mikegerber.com

If you’re reading this, you doubtless know about the “Downfall meme”—a running joke on the internet where a segment of the 2004 movie “Downfall” is used to express real or feigned outrage at something important or not so. Bruno Ganz, playing an embunkered Adolf Hitler, freaks out at his generals not over the conduct of the war, but over the death of Michael Jackson, Kanye West’s feud with Taylor Swift, the behavior of Goldman Sachs, the housing crisis, etc. There are literally hundreds of these parodies floating around, and when YouTube began to take them all down in late April over fears of copyright infringement, Downfall Hitler ranted about that too.

There has been lots of talk in the weeks since over parody, the limits of “fair use,” and the nature of copyright in our mashup-mad, obsessively connected world, and since I have quite a bit of personal experience in these matters (I did a series of book-length parodies of Harry Potter, one of Narnia, one of Dickens, one of—you get the picture) I thought I’d say a few words on the subject.

The growth of modern parody—that is, using the form or substance of an original widely distributed work to comment on that work or other issues—has precisely mirrored the growth of two things: the worldwide mass media, and advertising. The first made the target easier and immensely fatter; the latter made parody seem necessary in a way that it might not have been previously. This process began just before World War One, and has accelerated relentlessly after that.

Standardization makes parody easier; idiosyncratic originals are more difficult to spoof because they have a more individualized relationship with each audience member. (This is why parodies of say, Picasso, always seem anti-intellectual; not so with the label on a can of Campbell’s soup.) As media became mass media, the audiences grew; the bigger the audience for an original, the bigger the potential audience for a parody. And these big, standardized media vehicles began to occupy more and more space inside our noggins. The targets were getting ever-juicier (more authority to lampoon, a bigger audience to please), and the people with the parodic turn of mind spent more of their consciousness tangling with big mass media products.

To a great extent—especially after World War Two—mass media has been paid for via advertising. Advertising brings the manipulative aspects of media to the fore, and so constantly manipulated audiences became ever-more cynical, not to mention interested in getting their own back. As content became more and more inextricably linked to advertising, audiences became more anxious about both the ads and the content. For 80 years, audiences have been trained to be self-protective in the face of media, and parody is both a natural consequence of that and an essential weapon in our arsenal of skepticism.

So, what does this have to do with “Downfall” parodies, and Constantin Film AG’s decision to encourage YouTube to take them down? Just this: The forces behind the growth of parody are vast and powerful…and precisely the same forces that made a little-known German arthouse film about a fairly uncomfortable subject a winning proposition in the first place. The people behind “Downfall” cannot reasonably expect to harness the benefits of a globalized, standardized, highly technological and manifestly for-profit mass media, while at the same time maintaining perfect control of their product once it has been injected into the world’s cultural bloodstream. Technology alone means that time spent in this regard is time wasted.

Nor, I would argue, should they want to. There is no reason for anyone involved in “Downfall” to believe that this meme does anything but make money for the original; they shouldn’t be encouraging YouTube to take the parodies down, they should be running Adsense ads for the DVD! The persistent attempts on the part of corporations to micro-control audiences’ perception of their product are not only illusory and doomed, but (ironically in this instance) also blatantly anti-artistic and verging on totalitarian. It is “think only what WE want you to think” in its purest form. Peter Cook’s celebrated bon mot about satirical cabarets and Hitler aside, these parodies do the opposite of aggrandize Der Fuhrer, and the restriction of them shows that the drive to control what others think is far from dead in our day and age.

To my knowledge, none of the creators of these videos were reaping any personal financial reward as a result of the films—though I would argue vehemently that, as their addition to the original is both transformative and satirical, they should be allowed to, for example, have Adsense running next to their video (the small amount of commercial benefit being roughly proportional to their time and effort, vis a vis the much, much greater time and effort expended to create the original). And of course there is no injury to “Downfall”; in fact many commentators have said that these parodies were the way that they discovered the movie in the first place. Restricting Downfall’s cultural profile by encouraging YouTube to make parodies of it verboten is not only bad business, it’s bad law, and doomed besides. The only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to restructure the entire internet, and while I think that’s not likely, we can be sure someone thinks it’s a great idea. (Cass Sunstein?)

So with no commercial dimension to the parodies, clear protection under US fair use laws, and an actual benefit to the original (as well as documented support from the film’s director), the removal of the videos is simply a reflection of modern corporate fascism. That’s a tough word, but I think it’s worth busting out. The evil of fascism isn’t simply in what it does, but also how it uses unequal power to create an environment that encourages reasonable people to act unreasonably, usually out of fear. YouTube isn’t evil; but it is only good when it acts in the common good. When it acts selfishly, or with cowardice–as in this case–it shows how corporations can easily lose their way, and take the rest of us along with them.

Whatever its benefits to our society, the modern corporation is relentless and invasive; it attempts to control whatever it can, however it can, for its own benefit, regardless of the damage that it might inflict as a result. Damage? Certainly—because most of our shared mythology is no longer public domain stuff like “Cinderella” but (for example) Disney’s version of “Cinderella,” more and more of the world’s shared culture can be controlled by a small group of mega-corporations. It’s time for this debate to stop being about who can or cannot remix The White Album. It needs to start being about how the rest of us should allow corporations to act. If you think there’s no connection between excessive copyright protection and the drive to patent the human genome, for example, or BP fouling the Gulf of Mexico and you and I having to live with the results, or the rise of stuff like Blackwater (not to mention Goldman Sachs), think again.

Lest you say I’m biased, I surely am—but I’m also sure that my work has been bit-torrented as much, if not more so, than “Downfall.” Do I wish people would pay me instead? Absolutely. Do I have rent to pay? Sure I do. And if it were Bruno Ganz (the actor who played Hitler so brilliantly) behind this push to remove the videos, I’d feel differently. But Constantin Films AG is not a person; it does not need to be fed or clothed, or put its kids through college. A corporation is nothing sacrosanct, merely a legal device designed to help society function better. It is certainly not more important than an actual person; it only seems so because we have let it overstep. While Constantin AG’s commercial rights and interests should be recognized and protected to a reasonable degree, the clear and present danger facing us isn’t lack of protections for corporations, but lack of protection for everyone else.

And by the way, if anybody reading this runs into Europa Verlag in a bar, tell that corporation it still owes me 100,000 Euros in unpaid royalties. I’ll forgive that debt when Visa forgives mine.