“M” was one of the first (1931) sound films made in Germany, and the first sound film directed by legendary director Fritz Lang, who had already had critical success with “Metropolis” and “Woman In The Moon.” The latter was not the first film to depict a trip to Luna, but it did have two top-notch technical advisors: Hermann Oberth, the Robert Goddard of Germany, and Willy Ley, who had recently formed the first society in Germany to discuss the possibility of interplanetary travel and was intimately familiar with Oberth’s work in rocketry.

In creating “M,” Lang relied on the expert advice of psychiatrists, even spending a week in a mental institution, to create a film about a child murderer (Kindermorder), in tandem with his co-screenwriter, his then-wife, novelist/screenwriter (and subsequent Nazi propagandist) Thea von Harbou. Unlike most other films of its time, “M“ takes a humanist point of view towards criminality. It demands that we understand what makes a person commit the crime of child murder, and to see him not as a monster, but as a tormented soul suffering from severe mental illness. Such a person, the film argues, needs medical help, not incarceration or execution.

Equally contemporaneous with today’s America is the film’s depiction of the two forces seeking out the Kindermorder—the police and the criminal underworld. The latter is motivated to join the search not through community support or communal spirit, but simply because the nightly searches of after-hours bars, brothels and other dens of iniquity are cutting into their profits.

The police, desperate to find this man after months of offering increasingly generous rewards, following legions of false leads and compiling often contradictory eyewitness reports, resort to an astonishing degree of privacy invasion. Homeless people, citizens recently released from sanitariums, and customers of speakeasies and brothels who are caught in the police web are regularly searched and ordered to produce valid, up-to-date identity confirmation—passports, birth certificates, etc.—a chilling presage of what came two years later, when Adolf Hitler became Führer.

One of the police officials states outright his belief that the murderer will only be caught if the invasive searches of nightclubbers is expanded to include the general public. Again, very much in keeping with fascist doctrine—use the excuse of rampant crime (especially if committed by immigrants or tourists) to trump the civil rights of citizens and enact a de facto police state.

The whole movie reminded me of the French writer Alphonse Kerr’s adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” which has been proven true time and again over the two centuries since Kerr set it to paper. In a fascist state, it is the immigrant—the Other—who is always the enemy and must be cast out to recover national and racial purity. The penalties range from being expelled and returned to a country which they have never seen to literal concentration camps in everything but name. They can call them maximum security prisons, but after hearing a description of the environments in these places, and photographs from within their haunted walls, it’s obvious there’s no significant difference between CECOT and Bergen-Belsen. Or Alligator Alcatraz and Auschwitz.
We’ve learned that Resident Rump has revealed his hole cards and confirmed that Project 2025’s aim to either incarcerate or institutionalize the unhoused has been written into law by executive decree. Furthermore, ICE has ramped up its attacks on homeless shelters in LA, attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The more things change, indeed.

And now, a few words about a man who influenced my life and my thinking about life in more ways than I can count or contemplate…

There was that voice. That voice telling us stories of superheroes abandoned by their kind, corrupt generals organizing mass slaughter, and confirmation that your cynical teenage view of the world was accurate—not a bug, but a feature: “Nobody will ever let you know/when you ask the reasons why/they just tell you that you’re on your own/fill your head all full of lies.”

In a different world, these would be stories in comic books, complete with heroes arriving in the nick of time to save the day. But in the hands of Geezer Butler (lyrics, bass), Tony Iommi (guitar), Bill Ward (drums) and the voice of the late, great Ozzy Osbourne, these songs were reflections of the world as they saw it, then and now.

Superheroes are judged to be superfluous once society decides they’re no longer needed. Generals still gather in their masses. Authorities give you lies or silence in response to you asking, “Why are things like this? Why can’t they be better?”

Ozzy and Geezer understood. That understanding has kept a lot of young people going, who otherwise would have given up and either committed suicide or become even more cynical and bitter about a world that wasn’t designed for them. And that is why today is such a sad day for everyone who loved Ozzy and Black Sabbath. And while I am loath to put words in anyone’s mouth, I think what Ozzy would say to all his fans, if he could, is “No more tears.”