Karina on SpoutBlog

I was really into that video that was going around last week, of the scene from Downfall transformed via subtitles into the story of Hillary Clinton’s last stand––not just because I dislike Hillary Clinton, but because there’s a goofiness to it that makes it seem more clever than your typical “this politician is just like Hitler!” joke. A lot of my favorite parts are too obscene to excerpt, although I do like it when s/he slams “those fainting sissies over at MoveOn.org” for “choking on their tofu because I voted for the Iraq war!” But I think I was most impressed by what I thought was the novel choice of material––a 3-year old German film detourned into YouTube propaganda? How imaginative!

Um, turns out, it’s not as novel as I thought. A twitter from Chuck Tryon alerted me to the news that Downfall has been the basis of YouTube parodies long before the Hillary clip came to light. Many of these parodies reconfigure Hitler as a frustrated Xbox user; Hitler also has problems using Vista, is unhappy to hear that his favorite soccer team has lost the Champions League Final, and is absolutely irate at an underling’s suggestion that he buy a new Mustang. There are so many Downfall spoofs on YouTube that I’m almost positive I was the last one to know that spoofing Downfall was, like, a thing that people did.

Almost all of these clips have view counts on YouTube in the six or seven figures. Downfall was the second-highest grossing foreign language film of 2005, but it still only made about $5.5 million. Almost certainly, more people in this country have now seen a clip from the film wrangled into a new context than would have ever seen the film in its original state. Downfall thus becomes part of the cultural conversation, but at the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these clips could effectively function as commercials for the film. Maybe it’s sad or maybe it’s totally appropriate, but it seems clear that the general YouTube user would be able to summon way more excitement for the concept of Hitler on the phone with Microsoft tech support, than they would for the concept of Hitler…doing Hitler stuff.