good luck, have fun

The prisoners fear Bill Boss because a facet of maintaining his power over them involves asserting himself as an archetypical "white American." His obsession with the ridiculous cowboy-esque presentation and embodying of various negative traits associated with US nationals, especially men (e.g. always yelling, needlessly violent, incredibly conservative regarding gender roles, obsessed with the economy above all else), in addition to being having his immigrant status highlighted by characters other than himself imply a disdain for his own cultural background.

What's more is that Boss weaponises this via the nature of the US prison industry. While I've read journal postings that primarily link Boss' atrocities to Nazi ones, that feels as if it minimizes the very American nature of his actions and philosophy. The few references to Nazism (e.g. referring to torture castration as "the final solution") serve to highlight 2 ideas. 1) The United States' prison system forces slave labour and invites hired authorities to torture people who belong to marginalised racial and ethnic groups. 2) NSDAP members were not only accepted to integrate into the US, but were granted high-profile positions within government ranks. Bill Boss frequently articulates very explicitly, violent anti-Black and anti-Latino hate speech. One of the first things Boss does in the film is target a Navajo man for a scene of of intense physical torture.

If it were as simple as "Bill Boss is a Nazi," we would be more likely to hear him direct additional hatred towards Jewish and Roma people. We would also see him adopt a very different personal aesthetic. He would not be presenting like a "cowboy" if he were meant to hold a strong semiotic connection to Nazism on his own. Additionally, Boss' own character response to being called a Nazi would have been written to align with that of Josef Heiter's in the first film.

Bill Boss is, instead incredibly American. Likely in part due to personal insecurity regarding his immigrant status, he uses his relative "whiteness" as a weapon with which to legitimise his atrocities towards the prisoners he targets, especially those non-white indivduals who are "more American" than him by various metrics.

Compared to German NSDAP members in Germany, Boss has more to prove and less opportunity to prove it. Boss holds a tense position as he is ultimately, functionally, visibly a white man. Due to his immigrant status and apparently inability to seamlessly utilise American English phonetics, he cannot fully embody the image of the all-powerful, white American man. However, he still finds a way to embody the all-powerful white man, and does this by exploiting his power over non-white people and women every chance he gets.

This is why I have gripes with analyst writers' interpretations of Bill Boss that boil down to "German Nazi doing the Holocaust but in America using the prison indistrual complex." It misses the fact that the film highlights the very real phenomenon where white people with marginalised European backgrounds in the United States go into policing and get very involved with racist hate groups. This is documented especially among people with Irish, Italian, and German backgrounds (mostly Catholics). It feels like the "something American happening Americanly in America" tweet again, and Human Centipede 3 is absolutely "something American happening Americanly in America."

Fosco is a man who holds his own cultural values, but is ready and willing to understand the ideas behind even those he ultimately analyses and finds worthy of ridicule. Simultaneously "a man of the world" and "the Italian," he is comfortable enough the facets of his own cultural background he's chosen to maintain and does not regard a value or cultural tenet's region of origin to reflect on their merit. Boss, on the other hand, exploits oppressive national values that harm other people more than they do him as a justification to maintain a position of power where he's able to (and does) treat those people as if they were inhuman torture subjects.

characters are:

Radius from R.U.R. (my design)

Clyde and Ipso Facto from The Works

Hal 9000 from the Space Odyssey series

Filipe from The Treasure Planet

Dust from Dandy Dust (a cyborg)

Roz from The Wild Robot

Alan from The Twilight Zone (episode "in his image")

Roboko from Choko and Boko

Doctor Dumaya from Razia's Shadow (puppet show)

Eric from real life!

Gumby's impostor from The Gumby Movie

Toc-Man from the Pac-Man series

Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still

Der Maschinenmensch from Metropolis

Charlie from the Five Nights at Freddy's books

Robby from Forbidden Planet

Killbot from Killbot