Word: ubermensches
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...LAST FIVE YEARS, THE cinematic treatment of war has been anything but regular. In Coming Home war was a sociological case study. Michael Cimino attempted in The Deerhunter to create a charged-up folk tale complete with Robert DeNiro as an MIG-toting ubermensch. And in Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola made war something mythic; something so big and so surreal that one wondered who was playing The Ride of the Valkyries after all. But in Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli, there is something of a retrenchment, at least intellectually. In the movie, war does not get treated...
...slow down the brisk pace. Freud himself said Nietzsche, much maligned for his supposed "Nazi" affinities, "had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live." Surely Freud's concept of the superego was inspired by Nietzsche's ubermensch or superman. Further, argues Kaufmann the petty iconoclast, Nietzsche's will to power provoked Freud to posit the "death instinct" as a second principle motivating human behavior...
...horrifying movie that graphically portrays Stone's peculiar vision of America in the early '70s. Alexandr Solzhenyitsen aside, it is a curiously amoral world, careening along on its own hellish trip, where the good guys and the bad guys become indistinguishable. Where the last vision of sanity is of ubermensch Ray Hicks (stunningly portrayed by Nick Nolte) slamming a clip into his M-16 and proclaiming that "All my life I've taken shit from inferior people...
...scholarly The Evolution of Hitler's Germany (McGraw-Hill; $12.50), which examines the whole narcissistic era of German history bracketed by the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II. The epoch was one of paranoiac suspicion, which turned Germany inward toward its own bravado traditions and Ubermensch philosophy...
Rococo Invective. For a practicing iconoclast, however, Mencken chose surprisingly feeble icons of his own. As a young man, he fell for Nietzsche and his doctrinal fantasy of the Ubermensch. As misread by Mencken, Nietzsche provided license to despise the human race and delight in all things German-as epitomized by beer and Brahms. Politicians were rogues. The church was only a racket. People in general were boobs. Such were the underpinnings of Mencken's rococo invective. But when serious matters were involved, his philosophical resources were meager and his thinking often callow and jejune...