Cannes Film Festival

Let's dispense with all of the obvious fascism latent in the popular-judgement-based valuation of aesthetic merit which inevitably leads to a visual and artistic culture with the sole purpose of propagating the founding myths of the fascio-capitalist hegemony and focus on the recent events surrounding the exile and liminilization of the filmmaker Lars von Trier.

In comments made yesterday at his Cannes press conference von Trier said the following:

For a long time I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew, then I met Susanne Bier [fellow Danish director and this year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film] and I wasn't so happy. But then I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family was German. That also gave me pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler. I sympathize with him a bit...I don't mean I'm in favor of World War II and I'm not against Jews, not even Susanne Bier. In fact I'm very much in favor of them. All Jews. Well, Israel is a pain in the ass [pause] ... How can I get out of this sentence? OK, I'm a Nazi.

Why would this admission, which would seem to be so in line with fascist ideals, result in von Trier being banned by the fascist Cannes Film Festival?

The answer is twofold and is preceded by a caveat. The caveat is that fascism is distinct from Nazism, the latter being a violent and anti-semetic movement which is largely fascist.

The first, and less important reason for von Trier's expulsion from the delineated space of the fascist aesthetic, which is of course undelineated in that it permeates the very cultural fabric of the globalized-consumerist world, is that fascism disdains being called by its name. The reduction of fascism to its titulare essence undermines the very universalizing project that is fascism. To name it is to quarantine it. Fascism operates not on the plane of language, but above that plane. Fascism defines language, language does not define fascism.

The second, and far more important, is that no single statement is more anathema to the machiner of fascist self-promulgation than the admission that we are all always already fascists. It is a realization so true that it shakes the very cogs and wheels of the fascist apparatus, which is of course the interplay of all human "individuals"--which is of course a fallicy--expressed as "culture." Von Trier's admission of his always-already-fascistic inner-self threatens to derail the active assimilation qua education of the masses. Cannes could tolerate no self awareness lest its aims be thwarted.

And that is why Cannes Film Festival is fascist.