metaphor for fascism?

This is stretching my memory but...A couple of years ago the TCM channel showed a lengthy doc by Richard Schickel about Woody Allen and his films, which included extensive interviews with Allen himself. In discussing Zelig, I remember him mentioning the Nazi connection. He pointed out that the extreme version of "fitting in" or surrendering your individual identity really paves the way for fascism.

Zelig is a very rich and multi-faceted film, perhaps more than any of his other films (which is not to say it is his absolute best). The film seems a little too sentimental to me to be politically motivated, but I don't think that the metaphoric element you speak of was lost on the filmmaker.

If you ever get a chance to watch any of Schickel's documentaries, do so.

My two cents.

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i know the original post is like 20 months old, but i was just reading about this... this is from the book "woody allen, his films and career" by douglas brode, which is pretty outdated at this point but oh well:

"On the eve of the film's [Zelig's] release, Woody told journalist Michiko Kakutani that Leonard Zelig's existence as a human chameleon represented "a minor malady almost everyone suffers from - carried to an extreme." In other words, this was a movie about conformity. "It's that need to be liked," Woody continued, "just to keep people around you pacified. I thought that desire not to make waves, carried to an extreme, could have traumatic consequences. It could lead ultimately to fascism.""

Actually I interpreted it as a metaphor for the Jewish experience. A lot of the people Woody would have grown up around would have acted like Americans, but would have been Russians a generation before with central European/Germanic names... There would have been a lot of pressure on Jews in the States to assimilate, but many would have assimilated in Germany, Poland, and the Russian Empire, not to mention the biggest assimilation of all - Israel, which according to some of earlier Zionists was to change Jews back into Hebrews (and certainly got many of them to ditch Yiddish for Hebrew).

He would also be well aware, no doubt, of Jews who shaved off their locks, converted to Christianity, and changed their names (like he did) to something more Anglo-Saxon.

So, that's my take on it... Woody was saying that people should stand up for themselves more sometimes, instead of just agreeing or copying the people round them. It's not my favourite film of his (I prefer "Hannah and her Sisters"), but it's a clever metaphor.