Then and Now

Siefried Kracauer

Reading Siegfried Kracauer's great book From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film published in 1947.  In the present section, he is writing of the German films in the early years of The Great Depression, and has just finished discussing UFA's production of Mensch Ohne Namen (Man Without A Name) made in 1932 and starring Werner Krauss.
The next paragraph begins:

Times were indeed so bad that even qualified specialists could not count on re-employment once they had been dismissed.

Indeed! I have been reading of unemployed professionals - engineers and educators and more - that have been cut off from the business of their speciality for three years now. This is one reason why unemployment benefits have been extended, and this bit of largesse is - of course - under scrutiny by the conservative element.
Well, 99 weeks of benefits is a lot. Goes to show one how things really are here in Arcadia, I guess.

Kracauer picks up the thread with a discussion of Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Cristo) of 1932, another UFA film. Brigitte Helm is cast as a film extra cast as a leading lady. While shooting at night, she drives her luxury car used in the film to a real de luxe hotel, where she is treated royally because of her impressive luggage emblazoned with "Countess of Monte Cristo".
Things happen, and eventually she is found out. With a flair for publicity, the film company soothes over things with the hotel and turns the escapade into a great front-page story which is good for everyone involved: the film is on everyone's lips and she gets a good contract.
So ends that story,

...proving conclusively what all these screens opiates tended to demonstrate: thateveryday life itself is a fairy tale.

Notice how that rings a bell: from fathers seeking to save sons who were supposedly blown away in rogue balloons to good looking people whose only aim in 2009 seemed to be to crash a White House dinner and gather notoriety from it to people exposing way too much on the interenet to flash mobs which have become so common that they are debased into looting zombie hordes.
It sounds so much like Reality TV, which itself is crudely and cheaply scripted, and is so remote from "reality" that when a member of the cast commits suicide, all references to such unpleasantness have to be removed from the film already shot... all this in order to maintain the diseased  fairy tale illusion of our modern lives.

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