It took about two years for a scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 feature “Downfall” to become an internet meme Hall of Famer. You’ve probably seen some version of it. The late Bruno Ganz’s Adolf Hitler, dug into this bunker like a late summer tick, transforms in the space of a door clicking shut into an erupting Vesuvius, spewing lava-hot rage on his top officers.
Enterprising YouTubers changed the subtitles to suit whatever subject they wanted Hitler to be freaking out about in any given week, and for several years some version of it circulated before YouTube cracked down on our good time. Everyone had their favorite; mine was the 2010 version showing Ganz’s Hitler appearing to freak out about Jay Leno returning to “The Tonight Show.”
These days the internet moves much more quickly. Not even a couple of hours passed before online artists rolled up their sleeves to cook Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., for serving up one of the creepiest State of the Union GOP rebuttals ever.
Nestled in what appeared to be a kitchen display at her local Lowe’s, Britt dramatically read for the lead role in a Lifetime ‘90s-era woman-in-peril flick, dropping anecdotes about cartel-sanctioned gang rape, murder and the upbeat reminder that we are “steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world.”
“Mr. President, enough is enough. Innocent Americans are dying. And you only have yourself to blame,” Britt declared with an "angry teacher parent volunteer" energy. “Fulfill your oath of office. Reverse your policies. End this crisis. And —” for this part, she adopted a “9-1-1- call from the closet” whisper “— stop the suffering.”
I don’t think I fully appreciated what Kate Winslet and writer Will Tracy are doing with HBO's “The Regime” until I took in the highlights of Britt’s speech a few times. Britt has little in common with Winslet’s Chancellor Elena Vernham, the dictator of the nonexistent country of Middle Europe, understand. Elena knows how to perform, for one. She also dresses to impress . . . her will on her underlings.
Tracy, who co-wrote the script for “The Menu,” introduces Elena years into her iron-fisted rule and establishes how well-versed she is, or thinks she is, at speaking to the nation.
“My loves,” she calls her people in her impeccably staged official broadcasts where she touts her hard work at “smashing the failed state” and saving the country from “bandit radicals” of the left.
We can see how meaningless everything Elena preaches is but, oh, doesn’t she make autocracy look good! Her locks? Laid. Her drip? Flawless. Elena speaks about her regime as if she’s in a relationship with her people. “And so I bless you all and I bless our love. Always,” she tells them in her speech celebrating her seventh Victory Day – that is, the seventh year after she “won” her office in a “free and fair election.”
Tracy and Winslet have explained that Elena Vernham isn’t based on any one or two real-life strongmen; she’s a mosaic of many. Still, it's tempting to pick out certain traits – like her mysophobia or her obsession with starring in holiday song-and-dance performances despite being ridiculously tone deaf – and link them to specific leaders. For instance, she doesn’t simply want appreciation. She wants top billing in the dreams of her faithful. She wants to be loved.
“Broken people really love broken people, don’t they?” someone tells Elena in a later episode when her back against the wall. “They’re born in pain, so you turn their pain to anger and make their anger your cudgel. It’s brilliant!”
Political catchphrases, like memes, can twist our perception of the world. Elena speaks of having a “graceful mind,” which is what exactly? An undefinable and therefore unattainable state, save for the special and worthy who get it. It's a lovely sounding concept. Kind of like Middle Europe.
“Broken people really love broken people, don’t they?”
Elena’s land sits both geographically and philosophically between Russia and America’s European allies; their main resources are sugar beets and cobalt mines that the United States wants to secure exclusive majority control over in exchange for a sizable investment in Elena’s regime and agreement to look the other way as she cracks down on local protests with deadly force.
But she comprehends that how things look or sound matters more than what’s happening. Her party is called the New Liberty Front which sounds so, I don't know, free? And yet her administration allegedly protects her people’s freedom through surveillance and sanctions its law enforcement goons physical searches of its citizens.
When a group of miners protests and a military battalion responds by shooting them dead, she enlists their corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) to be her guard dog. He follows her around the hotel she’s co-opted as her political headquarters and palace with a moisture monitoring device until a nocturnal break-in reveals a better use for him.
Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts in "The Regime" (HBO)
All of this is about optics. Zubak isn't special. His entry level job could have been any member of his unit since Elena simply wanted a “butcher” in uniform. Luckily for her – Europe, not so much – Zubak only wants to please Elena and has a rugged sexy appeal, wrapping his violent inclinations in charisma.
Britt, one of the GOP’s youngest congressional members, was drafted along those same lines. She was supposed to play the reasonable, relatable young mom to Joe Biden’s supposedly doddering old man who, in his address, came out swinging. Her job was to make her party look good in comparison, and the Democrats lax on anarchy. Here’s how that worked out.
“What in the first week of acting school is this?” asked baffled X poster @nycsouthpaw
Soon after, a user who goes by the handle @BowmanInc spliced together an “Inside the Actors’ Studio” parody.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” jokes proliferated.
And the fun continued from there. One likened Britt’s 17-minute performance to an audition for a “Misery” reboot. John Fugelsang joked, "Guys I didn’t get to see the end of Katie Britt's speech but did she finally get to speak w/a manager?"
Political catchphrases, like memes, can twist our perception of the world.
“The Regime” isn’t as clean of a satire – an oblique way of saying that its comedic power is more reliant on Winslet’s excellent expressiveness than the setups. Maybe that’s a component of the environment. We aren’t merely post-“Veep,” a show that had the relative luxury of fantasizing about political fecklessness, but in an era when real-life political farce rains down around us and the actors are in a position to endanger and ruin lives.
This, I think, is what makes any joy one might take in MAGA conservatives’ misery over Britt’s broadcast debut temporary – and leave no doubt, the party’s leadership was aghast, according to many reports. (“What the hell am I watching right now?” a Trump adviser blurted, per Rolling Stone.)
But durable memes and other internet parodies are products of ironic remove, I think, which is something few of us can afford. Fifteen years ago we assured ourselves we were distant enough from Hitler and Nazism enough to make them into clowns. Most of us probably didn’t imagine a major political party would have overturned Roe v. Wade, either.
Or, for that matter, that they would enlist a woman to reassure other women that her party, the one working to destroy their reproductive rights and freedoms, is the “choice our children deserve.” While sitting in a fake kitchen.
Andrea Riseborough and Kate Winslet in "The Regime" (HBO)
Living in this bizarre reality augments the dissonance at work in “The Regime.” Elena is ridiculous but shockingly realistic. The humor laced through her lickspittles' obsequious efforts to placate her doesn’t quite dare you to laugh but isn’t going out of its way to encourage giggles either. This, too, is about optics; how can we easily laugh when we see the corrupt organs of our own sick political corpus behaving similarly every day?
The first of “The Regime's" six episodes shows Elena as a coddled ruler whose cabinet members appease her if only to keep the machinery going – a mechanism designed to line their pockets and those of their enablers, including the United States, leaving the scraps for the working class.
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Then again, the only members of the servant class that we see are Andrea Riseborough’s Agnes, the downtrodden palace manager. Elena never sets foot in the palace’s kitchen – that’s Agnes’s job, along with having given birth to the son Elena claims to be hers.
It’s plain to see Agnes knows something’s wrong with her leader’s mission but soldiers onward nevertheless. She’s just the help at the end of the day – same as Zubak. And Britt, perhaps, which further shortens the shelf life of this mockery. For every hilarious swipe at her expense, some believe everything half-baked statement she dropped.
That side-splitting “Downfall” meme was from a serious, depressing drama about the days leading up to Hitler's suicide, don't forget, and the story is told from the perspective of a secretary, Traudl Junge, who willingly went to work for him. At the top of the movie we see footage of the real Junge, expressing her guilt over the fact that she went along without thinking because she convinced herself she wasn’t a fanatic.
“In Berlin, I could have said, ‘No, I’m not doing it. I don’t want to go to the Fuhrer’s headquarters.’ But I didn’t do that. I was too curious. I also didn’t realize that destiny would take me somewhere I didn’t want to be. But nevertheless, I find it hard to forgive myself,” she said.
This is the scene worth recalling all these years after the meme’s relevance has subsided, and it hints at what we should be absorbing from “The Regime” as it airs simultaneously to the coming weeks of election madness.
Winslet is magnificent, and she makes Elena the sun queen around which all of her people revolve, an eminently GIF-worthy figure. We’d be wise to keep an eye on Agnes too, because the Elenas of the world couldn’t make it without the people just doing their jobs. And they're not the telegenic influencers making us laugh off proposals and positions that should terrify us.
"The Regime" airs Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.
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