In Mephisto, Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Hendrik Höfgen, an ambitious actor who becomes one of the most famous performers in Nazi theater and cinema. Based on a true story, the film charts the actor’s evolution in conscience and helps us define fascism.

He doesn’t start as a fascist. He starts as a striver, hungry for the spotlight and willing to say the right words to be loved by the right people.

The truth is, he’s less a person than a performer. “He’s completely hollow. And that hollowness, that void, is what the regime wants. He wants to keep working. He wants to be seen.” And the regime gives him everything he ever wanted.

What Mephisto shows us, with unbearable clarity, is how easily art can become an accessory to power. Not just propaganda films, but the entire theatrical ecosystem—the state theaters, the funding bodies, the cultural ministries. Höfgen doesn’t have to make fascist art. He just has to make art within fascism. The state will take care of the rest.

That’s the film’s most damning insight. Fascism doesn’t corrupt art by banning it. It corrupts it by offering it an audience. Höfgen is a man who believes so deeply in the power of performance that he willfully ignores or doesn’t even notice when the regime radicalizes. He’s still bowing, still smiling, still grateful for the applause—even when the auditorium goes dark.

Szabó’s direction is precise and devastating. He films Höfgen as both puppet and puppeteer, caught in endless rehearsals and mirrored spaces. “It’s all performance,” we say in the episode. “He even rehearses how to hold his face while he listens to Goebbels.” The film doesn’t just show us the relationship between art and fascism—it implicates us in it. Every time Höfgen preens for the camera, every time he bows too deeply, the film asks whether we, too, have applauded for the wrong reasons.

By the end of the film, Höfgen stands in a vast white void, spotlit and screaming, his voice swallowed by silence. There’s no one left to perform for. Just the machine.