As
Plantu —
again — compares
(the sightless) Uncle Sam to (the sightless) Osama Bin Laden — with all their common victims (in fact, there seem to be more in America's hair) entangled in their common bloody beard (replete with whiskers that looks like military-style barbed wire) —
Le Monde uses the 9/11 anniversary to treat us to its
usual pompous editorial ("total war" against terrorism, ignorance or minimizing of December 7, 1941 (only six years after 9/11 was ubiquitously called a modern-day "Pearl Harbor"!), "petitions of friendship for a great people that is making a mistake") along with a front page article about
a movie (by
Nicolas Klotz, due to be released on September 12, and based on
a book by
François Emmanuel) that compares the average multinational company (i.e., the typical American creation as well as the symbol of New York and its World Trade Center per se) to Nazi Germany.
La Question humaine … un film noir qui … établit en effet un lien entre le monde des multinationales et l'idéologie nazie. A mesure [qu'un psychologue d'entreprise, magistralement interprété par Mathieu Amalric] perce à jour la nature du pouvoir de son entreprise, une effarante proximité lui saute aux yeux entre la langue administrative nazie et celle qu'il emploie dans son travail.
In
an interview with
Jacques Mandelbaum, Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval state that
C'était frappant de voir à quel point [les étudiants d'HEC ou de l'Essec qui ont tourné dans La Question Humaine] comprenaient le film, pour ainsi dire de l'intérieur : ces jeunes gens se considèrent eux-mêmes comme des guerriers, des tueurs, et ont tout à fait conscience de servir une logique de productivité et de profit exponentiels où les plus faibles sont impitoyablement éliminés.
In addition, it turns out that the movie is the third in a trilogy (the first two were about
the homeless and
foreigners without documents — you can see that this movie follows in the same logic) and (as we learn from Le Monde's
review) that the name of the bad guy (played by a "very disturbing"
Jean-Pierre Kalfon) in this movie (which
Isabelle Regnier tells us "keeps its promises from end to end") is…
Karl Rove! (Actually, the
movie lists his name as Karl Rose — as does the book — but
Regnier (or the daily's spell-checker) seems to have gotten the screenwriters' intention right!) Karl Rove (or Karl Rose), it turns out, was born in a Third Reich
Lebensborn and was involved somehow with the SS Einsatzgruppen! We then learn how the "striking proximity" between the multinational firm (whose workers are "warriors, killers" and from which "the weakest are pitilessly eliminated") and the Holocaust:
To gas the Jews, or fire an alcoholic, the same dehumanizing terminology allows the human being to be treated as a production unit, valid or not.
Mon Dieu! The filmmakers have discovered the meaning of life (or death)! How can one avoid being dazzled by so much
lucidité?!
Regnier couldn't, as shown in her conclusion (about the movie in which there is a scene during which, "alors que les acteurs parlent parfois sans qu'on entende leur voix, un magnifique et interminable chant de flamenco est filmé en temps réel"):
La Question Humaine is a sophisticated film. It is also a beautiful film, a loving film, because its author likes his characters. … it is a great political film.
How wonderful. The viewpoint of
one Le Monde reader is slightly different:
The raison d'être of this film is shameful, first and foremost in consideration of the victims of totalitarianism who [unlike the movie's authors] are no longer around to engage in mental masturbation.
Update: See how
French (and European) TV commemorated the sixth anniversary of 9/11 (and the murder of 3,000 people)…