[[link removed]]

HE DIRECTED A FILM ABOUT THE 1939 FASCIST MSG RALLY — HERE’S WHAT
HE SAW AT TRUMP’S RALLY  
[[link removed]]


 

PJ Grisar
October 29, 2024
Forward
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Marshall Curry saw ‘brilliant’ stagecraft and dark, familiar
rhetoric _

Donald and Melania Trump at the Oct. 27 Madison Square Garden rally.,
Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

A couple of weeks ago, Marshall Curry saw a spike in search interest
[[link removed]]
in his Oscar-nominated 2017 documentary short _A Night at the Garden_
[[link removed]], about the pro-Nazi 1939
rally at Madison Square Garden.

The reason soon became clear: Donald Trump was using the venue as a
staging ground for a massive rally to finish off his 2024 presidential
campaign. In the weeks since, everyone from a state senator to
Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton drew a comparison between
Trump’s event and the one from 1939, anticipating a similar show of
nativism and hate.

Curry had to see the rally for himself.

What he saw up close was something strikingly familiar, if no longer
in black and white. He saw everyday Americans in good spirits
listening as a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of
garbage.” He heard Trump pledge to jail or deport “vicious,
bloodthirsty criminals,” language that echoed that of the ’39
rally’s keynote speaker, Fritz Julius Kuhn, leader of the German
American Bund.

He also saw a broader coalition, including Muslims and many Jews, at
Trump’s rally, a contingent he finds “puzzling.”

Curry walked away from the rally Sunday night feeling overwhelmed, and
unsure of how he, as a filmmaker, could respond to the onslaught.
I spoke with Curry, who won an Oscar for his 2019 film _The
Neighbors’ Window_, about what he saw. Our conversation has been
edited for length and clarity.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE THINGS THAT STRUCK YOU WATCHING THIS RALLY —
DID IT ECHO 1939 FOR YOU?

I’d never actually been to a Trump rally. I’d watched them on
television before, but it is a very different experience to be there
in person. And part of what felt so disturbing is that the audience,
when we were waiting to go inside, couldn’t have been more polite,
fun, just normal people, as if they’re at a football game having a
good time.

And when you got inside, it was like a switch was flipped, and
suddenly all of these same people who are like my friends and family
and neighbors seemed swept up by a lot of the dark stuff that was
being spouted at them from the stage. And that’s the thing that
struck me when I watched that footage in 1939, was that you see this
audience of Americans in their hats and their suits and their dresses,
and they’ve dropped their kids off with the babysitter and gone out
for an evening to cheer and laugh as somebody attacks people who will
be killed by the millions in the next couple of years.

 
DID YOU GO IN WITH THE FILM CREW? WERE YOU SORT OF COVERTLY FILMING? 

I didn’t have a film crew that got in, but I did have a pretty good
camera phone, and definitely shot some material. But mostly it was
about just witnessing it for myself.

WHO WAS THE FRITZ KUHN OF THIS? WE HAD THE COMEDIAN WHO MADE THOSE
RACIST JOKES, WE HAD STEPHEN MILLER. 

Trump is the master, of course. He’s the one who got them all there.
He’s the one who set the tone, and has been setting the tone for 10
years now. I don’t think that Donald Trump is a Nazi — I want to
be super clear about that — but he is a demagogue who uses the same
types of tactics as Fritz Kuhn and segregationist governors in
Mississippi, and that demagogues have been using since the days of
Sparta. They call forth people’s darkest impulses. They fill them
with fear. They use a dark humor. They use the symbols of patriotism
to attack outsiders, whether those people are immigrants or religious
minorities. And they do it in order to take power, and that’s what
you saw. That’s what we’ve seen for thousands of years, and
that’s what was happening that night.

The stagecraft was brilliant. The music was powerful and throbbing,
and the videos of Trump, where he looked so strong and stalwart and
handsome striding through the doors that opened as he arrived. It was
really well done, and that was also part of what kind of rattled me.

But then, Trump took the stage, and it was also a very weird
experience, because he seemed to read off of a teleprompter for about
five minutes, and then he kind of did his little meandering thing. And
people started to leave! And that was also extraordinary, to see him
unable to hold some of the crowd.

THERE ARE AT LEAST GESTURES AT SOME SORT OF A BROADER COALITION HERE.
THERE WERE MUSLIM LEADERS THERE, AND THEN OBVIOUSLY THERE WERE JEWISH
PEOPLE AS WELL. WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THAT?

That’s true, and it was this kind of puzzling experience to see some
of these gestures, and then to have a comedian say that Puerto Rico is
a garbage island, and to see Stephen Miller say “America is for
Americans” and to hear people just rail about immigrants and trans
people. The number of times that people talked about immigrants
killing Americans, immigrants raping little girls, on and on and on.

I saw that he had gotten a Muslim mayor to endorse him and other folks
on stage, and I remember eight years ago when he ran for president on
a policy of keeping Muslims from being allowed into our country
[[link removed]]
because of their religion.

Fritz Kuhn had a similar policy, a full stop of refugees. In that case
the religious minority was Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, but a
similar dynamic and a similar tool to define religious minorities as
the other, and team “us,” real Americans, against those people who
are here to take our things and destroy our culture. The gestures at
inclusion are really confusing to me, because it sounds like he’s
doing better with Latinos than Republicans have done in the past. I
certainly have Jewish friends who are supporting him, and I find it
puzzling.

DOES YOUR FILMMAKER MIND GO TO “HOW WOULD I EDIT THIS?”

I don’t know. I mean, they thought it through. They’ve already
made a movie. What you almost need is something to pull you out of the
movie. You are in an overwhelming, massive, throbbing soundtrack,
fast-cut action movie and you have no agency in it; you’re just
being swept by a tide of emotion.

The flipping and flopping between different things was disorienting.
You’d have him say, “We’re gonna destroy China.” People would
say things like that, and then they would say, “He’s the peace
candidate.” And they would attack people, and then they embraced
them. It made me think about that famous Steve Bannon line about the
whole goal was just to flood the zone with shit.

In the past, when I’ve watched Trump speeches, I’ve watched them
in small bits that were digestible and I could listen, I could
analyze, I could weigh how I felt about them, and I could critique
them and offer a response. And when you’re in that room, the flood
of misinformation and twisted points of view, frankly, overwhelmed my
circuits. Somebody would say inflation is skyrocketing, and you’d
say, “Well, actually, I think it’s come down to a low level at
this point,” and by the time you’ve even formulated that sentence,
there’s five new things you now have come at you. And that was also
a different experience to just feel like your circuits get overwhelmed
by the quantity of it.

The idea of creating media to respond to it felt pitiful, honestly. I
just thought the kinds of movies that I make usually are complicated,
analytical things that are nuanced and have turns and twists and they
would just be like a little flower right in the face of a torrential
flood. I left it feeling unsure how to respond, short of, you know,
making sure that people still show up to vote. And hopefully media
continues to do its job and remind people of who these people are.
We’ll see.

PEOPLE HAVE OBVIOUSLY LIKENED THIS TO THE ’39 RALLY. KAMALA HARRIS
AND OTHERS HAVE NOW CALLED TRUMP A FASCIST. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO
SOMEONE WHO SAYS “HOW DARE YOU MAKE THIS COMPARISON?”

I guess I would clarify that I’m not saying Trump is a Nazi. I would
point out that they don’t need to listen to liberals like me about
whether he’s a fascist; his own chief of staff and his own chairman
of the joint chiefs and Liz Cheney, who voted for him twice, who was
the third most powerful member of the House — all three of those
people have said he’s a fascist. His own vice president, who served
with him, will not endorse him because, among other reasons, he thinks
that he put himself over the Constitution.

It’s not about liberals. It’s about listening to the Republicans
who know him and have served with him. And if you’re not sure
whether he turns a blind eye to racism, just watch the rally that I
just went to where they let a comedian get up on stage and say that
Puerto Rico was a floating pile of garbage and make a racist joke
about Black people — that tells you who they are.

===

PJ Grisar is a _Forward_ culture reporter. He can be reached at
[email protected] and @pjgrisar [[link removed]] on
Twitter.

* Trump's Madison Square Garden Rally; 1939 Madison Square Garden
Rally;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]