The Empty Mirror

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While I doubt this movie appeals to the majority of people, it is never-the-less accurate both historically and psychologically. Many of the ideas expressed (by the character Hitler and his cohorts), facts referenced, and behavior exhibited are realistic. I have studied Hitler to a some extent, particularly his psychology and neuroses (read Robert G .L. Waite), and I feel that this movie shows the man as he was, a facade of power covering thinly doubt and pain. Hitler is not, after all, simply the worst monster in history, he had reasons and beliefs that motivated his actions. While the depiction of him may seem to inappropriate to some, it shows Hitler as a vulnerable, conflicted person who uses power and cruelty to attempt to hide his own debilitating lack of self confidence. Hitler needed to be accepted, loved, and to belong. He tried to use power and fear as a surrogate for all these things that make a healthy happy person, but it gave him no rest. He did indeed stare into an empty mirror. Hitler was a victim of his own twisted mind and lonely, hollow existence.

Hitler deserves not to be forgiven, but understood. The empty mirror shows Hitler as human, and a weak one. This is not a tribute: Hitler wanted to be remembered as a great destructive prophet, to see him as the vulnerable victim of himself (while not pardoning what he did) is not what Hitler wanted. Watch, and understand Hitler the victim.

>> If we understand Hitler, and how he was able to mesmerize 70 million otherwise highly intelligent people, then history will be far less likely to repeat itself. <<

Perhaps what needs to be understood is that they weren't any more intelligent than he was. This explains why they could be 'mesmerized' by him.

The fact is that Hitler WAS exactly the same as all the people around him. He represented the realization of their deepest desires, promised to deliver, was applauded for the early result then, as an escape from their own culpability, blamed for the entire 12 year debacle. Every murder, every despicable act by every person who either directly or tacitly supported him, was laid off on a single momentarily charismatic human being.

They weren't in any way unlike him, they were just like him; and he; just like them.

The real question that remains is — are we?

Maybe the point in de-demonizing Hitler was to make us understand that he was not so special & extra-ordinary that we don't have to be careful that he doesn't ever happen again. People seem to almost always simply do what they think is the right thing to do at any given time. Even Hitler. Maybe our seeing him as an ordinary guy who went a long monstrous way would help us prevent big lies, holocausts, invasions, death camps & secret police --& keeping silent in the face of them -- from ever again seeming quite so much like the right thing to do at the time as it did in Germany in the 1930s.

A superficial pass over The Empty Mirror will lead to superficial conclusions. I saw this several years ago at an American Cinematheque screening in Los Angles. The director (himself Jewish) tried to take a look at Hitler as a man, unsullied by the gross oversimplifications that typically underscore such material.

Most people feel a need to discard Hitler as merely "insane" and "evil" because it conveniently avoids the stickiness of trying to develop an understanding of his psychology. Most other material about Hitler and the Third Reich may try to offer honest insights, but more often then not devolve at some point into oblique moral condemnation "All you REALLY need to know is that they were all very NAUGHTY/BAD/EVIL." They don't trust you to be intelligent and reach your own conclusions.

The Empty Mirror takes a reasonably unclouded look - the majority of Hitler's lines are taken directly from _Mein Kampf_ and his interaction with other significant figures of the era provide us with insight (conjectured but believable) into his thought processes, motives, and rationalizations.

The movie occurs in a surreal, dripping dark stone bunker which the camera never seems to quite capture the dimensions of. It's more of a "dream" state than actual location as the rooms change, occupants shift, uniforms taken on and off.

See the movie yourself. The director is for once not insulting our abilities and is providing an opportunity to reach our own conclusions. Swallow your distaste for the subject for an hour and a half and try to objectively form your own opinion.

Remember that this is the last movie hitler would ever want anyone to see - one that demystifies the "Fuhrer-myth" by showing him to NOT necessarily be a 2-dimensional cartoon hellbeast, but alas, merely a man.

For a relatively young, post-war Boomer like myself, this spellbinding movie poses a question which is more fascinating than Hitler himself ever was. Out here in ultra-liberal California, why do we still pay any attention to this guy? He died in the Bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945, five years before I was even born.

Over the years, I've seen multiple object lessons on the benefits of tolerance and the sheer self-destructiveness of intolerance. I've seen everything improve from my love-life to my job prospects, as I have become more tolerant, more "easy-going" over the years.

Maybe it's because World War Two is one of the cases in which good really did vanquish evil.

On the other hand, maybe there is something mesmerizing about mental pathology, or at least the type that this neurotic SOB had. This guy was no BS-ing Spiro Agnew, no sobbing Jimmy Swaggart, he was the "real deal", a man who truly did the devil's work. And yet, who coolly maintained a distance between his person and the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem". An animal-loving, sentimental vegetarian who loved bloody war. A raging maniac who revelled in his own anger, but who never himself killed anyone in civilian life. An adherent of "physical culture" who was sallow-skinned and infected with syphilis. A charismatic figure who spent his private life in an odd sort of solitude. A man who lived for a "glorious" past, but whose operatives created jet airplanes, robot bombs and the first ballistic missile, majorly contributing to the Twentieth Century which he so detested.

Yeah, sometimes pathological men are entertaining. And this movie tells us something about him and a great more about ourselves. Research on the Third Reich itself can become a form of conquest.