As the large man’s knee pressed my head against the ground, I feared my skull would cave in like an overripe cantaloupe. To avoid panicking, I willed myself to zone out, but with only intermittent success. When I couldn’t stay calm, I switched back to hysteria.
How did I wind up in this life-threatening situation? Like millions of my fellow Americans, I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself surrounded by Nazis. In my case, the Nazis in question likely would not describe themselves as Nazis, Literally speaking, they were Trump Republicans, one of them a fake elector during his 2020-2021 coup attempt. Yet it is disingenuous to claim that the MAGA movement isn’t at the very least dogwhistling to Nazis, from Trump defending Nazi protesters in 2017 and retaining Elon Musk as an adviser despite the latter’s Sieg Hiel salute to advocating for Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party and trafficking in racist conspiracy theories during his presidential campaigns.
Like me on that early night, and everyone in America right now, the characters of the 2015 psychological thriller Green Room experience a crisis because they find themselves surrounded by Nazis. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival a decade ago in May, director/writer Jeremy Saulnier drew from his childhood memories attending punk rock concerts to tell the story of four working-class band members whose dream-like road life unexpectedly turns into a nightmare. After accidentally witnessing a violent crime following their concert at a neo-Nazi skinhead bar in rural Oregon, protagonists Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) must fight for their lives against the skinhead gang lead by Darcy Banker (Patrick Stewart).
The result, in Saulnier’s talented hands, is highly reminiscent of Straw Dogs, the 1971 psychological thriller directed and co-written by Sam Peckinpah. Both Straw Dogs and Green Room tell the stories of besieged individuals, previously timid, tapping into their inner violent beasts when raw survival is on the line. Neither movie is explicitly political, but each wears their politics covertly: Straw Dogs is a parable about toxic masculinity, xenophobia, and class resentment, while Green Room is about the white supremacist ideologies that infect American politics.
In Green Room, our heroes comprise an underground punk quartet known as the Ain’t Rights. They are idealistic enough to stay off of social media, but not so much to turn down a decent-paying gig for skinheads when their finances take a turn for the worse. The parallels between the Ain’t Rights and millions of Trump voters, though obviously unintentional, are still striking. Neither group necessarily sides with the skinheads, but they are ultimately willing to work with them if they think doing so will help their bottom line (cashing a nice paycheck in the case of the Ain’t Rights, helping the economy in the case of the majority of swing voters who picked Trump in the 2024 election).
This is not to say the Ain’t Rights are purely cynical. As Saulnier has admitted, two of the band members were intentionally written as minorities (Pat is Jewish and Sam is Arab), and in one invigorating scene, they simultaneously confront and win over their skinhead audience by singing the Dead Kennedys 1981 classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”
The lyrics are as accurate in 2025 as they were in 1981 and 2015:
Punk ain′t no religious cult
Punk means thinkin’ for yourself
You ain′t hardcore, ’cause you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks fuck off
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks fuck off
If you’ve come to fight, get outta here
You ain′t no better than the bouncers
We ain′t tryin’ to be police
When you ape the cops, it ain′t anarchy
Surprisingly, the Ain’t Rights’ moment of ideological boldness ends well for them. If not for a random stroke of bad luck, the story in Green Room could have ended with them collecting their fee and happily riding home with a bevy of colorful anecdotes.
Yet the thing about Nazis—which Americans, like the Ain’t Rights, are learning the hard way—is that playing with them is like playing with lit dynamite. The question is never if they are going to explode—it is only when. Thus Green Room is, at its core, a cautionary tale of exactly what happens when a bunch of Nazis finally go “Boom!”
In my case, the boom occurred on February 3, 2022. That day, I went to a Lehigh Valley Tea Party event at the Starlite Ballroom in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on assignment for Salon Magazine. I was invited by former Republican congressional candidate Dean Browning, and when I showed up, I was asked to identify myself. I explained who I was and joked, “You know we’re legit because you can read us on your phone.” The door-checker pulled out his phone and appeared to look up my then-recent article, “The psychological reason that so many fall for the ‘Big Lie’“, which was on the front page of Salon’s website. While I do not know for sure if that article prompted the subsequent attack, I’ve spent hours replaying those events in my head, and that explanation seems most likely.
Why? Because after typing “Salon” into his phone and glancing angrily at me, the door-checker quickly left, and abruptly, a different group of men surrounded me. I was shoved back as I repeatedly tried to explain that I’d been invited by Browning. But then they physically forced me from the Starlite Ballroom. One of the men was Tom Carroll, one of Trump’s fake electors during his coup attempt after he lost the 2020 election, and has since been sanctioned for his other election denial activities
Within a matter of minutes, I was tackled, roughed up, and had a grown man kneel on my head. Fortunately, my elderly father, who had dropped me off at the facility, showed up to check on me because I hadn’t called to tell him I’d safely entered the building. He collected me, and I left. Many people in my support network determined that I (and they) should “move on” with minimal fuss, so they pressured me to drop the charges. And at first, I did. But as my concussed brain fog cleared up, I realized my mistake. Yet the police also chose not to press charges, picking apart my story and repeatedly asking why I didn’t pick up on possible nonverbal cues from Carroll and the others, despite me explaining that autistic people like me cannot do this. (Carroll, for what it’s worth, has been active in Blue Lives Matter.)
Green Room doesn’t show how the surviving characters cope with the trauma from their harrowing ordeal with Nazis. My hunch, though, is that if their experiences were anything like real life, they would likely be encouraged, like me, to “drop it” and “move on.” That is because another important theme in Green Room, one that Saulnier himself may not have intended to put there, is the degree to which people try to cover up ugly and uncomfortable truths rather than confront them.
For instance, the violent crime that precipitates the plot’s central crisis did not need to catalyze a blood bath. If the skinheads had decided to turn on one of their own for being a murderer, the subsequent calamity would have been averted. Even before that murder, we see one character refer to the Ain’t Rights to the skinhead club and then try to soft-pedal their toxic politics by mumbling how they could be far left for all he knows. Finally, near the film’s end, one of the survivors confronts his chief tormentor by observing that he only seemed terrifying when he was mysterious, but was decisively less so observed in the flesh.
Thus is the triumph, as well as the tragedy, in Green Room. Once the characters stop denying their horrifying reality and decide to fight for their lives, they find that Nazis are intimidating, but not invincible. With the right mix of pluck, luck and smarts, Nazis can be defeated.
The key first step is to accept the fact that you are in that fight, and entered it the moment you started associating with Nazis, voluntarily or otherwise. Only then can you turn into reality the climactic lyrics in the Dead Kennedys/Ain’t Rights message to Nazi punks:
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks fuck off
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks fuck off
Categorized:Editorials