic depiction of the details their actual lives. I’d guess this is also a problem on the opposite end of the spectrum; any remotely realistic depiction of the details of the life of someone that people consider saintly, like Jesus Christ or Martin Luther King, would be seen by many as a disrespectful takedown.

This is probably the result of a signaling game wherein people strive to show how moral they are by thinking even more highly of standard exemplars of good and even more lowly of standard exemplars of bad, compared to ordinary people. This helps me to understand self-righteous internet mobs a bit better; once a target has been labeled evil, most mob members probably don’t want to look too close at that target’s details, for fear that such details would make him or her seem more realistic, and thus less evil. Once we get on our self-righteous high horse, we prefer to look up to our ideals in the sky, and not down at the complex details on the ground.

Added 11p: This attitude of course isn’t optimal for detecting and responding to real evil in the world. But we care more about showing off just how outraged we are at evil than we care about effective response to it.