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."
1 comment:
What a superb short essay! It makes me hate Schindler's List even more, and of course, love Jaws more passionately!
Another problem is that the movie renders the imprisoned Jews abject, and removes all their power to act. So we have Nazi psychopaths on the one hand, abject Jews on the other, and on that troubling third hand, a benevolent white gentile (like John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, etc.). Thomas Keneally's splendid novel is much better:
"The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish Army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labor camp, which had been under the administration of Untersturmführer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about 50 of them, and they worked in Oskar’s kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.
"Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who, apart from the Zionists, merely followed the politics of survival, was good. A number of them took private lessons on Uri Bejski’s automatics, for in the Polish Army of the Thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons.
"If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer’s. An armed Marxist Jew."
Your argument here connects up with Raul Hilberg's critique of the "wicked German" theory underlying Daniel Goldhagen's book--a theory somewhat lacking in explanatory power.
Dr. Parker, if you read this, would you please drop me a line at jamesholstun at hot mail? I just read your superb LARB essay and want to talk more with you, but I can't find an email address and I find that am almost too lazy to address an envelope any more. Jim Holstun in Buffalo.
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