alexis blog

Because the Broken Jug is a comedy, the message of Nazi imagery and propaganda is significantly less obvious because there are two goals, one is to promote the message of the Nazi Regime and the other is to make the audience laugh, two highly contradictory goals. The film is supposed to describe a society where the authority and order is broken, and the humor and opportunity for laughter in this situation. I liked to previous blog about this being a Nazi film, where we are able to laugh because this notion seems highly ironic and somewhat disturbing. My paper would focus on the challenge of promoting Nazi regime ideals in a way that is comic. It is easy to see why Goebbels did not like this film. The film’s moral of the story is that laws and authority cannot always be trusted, and Goebbels promoted that laws and authority will ultimately save the people. This film is most definitely a satirical false and my paper would focus on the irony that the judge who in the end is indentified as the guilty one conducts the trial. The message of the film is also about the failure of the justice system and how the judge allows his personal goals to interfere with his public ones and the harder he tries to cover them up, the deeper his lie becomes. The director begs the question, what does it mean if our judges are criminals? Who can we trust? What defines law if the system is corrupt? Because this film fits into the “happy films” category, there are strong elements of humor concerning the clumsy Judge Adams, who represents the disorder and uncleanly group that the Nazi Regime is so desperate to expel and exterminate. The propaganda in the happy films is much more covert propaganda, the message is that man’s private behavior disregards justice, which can be further analyzed that private behavior leads to corruption. Thus Nazi society should be thought of as a whole and not as individuals. We talked a lot in class about the significance of the male body; the physicality of the male body was a crucial part of the propagandist image of the Nazi in the 1930’s. The abnormal figure of Adam was both the object of humor and disdain and buffoonery is the embodiment of what a proper Nazi citizen should not look like. While his physical image is amusing, it sends the message to the audience that those clumsy in appearance will be clumsy individuals and make more private life decisions that affect the greater whole of society.