“The Wave”
is a famous 1981 American film. It´s quite short (only 45 minutes) and gives a
low-budget impression. Still, it´s quite interesting, all things considered. The
ending is something of a classic.
The film is supposedly based on real events
in Palo Alto in April 1967, when a school teacher tricked his students into
forming a kind of Hitler Youth organization to demonstrate how the Nazis could
take power in Germany. I´m not sure if the Palo Alto experiment really
happened, or whether it´s some kind of creative fiction.
Since the film is
relatively short, it´s not very psychologically convincing. The students go
very fast from average high school slackers to fanaticized storm troopers.
Also, the message is unconvincing. No, it really can´t “happen here”, at least
not in 1967 or 1981, since (of course) the political situation in the United
States was very different from Weimar Germany. “The Wave” claims that fascism
is within each one of us, which may be true in the abstract, but once again,
not enough to actually turn people into Hitlerjugend just here and now.
Strictly speaking, the film actually makes an even stranger claim: that the
Nazi experience was so sinister, that people forgot the whole thing shortly after
the war, and in the same way, the Palo Alto students will try to suppress what
happened during the Third Wave experiment. But this assumes that Germans
weren´t Nazis at heart, but good liberals! Why else would they have had a rude
awakening when the Allies broke the spell in 1945?
All this being said, “The Wave”
could nevertheless be seen as a warning about another danger: cults. They are
undoubtedly out there, ever ready to sink their teeth into unsuspecting
victims.
It´s interesting to speculate about what would happen if “The Wave”
was shown on American campus today. Let me guess: the film would be condemned
as “racist” (since some of the “Nazis” are African American), “ableist” (since
the existence of a classroom freak is taken for granted) and “sexist” (since
the hero is a pretty girl). Then, attempted screenings would be attacked by...wait
a minute…SJW stormtroopers…no, something´s not right about this scenario…
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