Now, I’m not the type of person to get offended or angry with regard to fictional media. However, watching Fringe 2x14 last night gave me the actual arse on.
I make jokes of things. Everything. I have an agreement with a good friend of mine that the first one of us to contract cancer holds a Cancer Party, with a cake in the shape of the tumour (I haven’t really thought through what’ll happen if it metastasises, other than a whole asston of cake). More key to my point here, I make jokes about the Holocaust.I am absolutely not a Holocaust denialist, nor do I believe that there was anything right about it whatsoever. In fact, I believe that in using it as a source of humour, you break a lot of the taboos that exist around it and bring it into the public consciousness - and the only way that it can get the respect it deserves is if it can pop into peoples’ heads at a moment’s notice, just like Brangelina and the best way to make scrambled eggs. When it’s in the forefront of everyone’s head, instead of a revered compartment only opened up once a year for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the memory of it affects each and every one of the decisions that we make as citizens and leaders, and that’s important.So it came as something of a surprise to me that, when Fringe last night had an episode that dealt with it, I watched aghast and felt that they were doing something seriously, tastelessly and offensively wrong.The episode begins with a Jewish wedding. The bride’s grandmother recognises someone (a wiry, Aryan man with round glasses and a pinched expression - your stereotypical Nazi scientist) and promptly dies of asphyxiation, followed by the rest of the bride’s family. Walter later discovers that the grandmother had a concentration camp numerical tattoo, and notes that the toxin used involved hydrogen cyanide (the active poison in Zyklon B). He later discovers that the poison is genetically targeted, and the Nazi’s endgame is to exterminate everyone that does not fit the profile of the Herrenvolk, starting with the delegates at a fictional world tolerance conference. Of course, the Nazi is foiled, and everyone skips away into the sunset.Now, I’m pretty sure that my problem with this comes with the triviality of Fringe. It’s a good show, don’t get me wrong - but it deals with pseudoscience like special soundwaves that can cross into parallel universes, parasites that can cure all diseases, aliens judging our merits as a species and such. Metaphor is important in science fiction - it’s what makes it such an important tool to issue social commentary while abstracting the issue, so if people agree with a point taken out of context, they may later discover that they realise that real-world events fit that fictional scenario.My problem comes with the combination of the innate triviality of science fiction storylines themselves mixing with an important and horrific real-world atrocity. I would not have reacted this way if the moral issues behind the Holocaust were dealt with through metaphor, as is traditional for science fiction to do. We actually had a ‘genuine’ Nazi, trying to enact a genuine and disgusting philosophy, and we had these things in a context that we usually pay little attention to - rather, we concentrate on what it’s trying to say and how that causes the characters to interact.I’m not saying BAN THIS SICK FILTH at all. I’m saying that it’s a slightly worrying direction to see science fiction going, and potentially dangerous because it might hurt its ability to make social commentary without attracting direct attention from those who would rather see it silenced. And if it is going to deal with such events, I would have thought that it could put across the horror of its subject matter without becoming the ‘find serial killer before serial killer kills lots of people’ that it turned out to be.I’d be very interested to read anyone’s thoughts on this, so feel free. Do you disagree? Did you get a different message from the episode? Am I turning into a reactionary Daily Mail columnist? Tell all - you can email me at dave@dave.io.
