S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc review – Throbbing Gristle’s gender-challenging tabloid-baiter

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Sympathetic docu-biography centres on the conceptual artist deemed ‘too shocking for punk’ who inadvertently spawned the industrial music genre Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: “he”, “she” and “they” are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The “P-Orridge” surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there’s also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well. Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influ...
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Goebbels and the Führer review – private life of propagandist shows grotesque heart of Nazism

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Joachim Lang’s bleak film shows a preening Goebbels and a careworn Hitler as they battle to convince the German public, and themselves, they will win the war

In an appropriate spirit of cynicism and bleakness, German director Joachim Lang has made a film about the private life of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Hexenmeister or chief sorcerer of lies, and his always strained relationship with Hitler. Robert Stadlober plays the preening and self-pitying Goebbels and Fritz Karl is a careworn Hitler. Franziska Weisz plays Goebbels’s wife Magda, who at first resented his infidelities with showbusiness starlets but for the sake of the Fatherland submitted to the public image of a good Nazi wife and mother of six adorable children – whom Joseph and Magda finally murdered in the bunker before killing themselves.

In its subversive, austerely satirical way, the film feels almost like a B-side to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall from 2004, and Lang has perhaps even inhaled, just a little, the numberless internet parody memes that Downfall inspired, with English subtitles reinterpreting Hitler’s impotent rage. Lang’s film shows us the fears and misgivings that quite senior Nazis had until late in the war, and is perhaps also in the spirit of The Zone of Interest; that is, the Martin Amis novel, whose knowing, ironised dialogue and drama was mostly excised by Jonathan Glazer for his film version.

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