I felt so sorry for his dancer boyfriend on the train and how he had to listen to them beating him and he couldn't do anything to help him. I kind of felt when he started beating him he did it to purposely kill him to put him out of his misery. What do you guys think?
shareYes, that was really hard to watch. I kept screaming "noooo what're you doing you fool!" Inside my head. THough, when he really started to beat him up badly i thought it was because he was just losing it; going kind of crazy. But your look at it could very well be true...hopefully it is, because your idea is much better than mine. The poor dancer boy though; I didn't want him to die....but at least he was put out of that misery.
shareIt’s so ironic that before the whole ordeal, he states he would like new glasses. If he would have taken them off, maybe things would have turned out differently… but how could he have known? In the train, Max thought about the terrible and unfair circumstances… I think that’s why he got upset… and started to beat him even more. It was very heartbreaking to watch.
I remember thinking that I would have rather have died with him...than do what he did...but the truth is, we none know what we would do in such a situation where your life is likely on the line. Such emotional abuse/manipulation can make you go stark raving mad, I imagine.
shareI just watched this yesterday and I thought when he finally lost it that is was a moment where he had to decide to live or love the dancer and his most basic instinct was to live. I think the ferocisity of the beating was his own anger at getting caught and not having left Rudy to begin with.
I loved this movie and thought that Max was a very complex and well played character. He isnt a hero, he isnt a good guy or bad, just a normal person who has faults the most obvious his own self absorption.
i think it's sad that the reason he ends up in Dachau at all is because he refuses to leave without his lover, who promptly gets killed.
shareI totally agree, Dally92000.
Okay, I'm a little misinformed, but what didn't the Nazis like about the glasses? I didn't understand that.
The Nazis didn't like the glasses because they were obessessed with physical perfection and the need for glasses to see would've been seen as a handicap.
shareThe soldier that made him step on his glasses was wearing glasses... That's what I didn't understand.
share[deleted]
Glasses were generally regarded not only as a physical flaw [let's face it: plenty of the Nazi High Command had to wear them in private], but they also symbolically represented something the Nazis feared as well as hated--the intelligentsia--people smart enough to see what was happening around them and committed to exposing it by writing or speaking against it.
This is one of the primary motivations for sacking and eventually exterminating university professors and students who, on the very most basic philosophical level, could and did question virtually every evil corruption being put in place by the Nazis. Nazi education was all about creating a conformist ethic that supported supposedly patriotic ideals, hordes of identical little puppets who would question nothing from on high unto death itself.
"Thank you, thank you--you're most kind. In fact you're every kind."
My question also! Is the train considered to be in 'private'? IE the only ones who would see were lower-level soliers and the prisoners (who didn't 'matter')?
shareYet you see at least one of the nazi's (one present on the train)was wearing glasses. How is that not hypocritical?
shareIt is hypocritical. They're Nazis. They murdered millions of people and you're hung up on the fact that they were also hypocrites. Of course they were hypocrites!
shareMinor detail: the nazi who takes Rudy's glasses I.D.'s him as 'intelligentsia' based on the fact that he is wearing HORN-RIMMED glasses...the nazi himself is wearing respectable lower-class (and cheaper) wire-rimmed glasses.
And numerous other tyrannical/genocidal regimes have used the wearing of glasses to identify a person as an 'intellectual', therefore someone to be killed ASAP.
Correct.
When I'm gone I would like something to be named after me. A psychiatric disorder, for example.
The Nazi who beat him called him an intellectual as a term of disgust, probably associated him with a communist.
shareThat doesn't make much sense considering the officer who commands he take off his glasses was himself wearing glasses...
shareThat's what I thought too, that when he beat him harder it was to kill him to end his suffering. Maybe that's why the nazis started saying "That's enough!" because they didn't want him dead yet, they wanted it to happen on their own terms, or something. That part was so heartbreaking though. I cannot believe what humans have done to each other...it's so horrible .
share