Do you want to be Leni Reifenstahl?

You do not.

In the early aughts, when I was in grad school, there’d be academic debates in class about whether the objectively beautiful films of Leni Reifenstahl could be enjoyed aesthetically, even though she was a Nazi and these same aesthtically groundbreaking, beautiful films were fascist propaganda. Something tells me these debates wouldn’t fly now. People wring their hands about cancel culture. And yes, in some cases it goes too far, blah blah. But it does lead to moral clarity. Reifenstahl’s films should be studied, obviously, but never solely from the perspective of aesthetics, or even more obnoxiously, from the view of, “She was the first female filmmaker to …” No. She was a fascist who prettified Ubermensch psychosis that helped lead to the Holocaust.

Upon hearing Hitler speak for the first time, she wrote: "I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth."

You had an orgasm, good for you #girlboss!

She regularly defended Hitler on the world stage even as the atrocities piled up. And someone smarter than me explains why her films were such effective propaganda.