July 2, 2026 • 60 mins
This week, Molly watched Citizen Vigilante, a new film from the world's worst director.
Sources & Further Reading:
https://scoutmagazine.ca/remembering-gastowns-ambitious-but-doomed-modern-german-restaurant/
https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/cinema/hanau-attack-film-angers-victims-families
https://people.com/movies/armie-hammer-controversy-timeline/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/26/news
Simi, Pete, and Robert Futrell. American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. The richest man on the planet is
out of his fucking mind. But you already knew that.
We're taking a little side quest this week. I was
sitting at my desk on Monday, trying valiantly to finish
(00:22):
my script for the week when I got distracted. That's
probably no surprise to you either, But I kept seeing
increasingly bizarre posts, and my weird little guy alarms were
going off so loud I couldn't concentrate. I didn't have
a choice, really, I had to watch what turned out
(00:47):
to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird little Guys. I
(01:16):
really shouldn't even let myself peek at social media when
I'm supposed to be writing. This whole thing could have
been avoided, and I'd be telling you about the next
chapter in the life of Byron de la beck with
right now. We'll pick that back up again next week.
I promise I won't forget. But I was letting myself
look at a few posts just as a treat when
(01:38):
I saw it. On Blue Sky. Someone had posted a
screenshot of a tweet. It's posts all the way down
in the screenshot, there was an image A man in
a black turtleneck is holding a gun, and the text
on the image reads, first the Traders, then the Invaders.
(02:00):
Above the image, the post's author wrote, no point in
bailing the boat while traders are still busy chopping holes
in the bottom. The guy who posted this his name
was vaguely familiar, Matt Bracken. I remember him as a
frequent guest on Alex Jones's Info Wars back when there
(02:21):
was on Alex Jones's Info Wars. He's in Islamophobic races,
conspiracy theory. Guy, it's not important, he doesn't matter. The
screenshot I saw included a reply Elon Musk wrote one word, yes,
(02:41):
yes to what first the traders, then the invaders. I
recognize that rhetoric, and it's deeply troubling. But what am
I looking at here? The man in the picture looked
kind of familiar, And the man in the picture is
not Matt Bracken. Some kind of meme image, and the
(03:01):
man looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. So at
this point I'm stuck in the position of needing to
find out why Elon Musk is engaging with what is
clearly some kind of neo Nazi propaganda, so I had
to figure out where the picture came from. It turns
out it's from a movie. That's why the blonde man
(03:24):
in the turtleneck looked so familiar. It's Army Hammer. It's
been a while since I've seen him in anything. He
didn't really act much after the cannibalism allegations. Okay, to
be fair, no one actually accused him of literally actually
engaging in cannibalism, but one of the many women who
(03:46):
came forward with allegations that he'd physically, emotionally and sexually
abused them did have a lot to say about his
very graphic cannibalism focused sexual fantasies. The cannibalism thing ended
up in all of the headlines for obvious reasons. But
the real story is a lot of women say that
(04:08):
he hurt them. I mean, one ex girlfriend said he
branded her, and another accused him of rape. There were
a number of women with stories of extreme physical violence.
For what it's worth, the La County District attorney declined
to indict him, so he was never charged with a crime.
(04:28):
Take that as you will, but the scandal tanked his
career and last I had heard about him, he was
selling time shares in the Cayman Islands. He was, as
the right wing likes to say, canceled. But that was
five six years ago. Maybe what's he doing in a
(04:50):
movie now? Why is Elon Musk posting about it? Maybe
everybody else already knew this. I spent all weekend gardening
and reading old FBI five about a segregationist group from
the fifties. I mean, maybe you guys were all talking
about this online while I was a tractor supply having
a great conversation with an old man about the pros
(05:10):
and cons of the different bird features they have for sale.
I don't know. I had no idea people were talking
about an insanely racist movie that was somehow streaming on
x Quite frankly, I still don't understand what it means
for a movie to be available to stream on Twitter
(05:31):
dot com. You can watch movies there now, I don't know.
But let's get to this movie. It's called Citizen Vigilante,
and I do not recommend it. Sometimes on this show,
i'll describe something awful to you, like some pornography that
(05:52):
a Nazi made that I found and watched, or a
suicide note left by a teenage mass shooter, and I'll
tell you, hey, I don't recommend that you seek this out.
I don't think that you should find and consume this
primary source. I can't stop you. I'm not your mom,
I'm not your boss. I'm not telling you what to do.
(06:14):
I'm just telling you that, in my professional opinion, you
are unlikely to gain anything from it, and it will
probably be an overall negative experience. You will encounter something harmful,
you will have a bad time, and you will hurt
yourself for no reason. So I don't recommend it. This
is not like that at all. This time. I am
(06:34):
genuinely telling you do not pay money to watch this movie,
not because I think it will harm you. It just
sucks and you won't like it. You'll be mad at
me if you spend money on this, and I don't
want to contribute to it, making any money or getting
any downloads. You will get nothing from it. I promise,
it's just not worth watching. Don't spend money on this.
(06:57):
It'll hurt my feelings. If you feel like you need
to see it, well, I don't think I'm allowed to
recommend crime. I know Robert does but there's some kind
of double standard at work here, so I am not
advising you to steal, but don't pay for it. Citizen
(07:19):
Vigilante is a bad movie, like, regardless of what you
think I mean by that. Yes, the acting is bad,
the script is bad, the message is bad, the politics
are bad, the special effects are bad. The cinematography is
straight up bananas. The director is a lunatic, the star
is a very bad person. And with a run time
(07:40):
clocking in at about eighty five minutes before the credits roll,
I swear to god you could cut together a full
fifteen minutes of footage that's just wide shots of the
protagonist walking silently across the screen. This movie was a
sort of attempted comeback for both the store and the director.
(08:02):
It was Armie Hammer's return to the screen after five
years in exile, and, according to an interview with the director,
gave on a Nazi podcast that's kind of why he
was cast canceled. Talent comes cheap.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Ami Hemma.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I contacted via Instagram because he had no representation, and
then he didn't answer it, and then I stayed on
it and said.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
No, I'm real, look me up.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Blah blah, blah, and then we had a zoom. We
talked about the script, he was canceled.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
So for me it was also not like, you know,
I couldn't offer millions of dollars, so I felt, okay, look,
if you do it perfect.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's the film director. Ove boll Now, admittedly I didn't
know a ton about ball film guy, so if you
do know anything about uve Bowl, you're already rolling. I
had a vague notion that he'd made some pretty bad movies,
(09:12):
and that turns out to have been a real understatement.
He's one of the worst directors in modern film. A
lot of his movies are low budget film adaptations of
video games, and he's made a lot of movies, although
his pace does seem to slow down a little bit
after the point at which the German government closed the
(09:35):
tax loophole he'd been exploiting to finance his movies. One
of those movies, his two thousand and five film Alone
in the Dark, is ranked as one of the worst
movies ever made by a variety of film review sites
like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritics, Cinema Score, and the movie review
Query Engine, and back in two thousand and five, he
(09:57):
responded to this criticism of his body of work in
the most normal way anyone has ever conceived of.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I said, look, if you want to do it and
come up to Vancouver, I fly you up, actually, but
it will be a real boxing fight, because I hate you.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
He challenged film critics who'd written negatively about his movies
to come physically fight him, and he actually did it.
Five critics took him up on the offer, and I
think most of them thought it was just some kind
of publicity stunt, right, like they'd both get a little attention,
they'd kept people talking, and they'd all just be goofing
(10:40):
around having a laugh. But uve Bol wasn't kidding, and
he beat them bloody, starting with Richard Kianka, the Something
Awful founder better known as Low Tax. And again, maybe
you guys already knew this, but I'm just finding this
out for the first time. This is my first time
(11:01):
finding out that Ouve Ball punched Low Tax in the
face in a boxing match in Vancouver in two thousand
and six. I mean, what a world. It's so fun.
We can still find out new things that surprise us.
In twenty fifteen, frustrated by his inability to crowdfund, his
latest movie project on Kickstarter.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
He quit, so yes, Uberball and that is the last update.
We have only four days to do with the Rampage
campaign and that was my third campaign now after Poster
two failed, after Indigo Go for Rampage three failed, and
now kickstarta failed two And basically my message is fuck yourself.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
He did end up releasing that film, but he said
he was done with Hollywood, and he was for a minute.
He turned to his other main passion in life. According
to one of his weird YouTube channels, he's kind of
a foodie. He loves going to fancy restaurants and posting
little review videos. It's something he was doing for years
(12:13):
before influencers popularized that kind of content on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
So.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
He hired a Michelin star chef and he opened Bauhaus,
a German restaurant in Vancouver. It was apparently really good.
It won a bunch of awards and was generally positively reviewed.
Bau House closed abruptly in March of twenty twenty, and
most sources, including Bull himself, put the blame on COVID,
(12:40):
which makes perfect sense. March of twenty twenty, a lot
of restaurants went under in twenty twenty. They closed temporarily
and just never came back. But several sites that cover
the restaurant seen in Vancouver alluded to a long standing
dispute with the landlord, and the Globe and Mail right
out and said the lease was terminated by the landlord
(13:03):
as a result of a year's long legal feud, So
COVID was almost certainly a factor. It would have been
very difficult for him to start a new restaurant in
early twenty twenty, but this was because he was having
beef with his landlord. But either way, he moved back
to Germany and returned to filmmaking. Bull's first attempt at
(13:27):
getting back into the business was a German language thriller
about the Hanau shootings, a twenty twenty attack by a
far right extremist who targeted immigrants in the German city
of Hanau. The shooter fatally wounded ten people before going
home and killing his mother and himself. I didn't have
(13:47):
a chance to watch this movie, and there's very little
written about it in English, but one English language article
quotes relatives of several of the victims. Chetin Gultekin, brother
of Girkhankote, who was killed in the attack, told a reporter,
in my eyes, he kills my brother a second time
with this slur armin Hamza Kurtovich, whose son Hamza Kurtevich
(14:12):
was killed, said I will do everything to prevent Bull's
fantasy about right wing perpetrators from being burned into the
minds of German viewers as the true fate of my son.
The mayor of Hanau condemned the movie, saying, no one
in Hano wants this unspeakable film. Like I said, I
(14:35):
didn't watch it, but it's a thriller made by a
guy who makes schlocky horror movies, and he started writing
it less than a year after a mass shooting that
killed ten people. The synopsis in English that appears for
the listing on Apple TV says, in part, in words
taken from the killer's manifesto, it becomes clear how he
(14:58):
was a victim of fake news US and suffered from
serious psychological problems. That doesn't excuse the cruel murders, but
it explains how things got out of control. He wrote
and directed a movie about a mass shooting and released
it almost exactly two years after the attack, and The
(15:20):
movie is from the perspective of the shooter, and it
is based largely on the text of his manifesto, and
it was made without the cooperation of any survivors or
family members of victims. It seems like it was in
pretty poor taste. And that brings us to Citizen Vigilante.
(15:42):
His film about the Hanau shootings was based on a
very real mass murder of immigrants and people the shooter
perceived to be immigrants because they were not white. Bull
claims he wasn't glorifying it, he was just exploring it.
That's what film does. It probes the depths of the
ue in Psyche whatever. But Citizen Vigilante is a work
(16:05):
of fiction and it absolutely glorifies that same violence. The
Citizen Vigilante is fighting back against immigration. The film takes
place in an unnamed European city. I guess so you
could imagine that it's any European city, right. The racist
(16:26):
audience is free to imagine it's whatever city full of
brown skinned immigrants they have nightmares about. The film opens
on an aerial shot of the city and the word
Europe appears over it on screen. This is just Europe,
It's any city. In Europe accepted so obviously and very specifically.
(16:51):
I mean every time we're outside, it is so specifically Zagreb.
There's no effort made to hide that. People like to
joke about how you can really tell which movies that
are supposed to be set in southern California are obviously
filmed in Vancouver. I never can, because at least those
(17:12):
movies try to hide things like big road signs that
say Vancouver. But in this movie, in the opening shot,
the one meant to introduce us to this unnamed every
city shows us a huge office building with a red
and white checked sign on it. It reminded me at
first glance of the crest of Croatia. But if you
(17:36):
look carefully you can read the sign. It's the headquarters
of the Croatian National Lottery in Zagreb. And during a
dramatic scene where the police are on their way to
raid the protagonist's house, they keep passing signs for tram
stops for the city tram that runs through Zagreb. And
(17:56):
there's an uncomfortably long scene where we're just watching arm
Hammer sit on a bus and the sticker on the
bus window that explains how to open it in case
of an emergency is very visible, very large, and very
in Croatian. I mean, the movie is just so clearly
and so specifically set in Zagreb that it feels like
(18:20):
that's intentional or part of the message, or that Zagreb
is a character in the film, And it's definitely not.
This is all entirely unintentional, and the fact that you
can see any of these things is evidence of an
extreme lack of attention to detail.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I know that is not overrun by it by Muslims,
but I see this city as this kind of It
doesn't matter that it's Zagreb rese and for Europe, you know,
Coped Frost.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
That's bowl explaining to a far right podcaster that it
was just cheap to film in Zagreb fair enough, And
he brings this same level of attention to detail to
things like the protagonist's tattoos. And like I said, I
barely recognized Army Hammer because he hasn't acted in years,
(19:13):
so I had no existing knowledge of what this man
looks like with his shirt off. And usually in a movie,
when the camera lingers on a character's visible tattoos, it's
because they mean something. They're communicating something about the character
that the movie needs you to know. So I paused
(19:34):
this movie every time I saw a visible tattoo. Every
time there was a visible tattoo on this man's body,
I'm pausing. I'm zooming in. I'm studying them closely. There's
some lettering on his wrist, a scorpion and the Hebrew
letter alf on his torso, a triangle on his sternum.
What do they mean? They don't mean anything. They don't
(19:57):
mean anything. I mean, maybe they do to Army Hammer,
but they don't mean anything. For the film, I wasted
probably fifteen minutes trying to find a plot relevant word
in the Croatian language that included the letters amme. I
couldn't make out the first or the last letters on
this wrist tattoo, but they kind of zoomed in on
(20:18):
it at a very important moment. So it must mean something, right,
Do you know what it says? It says Hammer, because
those are Armie Hammer's real tattoos that he just always
has on his body. And one of the tattoos that
Armie Hammer has on his body is his own last name.
And that's just in the movie for reasons that don't
(20:41):
make sense. Armie Hammer's character is Michael Sanders, a former
United States Army officer who's a strange father has died,
leaving him a portfolio of holding companies that own thirty
five hundred units of rental property in unnamed European city.
His name is almost never used in the movie because
(21:02):
no one's ever speaking to him. There's surprisingly little dialogue,
and we only know he had a dad or was
in the US Army because around the middle point of
the movie, he has a tense meeting with his business
manager and he walks over to a bookshelf full of
knickknacks and starts picking things up and inspecting things that
his dead father kept in this office, including a picture
(21:25):
of the aforementioned dead father and his own framed college
diploma that says United States Military Academy, United States Army.
I don't know why you would give your estranged father
a copy of your college diploma. It doesn't matter. The
timeline is very unclear. He doesn't seem to be in
(21:48):
the Army anymore, but he says he was active duty
military when he found out his father died, and that's
when he came to unnamed European city to manage his
father's assets. So he quit the army. I don't think
you can quit the army. We don't know how long
he's been here. The film puts us right into the
(22:23):
middle of an ongoing situation. Here unnamed European city, a
blond woman has just been brutally murdered. She was stabbed
in broad daylight by an undocumented African immigrant. I'm not
sure how we know that, because we don't really see
the man and he doesn't seem to have been caught,
but that's what the plot exposition blonde woman tells us.
(22:47):
The movie is held together by frequent cuts to a
TV news desk, where this other blonde woman explains what
we're supposed to understand about what we're seeing. So we
watched this first blonde woman bleed to death, and then
the newscaster blonde woman explains that immigrants are murdering white people,
and white people are very scared, but they all love
(23:09):
this mysterious vigilante citizen who is quote delivering a brand
of justice that some believe the authorities have failed to provide,
targeting both criminals and those in power accused of allowing
crime to flourish unchecked. How long has he been doing that?
We don't know how many people has he killed. They
(23:29):
don't say, but he's obviously been at it a while
because he has a fan base. It's sort of a
Batman situation. And I'm not just saying that because he's
a rich guy who wears black and is meeting out
vigilante justice uve Bold tried to call the film The
Dark Knight, but he got a cease and desist from
(23:50):
Warner Brothers because obviously they have a movie called The
Dark Knight. So right after we meet the blonde exposition
device at the news desk, we're introduced to another recurring
element of the film. An Instagram style interface appears on
the screen and we see a series of social media
posts from people who love the vigilante. And the first
(24:12):
time we see our vigilante hero, it's in an aggressively
spliced together series of two second clips. He's doing a
sit up, he's loading a gun, he's doing a bicubcurl,
he's chambering around, he's doing a landmine press, he's looking
at all of his guns, and it just cuts back
and forth between him working out and him fondling his guns.
(24:34):
And I think we're meant to understand that his body
is a weapon, but also doesn't he have a lot
of cool weapons. He's strong and tough and cool and
handsome and mysterious. And then suddenly he's shooting three guys
who seem like they were probably about to do some
kind of crime, just really lighting them up. We don't
(24:56):
know these men, but he's shooting them. And the scene
is it's dark, like I don't mean that it's shot
in a way that makes the setting look dark. I
don't mean they turned off all the lights in the room.
I mean the screen is black. There is a surprising
amount of this film that takes place while the screen
(25:16):
is completely black. There are scene cuts where the screen
is black. I used to stop watch for up to
nine seconds, but in this scene, with each burst of
muzzle fire, you can see for a split second he's
dual wielding guns. There's blood spraying everywhere, and you're meant
to understand that this looks very cool. And at the
(25:36):
end he calmly steps over their corpses and walks away,
And then we're watching more Instagram posts from his fans,
and we cut back to the TV news studio, and
all of this is interspersed with these little snippets of
the Vigilante recording a video manifesto. The film isn't in
(25:57):
chronological order. Scenes from different points in the narrative are
just sort of cut together at random, and there are
long stretches of the movie where nothing is happening. We're
just watching someone walk a significant distance across the screen
or sit quietly on a bus, and not in a
way that builds tension. It really feels like they shot
(26:19):
a bunch of b roll in case they needed a
few seconds of filler here or there, and they wanted
to get it from a bunch of different angles so
they could decide which one looked best, but they just
ended up using all of it in the movie. There's
a full minute of the movie that's just Army Hammer
sitting quietly on a city bus, and in that minute
(26:40):
the camera changes angles nine times, and there is a
visible hard black cut every time they switch cameras, like,
why are we in his lap? Now we're behind him,
Now we're under his chin, Now we're a few rows
in front of him looking back. What does that tell
us is what are we doing? The camera is never
stick It's kind of nauseating. Apparently, uve bowl is known
(27:05):
to shoot handheld, So I guess some of this is
just his style, but I don't love it. I found
it to be unwatchable. In the film, our hero is
being pursued by an Interpol officer named Henry. I don't
think we know how Interpol Officer Henry came to suspect
(27:27):
the killer, but we just sort of jump into the
middle of the story and he's already being pursued by
this cop. The people love the citizen vigilante, but Interpol
regional chief Henry, well, he believes that he has a
duty to uphold the law. We start seeing the snippets
of the police headed to the protagonist's house around the
(27:48):
ten minute mark, and we keep seeing random snippets of
two police vehicles driving through Zagreb for fully half an
hour before they actually arrive. And during that thirty minutes
of little clips of them driving, you better believe we
see those armored tactical vehicles from every angle. There are long,
(28:11):
silent stretches of b roll of vehicles driving. We see
them from the sky. We get point of view shots
from the guy in the back seat. We're looking out
the window at the scenery. We get a few seconds
of what looks like is footage shot from a go
pro shoved into the waistband of one of the guy's pants.
It's sort of like PLV. You are his penis looking
(28:32):
up at him. I don't know. We get an upward
angle from sort of under the steering wheel, We get
close ups of the tires. You really spend some time
rotating around the vehicle. And there's no dialogue during this,
and it lasts forever. When the police finally arrive at
the protagonist's house, we see them walking toward the door
(28:55):
for nearly four minutes. I'm not kidding. There is four
minutes of them approaching the door. Three and a half
minutes of it is them walking up an exterior staircase.
It takes the movie longer to show us this walk
up the stairs then it would take to walk up
and down those stairs half a dozen times. We see
it from every angle. Drone shots from the sky, from
(29:17):
across the street, from inside the line of cops like
we're walking with them, sort of video game style, from
behind the rifle, low angle, like the cameraman is lying
on the ground. From ahead, from behind, we see Army
Hammer watching them on security camera footage on his phone.
We watch him watch it on his phone, and then
cut back to the drone footage so we can see
what that looks like from outside. While this is happening,
(29:40):
my husband got up to get a snack. I shouted
to him in the kitchen. They're still walking up the
stairs three times while he got cookies and put the
kettle on. I mean, I think the movie would have
been about forty minutes long if you just cut out
all the unnecessary parts where someone's walking her way. Aside
(30:03):
from the walking around, the central tension of the film
is the vigilantes revenge on behalf of two rape victims.
He visits a woman named Elsa in the hospital. They
were clearly not allowed to film in an actual hospital,
because we get a single shot of Army Hammer approaching
the exterior door of a real hospital in Zagreb. But
(30:26):
then it hardcuts to a very tight shot of him
approaching a door that has just been labeled room too.
The sign is in Croatian and it's on a piece
of plain printer paper that has been laminated and taped
to the door, you know how they always do in hospitals.
Elsa has been beaten and raped by a gang of migrants.
(30:48):
This is the film's central anxiety that white women are
being raped by non white immigrant men. Apparently the beating
left her in a conbe well for three weeks, and
she's only just woken up, so I'm not sure why
she's still actively bleeding from a cut on her mouth,
and I as though the beating has just wrapped up,
(31:09):
but that doesn't matter. The vigilanti doesn't identify himself, but
he says he's there to help. He asks her what
she wants to happen to her attackers, and she says
she hopes they go to jail. And he's so condescending, right,
He tells her, Yeah, that could happen, but it'll take years.
(31:31):
There will be a trial, you'll have to testify, people
will call you a liar. It'll be horrible for you,
and they might not even get convicted, and they'll probably
do it again. And wouldn't that be on your conscience?
He only ever speaks in a very cold monotone. I
guess that's a character choice, or maybe Army Hammer can't
remember how to act, but in this scene it feels
(31:52):
so aggressive. He's really digging into her, coercing her into
giving him her blessing for this unspe promise of violence.
So after he's sort of broken her down and berated her,
he asks her, do you want justice? And she says yes.
(32:13):
As he leaves, he's watching more Instagram videos on his
phone of people saying they love him. Now, this is
a bit nitpicky, but the screen life elements in the
film have a mistake in them. So if you look
at Instagram the poster the person who made the post,
their profile picture appears in the little circle at the
top next to their name. But your profile picture, you
(32:37):
the viewer, You the person logged into your account. Your
profile picture is in the circle in the bottom right corner.
But in every instance of this Instagram interface used in
the movie, the same picture appears in both spots, as
though we are always logged in as the person who
posted it. It's so small, but it's again just it's
(33:00):
this total lack of attention to detail. It's so careless. Please,
mister uve Bold, do not come to my home and
challenge me to a boxing match. But this shit sucks.
The film's other rape victim is a fourteen year old girl,
and again considering this is what you might call the
actual plot of the movie. Like, if you ask me
(33:22):
to very briefly say what is the plot of the movie,
I would say he kills the men who raped this girl.
But this doesn't start being part of the movie until
it is almost over. We don't meet this girl until
fifty five minutes into the eighty five minute movie. The
Vigilanti goes to her house to ask her and her
father's blessing, and the father says no, but the girl
(33:46):
wants the Vigilantes brand of justice, and she says yes.
And he ultimately murders all of the teenaged boys who
assaulted this girl, as well as the entire family of
one of those boys. It's a bizarre orgy of violence
that is just minutes before the movie ends. In between
(34:06):
his two meetings with these tearful white women whose honor
must be avenged, the Vigilante visits a brothel. As he
enters this rented room with a sex worker he's chosen,
there's a real moment of tension. What kind of fascist
is he? Because we know that this man is a fascist.
This is a fascist film. We know that at this point.
(34:29):
But does he despise sex work? Does he think this
is disgusting? Does he hate this woman. Is he going
to hurt her or does he want to save her
from this indignity? It turns out neither. He just fucks her.
(34:49):
He seems like he's about to finish when suddenly he
notices some water damage on the wall near the ceiling.
So he shoves the naked woman off of him, and
he gets up to inspect it, and it's mold. He
grills the woman, you know, when you let Johns shower
after sex, do you open the window to let the
steam out? And she says she doesn't, and she asks
(35:10):
him why he cares. Apparently he owns the building, right,
He's not these women's pimp, he's the pimps landlord, which
is just so many layers of being a curse on society.
So he owns thirty five hundred apartments and this brothel,
(35:30):
and then he throws her back onto the bed and
finishes fucking her, but he's staring at the mold the
entire time. I watched two interviews that director uve Bold
did with right wing podcasters. I'm sure he did other
press for the movie's release, but the ones I found
and watched were both with white supremacist content creators. One
(35:52):
American and one English. He spent an hour chatting with
British neo Nazi Mark Collette, and the sex scene was
a real problem for Mark and his co hosts and
the listeners of Mark's show. Why put it in there
at all? Some of the people in the live chat
for Mark Collette's podcast were disgusted by this. They felt
(36:14):
it made the protagonist immoral. They don't have a problem
with the extra judicial violence, but this extramarital sex, this
paying for sex, that is what makes this man disgusting
to them. And Both's answer was kind of incoherent. He
said he needed the sex scene so you could see
(36:34):
him stop having sex to look at the mold, and
he doesn't flesh that out at all. I'm not sure
what is underneath that statement, but when I saw it,
before I watched him explain it, I thought the sex
scene was actually the only part of the movie that
had any character development. This is the only thing we
(36:56):
see from Armie Hammer's character that tells me anything about him.
He's fine using women. He doesn't actually care about protecting women.
Right The citizen vigilante is avenging these white women's rapes,
but he does not care about that he owns a brothel,
(37:18):
and this isn't the kind of place where the women
are safe and in control of their working conditions. This
isn't a sex positive, feminist worker run collective of women
who are doing this by choice. These are naked women
who are scared of their pimp. He does not care
about women being safe, but he also is not going
(37:38):
out of his way to hurt these women. He's participating
in this process, but he's not going out of his
way to hurt the sex workers.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
He fucks this woman, but he's a gentleman about it,
and he leaves her a tip, and he doesn't knock
her around. He's handsome and competent and rich, but he's
still paying for sex at a seed brothel. He did
not have to come here and fuck this woman to
inspect his property. He could have set up a property inspection.
He could have sent a property manager. But he likes
the sex. He doesn't have any weird kinks. He's not
(38:10):
hurting her or abusing her, but he's also very distracted.
Even as he's about to finish, she's more focused on
the property than anything else. And I don't know, maybe
this is going a little too far. But maybe on
some level his anger and anxiety about the mold maps
onto the feelings that he has about immigrants. You know,
(38:32):
when we see the mold, it's this dark, insidious thing.
Infiltrating the plaster and making the paint peel off, it's spreading,
turning the white wall dark and ruining it. It's hard
to say if uve Bol meant to communicate any of that,
but you could read it that way. Women don't really
(39:08):
speak in the movie. The two rape victims respond tearfully
to the vigilantes questions. The sex worker is doing her job.
There's a bartender who says a few words to him
while serving him a drink. We have the blonde newscaster
who reads off a teleprompter, but at one point she
turns to a man in the room and asks if
(39:28):
she's supposed to read the text on the screen. All
of these women exist to fulfill part of the fantasy.
The raped women are fragile, white womanhood, a justification for violence.
They are not people, They are a motivation. The sex
worker and the bartender exist to serve and pleasure him,
(39:50):
and the newscaster reads off racist propaganda about crime while
reminding the viewer of the blonde, white womanhood that the
crime threatens. The whole movie feels like they shot several
versions of every scene and then cut the entire film
into fifteen second chunks and reassembled them in a random order.
(40:10):
There are a few times throughout the film where I
swear I'm seeing the exact same scene I saw before
for no particular reason. And in one scene, the protagonist
says the exact same line of dialogue twice in a
row seconds apart, but from a different camera angle and
with a slightly different inflection. I think they shot two
(40:33):
takes and forgot to pick one. The pieces don't fit.
There are plot holes you could drive a car through.
Even the Nazi podcasters who praised the film during their
interview with Bull had to admit to each other after
Bull signed off the call that there was room for improvement.
They wanted to like it. They kept trying to convince
each other that they did like it, but then they
(40:55):
took turns suggesting ways the movie could have been better,
like if it had established any kind of coherent motivation
for the main character's actions, or if it had a
clear plot. I agree with the Nazi podcasters on both
of those counts, but I can't sign off on their
third recommendation, which was that there should have been more violence.
(41:16):
The plot exposition TV newscaster gets an assist from a
secondary framing device. Throughout the film, we keep cutting to
these straight to camera interviews with the protagonist, and as
I'm watching it, I'm assuming that this is going to
turn out to be a police interrogation, but that never resolved.
We don't see him apprehended. There's a scene where he's
(41:39):
lecturing three teens on a bus about how riding the
bus without paying the dollar fifty bus fare is stealing
and stealing is destroying society, and then he pulls a
gun on one of the children and no one reacts,
and based on the emphasis on knife crime, this seems
to be one of those European countries where people don't
really have guns, so you'd think having a gun pulled
(42:01):
on you would be kind of a big deal. But
the teens keep mocking and taunting him and being surly,
nasty little teens even after he shows them his gun.
And later in the movie, he encounters the same group
of teens bullying another kid in the park and he
tases two of the boys and breaks their hands. It's baffling.
(42:23):
It doesn't make sense. I think they should have cut
the whole subplot with the three teens. I don't know
why that was in there. Toward the end of the movie,
we meet the judge who freed the assailants who raped
the fourteen year old girl. The vigilanti murders him, staging
the scene to look like a suicide. Through the TV
news voiceover, we learn that this is the fourth suspicious
(42:44):
suicide of a judge. The movie ends with the vigilante
calling the Interpol detective and they have a conversation on speakerphone.
So the climax of this movie is Armie Hammer saying
to the detective, you have to get my message to
the government, and that message society is being taken over
(43:06):
by quote Islamist extremists and the blind sided woke left
and people aren't gonna take it anymore. And that's the
first time those phrases are used in the film, like
that's the implication all along, but it feels shoehorned in
at the end to just get the buzzwords in to
make sure you know this is about the woke left,
(43:29):
and the detective says, well, I can't get the message
to the government, and the vigilante gently insists, and the
detective agrees, like it's weird dialogue, and so the detective
asks another nearby policeman to get the Prime Minister on
the phone. And that's it, right, We've been watching these
men play cat and mouse for an hour. There's all
(43:50):
these scenes where the detective is, you know, watching Army
Hammer from Afar, stalking him because he knows he's the killer.
And this cat and house game resolves in a telephone
call on speaker phone, and the cop just agrees he's
gonna let the government know about the phone call they had.
(44:10):
We have the internet. We spent the whole movie cutting
back to clips of Army Hammer making a video manifesto.
He doesn't need inner poll to have a meeting with
the Prime Minister about his message. He could have just
uploaded it to the internet. Like I said, the plot
holes are enormous. The movie just doesn't make sense. Like
(44:32):
the movie is racist, and the movie is violent, the
movie is evil, but like, fundamentally it does not make sense.
The plot is incoherent. The movie sucked. Don't watch it.
It's not worth it. You aren't gonna like it. But
the reason I watched it, remember, is because I saw
some weird posts. I saw Elon Musk agreeing with a
(44:55):
post that said, first the traders, then the invaders. There
were some people who wanted to love this movie who
were confused. He only actually killed a couple of immigrants.
In the final minutes of the movie. He kills an
entire Muslim family, But for most of the movie he's
(45:18):
killing white people. Why would he do that. He kills
a ton of cops, he kills some white judges. Those
two teen boys he beat up, one is white and
the other is black, but they don't seem to be
immigrants here in an unnamed European city. So what's the
point of this movie about how it's good to kill
immigrants if he barely kills any immigrants. So Elon Musk
(45:43):
is retweeting and replying to posts from people who are
trying to explain that they're trying to explain to those poor,
unsophisticated violence enthusiasts what's actually going on here. This is intentional.
The vigilante didn't make a missay. He had a plan
and he executed it. A few days after the film
(46:05):
was released, Musk retweeted a post that said, people who
are complaining that he spends the first half of the
movie murdering white people, not migrants, fail to understand that
it's hammering home an important premise always hang a trader
before you shoot an enemy. A few days later, Musk
(46:25):
posted yes under that post with an image from the
movie in the text, first the traders, then the invaders.
And not long after that, replying to a post about
how immigrants threatened to drive white Germans to extinction, Musk
typed it out himself, posting, deal with traitors first, then invaders.
(46:50):
What does that mean? You don't need me to tell
you that it's racist and xenophobic. You can tell you
know that. But there's actually a really pretty killer context here.
Hang the traders first. The invaders in this context are immigrants, right.
(47:13):
That's the hateful word being used as shorthand here for
non white immigrants specifically doesn't mean immigrants, it means non
white immigrants. And the traders in this context are white
people who are contributing to the presence of those immigrants, right.
White people who are in favor of immigration, white people
(47:35):
who advocate for liberal policies, white people who are doing
things that pollute the pure white society and the pure
white gene pool. He's using this phrase first in the
context of the movie, talking about how Armie Hammer's character
killed a white judge before he killed a Muslim rapist.
But then he turns around and he uses the exact
(47:56):
same phrase a few hours later to reply to a
post about something in the real world, that post about
the decline in white German fertility. He's connecting the phrase
to this anxiety about the purity of the white race.
Invaders are non white immigrants. Traders are people who are
(48:21):
endangering the future of the race, and traders need to
be dealt with. The end goal is to be rid
of the invaders, to have a society free of immigrants.
But you can't do that until you've dealt with the traders.
That's what they're saying. This isn't a policy position, This
(48:42):
isn't an opinion on immigration law. This is a strategy
for winning a race war, and it comes directly from
the pages of the Turner Diaries. It's a foundational text
for white supremacist terrorists the world over, and it has
been for fifty years. It served as the blueprint for
(49:03):
the Crimes of the Order, the Nazi terror cell that
robbed armored cars and murdered Jewish talk radio host Alan
Burg in the early nineteen eighties. It directly inspired the
Oklahoma City bombing in nineteen ninety five, the deadliest act
of domestic terrorism in American history, and it was required
reading for members of the German terrorist group, the National
Socialist Underground. It's a book with a body count. We
(49:31):
covered the novel in an episode earlier this year, but
if you don't remember, in the Turner Diaries, there comes
a day called the Day of the Rope. The white
supremacists in the novel, who are engaged in a race
war for control of the country, cannot win until they've
killed all the race traders. Race traders hang first, first
(49:54):
the traders, then the invaders. Do you hear it. The
end goal is the expulsion, real elimination of Jews and
the complete subjugation or extermination of all other non white people.
The goal is to create a white ethno state through violence.
But you can't win a war if you have traders
at home. You have to hang the race traders first.
(50:16):
The white people who aren't on board with the cause.
I want to be so clear, I'm not saying that
liberal whites are the real victims of racism. That's not
what I'm saying here. That will be an insane thing
to say. The internal logic of Nazi propaganda does not
(50:37):
map neatly onto how structural racism exists in the real world.
These two things are largely separate, right, But a lot
of this Nazi propaganda logic comes back to the idea
that non white people are not intellectual equals of white people.
They are not worthy adversaries of the white supremacist and
(50:59):
in the apps of race traders, these white people who
disagree with them, in the absence of those people riling
up the minorities, so to speak, that we just wouldn't
have these same problems. You see, the sentiment echoed throughout
neo Nazi propaganda in the decades that followed. In his
book American Swastika, sociologist Peter Siemi describes a sermon he
(51:22):
heard given by a Christian identity pastor when he visited
the Aryan Nations Compound for research in nineteen ninety nine.
From the book quote, the pastor's face looked warped as
he spewed his racist vitriol. The race traders will be
the first to hang. It's the white race mixers who
are really ruining this country. At times, it felt like
(51:44):
he was speaking directly to me, targeting me. The race traders.
Some are in this very room. They hate immigrants and
Muslims and Jews, and black people and Hispanic people and
just about everybody else. But who's worst of all, White
people who don't agree, White people who are causing problems.
(52:11):
That's the most powerful enemy. You have to take out
the most dangerous enemy first. Race traders hang first. That's
what Elon Musk is agreeing with in those posts. And
don't tell me social media is not real life. Those
are just posts when the posts and question are made
(52:32):
by the richest man in the world on a platform
that he owns and manipulates in order to ensure that
his worst thoughts are broadcast directly at millions of people
who log into his right wing reality distortion machine every day.
Like I said, I don't think you should watch the movie,
but only because it's not a very good movie. I
(52:55):
don't think it's actually effective at communicating anything. I don't
think the movie is an effective vehicle for spreading a
message that isn't already everywhere. People who think all crime
is caused by immigrants don't need a movie to tell them.
They already think that, and uve Bowl is too weird
to pin down and say with this movie is proof
(53:16):
that uve Bowl wants a race war. I'm not saying that.
I don't think he specifically does want that. I don't
know what he wants. His politics are incoherent. Before I
made my husband watch the movie, he suggested that, well,
you know, maybe Bull is making a ham handed attempt
to do some kind of parody. This is weird social commentary.
(53:39):
He's taking a misguided stab at his own modern Starship
Troopers or something. But once he saw the movie, he
didn't think that anymore. In an interview he gave on
one of those Nazi podcasts, boll is quite clear he
believes the central lie of the film that immigrants from
non white country are ruining Europe, that they're dangerous, that
(54:02):
they are disproportionately responsible for violent crime. It is an
explicitly fascist film, without a doubt. The message is abhorrent.
It is a movie that glorifies vigilante violence premised on
racist lies about immigrant populations and bull has always been
(54:22):
a contrarian and a bit of a nihilist, and his
politics are a little scattered because he doesn't really have
a clear north star, and he might honestly be a
bit of an idiot pretending his accidents are art. But
he's had a very clear far right swing in the
last few years, since twenty twenty. Honestly, on YouTube and
(54:44):
on Facebook and on interviews, you could hear the same
bitter refrain we saw from random middle aged middle Americans
who didn't want to stop going to Chili's during COVID.
He had been about to open a second location of
his restaurant, and then his dreams were crushed. Maybe he's
always been like this, but he does seem to have
(55:05):
started posting with increasing fervor about his personal disgust for
drug addicts and homeless people and immigrants around the time
that those were becoming huge right wing talking points online
in the early pandemic era. I don't know what he's
believed at every stage of his life, but I can
(55:27):
tell you that he definitely has very standard right wing
idiot beliefs.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
Now it's like in this migration saying I'm very really
right wing, like we have to solve that problem.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
But the movie isn't what got under my skin. Watching
the movie didn't change how I thought about those posts
from Elon Musk about the movie. I think he sees
himself in it. That's the scary part he's posting about
the movie because he relates to it. I mean, he's
the world's leading solepsyst anything he's very interested in. It
(56:07):
is something that he sees himself in. Armie Hammer plays
a white immigrant whose a rival in unnamed European country
is business related and it may not be entirely legal.
His hatred of immigrants is never framed as hypocritical. The
viewer obviously understands that when we talk about immigrants we
mean black and Muslim ones. It doesn't mean someone from
(56:29):
another country. It means someone who doesn't look like you,
the viewer who is understood to be white. Immigrant is
a racial category, not a legal one. It's not related
to space or distance or national origin. It's racialized. Think
back to the Hanau shooter, the very real mass shooting
(56:50):
that Bull made a movie about. He was targeting immigrants,
but he just shot people who weren't white. Most of
them were German born. Musk The vigilant is rich. He
makes more than fifty million euros a year, and he's
always thinking about ways to squeeze more money out of
the poor. We see a meeting with his business manager
about how to speed up evictions, and this rich white
(57:15):
immigrant with no relevant knowledge or experience, has inexplicably decided
that he knows best. He has a solution for this society,
and the solution is violence. For musk the violence has
been structural. The holes he tore in usaid alone will
kill millions in years to come. Poor people, African people,
(57:39):
Muslim people, the same people the vigilante doesn't want to
see in unnamed European city. They know what's best. They
especially know what's best for the white people of their
new adopted home. They're willing to do what it takes
to change this place. They've chosen to bend it to
their personal will using violence, and in his obsession with
(58:04):
the film and its message, he seized on one very
particular idea to amplify traders first, then invaders. The richest
man in the world is obsessively posting, retweeting, endorsing, and
promoting an idea that comes from the most violent neo
Nazi propaganda ever produced in the English language. I've seen
(58:29):
my fair share of what i'd call day of the
rope posting. Guys who post like this want a race war.
They're accelerationists. They want conflict and death. They want to
push society over the edge into an orgy of violence,
from which they imagine they will emerge victorious, baptized in
(58:50):
the blood of their enemies, and ready to start a
new life in a white ethno state. They want to
see this world burn, and sometimes they try. They make plans.
They want to shoot up a power station and cause
a blackout. They aspire to be mass shooters, and sometimes
(59:10):
they do it. Sometimes they kill people. But there's only
so much they can do. Their audiences are small, their
messages don't reach millions. The chaos they cause doesn't often
ripple far beyond the communities they've harmed. I've seen plenty
(59:35):
of guys who feel this way, but they were all
just weird little guys. None of them were the world's
only trillionaire. So what happens when the man who wants
to watch the world burn has all the money in
the world weird little guys. It's a production of Cools
(01:00:12):
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly conger ourg Executive producers are Sophie Lectreman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(01:00:33):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. The richest man on the planet is
out of his fucking mind. But you already knew that.
We're taking a little side quest this week. I was
sitting at my desk on Monday, trying valiantly to finish
(00:22):
my script for the week when I got distracted. That's
probably no surprise to you either, But I kept seeing
increasingly bizarre posts, and my weird little guy alarms were
going off so loud I couldn't concentrate. I didn't have
a choice, really, I had to watch what turned out
(00:47):
to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird little Guys. I
(01:16):
really shouldn't even let myself peek at social media when
I'm supposed to be writing. This whole thing could have
been avoided, and I'd be telling you about the next
chapter in the life of Byron de la beck with
right now. We'll pick that back up again next week.
I promise I won't forget. But I was letting myself
look at a few posts just as a treat when
(01:38):
I saw it. On Blue Sky. Someone had posted a
screenshot of a tweet. It's posts all the way down
in the screenshot, there was an image A man in
a black turtleneck is holding a gun, and the text
on the image reads, first the Traders, then the Invaders.
(02:00):
Above the image, the post's author wrote, no point in
bailing the boat while traders are still busy chopping holes
in the bottom. The guy who posted this his name
was vaguely familiar, Matt Bracken. I remember him as a
frequent guest on Alex Jones's Info Wars back when there
(02:21):
was on Alex Jones's Info Wars. He's in Islamophobic races,
conspiracy theory. Guy, it's not important, he doesn't matter. The
screenshot I saw included a reply Elon Musk wrote one word, yes,
(02:41):
yes to what first the traders, then the invaders. I
recognize that rhetoric, and it's deeply troubling. But what am
I looking at here? The man in the picture looked
kind of familiar, And the man in the picture is
not Matt Bracken. Some kind of meme image, and the
(03:01):
man looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. So at
this point I'm stuck in the position of needing to
find out why Elon Musk is engaging with what is
clearly some kind of neo Nazi propaganda, so I had
to figure out where the picture came from. It turns
out it's from a movie. That's why the blonde man
(03:24):
in the turtleneck looked so familiar. It's Army Hammer. It's
been a while since I've seen him in anything. He
didn't really act much after the cannibalism allegations. Okay, to
be fair, no one actually accused him of literally actually
engaging in cannibalism, but one of the many women who
(03:46):
came forward with allegations that he'd physically, emotionally and sexually
abused them did have a lot to say about his
very graphic cannibalism focused sexual fantasies. The cannibalism thing ended
up in all of the headlines for obvious reasons. But
the real story is a lot of women say that
(04:08):
he hurt them. I mean, one ex girlfriend said he
branded her, and another accused him of rape. There were
a number of women with stories of extreme physical violence.
For what it's worth, the La County District attorney declined
to indict him, so he was never charged with a crime.
(04:28):
Take that as you will, but the scandal tanked his
career and last I had heard about him, he was
selling time shares in the Cayman Islands. He was, as
the right wing likes to say, canceled. But that was
five six years ago. Maybe what's he doing in a
(04:50):
movie now? Why is Elon Musk posting about it? Maybe
everybody else already knew this. I spent all weekend gardening
and reading old FBI five about a segregationist group from
the fifties. I mean, maybe you guys were all talking
about this online while I was a tractor supply having
a great conversation with an old man about the pros
(05:10):
and cons of the different bird features they have for sale.
I don't know. I had no idea people were talking
about an insanely racist movie that was somehow streaming on
x Quite frankly, I still don't understand what it means
for a movie to be available to stream on Twitter
(05:31):
dot com. You can watch movies there now, I don't know.
But let's get to this movie. It's called Citizen Vigilante,
and I do not recommend it. Sometimes on this show,
i'll describe something awful to you, like some pornography that
(05:52):
a Nazi made that I found and watched, or a
suicide note left by a teenage mass shooter, and I'll
tell you, hey, I don't recommend that you seek this out.
I don't think that you should find and consume this
primary source. I can't stop you. I'm not your mom,
I'm not your boss. I'm not telling you what to do.
(06:14):
I'm just telling you that, in my professional opinion, you
are unlikely to gain anything from it, and it will
probably be an overall negative experience. You will encounter something harmful,
you will have a bad time, and you will hurt
yourself for no reason. So I don't recommend it. This
is not like that at all. This time. I am
(06:34):
genuinely telling you do not pay money to watch this movie,
not because I think it will harm you. It just
sucks and you won't like it. You'll be mad at
me if you spend money on this, and I don't
want to contribute to it, making any money or getting
any downloads. You will get nothing from it. I promise,
it's just not worth watching. Don't spend money on this.
(06:57):
It'll hurt my feelings. If you feel like you need
to see it, well, I don't think I'm allowed to
recommend crime. I know Robert does but there's some kind
of double standard at work here, so I am not
advising you to steal, but don't pay for it. Citizen
(07:19):
Vigilante is a bad movie, like, regardless of what you
think I mean by that. Yes, the acting is bad,
the script is bad, the message is bad, the politics
are bad, the special effects are bad. The cinematography is
straight up bananas. The director is a lunatic, the star
is a very bad person. And with a run time
(07:40):
clocking in at about eighty five minutes before the credits roll,
I swear to god you could cut together a full
fifteen minutes of footage that's just wide shots of the
protagonist walking silently across the screen. This movie was a
sort of attempted comeback for both the store and the director.
(08:02):
It was Armie Hammer's return to the screen after five
years in exile, and, according to an interview with the director,
gave on a Nazi podcast that's kind of why he
was cast canceled. Talent comes cheap.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Ami Hemma.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I contacted via Instagram because he had no representation, and
then he didn't answer it, and then I stayed on
it and said.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
No, I'm real, look me up.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Blah blah, blah, and then we had a zoom. We
talked about the script, he was canceled.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
So for me it was also not like, you know,
I couldn't offer millions of dollars, so I felt, okay, look,
if you do it perfect.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's the film director. Ove boll Now, admittedly I didn't
know a ton about ball film guy, so if you
do know anything about uve Bowl, you're already rolling. I
had a vague notion that he'd made some pretty bad movies,
(09:12):
and that turns out to have been a real understatement.
He's one of the worst directors in modern film. A
lot of his movies are low budget film adaptations of
video games, and he's made a lot of movies, although
his pace does seem to slow down a little bit
after the point at which the German government closed the
(09:35):
tax loophole he'd been exploiting to finance his movies. One
of those movies, his two thousand and five film Alone
in the Dark, is ranked as one of the worst
movies ever made by a variety of film review sites
like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritics, Cinema Score, and the movie review
Query Engine, and back in two thousand and five, he
(09:57):
responded to this criticism of his body of work in
the most normal way anyone has ever conceived of.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I said, look, if you want to do it and
come up to Vancouver, I fly you up, actually, but
it will be a real boxing fight, because I hate you.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
He challenged film critics who'd written negatively about his movies
to come physically fight him, and he actually did it.
Five critics took him up on the offer, and I
think most of them thought it was just some kind
of publicity stunt, right, like they'd both get a little attention,
they'd kept people talking, and they'd all just be goofing
(10:40):
around having a laugh. But uve Bol wasn't kidding, and
he beat them bloody, starting with Richard Kianka, the Something
Awful founder better known as Low Tax. And again, maybe
you guys already knew this, but I'm just finding this
out for the first time. This is my first time
(11:01):
finding out that Ouve Ball punched Low Tax in the
face in a boxing match in Vancouver in two thousand
and six. I mean, what a world. It's so fun.
We can still find out new things that surprise us.
In twenty fifteen, frustrated by his inability to crowdfund, his
latest movie project on Kickstarter.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
He quit, so yes, Uberball and that is the last update.
We have only four days to do with the Rampage
campaign and that was my third campaign now after Poster
two failed, after Indigo Go for Rampage three failed, and
now kickstarta failed two And basically my message is fuck yourself.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
He did end up releasing that film, but he said
he was done with Hollywood, and he was for a minute.
He turned to his other main passion in life. According
to one of his weird YouTube channels, he's kind of
a foodie. He loves going to fancy restaurants and posting
little review videos. It's something he was doing for years
(12:13):
before influencers popularized that kind of content on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
So.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
He hired a Michelin star chef and he opened Bauhaus,
a German restaurant in Vancouver. It was apparently really good.
It won a bunch of awards and was generally positively reviewed.
Bau House closed abruptly in March of twenty twenty, and
most sources, including Bull himself, put the blame on COVID,
(12:40):
which makes perfect sense. March of twenty twenty, a lot
of restaurants went under in twenty twenty. They closed temporarily
and just never came back. But several sites that cover
the restaurant seen in Vancouver alluded to a long standing
dispute with the landlord, and the Globe and Mail right
out and said the lease was terminated by the landlord
(13:03):
as a result of a year's long legal feud, So
COVID was almost certainly a factor. It would have been
very difficult for him to start a new restaurant in
early twenty twenty, but this was because he was having
beef with his landlord. But either way, he moved back
to Germany and returned to filmmaking. Bull's first attempt at
(13:27):
getting back into the business was a German language thriller
about the Hanau shootings, a twenty twenty attack by a
far right extremist who targeted immigrants in the German city
of Hanau. The shooter fatally wounded ten people before going
home and killing his mother and himself. I didn't have
(13:47):
a chance to watch this movie, and there's very little
written about it in English, but one English language article
quotes relatives of several of the victims. Chetin Gultekin, brother
of Girkhankote, who was killed in the attack, told a reporter,
in my eyes, he kills my brother a second time
with this slur armin Hamza Kurtovich, whose son Hamza Kurtevich
(14:12):
was killed, said I will do everything to prevent Bull's
fantasy about right wing perpetrators from being burned into the
minds of German viewers as the true fate of my son.
The mayor of Hanau condemned the movie, saying, no one
in Hano wants this unspeakable film. Like I said, I
(14:35):
didn't watch it, but it's a thriller made by a
guy who makes schlocky horror movies, and he started writing
it less than a year after a mass shooting that
killed ten people. The synopsis in English that appears for
the listing on Apple TV says, in part, in words
taken from the killer's manifesto, it becomes clear how he
(14:58):
was a victim of fake news US and suffered from
serious psychological problems. That doesn't excuse the cruel murders, but
it explains how things got out of control. He wrote
and directed a movie about a mass shooting and released
it almost exactly two years after the attack, and The
(15:20):
movie is from the perspective of the shooter, and it
is based largely on the text of his manifesto, and
it was made without the cooperation of any survivors or
family members of victims. It seems like it was in
pretty poor taste. And that brings us to Citizen Vigilante.
(15:42):
His film about the Hanau shootings was based on a
very real mass murder of immigrants and people the shooter
perceived to be immigrants because they were not white. Bull
claims he wasn't glorifying it, he was just exploring it.
That's what film does. It probes the depths of the
ue in Psyche whatever. But Citizen Vigilante is a work
(16:05):
of fiction and it absolutely glorifies that same violence. The
Citizen Vigilante is fighting back against immigration. The film takes
place in an unnamed European city. I guess so you
could imagine that it's any European city, right. The racist
(16:26):
audience is free to imagine it's whatever city full of
brown skinned immigrants they have nightmares about. The film opens
on an aerial shot of the city and the word
Europe appears over it on screen. This is just Europe,
It's any city. In Europe accepted so obviously and very specifically.
(16:51):
I mean every time we're outside, it is so specifically Zagreb.
There's no effort made to hide that. People like to
joke about how you can really tell which movies that
are supposed to be set in southern California are obviously
filmed in Vancouver. I never can, because at least those
(17:12):
movies try to hide things like big road signs that
say Vancouver. But in this movie, in the opening shot,
the one meant to introduce us to this unnamed every
city shows us a huge office building with a red
and white checked sign on it. It reminded me at
first glance of the crest of Croatia. But if you
(17:36):
look carefully you can read the sign. It's the headquarters
of the Croatian National Lottery in Zagreb. And during a
dramatic scene where the police are on their way to
raid the protagonist's house, they keep passing signs for tram
stops for the city tram that runs through Zagreb. And
(17:56):
there's an uncomfortably long scene where we're just watching arm
Hammer sit on a bus and the sticker on the
bus window that explains how to open it in case
of an emergency is very visible, very large, and very
in Croatian. I mean, the movie is just so clearly
and so specifically set in Zagreb that it feels like
(18:20):
that's intentional or part of the message, or that Zagreb
is a character in the film, And it's definitely not.
This is all entirely unintentional, and the fact that you
can see any of these things is evidence of an
extreme lack of attention to detail.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I know that is not overrun by it by Muslims,
but I see this city as this kind of It
doesn't matter that it's Zagreb rese and for Europe, you know,
Coped Frost.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
That's bowl explaining to a far right podcaster that it
was just cheap to film in Zagreb fair enough, And
he brings this same level of attention to detail to
things like the protagonist's tattoos. And like I said, I
barely recognized Army Hammer because he hasn't acted in years,
(19:13):
so I had no existing knowledge of what this man
looks like with his shirt off. And usually in a movie,
when the camera lingers on a character's visible tattoos, it's
because they mean something. They're communicating something about the character
that the movie needs you to know. So I paused
(19:34):
this movie every time I saw a visible tattoo. Every
time there was a visible tattoo on this man's body,
I'm pausing. I'm zooming in. I'm studying them closely. There's
some lettering on his wrist, a scorpion and the Hebrew
letter alf on his torso, a triangle on his sternum.
What do they mean? They don't mean anything. They don't
(19:57):
mean anything. I mean, maybe they do to Army Hammer,
but they don't mean anything. For the film, I wasted
probably fifteen minutes trying to find a plot relevant word
in the Croatian language that included the letters amme. I
couldn't make out the first or the last letters on
this wrist tattoo, but they kind of zoomed in on
(20:18):
it at a very important moment. So it must mean something, right,
Do you know what it says? It says Hammer, because
those are Armie Hammer's real tattoos that he just always
has on his body. And one of the tattoos that
Armie Hammer has on his body is his own last name.
And that's just in the movie for reasons that don't
(20:41):
make sense. Armie Hammer's character is Michael Sanders, a former
United States Army officer who's a strange father has died,
leaving him a portfolio of holding companies that own thirty
five hundred units of rental property in unnamed European city.
His name is almost never used in the movie because
(21:02):
no one's ever speaking to him. There's surprisingly little dialogue,
and we only know he had a dad or was
in the US Army because around the middle point of
the movie, he has a tense meeting with his business
manager and he walks over to a bookshelf full of
knickknacks and starts picking things up and inspecting things that
his dead father kept in this office, including a picture
(21:25):
of the aforementioned dead father and his own framed college
diploma that says United States Military Academy, United States Army.
I don't know why you would give your estranged father
a copy of your college diploma. It doesn't matter. The
timeline is very unclear. He doesn't seem to be in
(21:48):
the Army anymore, but he says he was active duty
military when he found out his father died, and that's
when he came to unnamed European city to manage his
father's assets. So he quit the army. I don't think
you can quit the army. We don't know how long
he's been here. The film puts us right into the
(22:23):
middle of an ongoing situation. Here unnamed European city, a
blond woman has just been brutally murdered. She was stabbed
in broad daylight by an undocumented African immigrant. I'm not
sure how we know that, because we don't really see
the man and he doesn't seem to have been caught,
but that's what the plot exposition blonde woman tells us.
(22:47):
The movie is held together by frequent cuts to a
TV news desk, where this other blonde woman explains what
we're supposed to understand about what we're seeing. So we
watched this first blonde woman bleed to death, and then
the newscaster blonde woman explains that immigrants are murdering white people,
and white people are very scared, but they all love
(23:09):
this mysterious vigilante citizen who is quote delivering a brand
of justice that some believe the authorities have failed to provide,
targeting both criminals and those in power accused of allowing
crime to flourish unchecked. How long has he been doing that?
We don't know how many people has he killed. They
(23:29):
don't say, but he's obviously been at it a while
because he has a fan base. It's sort of a
Batman situation. And I'm not just saying that because he's
a rich guy who wears black and is meeting out
vigilante justice uve Bold tried to call the film The
Dark Knight, but he got a cease and desist from
(23:50):
Warner Brothers because obviously they have a movie called The
Dark Knight. So right after we meet the blonde exposition
device at the news desk, we're introduced to another recurring
element of the film. An Instagram style interface appears on
the screen and we see a series of social media
posts from people who love the vigilante. And the first
(24:12):
time we see our vigilante hero, it's in an aggressively
spliced together series of two second clips. He's doing a
sit up, he's loading a gun, he's doing a bicubcurl,
he's chambering around, he's doing a landmine press, he's looking
at all of his guns, and it just cuts back
and forth between him working out and him fondling his guns.
(24:34):
And I think we're meant to understand that his body
is a weapon, but also doesn't he have a lot
of cool weapons. He's strong and tough and cool and
handsome and mysterious. And then suddenly he's shooting three guys
who seem like they were probably about to do some
kind of crime, just really lighting them up. We don't
(24:56):
know these men, but he's shooting them. And the scene
is it's dark, like I don't mean that it's shot
in a way that makes the setting look dark. I
don't mean they turned off all the lights in the room.
I mean the screen is black. There is a surprising
amount of this film that takes place while the screen
(25:16):
is completely black. There are scene cuts where the screen
is black. I used to stop watch for up to
nine seconds, but in this scene, with each burst of
muzzle fire, you can see for a split second he's
dual wielding guns. There's blood spraying everywhere, and you're meant
to understand that this looks very cool. And at the
(25:36):
end he calmly steps over their corpses and walks away,
And then we're watching more Instagram posts from his fans,
and we cut back to the TV news studio, and
all of this is interspersed with these little snippets of
the Vigilante recording a video manifesto. The film isn't in
(25:57):
chronological order. Scenes from different points in the narrative are
just sort of cut together at random, and there are
long stretches of the movie where nothing is happening. We're
just watching someone walk a significant distance across the screen
or sit quietly on a bus, and not in a
way that builds tension. It really feels like they shot
(26:19):
a bunch of b roll in case they needed a
few seconds of filler here or there, and they wanted
to get it from a bunch of different angles so
they could decide which one looked best, but they just
ended up using all of it in the movie. There's
a full minute of the movie that's just Army Hammer
sitting quietly on a city bus, and in that minute
(26:40):
the camera changes angles nine times, and there is a
visible hard black cut every time they switch cameras, like,
why are we in his lap? Now we're behind him,
Now we're under his chin, Now we're a few rows
in front of him looking back. What does that tell
us is what are we doing? The camera is never
stick It's kind of nauseating. Apparently, uve bowl is known
(27:05):
to shoot handheld, So I guess some of this is
just his style, but I don't love it. I found
it to be unwatchable. In the film, our hero is
being pursued by an Interpol officer named Henry. I don't
think we know how Interpol Officer Henry came to suspect
(27:27):
the killer, but we just sort of jump into the
middle of the story and he's already being pursued by
this cop. The people love the citizen vigilante, but Interpol
regional chief Henry, well, he believes that he has a
duty to uphold the law. We start seeing the snippets
of the police headed to the protagonist's house around the
(27:48):
ten minute mark, and we keep seeing random snippets of
two police vehicles driving through Zagreb for fully half an
hour before they actually arrive. And during that thirty minutes
of little clips of them driving, you better believe we
see those armored tactical vehicles from every angle. There are long,
(28:11):
silent stretches of b roll of vehicles driving. We see
them from the sky. We get point of view shots
from the guy in the back seat. We're looking out
the window at the scenery. We get a few seconds
of what looks like is footage shot from a go
pro shoved into the waistband of one of the guy's pants.
It's sort of like PLV. You are his penis looking
(28:32):
up at him. I don't know. We get an upward
angle from sort of under the steering wheel, We get
close ups of the tires. You really spend some time
rotating around the vehicle. And there's no dialogue during this,
and it lasts forever. When the police finally arrive at
the protagonist's house, we see them walking toward the door
(28:55):
for nearly four minutes. I'm not kidding. There is four
minutes of them approaching the door. Three and a half
minutes of it is them walking up an exterior staircase.
It takes the movie longer to show us this walk
up the stairs then it would take to walk up
and down those stairs half a dozen times. We see
it from every angle. Drone shots from the sky, from
(29:17):
across the street, from inside the line of cops like
we're walking with them, sort of video game style, from
behind the rifle, low angle, like the cameraman is lying
on the ground. From ahead, from behind, we see Army
Hammer watching them on security camera footage on his phone.
We watch him watch it on his phone, and then
cut back to the drone footage so we can see
what that looks like from outside. While this is happening,
(29:40):
my husband got up to get a snack. I shouted
to him in the kitchen. They're still walking up the
stairs three times while he got cookies and put the
kettle on. I mean, I think the movie would have
been about forty minutes long if you just cut out
all the unnecessary parts where someone's walking her way. Aside
(30:03):
from the walking around, the central tension of the film
is the vigilantes revenge on behalf of two rape victims.
He visits a woman named Elsa in the hospital. They
were clearly not allowed to film in an actual hospital,
because we get a single shot of Army Hammer approaching
the exterior door of a real hospital in Zagreb. But
(30:26):
then it hardcuts to a very tight shot of him
approaching a door that has just been labeled room too.
The sign is in Croatian and it's on a piece
of plain printer paper that has been laminated and taped
to the door, you know how they always do in hospitals.
Elsa has been beaten and raped by a gang of migrants.
(30:48):
This is the film's central anxiety that white women are
being raped by non white immigrant men. Apparently the beating
left her in a conbe well for three weeks, and
she's only just woken up, so I'm not sure why
she's still actively bleeding from a cut on her mouth,
and I as though the beating has just wrapped up,
(31:09):
but that doesn't matter. The vigilanti doesn't identify himself, but
he says he's there to help. He asks her what
she wants to happen to her attackers, and she says
she hopes they go to jail. And he's so condescending, right,
He tells her, Yeah, that could happen, but it'll take years.
(31:31):
There will be a trial, you'll have to testify, people
will call you a liar. It'll be horrible for you,
and they might not even get convicted, and they'll probably
do it again. And wouldn't that be on your conscience?
He only ever speaks in a very cold monotone. I
guess that's a character choice, or maybe Army Hammer can't
remember how to act, but in this scene it feels
(31:52):
so aggressive. He's really digging into her, coercing her into
giving him her blessing for this unspe promise of violence.
So after he's sort of broken her down and berated her,
he asks her, do you want justice? And she says yes.
(32:13):
As he leaves, he's watching more Instagram videos on his
phone of people saying they love him. Now, this is
a bit nitpicky, but the screen life elements in the
film have a mistake in them. So if you look
at Instagram the poster the person who made the post,
their profile picture appears in the little circle at the
top next to their name. But your profile picture, you
(32:37):
the viewer, You the person logged into your account. Your
profile picture is in the circle in the bottom right corner.
But in every instance of this Instagram interface used in
the movie, the same picture appears in both spots, as
though we are always logged in as the person who
posted it. It's so small, but it's again just it's
(33:00):
this total lack of attention to detail. It's so careless. Please,
mister uve Bold, do not come to my home and
challenge me to a boxing match. But this shit sucks.
The film's other rape victim is a fourteen year old girl,
and again considering this is what you might call the
actual plot of the movie. Like, if you ask me
(33:22):
to very briefly say what is the plot of the movie,
I would say he kills the men who raped this girl.
But this doesn't start being part of the movie until
it is almost over. We don't meet this girl until
fifty five minutes into the eighty five minute movie. The
Vigilanti goes to her house to ask her and her
father's blessing, and the father says no, but the girl
(33:46):
wants the Vigilantes brand of justice, and she says yes.
And he ultimately murders all of the teenaged boys who
assaulted this girl, as well as the entire family of
one of those boys. It's a bizarre orgy of violence
that is just minutes before the movie ends. In between
(34:06):
his two meetings with these tearful white women whose honor
must be avenged, the Vigilante visits a brothel. As he
enters this rented room with a sex worker he's chosen,
there's a real moment of tension. What kind of fascist
is he? Because we know that this man is a fascist.
This is a fascist film. We know that at this point.
(34:29):
But does he despise sex work? Does he think this
is disgusting? Does he hate this woman. Is he going
to hurt her or does he want to save her
from this indignity? It turns out neither. He just fucks her.
(34:49):
He seems like he's about to finish when suddenly he
notices some water damage on the wall near the ceiling.
So he shoves the naked woman off of him, and
he gets up to inspect it, and it's mold. He
grills the woman, you know, when you let Johns shower
after sex, do you open the window to let the
steam out? And she says she doesn't, and she asks
(35:10):
him why he cares. Apparently he owns the building, right,
He's not these women's pimp, he's the pimps landlord, which
is just so many layers of being a curse on society.
So he owns thirty five hundred apartments and this brothel,
(35:30):
and then he throws her back onto the bed and
finishes fucking her, but he's staring at the mold the
entire time. I watched two interviews that director uve Bold
did with right wing podcasters. I'm sure he did other
press for the movie's release, but the ones I found
and watched were both with white supremacist content creators. One
(35:52):
American and one English. He spent an hour chatting with
British neo Nazi Mark Collette, and the sex scene was
a real problem for Mark and his co hosts and
the listeners of Mark's show. Why put it in there
at all? Some of the people in the live chat
for Mark Collette's podcast were disgusted by this. They felt
(36:14):
it made the protagonist immoral. They don't have a problem
with the extra judicial violence, but this extramarital sex, this
paying for sex, that is what makes this man disgusting
to them. And Both's answer was kind of incoherent. He
said he needed the sex scene so you could see
(36:34):
him stop having sex to look at the mold, and
he doesn't flesh that out at all. I'm not sure
what is underneath that statement, but when I saw it,
before I watched him explain it, I thought the sex
scene was actually the only part of the movie that
had any character development. This is the only thing we
(36:56):
see from Armie Hammer's character that tells me anything about him.
He's fine using women. He doesn't actually care about protecting women.
Right The citizen vigilante is avenging these white women's rapes,
but he does not care about that he owns a brothel,
(37:18):
and this isn't the kind of place where the women
are safe and in control of their working conditions. This
isn't a sex positive, feminist worker run collective of women
who are doing this by choice. These are naked women
who are scared of their pimp. He does not care
about women being safe, but he also is not going
(37:38):
out of his way to hurt these women. He's participating
in this process, but he's not going out of his
way to hurt the sex workers.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
He fucks this woman, but he's a gentleman about it,
and he leaves her a tip, and he doesn't knock
her around. He's handsome and competent and rich, but he's
still paying for sex at a seed brothel. He did
not have to come here and fuck this woman to
inspect his property. He could have set up a property inspection.
He could have sent a property manager. But he likes
the sex. He doesn't have any weird kinks. He's not
(38:10):
hurting her or abusing her, but he's also very distracted.
Even as he's about to finish, she's more focused on
the property than anything else. And I don't know, maybe
this is going a little too far. But maybe on
some level his anger and anxiety about the mold maps
onto the feelings that he has about immigrants. You know,
(38:32):
when we see the mold, it's this dark, insidious thing.
Infiltrating the plaster and making the paint peel off, it's spreading,
turning the white wall dark and ruining it. It's hard
to say if uve Bol meant to communicate any of that,
but you could read it that way. Women don't really
(39:08):
speak in the movie. The two rape victims respond tearfully
to the vigilantes questions. The sex worker is doing her job.
There's a bartender who says a few words to him
while serving him a drink. We have the blonde newscaster
who reads off a teleprompter, but at one point she
turns to a man in the room and asks if
(39:28):
she's supposed to read the text on the screen. All
of these women exist to fulfill part of the fantasy.
The raped women are fragile, white womanhood, a justification for violence.
They are not people, They are a motivation. The sex
worker and the bartender exist to serve and pleasure him,
(39:50):
and the newscaster reads off racist propaganda about crime while
reminding the viewer of the blonde, white womanhood that the
crime threatens. The whole movie feels like they shot several
versions of every scene and then cut the entire film
into fifteen second chunks and reassembled them in a random order.
(40:10):
There are a few times throughout the film where I
swear I'm seeing the exact same scene I saw before
for no particular reason. And in one scene, the protagonist
says the exact same line of dialogue twice in a
row seconds apart, but from a different camera angle and
with a slightly different inflection. I think they shot two
(40:33):
takes and forgot to pick one. The pieces don't fit.
There are plot holes you could drive a car through.
Even the Nazi podcasters who praised the film during their
interview with Bull had to admit to each other after
Bull signed off the call that there was room for improvement.
They wanted to like it. They kept trying to convince
each other that they did like it, but then they
(40:55):
took turns suggesting ways the movie could have been better,
like if it had established any kind of coherent motivation
for the main character's actions, or if it had a
clear plot. I agree with the Nazi podcasters on both
of those counts, but I can't sign off on their
third recommendation, which was that there should have been more violence.
(41:16):
The plot exposition TV newscaster gets an assist from a
secondary framing device. Throughout the film, we keep cutting to
these straight to camera interviews with the protagonist, and as
I'm watching it, I'm assuming that this is going to
turn out to be a police interrogation, but that never resolved.
We don't see him apprehended. There's a scene where he's
(41:39):
lecturing three teens on a bus about how riding the
bus without paying the dollar fifty bus fare is stealing
and stealing is destroying society, and then he pulls a
gun on one of the children and no one reacts,
and based on the emphasis on knife crime, this seems
to be one of those European countries where people don't
really have guns, so you'd think having a gun pulled
(42:01):
on you would be kind of a big deal. But
the teens keep mocking and taunting him and being surly,
nasty little teens even after he shows them his gun.
And later in the movie, he encounters the same group
of teens bullying another kid in the park and he
tases two of the boys and breaks their hands. It's baffling.
(42:23):
It doesn't make sense. I think they should have cut
the whole subplot with the three teens. I don't know
why that was in there. Toward the end of the movie,
we meet the judge who freed the assailants who raped
the fourteen year old girl. The vigilanti murders him, staging
the scene to look like a suicide. Through the TV
news voiceover, we learn that this is the fourth suspicious
(42:44):
suicide of a judge. The movie ends with the vigilante
calling the Interpol detective and they have a conversation on speakerphone.
So the climax of this movie is Armie Hammer saying
to the detective, you have to get my message to
the government, and that message society is being taken over
(43:06):
by quote Islamist extremists and the blind sided woke left
and people aren't gonna take it anymore. And that's the
first time those phrases are used in the film, like
that's the implication all along, but it feels shoehorned in
at the end to just get the buzzwords in to
make sure you know this is about the woke left,
(43:29):
and the detective says, well, I can't get the message
to the government, and the vigilante gently insists, and the
detective agrees, like it's weird dialogue, and so the detective
asks another nearby policeman to get the Prime Minister on
the phone. And that's it, right, We've been watching these
men play cat and mouse for an hour. There's all
(43:50):
these scenes where the detective is, you know, watching Army
Hammer from Afar, stalking him because he knows he's the killer.
And this cat and house game resolves in a telephone
call on speaker phone, and the cop just agrees he's
gonna let the government know about the phone call they had.
(44:10):
We have the internet. We spent the whole movie cutting
back to clips of Army Hammer making a video manifesto.
He doesn't need inner poll to have a meeting with
the Prime Minister about his message. He could have just
uploaded it to the internet. Like I said, the plot
holes are enormous. The movie just doesn't make sense. Like
(44:32):
the movie is racist, and the movie is violent, the
movie is evil, but like, fundamentally it does not make sense.
The plot is incoherent. The movie sucked. Don't watch it.
It's not worth it. You aren't gonna like it. But
the reason I watched it, remember, is because I saw
some weird posts. I saw Elon Musk agreeing with a
(44:55):
post that said, first the traders, then the invaders. There
were some people who wanted to love this movie who
were confused. He only actually killed a couple of immigrants.
In the final minutes of the movie. He kills an
entire Muslim family, But for most of the movie he's
(45:18):
killing white people. Why would he do that. He kills
a ton of cops, he kills some white judges. Those
two teen boys he beat up, one is white and
the other is black, but they don't seem to be
immigrants here in an unnamed European city. So what's the
point of this movie about how it's good to kill
immigrants if he barely kills any immigrants. So Elon Musk
(45:43):
is retweeting and replying to posts from people who are
trying to explain that they're trying to explain to those poor,
unsophisticated violence enthusiasts what's actually going on here. This is intentional.
The vigilante didn't make a missay. He had a plan
and he executed it. A few days after the film
(46:05):
was released, Musk retweeted a post that said, people who
are complaining that he spends the first half of the
movie murdering white people, not migrants, fail to understand that
it's hammering home an important premise always hang a trader
before you shoot an enemy. A few days later, Musk
(46:25):
posted yes under that post with an image from the
movie in the text, first the traders, then the invaders.
And not long after that, replying to a post about
how immigrants threatened to drive white Germans to extinction, Musk
typed it out himself, posting, deal with traitors first, then invaders.
(46:50):
What does that mean? You don't need me to tell
you that it's racist and xenophobic. You can tell you
know that. But there's actually a really pretty killer context here.
Hang the traders first. The invaders in this context are immigrants, right.
(47:13):
That's the hateful word being used as shorthand here for
non white immigrants specifically doesn't mean immigrants, it means non
white immigrants. And the traders in this context are white
people who are contributing to the presence of those immigrants, right.
White people who are in favor of immigration, white people
(47:35):
who advocate for liberal policies, white people who are doing
things that pollute the pure white society and the pure
white gene pool. He's using this phrase first in the
context of the movie, talking about how Armie Hammer's character
killed a white judge before he killed a Muslim rapist.
But then he turns around and he uses the exact
(47:56):
same phrase a few hours later to reply to a
post about something in the real world, that post about
the decline in white German fertility. He's connecting the phrase
to this anxiety about the purity of the white race.
Invaders are non white immigrants. Traders are people who are
(48:21):
endangering the future of the race, and traders need to
be dealt with. The end goal is to be rid
of the invaders, to have a society free of immigrants.
But you can't do that until you've dealt with the traders.
That's what they're saying. This isn't a policy position, This
(48:42):
isn't an opinion on immigration law. This is a strategy
for winning a race war, and it comes directly from
the pages of the Turner Diaries. It's a foundational text
for white supremacist terrorists the world over, and it has
been for fifty years. It served as the blueprint for
(49:03):
the Crimes of the Order, the Nazi terror cell that
robbed armored cars and murdered Jewish talk radio host Alan
Burg in the early nineteen eighties. It directly inspired the
Oklahoma City bombing in nineteen ninety five, the deadliest act
of domestic terrorism in American history, and it was required
reading for members of the German terrorist group, the National
Socialist Underground. It's a book with a body count. We
(49:31):
covered the novel in an episode earlier this year, but
if you don't remember, in the Turner Diaries, there comes
a day called the Day of the Rope. The white
supremacists in the novel, who are engaged in a race
war for control of the country, cannot win until they've
killed all the race traders. Race traders hang first, first
(49:54):
the traders, then the invaders. Do you hear it. The
end goal is the expulsion, real elimination of Jews and
the complete subjugation or extermination of all other non white people.
The goal is to create a white ethno state through violence.
But you can't win a war if you have traders
at home. You have to hang the race traders first.
(50:16):
The white people who aren't on board with the cause.
I want to be so clear, I'm not saying that
liberal whites are the real victims of racism. That's not
what I'm saying here. That will be an insane thing
to say. The internal logic of Nazi propaganda does not
(50:37):
map neatly onto how structural racism exists in the real world.
These two things are largely separate, right, But a lot
of this Nazi propaganda logic comes back to the idea
that non white people are not intellectual equals of white people.
They are not worthy adversaries of the white supremacist and
(50:59):
in the apps of race traders, these white people who
disagree with them, in the absence of those people riling
up the minorities, so to speak, that we just wouldn't
have these same problems. You see, the sentiment echoed throughout
neo Nazi propaganda in the decades that followed. In his
book American Swastika, sociologist Peter Siemi describes a sermon he
(51:22):
heard given by a Christian identity pastor when he visited
the Aryan Nations Compound for research in nineteen ninety nine.
From the book quote, the pastor's face looked warped as
he spewed his racist vitriol. The race traders will be
the first to hang. It's the white race mixers who
are really ruining this country. At times, it felt like
(51:44):
he was speaking directly to me, targeting me. The race traders.
Some are in this very room. They hate immigrants and
Muslims and Jews, and black people and Hispanic people and
just about everybody else. But who's worst of all, White
people who don't agree, White people who are causing problems.
(52:11):
That's the most powerful enemy. You have to take out
the most dangerous enemy first. Race traders hang first. That's
what Elon Musk is agreeing with in those posts. And
don't tell me social media is not real life. Those
are just posts when the posts and question are made
(52:32):
by the richest man in the world on a platform
that he owns and manipulates in order to ensure that
his worst thoughts are broadcast directly at millions of people
who log into his right wing reality distortion machine every day.
Like I said, I don't think you should watch the movie,
but only because it's not a very good movie. I
(52:55):
don't think it's actually effective at communicating anything. I don't
think the movie is an effective vehicle for spreading a
message that isn't already everywhere. People who think all crime
is caused by immigrants don't need a movie to tell them.
They already think that, and uve Bowl is too weird
to pin down and say with this movie is proof
(53:16):
that uve Bowl wants a race war. I'm not saying that.
I don't think he specifically does want that. I don't
know what he wants. His politics are incoherent. Before I
made my husband watch the movie, he suggested that, well,
you know, maybe Bull is making a ham handed attempt
to do some kind of parody. This is weird social commentary.
(53:39):
He's taking a misguided stab at his own modern Starship
Troopers or something. But once he saw the movie, he
didn't think that anymore. In an interview he gave on
one of those Nazi podcasts, boll is quite clear he
believes the central lie of the film that immigrants from
non white country are ruining Europe, that they're dangerous, that
(54:02):
they are disproportionately responsible for violent crime. It is an
explicitly fascist film, without a doubt. The message is abhorrent.
It is a movie that glorifies vigilante violence premised on
racist lies about immigrant populations and bull has always been
(54:22):
a contrarian and a bit of a nihilist, and his
politics are a little scattered because he doesn't really have
a clear north star, and he might honestly be a
bit of an idiot pretending his accidents are art. But
he's had a very clear far right swing in the
last few years, since twenty twenty. Honestly, on YouTube and
(54:44):
on Facebook and on interviews, you could hear the same
bitter refrain we saw from random middle aged middle Americans
who didn't want to stop going to Chili's during COVID.
He had been about to open a second location of
his restaurant, and then his dreams were crushed. Maybe he's
always been like this, but he does seem to have
(55:05):
started posting with increasing fervor about his personal disgust for
drug addicts and homeless people and immigrants around the time
that those were becoming huge right wing talking points online
in the early pandemic era. I don't know what he's
believed at every stage of his life, but I can
(55:27):
tell you that he definitely has very standard right wing
idiot beliefs.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
Now it's like in this migration saying I'm very really
right wing, like we have to solve that problem.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
But the movie isn't what got under my skin. Watching
the movie didn't change how I thought about those posts
from Elon Musk about the movie. I think he sees
himself in it. That's the scary part he's posting about
the movie because he relates to it. I mean, he's
the world's leading solepsyst anything he's very interested in. It
(56:07):
is something that he sees himself in. Armie Hammer plays
a white immigrant whose a rival in unnamed European country
is business related and it may not be entirely legal.
His hatred of immigrants is never framed as hypocritical. The
viewer obviously understands that when we talk about immigrants we
mean black and Muslim ones. It doesn't mean someone from
(56:29):
another country. It means someone who doesn't look like you,
the viewer who is understood to be white. Immigrant is
a racial category, not a legal one. It's not related
to space or distance or national origin. It's racialized. Think
back to the Hanau shooter, the very real mass shooting
(56:50):
that Bull made a movie about. He was targeting immigrants,
but he just shot people who weren't white. Most of
them were German born. Musk The vigilant is rich. He
makes more than fifty million euros a year, and he's
always thinking about ways to squeeze more money out of
the poor. We see a meeting with his business manager
about how to speed up evictions, and this rich white
(57:15):
immigrant with no relevant knowledge or experience, has inexplicably decided
that he knows best. He has a solution for this society,
and the solution is violence. For musk the violence has
been structural. The holes he tore in usaid alone will
kill millions in years to come. Poor people, African people,
(57:39):
Muslim people, the same people the vigilante doesn't want to
see in unnamed European city. They know what's best. They
especially know what's best for the white people of their
new adopted home. They're willing to do what it takes
to change this place. They've chosen to bend it to
their personal will using violence, and in his obsession with
(58:04):
the film and its message, he seized on one very
particular idea to amplify traders first, then invaders. The richest
man in the world is obsessively posting, retweeting, endorsing, and
promoting an idea that comes from the most violent neo
Nazi propaganda ever produced in the English language. I've seen
(58:29):
my fair share of what i'd call day of the
rope posting. Guys who post like this want a race war.
They're accelerationists. They want conflict and death. They want to
push society over the edge into an orgy of violence,
from which they imagine they will emerge victorious, baptized in
(58:50):
the blood of their enemies, and ready to start a
new life in a white ethno state. They want to
see this world burn, and sometimes they try. They make plans.
They want to shoot up a power station and cause
a blackout. They aspire to be mass shooters, and sometimes
(59:10):
they do it. Sometimes they kill people. But there's only
so much they can do. Their audiences are small, their
messages don't reach millions. The chaos they cause doesn't often
ripple far beyond the communities they've harmed. I've seen plenty
(59:35):
of guys who feel this way, but they were all
just weird little guys. None of them were the world's
only trillionaire. So what happens when the man who wants
to watch the world burn has all the money in
the world weird little guys. It's a production of Cools
(01:00:12):
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly conger ourg Executive producers are Sophie Lectreman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(01:00:33):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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