Let's Discuss a Scene: Captain von Trapp Tears a Nazi Flag in Half

Everyone’s talking about Charlottesville, which makes sense. We have reached an arguable point of no return where we can no longer politely pretend things aren’t happening or escalating. Yet, plot twist: I’m not here to talk about Charlottesville. I don’t have anything new to say about it. Possibly I don’t even have anything intelligent to say about it. Rather than create verbal clutter, I’m instead going to talk about this:

If for some reason the gif isn’t loading for you, above is a repeating clip of Christopher Plummer tearing a Nazi flag in half with his bare hands. If you’ve been on social media over the weekend, you’ve likely seen it at least once. Heck, you’ve probably seen it if you’ve been on social media since mid-2016, what with the rise of the anti-fascist or “antifa” movement as the internet (and real life) response to the alt-right. It’s a striking image.

It’s also possible you’re not familiar with the source material for this gif. Should this be the case, get comfortable, because I am only too pleased to enlighten you. Christopher Plummer is here portraying the high-octane-levels-of dashing Captain von Trapp, patriarch of the family from The Sound of Music. Already I can imagine some heads are nodding in recognition, while others are nodding in the hopes that the topic changes. Well, tough luck to the latter mates, because I first saw this film when I was about five years old and it is therefore near and dear to my heart and phooey to any distaste you have for musicals.

It’s actually that last fact that brings me to the keyboard today. Being five, I could parse a lot of this film even when it got subtle. Captain von Trapp hated music because it reminded him of his dead wife, whom he must have loved to have seven children ranging in age from sixteen (Liesl) to five (Gretl). The Baroness is only pretending to be nice to Maria and the children because she wants to marry the Captain for his extremely nice house, at which point the former will be fired because she’s got too much chemistry with von Trapp and the latter will be packed off to boarding school because, ew, children.

What I did not follow at all was the plot which makes up most of the second act, where the Nazis start making eyes at Austria and Captain von Trapp decides the family should make a quiet yet hasty retreat before he’s drawn back into service fighting a war he does not support. In my defense, this subplot has very few expository songs (no, this isn’t the musical where Hitler gets a solo) so my comprehension of the looming threat of the Third Reich was entirely dependent on paying attention to the talky bits.

And, if you’re not familiar with The Sound of Music, let me tell you: this movie is LONG. The version I first saw was my grandmother’s on VHS tapes. That’s right, tapes. If I’m remembering rightly, the first tape ends prior to the end of Act One! And the fascist menace plotline doesn’t really pick up until Julie Andrews is safely wed to Christopher Plummer, so it’s really asking a lot of a five year old to believe they’ll then sit patiently and process political intrigue.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t solely dependent on the talky bits after all. Let’s look at that gif again:

Allow me to contextualize: The scene prior, eldest girl Liesl asks occasional beau Rolf if he might like to drop off an important telegram for her father later that evening, wink, nudge. Rolf, resplendent and smug in his fresh-pressed new uniform, rebuffs her. “I am now occupied with more important matters. And your father better be too, if he knows what’s good for him.” He strides away, leaving a hurt and bewildered sixteen year old girl in his wake.

Cut to Captain Georg von Trapp yanking a Nazi banner down from his family manor and ripping it in half, the whole time with the dispassionate expression one uses when taking out garbage. Minutes later, his weaselly friend Max will try and convince him that things are for the best because, hey, at least the Anschluss happened peacefully, oughtn’t they be grateful for that? Von Trapp’s eyes will flash, and in that moment he will be more dangerous than any pair of Nazi fists in this film.

I understood all of this from simple nuance. Maybe I didn’t know anything about Nazis as a child, but it doesn’t take a historian or a vexillologist to read between the lines here. Tearing a flag in half is a symbolic middle finger which, as gestures go, is much stronger than the actual middle finger. Even a child can perceive that, which is why that gif has such staying power.

You might be thinking to yourself, this is obvious stuff here. Anyone can tear a flag in half and have it mean something. I’d argue not so, on the grounds that it took me a solid while’s worth of mulling to explicate why this scene is as effective as it is. Plus, it’s all about the framing, the juxtaposition, the non-verbal gestures intermixed with what is actually said. Captain von Trapp rips a Nazi flag in half, true, but he then balls it up and keeps it out of the sight of his children, lest they realize there’s more than one side to this new normal in a post-Anschluss Austria. As the children crowd around his wife, he opens the bundle enough so that it is not just a red blanket, so that the cruel swastika-shaped innards are visible, and presents it with a stern face to Max. Fighting Nazis was something adults did amongst themselves, this movie says, but the children were to be protected from that harsh reality. If you think just anyone can communicate that much information in forty seconds (yes, I counted), then you’ve been spared a lot of student films.

So, yes, it’s a cool, catchy gif, very much in line with the zeitgeist, very much brimming with the heat of the now. But it’s also, I’d say, quite a bit more. I don’t pretend to be a film critic; I’m sure there’s an entire toolbox of terms that are out there to describe far more efficiently what I just expressed to you. Even so, I think there’s something valuable in understanding how this scene managed to effectively, wordlessly communicate that Nazis are bad well before I could recognize Adolf Hitler.