It's easy to paint all of nazi germany as sadistic monsters, ripping the heads off of babies and throwing them into ovens, but the truth is a little more disturbing. We must rationalize and demonize in order to cope with the fact that some of these monsters, these murderers, were little more than bureaucrats
performing a grotesque but necessary function in order to make society a "better" place. While nazism had roots in mysticism and the occult, it also arose out of intellectual pursuits in genetics and socialism. The purpose of weeding out "inferior" gene pools of the jews, mentally ill, gypsies, etc. was to make the human race as a whole more strong. In this society, the individual was unimportant, only the propagation of the species. The idea that some of us are the "master race" while others are a "sub-species", while primitive pseudo-science, could be swallowed by a lot of people with the right motivators in place (and a master orator like Hitler to feed it to them). It's not enough, especially in hindsight, to recognize something as evil, whether it be a movement or idea, we have to understand how evil rises out of something benign.
"Heartbeat Detector" (also known as " La question humaine") centers around a corporate psychologist who, while extremely efficient in stream-lining the corporation, has suddenly found himself surrounded by executives with nazi connections. Granted, firing someone from a job is in no way equivilent to murdering them in a holocaust, but the methods and terminology of the business world are eerily similar to that of the nazis. Referring to men as numbers, it's easier to terminate them if they can be somehow dehumanized. Is there something intrinsically evil in trying to increase the "greater good" by eliminating the lesser and weaker members of an organization? Maybe Heartbeat Detector tries to make that connection, but one can always get another job if one is fired from a business for issues one has created for oneself. Being fired for being lazy isn't the same as being murdered for being born the wrong religion or race. It is an intriguing concept, however. Heartbeat detector is an interesting, thought-provoking film that challenges the notion of innocence or guilt when it comes to committing evil deeds.
June 27, 2011
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