Abstract
This essay examines Mel Brooks’s famous 1967 satirical film, The Producers, as a study on the ruination of “History” enabled both by the inevitable dependence of historical truth on ruins whose incompleteness lays history open to (mis) interpretation and also by the anti-intellectual, ahistorical spirit of American capitalism manifest in the show-business sector. The term “hystery” is introduced to encompass both a trauma-induced failure of the senses (as in hysteria) to perceive historical fact and the pursuit of the “hysterical” joke in the entertainment business that leads to a fragmented, decontextualized and travestied presentation of history that ruins its organic significance. Thus in the film, the moral ruination of the innocent Jewish accountant by the wily producer is seen as a parable on the perils of reading ruins piecemeal to pave an amnesiac Broadway triumph with those very fragments.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Louis Marin (1994).
- 2.
The idea of the ghost after-image nevertheless aligns itself with Baudrillard’s notion of “recyclability” of history which ends up producing a “ghostly” version of “cloned events, farcical events, phantom events” and such distortions and caricatures of the original (1997, 452, 453).
- 3.
Defining “reversibility … a model that can be detected as an underlying pattern intrinsic to post-modern culture,” Botz-Bornstein explains: “All systems based on techniques, science, and logic are bound to run empty sooner or later because technical perfectionism kills the enigmatic surplus or the quantity of the ‘unknown’ that philosophical investigations should maintain if they want to be interesting and fruitful as philosophies and not merely as scientific accounts of realities” (2013, 2).
- 4.
I thank the anonymous reviewer who suggested this larger possibility to me in her/his astute remarks on my paper.
- 5.
For an alternative cinematic representation of the Holocaust through the absence of ruins, see Chapter 13 by Angeliki Tseti.
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Dokou, C. (2019). Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_12
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