American Idol

Alan Arkin and the child actor Abigail Breslin are up for Academy Awards for their performances in the strenuously kooky comedy-drama "Little Miss Sunshine" (the film itself is a Best Picture nominee), but there's a certain brooding intellectual whose contribution to the movie has gone unheralded: Friedrich Nietzsche.

The unclassifiable German philosopher who announced God's death, declared that all human knowledge was fragmentary and subjective, and called for bold "supermen" to step away from the herd of human cattle, serves as a hero to the film family's requisite troubled teenager. That character, played by Paul Dano, has a giant black-and-white painting of Nietzsche's face in his room. (Those penetrating eyes! That Teutonic mustache!) He keeps his nose buried in "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his goal of flying jets for the Air Force.

Nietzsche here serves as a shorthand signifier of alienation and a desire to rise above one's circumstances. There's not a line of dialogue about the writings themselves. "All we have to do is see Nietzsche's image and we get this kid," says Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "We realize the kid's rage, realize that he is out of sorts, and that he's not out of whack -- his culture is."

In an essay in the latest issue of the Journal of American History, Ratner-Rosenhagen, who got her doctorate at Brandeis, explores how Nietzsche -- his ideas, but just as much, his name and visage -- became such a potent symbol in American culture. The story stretches from the journalist H.L. Mencken's championing of him in the early years of the 20th century as an antidote to the middlebrow "booboisie" he loathed ("Only blockheads today know nothing of his ideas and only fools are unshaken by them") through Nietzsche's use today as a pop-culture prop.

Part of Nietzsche's appeal, of course, is his sheer quotability. Pith, not profundity, is what attracts T-shirt makers, not to mention journalists on deadline. Opined a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist last September, during a wrenching struggle by the Twins to win their division: "Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'What doesn't destroy me makes me stronger.' Were he alive today, Nietzsche ... might hold Twins season tickets."

But Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that, in a more serious way, America has been surprisingly fertile ground for Nietzsche's ideas, ever since he was first translated into English, in 1896. This is more than a little counterintuitive, as she points out, because Nietzsche challenged pretty much everything America embodies or represents, including the ideal of equality, reverence for Enlightenment rationality, and belief in God.

In a sense, that's precisely why a frustrated minority of marginalized and discontented Americans have seized on Nietzsche as a thinker and symbol. The commercial bourgeois culture, hostile to art and learnedness, that Nietzsche worried about in Europe was even more advanced here. "American readers" -- or at least those on the margins -- "have had a sense that Nietzsche is talking to them directly," Ratner-Rosenhagen says. For them, she writes, Nietzsche provided a "moral language for greatness."

The American academy, naturally the main site of arguments over Nietzsche, has been divided over what to make of this moral language. The Nazis claimed him as a hero, and the Harvard historian Crane Brinton, in his 1941 book "Nietzsche," argued that Nietzsche's writings "paved the way," as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it, for the Third Reich. Others countered that fascism, with its notion of society as a single organism, not to mention its hostility to all art but the most traditional, is in fact antithetical to the Nietzschean ideal. Ratner-Rosenhagen will explore this and other weighty topics (is Nietzsche to blame for what Allan Bloom called the "nihilism, American-style" evident in some modern humanities departments?) in a book she's working on.

But in the Journal of American History she is just as interested, perhaps more interested, in America's fascination with...Nietzsche's facial hair. Obsession with the philosopher's appearance, and elements of his biography, have long paralleled interest in his thought. The early 20th-century philosopher Paul Carus criticized Nietzsche for grooming himself in the style of a robust military man -- "His martial mustache almost anticipates the tonsorial art of the imperial barber of the present Kaiser," Carus wrote -- when by all accounts, Carus added, he was a mild-mannered neurotic. The mustache, Carus wrote, suggested the philosopher was "at war with himself."

Americans have always found intellectuals a bit easier to sidle up to if they've got a touch of the eccentric about them, and Nietzsche has more than a touch. He spent his last 11 years, until his death in 1900, in a deranged state, possibly caused by syphilis acquired during what may have been his lone sexual encounter. American accounts of Nietzsche's life often emphasize his sexual oddity. A curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts wrote in 1920 that Nietzsche was "more than two-thirds ein Narr -- a fool -- since he loved neither Wein nor Weib." ("Wine or Broads," Ratner-Rosenhagen helpfully explains.)

But it is Nietzsche's ferocious call for independence from social conformity that truly made him famous. The paradox of Nietzsche's popularity as an icon, then, is that glib references to a few well-worn ideas and quotes -- or hanging up a Nietzsche poster -- places one firmly in the herd.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.