The Cinema of Cancellation, Part 2
On the German comedy "Old White Man"
I’d been putting off either watching or writing about the 2024 German comedy Alter Weisser Mann (Old White Man), even though I knew eventually I’d have to. Alter Weisser Mann was, judging from the trailer alone, Cancel Culture Panic: The Movie. The movie came out on October 31 of last year, and was seen by almost 825,000 people during its theatrical run — the fourth most popular German language film of 2024. As something of a connoisseur of “PC”-panic artifacts, as an eager analyst of German cultural debates, it felt like I couldn’t really avoid Simon Verhoeven’s film forever.
Last week, I finally broke down, and I’m kind of glad I did. Not because Alter Weisser Mann is any good — it isn’t. But because Alter Weisser Mann is in its own way an amazing artifact. A message in a bottle from the golden age of anti-wokeness. It is a film comedy about our moment seemingly written by an AI trained on Atlantic-articles (or their equivalent in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), heavily funded by the German government, and indeed fairly successful at the box office. It pretends to be a testament to changing times; its existence testifies to the fact that very little has changed at all.
Satire exaggerates. And for a particular kind of person that seems to mean that, if you're being satirical, you don’t have to really justify what you’re trying to say. That particular kind of person seems to have made Alter Weisser Mann. Of course, that's not true: you're still responsible for those exaggerations, you are still making them after all. There are forms of comedy -- absurdist ones, physical comedy, etc. -- where “it’s just a comedy” is indeed an excuse. "Jackass" may be making a point about masculinity by having the dudes pee in snow and then turn that snow in to shaved ice. But it's totally plausible and fine if the filmmakers were to say "hey, we just thought dudes drinking their own pee was funny." But satire? Well, satire has a point of view on the world, and that point of view can be identified, interrogated and — gasp! — critiqued.
Alter Weisser Mann contains pretty much every cliché of recent German culture wars, but it skips one. Arguably because that cliché actually is the reason the film exists at all. It’s the Kurt Tucholsky bonmot that “satire is allowed to do anything”. A movie like Alter Weisser Mann feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to be taken seriously for the things it’s saying, and it also wants to not be saying them. For those who agree with the film’s obvious politics, this is what makes Alter Weisser Mann important and indeed fun (the Lawrence of Arabia-line about a “funny sense of fun” comes to mind). And those who disagree with the film’s obvious politics will be told that the film doesn’t actually have politics. It’s just a comedy. Lighten up. Satire becomes a token for unassailability. You’re only “joking” because you are shocked to have gotten pushback on a statement that twenty years ago wouldn’t have gotten any. Because this type of humor is, in its own way, deeply serious.
The film stars Jan Josef Liefers as Heinz Hellmich, a middle manager at a large German corporation in what is supposed to be a wealthy West German suburb, but in fact appears to be a composite of Hamburg’s and Munich’s outer rim. An everyman in an anytown. But Heinz finds himself slowly ground down by a change in the zeigeist. Wokeness is afoot.
Liefers is probably best known for playing half of an investigative team for the extremely long-running German police procedural Tatort. Since 2002, Liefers has portrayed the haughty, pretentious and aristocratic pathologist Prof. Dr. Dr. Börne, who helps shlubby plebeian inspector Thiel solve his crimes. The show featuring this mismatched duo does incredible numbers, when Thiel and Börne solve crimes on Sunday (which happens about 4-5 times a year) something like 1 in 5 German households tune in. Börne is an absolute genius: he appears to speak at least seven languages, plays piano at a professional level, is a great cook, etc. etc. He is also an insufferable asshole — think Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, if he was right only 50% of the time. Börne haunts the Hellmich-character in Alter Weisser Mann, in that Börne is an unapologetic elitist where Hellmich has begun to give up on defending both the kind of culture and the ego that comes naturally to Börne. Hellmich is beta-Börne.
More recently, Liefers has also been in the public eye for anti-lockdown hashtagtivism during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’d venture that most German cinema goers would have been aware that Liefers himself had been at the center of public opprobrium — and there’s a scene late in the film where Liefers’ character finally stands up for himself that seems to have been written for Liefers the actor, not for Heinz his character. The paratext of the actor’s recent activism, and the blowback he received for it, casts an interesting light on Heinz’s travails. As so often, the film transmutes an experience of public blowback for public statements into a more straightforward fable of professional consequences. The hit to his professional and financial future that the real Liefers did not experience for his public statements, fictional Heinz now experiences for his. Oh, and just in case, you’re wondering about how much of Liefers is in Heinz and vice versa, here’s a recent interview with the actor in BILD:
“We have diversity and pronouns, but not enough living space.” The film Alter Weisser Mann winds up talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to wokeness. But paratextually, as the literary critic says, we’re clearly supposed to recognize which side of the mouth reflects its actual opinions. Sure, to some extent Liefers might be poking fun at his own persona; but most of all his public persona seems to inform the politics of the film he’s in.
Hellmich is a middle manager at a German company with global aspirations, and is terrified that his whiteness and maleness will cost him the promotion he desperately needs. Heinz is also struggling with the ravages of middle age, torn between his obsessively un-PC father (Friedrich von Thun) and his hyper-woke children (Momo Beier, Sarah Mahita and Juri Winkler). His wife (Nadja Uhl) seems much more at home in the Brave New World of wokeness, which creates further tensions. When his smarmy boss, basically a PMC nightmare straight out of Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s Elite Capture, proposes a dinner at Heinz’s house, he smells a test. “They want to know how male and white I am. Not outwardly, but in here.” The evening goes wrong in predictably unpredictable ways, and in the end Heinz learns a valuable lesson — or something?
One review I read called it “a fleet, provocative and yet light-footed comedic dance on mined social terrain.” Which fascinated me, because I’d question every single one of these words — above all the emphasis on “lightness”. The movie feels encumbered and undercooked precisely because it seems to have imbibed so much discourse it now feels the need to regurgitate. Sure, the film may not endorse a statement like “today you’re called a Nazi just because you said a man can’t get pregnant”; it’s too self-aware for that. But it doesn’t seem aware that having its characters constantly vomit up the kind of stuff culture warriors put into their columns is in its own way exhausting and hemmed in. It ties itself into knots to provide an original take on the topic while showing us nothing that could motivate or justify this original take. The review I just quoted speaks of “mined terrain”, which is itself a phrase drawn from the exhaustingly repetitive vocabulary of German culture wars. This is the central problem with the movie and its reception: it’s just people congratulating themselves on saying the same thing they’ve been reading, saying, shouting on talk shows … again.
As I mentioned, the movie plays like a greatest hits of German culture-pages debates — to the point that explaining this to a non-German feels like explaining Doctor Who 45 seasons in. To any American viewer it might be deeply mysterious why we start with Liefers in full Native American garb, riding a white horse across the prairies in a dream. It’s a deliberate (and repeated) nod to the German freakout about cultural appropriation. One of the biggest victims of “cancel culture”, according to the German culture pages, is adventure writer Karl May (1842 — 1912) and his tales of global travel that were ultimately not particularly interested in other cultures. And Germans of a certain age seem particularly incensed at the suggestion that having worn a native head garb, painted their faces red (!) and waved a plastic tomahawk in some mock ceremony as a kid may have been … the teensiest bit problematic. The film firmly establishes from minute one whose biography, feelings and fixations it will center — hint: it’s in the title — and whose biography, feelings and fixation it will demote to mere epiphenomena to those of the “old white man”.
Because, you see, the whole dream sequence is mostly a set-up for a conversation with Liefers' (Black) therapist who is offended at his use of the word "Indian", and tells him his fantasies of riding in red face across Monument Valley are nothing to be ashamed of — "so long as you're aware that Winnetou [a May character] is not a genuine representation of indigenous life, but the colonial fantasy of an old white man". It’s an interesting moment twice over: who in their right mind would hire a therapist who lectured them in this way? I’m really hoping Heinz isn’t paying out of pocket to essentially have his therapist read social justice tumblr posts to him! But I think the bizarre moment is actually indicative of something deeper: the film wants to put people of color in positions of authority over Heinz. But that authority doesn’t flow from traditional power structures — a Black boss, say — it’s rather the imposed, “fake” power structure of the therapeutic regime.
For the German edition of The Cancel Culture Panic, I built a database of thousands of German-language articles about “wokeness”, “cancel culture”, and, yes, “old white men”. The screenplay — credited to director Verhoeven — reads in its first third as though someone had just gone through that database with Control+F. The second word uttered is “shitstorm”, uttered by Liefers’ secretary, who is in her car outside of his house. You see, an ad for his company is too white, and his company (which appears to make fax machines or something) takes the internet’s opinions about the relative whiteness of its ad campaigns so seriously that his secretary shows up at his place at like 2 am because of it. We get a smarmy Silicon Valley dude who keeps apologizing for “mansplaining”. Five minutes in, Heinz has to conduct a job interview with a coddled, easily triggered softie straight out of a Jonathan Haidt book. Everyone is “gendering” (i.e. using a glottal stop to indicate gender neutrality — I wrote about this particular moral panic here) like there's no tomorrow. Heinz mistakes one Asian person for another like 20 minutes in and everyone gets mad at him, though he didn’t do it “in a racist way”. The word “language police” shows up a bunch. Also everyone seems to also just be totally sensitive to words like "shit" and "fuck" for like no reason whatsoever (Wait, is it unwoke to say "fuck"? Fuuuuck.). The first "identifying as a cat"-bit (and the first Lia Thomas bit) are 10 minutes in, in case you're wondering. In other words: It’s relentless.
Even the rhythms are those of exhausting social media or print media gotchas. There’s a running gag (I think it’s a gag? It’s very hard to tell.) where Heinz’s kids declare some term problematic or racist — because it contains the word “black”, for instance. And then Heinz’s wife will correct them and provide the actual etymology of the word — you know, a very normal thing normal people do in everyday conversation and not at all a thing persnickety posters with a “classical liberal” in their bio do on X, or failed doctoral candidates do in the culture pages. Or maybe she’s supposed to be a retired etymologist, and I missed it. She’s such a non-factor that I didn’t even catch her name. The screenplay is fully an artifact of processes of normie radicalization that it pretends to decry.
The film opens with just a non-stop cavalcade of culture war topoi. Which makes the shagginess of some other parts of the film all the stranger. The movie loses focus repeatedly. Heinz takes a detour to Berlin, goes partying with a bunch of young people who don’t seem either woke or unwoke. The effect is that the viewer gets to relax, to enjoy that finally there’s a moment without various wokescold harridans pursuing Heinz. As in the anti-feminist movie, the movie has a metapolitics of “those people” just shutting the fuck up for a moment. The movie takes two minutes out of its two hour runtime to show a bike courier playing pretty much half of Rachmaninov’s “Bells of Moscow” — because, you see, people contain multitudes, which the wokesters won’t tell you.
In the end, everyone in the film, including Heinz, learns a valuable lesson that maybe it would be better to confront each other without “culture war terms” (“Kampfbegriffe”) and speak to one another “without foaming at the mouth (“ohne Schaum vorm Mund reden”). Two terms that are themselves hoary tropes of “cancel culture”-articles in the German press. This is the position this film wants to craft for itself: it dredges up the jetsam of right wing culture war-polemics for most of its runtime, and for the remainder it seeks to fashion a kind of consensus position out of it. As our poetess laureate of wokeness would say: good luck, babe.
In coming to its ostensible consensus position, the movie also shamelessly relies on the very social mechanisms it's ostensibly critiquing to have its characters arrive at some easy lessons to learn. Because this is the moment where everyone gets to gang up on Heinz’s boss, the unctious Dr. Steinhofer (an excellent Michael Maertens), who for most of the film was my favorite part of it: misguided, oily, panicked, but horrifically recognizable. Well, scratch that because Steinhofer does a complete heel turn — revealing himself as such an awful classist/sexist/homophobe/liar/likely embezzler that everyone gathered at the table (Heinz, his anti-woke dad, his woke kids, his Turkish secretary, the therapist he invited in an act of literal tokenism, and the South Asian delivery guy his dad hit with his car) can hate. The film chides people for not bothering to try to get along, and then concocts a scenario to have them at last speak to each other “without foam at the mouth”, which requires a set of contrivances Rube Goldberg would dismiss as farfetched.
Early in the film, there’s a bit that the movie seems very proud — it’s supposed to be the biggest moment in the movie. It’s been decided that Fernfunk AG’s latest ad campaign for its new family plan is too white, too heteronormative, too ablist, etc. So Heinz and his team keep adding people to the visual — with predictable results.
It’s a deeply predictable gag, not exactly a knee-slapper, but perhaps an okay observation of how identity politics has been operationalized in the field of advertising. But here’s the thing: take another look at the poster that advertises Alter Weisser Mann:
Am I crazy to think that this is essentially the same poster? The same yes-and logic the movie lampoons seems to motivate its own plotting. Roger Ebert famously had a “law of conservation of character”: “Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems.” Well, clearly Ebert postulated this law without having seen German mainstream comedies, which are chock-a-block with characters whose inclusion only makes sense based on some bizarre corruption scheme. Maybe this is where public funding of films in Germany gets you: whether it comes to actors or whether it comes to op eds, the film seems unwilling to edit or skip any one.
So the movie itself doesn’t seem to believe its own message. Or perhaps better: the movie doesn’t believe that message, because that isn’t in the end its message. It’s message is rather: we should get to freak out about all this to our heart’s content, and then our gay children should sit down with us for dinner and be at least a little civil about it.
The central part of the movie is barely a comedy at all, as Heinz has relationship problems, tries to reconcile with his children, goes to Berlin and gets totally fucked up on drugs. Suddenly it’s a movie about midlife, about the sacrifices we make and how they come back to haunt us. It’s a yuppy redemption movie, and the perils of wokeness seem far, far away. It’s a totally different movie — vaguely amusing, but if the point is that life happens elsewhere, not in dumb internet freakouts about cultural appropriation, someone might have told the screenwriter. It’s fine that it's shameless boomer wish fulfillment, right down to everyone grooving out to David Bowie at the end. But the problem is that the film clearly takes itself to have said something along the way. When in fact it has just stuck five years of dumb German articles into a centrifuge and then evenly spread out the resulting gruel.
As tends to be the case in the source material — tens of thousands of massively interchangeable articles about “cancel culture” —, the movie doesn’t seem particularly concerned with accuracy, or particularly curious about the phenomena it’s critiquing. There are moments where just being mean to someone is somehow unwoke, or old white man behavior. There’s a hacky moment where everyone is trying not to use the word “fat”, which feels like a bit Dennis Leary rejected for a 1993 standup set and also manages to get the politics of fatness at the present moment completely wrong. Then there’s stuff that frankly feels like just things a boomer focus group might come up with about kids these days. Everyone is on their phone, Heinz has one of those douchey bluetooth headsets, there is a zoom call during which Heinz does something embarrassing (no, not the Toobin thing). There’s even a Twitter/X joke.
There are a few funny bits. Heinz Hellmich repeatedly chews out his employees for keeping around a mug that hints at an authoritarian management style. But otherwise it's pretty much sub-Gervais shit. “Sub-Gervais” because Hellmich feels like a composite of every beleaguered white male figure we get in various anti-woke freakouts — and thus not much of a person. He desperately tries to do the right thing, and keeps accidentally getting in trouble. He creates an ad campaign so “woke” his older co-workers complain that it looks like a “circus” and the younger ones say it feels “tokenizing”. He’s having solar panels put on his house by a guy he’s too polite to admit is a fuck-up.
That’s the Heinz Hellmich we meet in every other scene. In the others he seems more like an Archie Bunker-figure, deeply upset with the PC argot of his age. He’s a total beta, and then again lets out traditionalist aggression, with rants straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm. There are two kinds of protagonists in anti-PC films: hapless betas who nevertheless get ground up by the forces of left-wing censoriousness; and proudly defiant assholes who won’t give an inch. Liefers’ Heinz is both at once, or seems to forget which one he is throughout the film’s two hour runtime.
There is an odd mini-genre of a workplace comedy where a member of the majority is forced to pretend to be a minority in order to “survive” in their job. Some Like it Hot has some fun with this premise and doesn’t seem to take it particularly seriously. But shows like Bosom Buddies (1980-1982) and Tootsie (1982) do seem to take at least somewhat seriously the idea that there are gendered inequalities at the heart of their cross-dressing conceits. Maybe women’s hotels being so cheap is ultimately unfair to dudes? Maybe women do get all the good roles? But the utterly misconceived 2012 sitcom Work It (you can find Emily van der Werff’s excellent review of it here) makes the simmering gender resentment underneath the conceit explicit. In Work It (which I sincerely hope you haven’t seen) two all-American manly-men caught find themselves caught in the throes of a “mancession”, and decide to apply for jobs as women instead.
These shows are premised on a degree of plausible deniability: “of course we’re not saying this is literally true” the creators can (and will) say. There is always the possibility in — and the implicit defense of — these kinds of movies and shows that they don't mean to depict the world as it really exists, or as the filmmakers think it exists, but a version of that world that presents itself to the main character. See, this is how this type of person looks at the world, people will say. It's satire, so of course the film is not taking this worldview altogether seriously!
This has always seemed to me a little question-begging. There is a kind of satire that is sort of free-floating, seeking one target, then another. At the same time, satire does proceed from a fairly stable picture of the world -- that's why it feels so comfortable exaggerating. A satire that didn’t believe in its central premise — that skewered, let’s say, Hollywood vapidity — without believing that the problem it describes is to some extent real, would be a strange satire indeed. It may in the end say “hey it’s not that big a deal, we’re just having fun”, or “the opposite position is just as annoying”, but it’s unlikely that it completely invalidates the moral basis of its satire. Doctor Strangelove does not come around to a position that the army is a bunch of hardworking people who deserve their nukes. Triangle of Sadness doesn’t conclude that the wealthy are just like you and me. And Death of Stalin does not in the end decide that maybe totalitarian dictatorship gets a bad rap.
So here's what we know is true in the world of “Alter Weißer Mann”:
German companies are at the mercy of social media opinion, corporate DEI-consultants and activists. The people nominally in charge — the Dr. Steinhofers of the world — are at their mercy, or at least act as though they were. "It’s enormously important, that we react quickly when accusations of racism arise," Dr. Steinhofer says. And tells Heinz that he needs to “present yourself from your most progressive side".”
The young are oversensitive when it comes to their own feelings and completely insensitive when it comes to the feelings of their elders. This differs markedly from the feelings of the middle generation (i.e. boomers or early X-ers), who desperately seek to do right by both their elders and their children.
Traditional progressive or leftist opinions have been abandoned and are being declared “Nazism” by the young.
Not all of these seem to me equally questionable. But it’s hard to argue that the film doesn’t stipulate to these facts. And those facts are, at least, debatable. It’s a film about racism and immigration that doesn’t include anyone who is positioned as an explicit racist or as being anti-immigrant. Even Heinz's retrograde dad is insistently coded as a former hippie who just hasn't gone with the times. Heinz's world is a world in which people accuse each other of racism, even though in the end — the movie thinks — no one is racist. In the end, they all want the same thing. Which, in a country where something like half the population seems to want nothing more than the mass deportation of neighbors who don't look like them ... is certainly a choice. And the film might have to answer for making it.
And that’s the point where Alter Weisser Mann becomes an interesting artifact. Because it has its own moral geography around issues of race and identity, some of it surprisingly specific. Just one example: Heinz’s world at work is consistently threatened by outsiders. There are a bunch of people brought in from the outside to help the obviously ailing company (again, it appears to make fax machines, so go figure). There’s a hip New York PR team and a Silicon Valley investor douchebag (who namedrops Elon Musk and goes on and on about AI), and that AI itself. Other than the AI, the two others appear to be Germans who have left Germany ... and neither of them are white “potato”-Germans (they are played by Yun Huang and Elyas M'Barek respectively). Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the idea seems to be that Silicon Valley disruption and PR newspeak are the ethnic other’s revenge on the (white) German workplace. That perhaps these are the avenging angels of previous exclusion — people who were shut out of German workplaces, moved abroad, and are now returning to torment and destroy the old homogeneous workplaces.
That’s an interesting fantasy, as far as it goes. And an old one, at that. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956), a wealthy widow returns to a small town where she was badly mistreated as a teenager. She offers the bankrupt tone a huge amount of money. All they have to do is kill the man who got her pregnant and abandoned her. But here’s the thing: it treats the outsider as an inciting factor, as a moral test, not as a coequal participant in the story. That’s why we get the odd AI-subplot, with Heinz Hellmich’s imperfections being measured against the supposed flawlessness of AI: The film seems to think that “wokeness” is an unwillingness to admit that we all are imperfect. Again, where this movie feels to countenance and notice imperfections, where it treats them with curiosity and empathy, is deeply revealing: and again, if you’re wondering where, the answer is right there in the title.