Schindler's List (1993)

The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács offers a very useful expression, "intellectual physiognomy," to describe the fictional construction of characters' worldviews--how authors integrate a personality as a synthesis of a life history and an individualized way of thinking. Characters ought not to be mere "mouthpieces of the spirit of the age" (Marx's expression), but vivid and particularized voices emanating from a unique subjectivity.

The ideas of the individuals are not abstract, generalized and unmotivated. Instead the total personality of each character is synthesized and exemplified through his mode of thinking, in his mode of self-expression, and in his conclusions regarding the subject at hand. Through the specific style and process of thinking, [the author] is able to expose the characteristic approach of each individual: how he confronts a problem, what he accepts as axiomatic, what he seeks to prove and how he proves it, the level of intellectual abstraction he attains, the sources of his examples, what he underplays and evades and how he does so.

Lukács offers many examples of characters whose way of thinking--abstract ideas, prejudices, intellectual insights and errors, and so on--is an indelible characterization: Aristophanes, Socrates, and Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium; Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Shakespeare's Othello; Julien Sorel in Stendhal's The Red and the Black. (The current debate about the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is precisely about the intellectual physiognomy of Atticus Finch.)


Spielberg's Schindler's List is about the changing responses of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) to Nazism, and particularly to the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews. But Spielberg presents this response not in the context of Schindler's character (his morality, his conscience, his prejudices, his ideology, his understanding of history, his politics) but in the context of our (the audience's) character. The movie is not about the conflicts in Schindler's breast, which would need to be resolved dramatically--but rather about the obvious repugnance of absolute evil, which is as it were built into our perception of the film. It is not possible to struggle intellectually or emotionally with what we are seeing onscreen (everything Nazi is unambiguously bad and villainous, just as in Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies); and yet the movie asks us to be interested in the pseudo-struggle of the hero faced with the same events!

In order for us to care about this man's disavowal of Nazism, and his dawning awareness of Jewish suffering, we have to understand why someone could be a Nazi. (After all, there were millions of Nazis!) But the answer the film gives, in the person of Ralph Fiennes's character Amon Goeth, is: Nazis were psychopaths. (The closing text informs us that he was arrested while in a mental institution.) This, you will notice, is not an explanation but an evasion.

How did Nazism function as an ideology? What aspects could be accepted under the heading of everyday political cynicism? How much of an illusion (about Hitler's plans for the Jews) were ordinary Germans (and even committed Nazis) living under? To what degree were the Jews themselves asked to buy into the program of their restricted freedom? What sort of personalities resisted and which buckled under? What kind of apologetic arguments were offered by rational people?

We know from history, for example, that the German army was opposed to Hitler in limited and insufficient ways (as were institutions like the Catholic church). But this opposition was couched in terms far from removed from Good Versus Evil. The Wehrmacht had its own privileges to defend, its own authority, its own response to the Versailles treaty, its own history of anti-semitism, its own ideas about strategy, and (above all) an opposition to the Nazi SS as a politicized, ideological intruder into military affairs. One can imagine hours of riveting, fraught argument in opposition to Nazism within the German Army... but one cannot imagine that this opposition could take the form of condemning the badness of Nazism. Schindler's List, however, is limited to this kind of response. (Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, has reproached Spielberg for numerous scenes carried out "without nuance," where "one should, instead, have worked with a pair of tweezers.")

What that means is that the characterization and drama is extremely pallid. Take, by contrast, the varied ideological arguments put forward in Spielberg's Lincoln, which is a flawed and bloated movie but which allows that the argument over slavery was not a matter of "good" and "bad" people lining up according to their basic human decency. This movie is filled with scenes of Abraham Lincoln explaining himself, and it is these rhetorical and argumentative scenes which most convey his personality, his warmth, his reflection on his own life. Take by contrast David Lean's film Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alec Guinness's character, a captured British officer, persuades himself to build a bridge for the Japanese using prisoners of war, through an agonizing and shameful decision that emphasizes an ideology of officers commanding their own troops (rather than the Japanese captors giving the orders to workers). This is a believable and interesting mistake, because it takes place against the background of that character's life and ideological formation.

Nothing of the sort occurs in Schindler's List. We do not understand Amon Goeth (because he is crazy); we do not understand the collaboration of the Judenrat and Jewish ghetto police (because it is conveyed as mere information: this existed, without further probing); we do not understand the mass of Jews saved by Schindler (because they are not characters, they are so many lives to be preserved). And lastly, we do not understand Schindler, because he has no one to speak to about his conflict and understanding: his reversal of conscience is presented not in dialogue but in a vision (the little girl in the red coat).

Not only does this make for a fairly tedious movie, since the central conflict cannot be put onscreen, but it does a disservice to the avowed project of historical memory of the Holocaust. We leave the movie feeling good about ourselves, but with an incredulity that anything so very bad could ever have happened, and a curious belief that the Holocaust was carried out somehow unconsciously, by no one. This is the pernicious line of thought that Marcel Ophüls skewers in his film The Memory of Justice, when an actor admits (I paraphrase): "I am the only surviving Nazi. I must be, because no one else will admit to having been in those mass rallies. And I must also have been the narrator of all of those films you see, because no one else has come forward, it was only me."

Selma (2014)

The film biography is a treacherous endeavor. I can think of a few good biopics: Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Ivan the Terrible, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Last Emperor, Raging Bull, Young Mr. Lincoln, Serpico, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Reds. The greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, is a biopic.

Of the recent Hollywood biopics, I remember seeing Milk with Sean Penn, and Ali with Will Smith. I passed on Milk, The Iron Lady, Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom, J. Edgar, The Aviator, and others.

The reception of Selma has been universal acclaim. According to one aggregator, every single review by a "top critic" has been positive, which would suggest that Selma is one of the greatest works of cinematic art ever produced. Undoubtedly, this acclaim is motivated by the unequivocal rightness and moral power of the events and persons depicted--not solely by the merits of the film itself.

Many of the scenes commit the cardinal sin of movie storytelling: the characters are talking only to provide the viewers with information (political background, exposition, informing us what face matches what historical personage). But information is presumably the last thing the moviegoing public wants. Think about how Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane handles exposition: Lawrence is being kept in the dark about the Franco-British objectives in the Middle East, and so much of the film is his education (along with ours) of the complexities he is not introduced to originally. In Citizen Kane, there is the famous "News on the March" newsreel, a tactic that can probably only be used once. The point is that scenes should avoid having characters tell each other things they already know. (Further, scenes should avoid having simple purposes like a checklist: 1. Show that MLK had affairs and was not "perfect." 2. Show that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had surveillance on MLK. 3. Show that Malcolm X was in Selma for a minute and secretly supported MLK.) It's anti-narrative because the information just sits there; the story doesn't resolve or respond to these scenes.

This approach is dictated by the film's didacticism... but then, what is the message of the film? What do we learn, really, about racism (for instance)? Why did Governor Wallace stake his political career and place in history to oppose voting rights? Why did Johnson stall? Why did the KKK kill white supporters of MLK? The answer to this can only be: there were important, vital stakes in the Jim Crow political dispensation--stakes that these historical actors stood to lose.

But there is no sense of those stakes in the film. Wallace's actions seem arbitrary and unmotivated. LBJ's opposition and turnaround are only sketched in. The result is that white supremacist rule over the south is disentangled from institutional and economic and political privilege and made to seem like a capricious personal misjudgment. (Take by contrast the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas is on the wrong side of history, but his rhetoric and personality are compelling because he has thought through and is able to argue his pro-slavery position as a coherent one. These positions are abominable but they are rooted in real personalities and real concerns. The racists in the film Selma are not real people; this is an enormous mistake.)

Naturally--because the triumph depicted in the film is the abolition of barriers to voting for blacks. If the movie wanted to show OTHER problems (economic exploitation comes to mind), then the film could not show the Selma march as an unequivocal, soaring victory. The picture of racism in the film is dictated not by history, but by the "happy ending".

Unfortunately, by vitiating the motivations and stakes of the Bad Guys, the movie makes nonsense of its narrative structure: a battle of wills. The opposing wills (of Johnson and Wallace) are silly and half-drawn. This saps out most of the suspense.

There is a moment when MLK recalls a long desegregation campaign in Albany, Alabama, which was unsuccessful because the police chief, Laurie Pritchett, patiently waged a war of attrition and de-escalation against MLK's non-violent tactics. Albany was evidently a complicated, stressful, drawn-out, tactical defeat. This to me sounds like a much more interesting movie, because the doubts and debates and frustrations of the SCLC are built into the events themselves: King is not "infallible" in Albany.

In Selma, King is infallible--some weak gestures by the film aside--and this is just not as interesting to watch.