Sure, when children are young they can be brattish, selfish, and even cheeky AF, but what is it that makes them grow up to retain that arsehole way, embracing the “dickhead demagogue”?

This is what Vice UK‘s Tom Seymour asked after he watched The Childhood of a Leader.

The film took inspiration from Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism published in 1933 – the year Hitler took control of Germany. Here’s what got Seymour:

Near the beginning of new film The Childhood of a Leader, a young boy is learning to speak French. At the end of the exercise, his teacher, a prim but gentle Stacy Martin, tells him how well he is doing, and the boy, with eyes as hard as diamonds, purposefully places his hand on her breast. “My mother lets me do it all the time,” he tells her.

We’re in Versailles, France, in the aftermath of the First World War. The boy’s American father, we learn, is helping negotiate the peace terms with Germany. His mother, in public, is distant and cold, leaving her son to the passing whims of nurses, maids, and tutors.

One answer comes from history professor Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, author of Franco: The Biography of a Myth, on the former Spanish dictator. He said that:

If you look at the childhoods of Franco, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, one very obvious thing they all had in common was very complex relationships with their fathers. Each of their fathers were frequently absent, and then, when present, were drunk and violent and threatening. That meant each child developed very close and emotionally intense relationships with their mothers. They went through their life resenting their fathers, while they always saw their mothers as a sanctuary of emotional refuge. But how might that work?

It’s easy to image the conversation. After a violent outbreak from their father, a mother vesting her hopes in the child could fuel a sense of that the child will be different. A belief in themselves as somehow greater than their environment.

The other answer stems from the writer of the film, Brady Corbet, who spoke on Reich’s influence on the story:

In chapter five, Reich wrote that the family is “the first cell” of a fascist society, its “first central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual.” He [Corbet] went on: “Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.”

“There was a widespread idea at the time that the only way to be a parent was to be an authoritarian,” Corbet says, speaking to me over the phone. “Children were spoken to and not heard. I wanted to ask whether that might have been a contributing factor to the rise of some of the most notorious figures in history.” Jean-Paul Sartre also looms large in the film—The Childhood of a Leader takes its title from a 1939 Sartre short story, a portrait of a young boy who endures a very Freudian form of therapy before embracing the ideology of fascism.

But even knowing that, the fact your child will grow up to be a dick is not set in stone. Seymour goes on to explore other contributing factors, such as the time in which people grow up, and even acknowledges that children from fractured childhoods grow up to be successful in many ways. It’s an interesting read that covers a lot of bases.

Read Seymour’s whole piece HERE and watch the trailer for The Childhood of a Leader, below:

[source:vice]