Bonhoeffer/Wicked

Nov 28, 2024

Well, I wanted to do this particular article as a “special” but between rebuilding parts of my 20-year-old deck, traveling for my lodge, and going down to OR for the long weekend to spend some time with my friends… I’m OBE. I will be doing the planned piece later in the year regarding the west coast’s idiocy with new vehicle laws, and how that’s going to bite them in the ass. I’m on the road on Wednesday, so it’s getting written Tuesday. Please enjoy your feast, and raise a glass for those deployed.

Oh, and as always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar. While you can do a paid subscription here at Substack, and it’s a welcome donation, Stripe (the folks that handle the money for sub stack) get a BIG cut. The Tip jar money all goes straight to me.

Looking at the reviews, both of these movies seem to be rather controversial… The Left hates Bonhoeffer, and the Right hates Wicked. Well, let me share my perspectives.

First, Let’s talk about Bonhoeffer. A Lutheran minister named Angela Denker did a review on the movie for Slate… (a rag somewhere to the left of CNN and Pravda) but the thing is, I don’t think she ever saw the movie. Her entire multipage screed was a screaming fest about “the nationalist right, Christian Nationalist movement is taking my hero and using him as a justification to throw refugees out of the country, and destroy the environment!!!”

This all seems to be based on the fact that the movie was made by Angel Studios, and of course “those people are evil conservatives who all back Project 2025! Further they use Bonhoeffer as a Christian Martyr in the foreword of 2025 Giving his theological blessing to the document!!!”

Cue the rending of clothing and the ripping out of hair while screaming to the sky. Then she goes off on how “more than 80 Bonhoeffer descendants made statements about how evil Christian Nationalism, and TRUMP (foam, foam, slaver, slaver) is.

Pastor, get the fuck over yourself, and see the movie.

I don’t agree with Todd Komarnicki (the director, who does an intro to the movie) that Bonhoeffer was “the bravest man I ever heard of.” The events of the most horrible war in the history of war gave far too much room for heroism and bravery of all sorts, to make a statement like that, in my mind. And while Bonhoeffer was undoubtedly a man of great courage and moral commitment, “Bravest ever” is maybe a bridge too far.

His path was not one I follow, yet there is much to be admired about the man, and the movie gives a good accounting of that. This movie is another proof that you don’t need massive special effects budgets, and big names to make a film worth seeing on the big screen, and I want to talk about the film, before I talk about the man.

Hollywood has developed and pushed story telling through time hopping back and forth with no warning, past its reasonable use. It seems like there’s a school that teaches all the would-be film makers today that, “If you want to make a movie great, throw in at least five unannounced time jumps back and forth, so that people have to figure out ‘when the hell is this happening!’ If you just tell the story from beginning to end, it’s shit.”

Well, Komarnicki obviously took notes, because he does this, a LOT. I’m not a fan of it, as you may have guessed. Seriously, if you can’t tell the story in a linear fashion, then at least put down a subtitle with the date, as you change the scene. (Sometimes they did this, some times they didn’t, mostly they didn’t.) It was annoying, and it took what would have been a Six bullet rating down to a five.

They also played fast and loose with history a couple of times. The most noticeably in how Bonhoeffer was killed. (The fact that he was executed by the Nazis should not come as a spoiler.) Oh, I get it, the writers wanted to paint him as even more of a Christlike figure than he was, (which seems to me to be a little sacrilegious, but hey, not a Christian, so…) But NO, he was not put on a bus with 12 other Nazi political prisoners and hung on some hillside in the middle of nowhere, he was not offered his salvation the night before his execution, or any of that.

He was indeed hung less than a month before the war ended, but his actual death was far worse than portrayed. After a drumhead Court-martial, he was hung at dawn at Flossenbürg concentration camp, after being stripped naked, and marched to the gallows, along with the senior two members of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) a military judge, a businessman, and a resistance fighter. The only witness to the execution was a doctor who may have downplayed the torture involved to cover his own ass, having been ordered on several occasions to revive the strangled, so that they could be strangled again, and again.

Considering the fact that the people hung that day were ordered executed by direct order of Der Fuhrer, due to the discovery of Admiral Canaris’ (the head of the Abwehr) diary, where the attempts on Hitler’s life, and Canaris’ spying for the English were spelled out… (Seriously, WHO THE FUCK KEEPS A DIARY AS A SPY? What the hell was wrong with Canaris?) The thought that these guys might have gotten the full torture deal is not unlikely.

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None of these complaints take away from the fact that the movie was an incredible experience. There are a few movies that I believe should be mandatory watching. Saving Private Ryan, The Sound of Freedom, and now this one, are on the list. They should all be shown in high school, and if you’re an elected official you should be forced to watch them annually, as a reminder.

Let’s talk about the man in the film, for a second. I don’t know if Bonhoeffer was a Freemason or not, but his philosophy surely resonates with the lodge’s teachings. He didn’t believe in “religion” but in Faith, and he taught that faith in Deity was more important than color, creed, or what mouth sounds you make to describe the divine. That Jews were just as worthy as gentiles, blacks, whites, or green with yellow polka dots, none of that mattered. The ridged teachings of religious dogma were worthless without faith, but faith without religion? Well, that will get you there.

I was sad to note that, of the audience for the movie on the day we went, my wife and I where among the youngest patrons present. That’s a damn shame. Go, see the movie. Learn something.

Now let’s talk about Wicked. I came into this movie blind. I haven’t read the book, I haven’t seen the musical. The Right seems to hate this flick as much as the left hates the previous one, and for about as viable a reason.

“Oh, no, it’s a woke fest!” Uh, not that I saw.

“Oh, my goodness they hired a black woman for no reason, it’s tokenism bullshit.” Please! The character is GREEN for fuck’s sake, what does the color of her skin under the makeup matter?

“LESBIANISM!!!” Again, not that I saw. I don’t care what the actress under the makeup does to get through the night, as long as it doesn’t become part of her acting in the role. It didn’t.

Get over yourselves.

It’s a huge diatribe against “mean girls” and “Popular bitches.” But hey, they deserve all the scorn and disrespect they get.

The movie started slowly, WAY TOO SLOWLY, and there were a couple of the same sort of time jumps that I complained about in Bonhoeffer, but I’ll give them a little bit of a pass, because it felt like the sort of setup that the original Wizard of Oz had. The tie ins that explain some of the events of that movie are brilliant, there was some good foreshadowing, and while it will never be one of my all time favorites… (I’m a little miffed that they broke it into a two movie show… Seriously, the first movie is longer than the whole stage play musical… Why?)

The Scuttlebutt

Bonhoeffer/Wicked

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