06-22-2018, 08:23 PM
Let's consider the last completed Crisis. As I see it, a Crisis results from a depraved "Degeneracy" (I need an antonym for Howe and Strauss' "regeneracy", and I think it fits well
What could be a more degenerate lead into a Crisis than this depiction of a sort of burlesque:
All sorts of stage permutations of the musical Cabaret are possible, but all of the culminate with the rise of you-know-what. Although Cabaret as a movie is not conventionally seen as a horror movie, t has some crucial elements: freakish characters, people doing nasty and depraved stuff as if they could not do otherwise, and bad things happening to innocent people. Of course we know from history the ultimate horror which needed not be shown explicitly. The only likable people in the movie are Jewish characters, and we know what will happen to them. If we don't quite get the message, we see the dead pet dog of the (Jewish) Landauer family being shown beaten to death.
(I understand that one stage version has the characters of the Kit Kat Club [the name of the Cabaret] in an epilogue in one final performance -- as they are about to be gassed in a murder camp).
What could be a more degenerate lead into a Crisis than this depiction of a sort of burlesque:
Quote: What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Come to the cabaret
Put down the knitting, the book and the broom
It's time for a holiday
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret
Come taste the wine
Come hear the band
Come blow that horn
Start celebrating right this way
Your table's waiting
What could permitting some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret
All sorts of stage permutations of the musical Cabaret are possible, but all of the culminate with the rise of you-know-what. Although Cabaret as a movie is not conventionally seen as a horror movie, t has some crucial elements: freakish characters, people doing nasty and depraved stuff as if they could not do otherwise, and bad things happening to innocent people. Of course we know from history the ultimate horror which needed not be shown explicitly. The only likable people in the movie are Jewish characters, and we know what will happen to them. If we don't quite get the message, we see the dead pet dog of the (Jewish) Landauer family being shown beaten to death.
(I understand that one stage version has the characters of the Kit Kat Club [the name of the Cabaret] in an epilogue in one final performance -- as they are about to be gassed in a murder camp).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.