Swing Kids
Mar. 24th, 2010 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieI watched Swing Kids tonight (because apparently I wanted to completely depress myself). So...did Robert Sean Leonard pretty much get typecast in the early 1990s as "sensitive teenager who grapples with moral dilemmas inherent in living in an authoritarian environment, and who has a buddy who betrays the rest of their little gang"? Granted, I'm only drawing on this and Dead Poets Society, but that's all I've ever seen him in, so, yeah.
(And really, was there any question that one of those kids was going to die, probably through suicide, and another would join the Nazis? I mean, it was good and affecting and all, but I could pretty much tell from the first scene that both of those things would happen.)
I realized (again) while watching this how deeply the Nazis = ultimate evil equation has sunk into popular culture, at least in this country. There were a crapload of swastikas in this movie, and the shudder of revulsion I felt upon seeing one never lessened at any point. Not that I would want it to--really, I find it hard to think of anything else that was both as truly vile as Nazism and as frighteningly widespread in popularity--but I do think it's interesting how we've latched onto WWII as kind of a controlling good vs. evil mythos. I can certainly see why we did; Hitler is about as close to a tailor-made figurehead of absolute evil as you can get. (Okay, I thought I was going somewhere with this, specifically somewhere about it being easier to teach this war rather than WWI because we can cast each side as unequivocably good or evil, instead of the mess that was WWI, but it's late, and I'm not, so I'm posting and going to bed.)
(And really, was there any question that one of those kids was going to die, probably through suicide, and another would join the Nazis? I mean, it was good and affecting and all, but I could pretty much tell from the first scene that both of those things would happen.)
I realized (again) while watching this how deeply the Nazis = ultimate evil equation has sunk into popular culture, at least in this country. There were a crapload of swastikas in this movie, and the shudder of revulsion I felt upon seeing one never lessened at any point. Not that I would want it to--really, I find it hard to think of anything else that was both as truly vile as Nazism and as frighteningly widespread in popularity--but I do think it's interesting how we've latched onto WWII as kind of a controlling good vs. evil mythos. I can certainly see why we did; Hitler is about as close to a tailor-made figurehead of absolute evil as you can get. (Okay, I thought I was going somewhere with this, specifically somewhere about it being easier to teach this war rather than WWI because we can cast each side as unequivocably good or evil, instead of the mess that was WWI, but it's late, and I'm not, so I'm posting and going to bed.)
