The Übermensch and the eternal recurrence in the film “The Believer”

On the other hand, neo-Nazi groups accused the production of defamation for depicting a case that for them dulled much of their political achievements and outreach in the United States. The film, in fact, is based on the authentic case of Daniel “Dan” Burros, a former member of the American Nazi Party who committed suicide after the press revealed his Jewish origins.

The film reconstructs some of the fundamental moments in Daniel’s political life. This character is portrayed as an intelligent militant who is defined not only by his taste for violence, but also by his extensive knowledge of the customs and traditions of the Jewish people he despises. His flair for oratory and the radicalism of his early Nazi political views attract the attention of Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) and Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell) members of a fascist organization operating underground. Both persuade Daniel to join their organization. There he will meet other neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Drake (Glenn Fitzgerald), an expert in handling long-range weapons and explosives.

In order to gain media attention, Daniel and his new followers, with the support of the fascist movement to which they belong, initiate a series of terrorist acts that end up inexplicably tarnished. First, they fail to blow up a Jewish synagogue. Mysteriously, the explosives installed were deactivated 30 minutes before the final detonation. Frustrated and faced with the Jewish proclamation that God had intervened to save the place, Daniel sets a more daring objective, to kill a well-known Jewish businessman, Ilio Manzetti (Henry Bean). Together with Drake, they prepare the attack hiding behind some bushes and armed with a long-range rifle. They only wait for Manzetti to come out of their meeting place to kill him. When he does, Daniel misses two shots. In desperation and frustration, they both decide to abort the mission, but when they do, Drake realizes that Daniel has a Talit attached to his waist. He immediately figures out that Daniel is Jewish. The two begin to struggle until Daniel shoots and leaves Drake wounded and lying on the ground.

Subsequent events recreate the most dramatic (and last) moments in Daniel’s life. After the failed terrorist attempts to gain media attention, he discovers that the fascist organization he belongs to is full of disguised FBI agents. He later learns that Manzetti was killed by a neo-Nazi who was none other than Drake. He had survived; however, the authorship of the crime was imputed to Daniel because he had publicly declared that he was going to kill the Jewish businessman.  To make matters worse, journalist Guy Danielsen (A. D. Miles) warns Daniel that he is going to publish his story in the press so that everyone will know about his Jewish origins and his inexplicable association with neo-Nazi groups.

Faced with the imminent end of his political career, and the subsequent exposure to death threats not only from Jewish groups but mainly neo-Nazis, Daniel understood that the best way to end it all was to return to where he had started. To a synagogue with his people (and with a good amount of explosives).

Daniel decides to immolate himself and take his Jewish childhood friends with him.  However, within minutes of the bomb going off, Daniel changes his mind. He climbs up the altar of the synagogue and warns everyone that explosives are about to detonate at his feet. As everyone desperately leaves the place, Daniel witnesses the last moments of his life while the fire, the result of the explosion, consumes the place. In a sequence of dreamlike images, Daniel goes back in time to the old school building he is trying to get out of. He desperately climbs the stairs, but always ends up facing his old teacher who implores him to stop. He ignores the warning and flees the place, but his teacher’s voice constantly urges him that “there is nothing up there”.

Clearly what transcends this discussion goes beyond any question of faith. It is about power. Daniel is a character identified with the power of the oppressor; he feels no compassion for the weak. He openly defies the God of his people. He is a sociopath who pursues absolute power in the streets by confronting even members of his own Nazi ideology. However, in the end we see that he enters into an open confrontation with the Nazis, returns to the synagogue to have one last encounter with the God of his people and immolates himself saving the lives of his former childhood friends. What does this profile remind us of? We do not know if the director or the screenwriter wanted to personify the figure of the Übermensch of the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, but the character of the film, Daniel, represents this incarnate power. Let’s analyze what coincidences we find between the two.

Philosopher David Birch (2020) helps us by compiling some of the fundamental characteristics of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. To begin with, he recognizes that it is a conceptual response to a decadent humanity that despises life, the strong, the vigorous. These properties were universalized at some point to turn the world into a nihilistic place in which the weak and the envious have triumphed. Its vital elen is the reactive will to power that seeks preservation, hatred of the strong, repudiates affirmation as opposed to absolute truths. Culturally Nietzsche identifies in the universalization of Christianity the culminating point of this process. Its ethos based on equality devalues terrestrial life because the realization of being is in the afterlife, it tends to a change of power to give it to the weak and take it away from the powerful, it promotes a slave morality that ontologically opposes good against evil.

The Übermensch arises in opposition to Christian values and decadent society. It has no compassion for the weak, lacks humility, pity, is not interested in duty. It has no moral or ethical limits. He affirms the overflowing abundance of life by turning what is bad and heavy into good and light. This being his nature, we can infer that this figure does not follow the conventional guidelines of society, he is not someone who identifies with political correctness or with traditional or conventional values. His purpose is to destroy idols and their culture through active experience. This is an opposition to the reactive will of Christianity that seeks to preserve the culture and semantics of power. The Übermensch creates its own values, it will rebuild the world in its image by destroying everything that impedes its purpose.

Although the association of Hitler and Nazism with Nietzsche’s philosophy continues to be denied, the fact is that there are many coincidences. The political struggle of the Führer was not only against the communism of the Soviet Union, but also against capitalism and its cultural bases, i.e., democracy, liberalism, and Christianity. The brutality with which they wanted to build their empire openly exposes them as a counterculture that wanted to dispute the hegemony of the world by destroying their opponents, exterminating them massively without any moral or ethical consideration to achieve it. In that sense, science, technology, and Nazi politics functioned as active experiences that allowed them to lay the foundations of a new world made in their own image and will, with their own values. Hatred of the weak is a recurring theme of their ideology because they repudiated living together with other cultures. Their racist vision made them distinguish between decent humans and humans unworthy of living. For that reason, they found in the Jew, in the incapacitated, in the blacks, in the communists a lineage of disposable humans. But it was not only a question of skin type or physical constitution of the body, what the Nazis most repudiated was their culture, their way of thinking and seeing the world, that is why they crushed them to extinction.

Why do we quote Hitler and Nazism? Because the character of the film, Daniel, is a fanatic of pure and brutal Nazism strictly identified with the hatred of the weak, of democracy, of liberalism, of communism. He is someone who idolizes Hitler and repeats his same rhetoric, he appropriates the active will of the Übermensch to achieve his purposes without measuring the consequences of the process or the deaths that this will involve. Daniel is an idol destroyer who sets out to build the world in his image, even if he has to burn it in the attempt. Daniel is the Übermensch, only that unlike Hitler he was not accompanied by faithful followers to help him capture power. A phrase unveils him when a group of Jewish veterans ask him what they can learn from him, and he says: “Kill your enemy”.

^{The following video has been published for educational purposes. Copyrights by Seven Art Pictures.}

The Übermensch is a complex figure. If we think only of its destructive and immoral side, we fall into an irreparable deception. For Nietzsche his figure represents the unification of opposites involving various ideas. While it can self-create, it can also self-destruct, that is its nature. In fact, Nietzsche thought of his figure as a man who becomes lord of himself, but to do so he must let his life pass through creation and destruction. Both conditions are ontologically linked. This means that the Übermensch is not only the reflection of the life he pursues, but also of the death his actions carry with them. He not only rebuilds the world, but he also self-destructs on the way. The latter may sound controversial and debatable to those who follow Nietzsche, but the German philosopher seems to ignore that there is a universal vital elen that is embedded in all matter. Human beings naturally carry it. It is by willpower (neither reactive nor active) that the oppression and annulment of another is ontologically impossible. The Übermensch is only a fictitious figure, but at some point, he will have to face his death by the natural response of the oppressed who will revenge his annihilation. The Übermensch will be constituted if he confronts his death and survives. Only then can he become someone more than a human. It is not in vain that Nietzsche recognizes that his figure seeks totality, cosmic unity through the radical opposition of senses that form his nature.

In the film we see that the character challenges the divine authority of his religion, and not only that, but he sets out to destroy it. But in the end a repentance is also unveiled that entails a punishment. When Daniel comes to his senses and forces his friends to leave him alone to immolate himself, he is recognizing that there is a divine punishment that he must assume, because otherwise the world that awaits him will be his public humiliation, the trampling of his values, his own identity, and inevitably death. In any case, the chain of events was going to lead to the end of his life. So, in the end it’s as if the character is questioning to whom he is accountable. To the imperfect humans who never understood his message or to the overbearing and abusive Jewish god he was confronted with since he was a child.

The following video has been published for educational purposes. Copyrights by Seven Art Pictures.

The film suggests that the character dies. Later, one sees dreamlike images (from a metaphysical reality) of Daniel entering the building that was once his school. As he climbs the stairs, the figure of his teacher appears, whom he challenged as a child for demonstrating to him, based on logical arguments, that the god of his people was arrogant and abusive and that he ruled based on fear. But, in addition, he suggested to him that his power was non-existent by asking him to destroy him at that moment without anything happening. The adult Daniel keeps this moment in his memory because it was the one that defined the rest of his life. Reliving it again after death in an endless chain suggests something: the existence of an eternal recurrence that is also part of Nietzsche’s thought.

The eternal return is a conceptual construction that suggests that life is cyclical, that is, that after death there follows a rebirth in an infinite chained series. In Nietzsche this process has a detail. Recurrence allows us to relive and repeat the same events of the past life, even if we are not conscious of it. Using a metaphor, Nietzsche (1882) explains it in these terms: “What would happen if some day or night a demon were to sneak up behind you in your loneliest solitude and say to you: ‘This life, as you live it, is the same as the life you have lived: This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live it once more and countless times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life will have to come back to you, all in the same succession and sequence, and the same this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and the same this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over and over again, and you with it, speck of dust.”

For Nietzsche this property of reality leaves us only two paths: either to live life to the fullest, so that we can enjoy it when we relive it, or to live it in eternal torment because not being aware that we are going to reproduce our mistakes, life becomes a punishment rather than a joy.

In the film Daniel is punished by a divine force to this eternal recurrence, but it is much more tormenting than the one raised by Nietzsche because it is focused on the moment of his life in which he breaks with the traditions of his people and converts to neo-Nazism. We see Daniel trapped in an endless loop of events climbing the stairs of his school building to reach himself and prevent the outcome that he already knows, however, we only see that he incurs in the same action of going up and up the stairs, it is as if in each certain stretch his mind is reset and fails to be aware of the endless chain of events that he is living. So, the character not only has to face death, but the tragic fact that he will not be able to repair the damage he did to his life and the lives of others when he defied the God of his people. In effect, the film suggests that a supreme divinity destroys him by applying a tormenting punishment, locking him in a prison where he will live in eternal recurrence the regret of having defied him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Birch, David. 2020. ‘I Am A God’: On Becoming More Than Human. Philosophy Now Issue 137.

Nietzsche, Freidrich. 1882. The Gay Science. Kindle Edition.