Right you are, fletcher. Sorry to have misunderstood. And about Selim and Latika's eternal love, I think we're supposed to believe it was a matter of destiny. From the moment their eyes locked as six-year-olds, they knew each was the other's one and only. Blech.
And, buff, here's what I wrote to a friend in 1995 after seeing Schindler's List. (Notice I use some of the same language I used in my earlier post. Impressively consistent, n'est-ce pas?)
I just went to see what has been called "the best movie ever made about the Holocaust." But even if Schindler's List deserved that accolade, saying that a better movie has never been made does not mean that this is a good one. And I can't help wondering why everyone is rushing so frantically to hop on the pro-Spielberg bandwagon. Is it that we are so uncomfortable with his subject that to criticize the movie is tantamount to sacrilege? Are we afraid that we will be accused of anti-Semitism, pro-Nazism, and who knows what else if we dare to point out the movie's obvious flaws? Or are we hoping that if we can convince ourselves that Spielberg has finally done it, captured once and for all the obscenity that was the Holocaust, we will nevermore have to see its images, consider its relevance and its consequences, or wonder if it can happen again? Though it frightens me to believe it, I suspect that this last reason is the truest.
Schindler's List is a bowdlerized, prettified, quinine-coated sugar pill meant to soothe our consciences. It is a perfect movie for the end of the millennium: dishonest, corrupt, and trite. It shows just enough nastiness for its viewers to kid themselves that it's the real thing, while all along its disingenuous, beautifully photographed frames have but one function: to give us a titillating little catharsis while at the same time exonerating us all of any residual guilt we may feel for what happened in Europe earlier in this century.
Since when, I ask you, would people who had been underfed and brutalized for years look as good as those in Spielberg's labor camp scenes? And did any of you notice the abundance of fashionably slender women, with just a few fatties thrown in to show that Mr. S. accepts that not all of us are picture perfect? Where were the skeletal women? Where were the diseased women, tenderized by bruises and dripping with sores? And where, oh where, were the masculine equivalents of Spielberg's nubile Jewesses? Oh, give him his due--in the nude scenes, he did show a couple of naked men, complete with penises. But they were without fail aging and scrawny, whereas the gals were mostly slender and pleasantly endowed (again, with the exception of the token chubs just mentioned). Had I known that these scenes were intended to serve a secondary purpose as male-oriented pornography, I would not have been surprised by these inequities. But since reviewers had raved about the authenticity of Mr. Spielberg's vision, I expected to see plain, sick, skinny, suffering, pitiful people of both sexes, not some skewed, edited-for-the-modern-viewpoint so-called random sample of humanity. Did no one think to question the remarkable lewdness of vision that would lead a director to populate his labor camp with people who could double as fashion plates? Hell, their hair wasn't even dirty.
And what about our saintly hero, Mr. Schindler--the noble Gentile who saves the little Jews? One Christian doing a good deed is enough to redress all wrongs? Yes, Oskar Schindler did something that not many people had the guts to do. But is he a suitable stand-in for Jesus Christ? Is his back broad enough to shoulder all our sins? As the movie ended, I could almost feel the people around me sighing with satisfaction: Spielberg's handy moral antacid had neutralized any lingering doubts eating them about the role of the average Gentile in the Holocaust. One Christian saved 1,100 Jews--everything's okay now. One Christian saved 1,100 Jews--see, that Hitler was just a screwball, nothing to do with real Christians. One Christian saved 1,100 Jews--if only we had been there, the remaining 5,998,900 would have survived, too.
But perhaps the most insidious feature of this movie is that it claims to provide for us an approximation of the actual experience of the Holocaust. (Well, perhaps that's not fair-- this is what some of its reviewers have claimed for it. The director may have no such pretensions.) For any audience to think that a movie can furnish them with the reality of an experience is disturbing; for people to leave Schindler's List thinking that they have felt what it was like for the people living through that particular reality is downright dangerous. Aside from the fact that it is impossible for any movie to capture and communicate any experience in its entirety, and the fact that this particular experience is nothing if not indescribable, and the fact that Spielberg's specific exercise in deception is peculiarly incapable of telling the truth, that people can be persuaded to think that three-and-a-half hours of a nicely shot, well-cast, multimillion dollar extravaganza carefully designed to stretch people's tolerance for certain kinds of unpleasantness in a very safe, sanitized way are enough to inform them completely as to the truths of this unimaginable period in our history--well, I have no words to describe what I think that means. The point about the Holocaust is that it is inconceivable, yet it happened. A film that leads people to think that they've seen all there is to see, learned all there is to learn, makes it that much easier for history to repeat itself.
I begin to think that we should all be forced to undergo token tortures--though not too token--perhaps on a regular basis, just to remind us never to become complacent. That and yearly visits to Yad Vashem to view the record of the Holocaust enshrined there might go some way toward proving to us that we can never know what it was like but we must make sure it never happens again. Schindler's List dupes people into thinking they've had the experience--and in one not-too-arduous evening, to boot. From there, how much further is it to thinking that the fuss has been undeserved, and there's no need for us to guard against a repetition of these events? Meanwhile, hate crimes are on the rise, racism rages, anti-Semitism and homophobia are the norm, and violence against women remains a standby. If we think we're done dealing with the Holocaust, how much easier does it then become for its twin to be born?
Schindler's List is a manipulative, sentimentalized, dishonest film. And if no film before it has been as explicit, this only shows what ostriches we are. The book on which it is based did not pretend to offer the definitive print portrait of the Holocaust; it was a workmanlike, rather dull, but creditable piece of fictionalized reportage. At most, it wanted to tell the story of one man's deeds, something of the context in which they were played out, and their effect on those around him. Had Steven Spielberg shared Thomas Keneally's ambitions, his movie could have been a respectable addition to the lexicon of Holocaust-inspired art. If the movie as it now exists had not evoked such aggrandizing responses among its reviewers, perhaps it, too, could have served as a flawed but acceptable contribution to the cumulative creative response to the Holocaust. But to say that a film that reduces the experience of the Holocaust to the exploits of one Gentile surrounded by a crowd of Jewish extras presents the definitive portrayal of that time demonstrates a superficiality of sensibility, a paucity of reason, and a willing disregard for truth that say little for this species' chances of making it through another century.
