Weimar/Nazi/evangelical films
A watch list for progressive masochists from Becca Rothfeld’s “The MAGA Theory of Art” in Art in America.
Just as Weimar and Nazi films pandered to white-collar workers who refused to confront a new economic reality, evangelical films pander to a rural class that clings to an outmoded notion of small-town affluence—and thereby to a bygone socio-economic order. They present the rural as a refuge from modernity, a realm that economic history has happily bypassed. To escape deindustrialization and suburbanization, one must simply drive beyond the outer boroughs, beyond the billboards and the strip malls, and straight back into the mythic past.