Filed under: Film, Literature | Tags: Bernhard Schlink, David Hare, Fascism, Germany, Kate Winslet, Nazi Germany, Ron Rosenbaum, Schindler's List, Stephen Daldry, Steven Spielberg, The Holocaust, The Reader
No, not Jakob the Liar (1999), whose twin crimes consist of 1) enlisting the holocaust to effect unearned pathos and 2) employing Robin Williams. According to Ron Rosenbaum, this unfortunate distinction goes to Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel, The Reader (2008). Disclosure: I have not seen the film yet, but I have read Schlink’s novel. And while I understand there are key differences between the film and novel, some of which Rosenbaum addresses in his review, Rosenbaum’s chief criticism stems from his interpretation of the novel’s conceit: namely, that Hanna, played by Kate Winslet, a concentration camp guard on trial for war crimes, is less guilty because she turns out to be illiterate. Indeed, Rosenbaum believes that the film pretends redemption because Hanna learns to read while serving her prison sentence (that she could have avoided had she admitted her illiteracy):
that’s what The Reader is about: the supposedly difficult struggle with this slowly dawning postwar awareness. As Cynthia Ozick put it in her essay: “After the war, when she is brought to trial, the narrator ['Michael Berg'] acknowledges that she is guilty of despicable crimes—but he also believes that her illiteracy must mitigate her guilt. Had she been able to read, she would have been a factory worker, not an agent of murder. Her crimes are illiteracy’s accident. Illiteracy is her exculpation.”
Indeed, so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn’t require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it’s been declared “classic” and “profound”) actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder. From the Barnes & Noble Web site summary of the novel: “Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges, Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret more shameful than murder.” Yes, more shameful than murder!
Leaving aside the fact that Rosenbaum apparently gleans his plot glosses from promotional copy rather than actually reading the novel, I think, underneath Rosenbaum’s justified anger at Barnes & Noble’s reduction, the book giant inadvertently makes an important point: does shame, truly, bear any relation to the objective gravity of a crime? Indeed, is a healthy dose of shame really what we want from those who commit the most inhuman of crimes? The fact that Hanna is illiterate does not vindicate her crime, but it does demonstrate how vulnerability, no matter how it is expressed, renders the human subject susceptible to the worst demands of fascism. In fact, we know this is how fascism works: brought low through the excesses and oppression of the elite, the poor, the disenfranchised, the uneducated seek solace in the solution and affirmation of racism and violence. But to explain is not to excuse: it is such simplistic logic that the far-right employ to smear supporters of social democracy.
This is not to say that Rosenbaum’s criticism is without merit. He is right when he says ‘Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a “Holocaust film,” it must be worthy of approbation, end of story’. When Steven Spielberg attempts to impart the gravity of genocide through a flash of colour from a little girl’s red dress on otherwise black and white photography, the result, when fully considered, is cartoonish if not grotesque. But Rosenbaum’s isolation of The Reader for particular opprobrium is curious. In a Slate article published three months before his request to deny The Reader an Oscar, Rosenbaum names the film as an example of an increasing obsession with the sex life of Nazis. Oddly, Rosenbaum condemns all of Germany, the only nation in the world, incidentally, ever to engage publicly with its homegrown fascism, for elevating Schlink’s novel to best-seller status; suggesting, in the process, that Germany is especially receptive to ‘Nazi porn’ or holocaust revisionism.
But Germany is unique in its journey to reconcile a fascist past with contemporary understanding. I wonder if Rosenbaum would condemn Nobel laureate Gunter Grass’s similar attempts, or indeed Peter Eisenman’s postmodern Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As Professor Julian Dodd wrote in the letter pages of the Guardian, Hanna’s guilt is never ‘mitigated’. It haunts the text like the 300 victims of her complicity and equivocalness:
The affair between Hannah and Michael is not “glorious”; though sexually fulfilling, it is troubled and hints at disaster from the off. When Hannah silences the judge with “What would you have done?”, the judge is not silenced by her moral honesty, but is rendered speechless by horror. (Hannah’s question ends cross-examination in which she fails to see she had a moral responsibility to save 300 people locked inside a burning church.) Finally, it was, indeed, toe-curling to see Michael attempt to carry out Hannah’s wish that her money be given to Ilana, one of her victims. But this was precisely the effect that this scene was designed to elicit: to the very end Hannah has failed to appreciate the nature of her crime and Michael, in fulfilling what he takes to be his duty to her, has failed to see this too.
Perhaps this irony is not as evident in the film as it is in the book, but I suspect Rosenbaum is uninterested in making a distinction. Besides, he condemns Schlink’s novel and David Hare’s screenplay equally. Rosenbaum’s goal remains to judge the inhabitants of 1940s Germany and their descendants unequivocally. Aside from the crude Manichean logic such a crusade necessitates, it is also supremely arrogant. Hare composed a withering response to critics like Rosenbaum (and, specifically, to Peter Bradshaw’s review in the Guardian),
it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it’s a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.
The question Hanna asks the judge, ‘What would you have done?’ is posed, naturally, for us too. It conceals a bottomless horror: a knowledge of evil without the concomitant knowledge of righteousness. It echoes both in known history and unknown contingencies. The Reader captures this echo, in its horror, its irony and its desire. Preventing genocide and fascism, something, criminally, this century has yet to accomplish, is not about deciding at which doorstep to lay the blame of past sins, but to seek the understanding, caution and fear that will keep such inhumanity at bay.
Filed under: Rhetoric | Tags: Charlie Chaplin, Communism, Democracy, Fascism, Propaganda, Solidarity, The Great Dictator
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…
To those who can hear me I say, ‘Do not despair’. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
Soldiers: Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, ‘the kingdom of God is within man’—not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers: In the name of democracy, let us all unite!
—The Great Dictator (1940). Dir. Charlie Chaplin.
Filed under: Film | Tags: Alejandro Amenábar, El espinazo del diablo, El laberinto del fauno, El Orfanato, Fascism, Francisco Franco, Guillermo del Toro, Juan Antonio Bayona, Robin Wood, Socialism, Spanish Horror, Stanley Kubrick, The Grotesque, The Others, The Shining, The Spanish Civil War, The Uncanny
There is something terrifying about Spanish horror. Films like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (2006) have ushered the genre into maturity. I recently saw Juan Antonio Bayona’s brilliant El orfanato (The Orphanage) (2007), a chilling, unsettling entry into the growing canon.
These films don’t rely on the shock horror shtick of hit films like The Descent (2005) but rather on the ghastly subtext of fascism to motivate the plot. Both of del Toro’s films are set during the Spanish Civil War, and The Orphange, though set in present day, invokes concentration camp imagery in the institution—grey school uniforms, austere steel-framed beds with chipped paint, and, horrifyingly, incinerated bodies reduced to ash—to communicate the traumatic history of Francisco Franco’s Spain. Robin Wood famously argues that the monster in the horror genre remains a reconstitution of the repressed—the grotesque return of the uncanny. It’s difficult to deny that the trauma of Spain’s past still haunts the present, and Bayona’s film articulates this haunting beautifully.
(SPOILER: Those who have not seen the film and wish to remain unsullied by plot synopsis should probably just skip to the end. Hell, you might want to anyway.)
Laura, with her husband Carlos and her adopted son Simón, has returned to live in the mothballed orphanage where she was raised as a child. Simón has an unhealthy number of imaginary friends, and he interacts with them quite intensely. (Oh, and incidentally, they’re probably ghosts.) In a disagreement with his mother during a masquerade party for special-needs children at the old orphanage, Simón disappears, devastating Laura and sparking a nine-month child hunt.
The “monster” in El orfanato, if he can be so-called, is a “deformed” child, Tomás, who drowned as a result of a prank played on him by his fellow orphans just after Laura left the orphanage thirty years ago. The children are not blamed for their crime by local authorities (“they were only playing”). Eventually, however, Laura reveals that Tomás’s mother Benigna, a steward at the orphanage, poisons the children and burns their bodies in the incinerator. In the context of Spanish horror, the ghost of Tomás would seem to represent the trauma of Spain’s fascist past. He hides his grotesqueness with an even more hideous mask. In the press notes to El laberinto del fauno, del Toro argues that “fascism is first and foremost a form of perversion of innocence, and thus of childhood.”
But what is achieved by representing fascism in the ghostly body of an innocent, disfigured, child? The answer comes in a cinematic slight-of-hand that recalls Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), where the film’s title, referring to Danny’s mysterious mind-reading power, distracts from the actual threat of the film, Jack Torrance’s possessed, murderous rage. The “grotesqueness” of Tomás, a double of Simón, becomes a red herring for Benigna’s much more sinister crime. Benigna, (chillingly “mild” and “benign”), the institutionalized custodian, has executed an uncanny repetition of the crimes of Franco: the “disappearing” of inconvenient or unwanted auxiliaries. Indeed, as screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez points out in this interview with SciFi.com, where else but in Franco’s Spain could six children go missing without anybody raising a fuss? By the end of the film Tomás has ceased to act as the object of terror, and instead, the children who murdered him haunt Laura (and the audience) in her search for her son.
It is thus the crime of the children, their “lesser” murder of Tomás, which haunts the film. The real terror the film seeks to expose is the “benign” terror of fascism, the kind that disguises barbarity and atrocity for “play” or “innocence.” In the film’s most chilling scene, a hysterical Laura, alone in the orphanage, hauls out the old beds, drapes and linens of the Franco-era institution and reproduces the historical setting right down to an elaborate meal at a long table where she sits alone. The banality of the scene is undercut by the fascist history to which Laura has returned.
The film only achieves unity once Laura realizes that she was complicit in her son’s accidental death—she inadvertently locked him in a secret room where he fell and subsequently starved to death. As a result, she commits suicide in order to “join” Simón and his ghostly friends. Tomás’s mask disappears and Laura caresses his unhidden, smiling, sun-kissed face, “deformity”and all. Yet, as in the end of El laberinto del fauno when Ofelia chooses fantasy over reality, this unity is undermined by the suicide required to recover it. This scene of unity is followed by a juxtaposition with a gravestone memorializing Laura, Simón, and the six dead orphans. The audience is not allowed to comfortably accept Laura’s choice.
Our last view of Laura occurs when her husband Carlos, moving out of the orphanage for good, finds in the foyer the St. Anthony’s medal he lent to Laura while she searched for their son. She promised to return it once they found him. If only symbolically, Laura has found what she was looking for—she has restored the innocence of children from the perversion of fascism. When Carlos picks up the medal, his impression, and that of the audience’s, is one of closure. But the meaning of the medal, a metonym for the narrative of loss, memory and recovery in the film, suggests that Carlos, the cynical doctor and father figure, must begin his own journey of discovery and redemption. Carlos, and the audience, make the wrong interpretation at their peril.
The true terror of Spanish horror, then, is not “simply” the horror of fascism. Realist representations of fascism articulate such historical atrocity quite adequately. Rather, the Spanish horror is concerned with a repressed fascist history returning as uncanny innocence. Moreover, only through imaginative reconstructions of such sinister banality are such harmful strategies exposed. “It is not ‘seeing is believing,’” a medium counsels Laura after an encounter with the ghosts, “but the other way around.” Like the beast in El laberinto del fauno that sees with its hands, the mild fascism of present-day has infiltrated our senses making innocence grotesque and evil benign. And that is certainly terrifying.
