Lars Von Trier can’t quite shake his Nazi obsession, relentlessly poking at his recent Nazi comments at Cannes like some sort of mental cold sore, if a cold sore had killed millions of Jews. To be fair, it’s one of those conversational rabbit holes so many of us have tumbled down, where you make one little joke about how you understand Hitler, and then you have to spend the next several months talking about Nazis to everyone you see—because to not talk about Nazis would just seem like you were avoiding the whole Nazi thing, and that would probably just make the whole Nazi thing even worse, right? We’ve all been there. Anyway, Von Trier most recently trotted out his thoughts on Nazis for a Berlin crowd—where, let’s face it, not talking about Nazis would be like Lynyrd Skynyrd playing Tuscaloosa and skipping “Sweet Home Alabama.”
After adding, “Some German journalists interviewed me, and I told them the French are the real Nazis, and they really liked that”—which probably won’t help him get back into Cannes anytime soon—Von Trier then went on to qualify his original remarks, having apparently moved well beyond the “it was just a joke” defense. “There was a point to this whole thing,” he now insists. “I think history shows that we are all Nazis somewhere, and there are a lot of things that can be suddenly set free, and the mechanics behind this setting-free is something we really should really investigate, and the way we do not investigate it is to make it a taboo to talk about it.” In the meantime, Lars Von Trier will simply have to keep this one-sided conversation up until we admit that, hey, we all go a little Nazi sometimes.