Schindler's List as wish-fulfillment

Before I get into the valuation matrix and what it is/does in Schinlder’s List, true to my motto ‘every film is a wish-fulfillment’, it would be good (for me, always for me) to adumbrate the many ways in which this film manifestly constitutes a wish-fulfillment.

So at the very basic level, the film embodies the wish that deep down, beneath the Nazi-party membership and the war-profiteer's façade, Schindler really were a moral person who made a conscious choice, who was capable of a conscious choice, to do good.

In as much as Schindler starts out as a “bad” (though more of the coarse, selfish, opportunistic type than of the cruel, bloodthirsty type) person, the film charts out the wish that people were really capable of change – for the better.

Furthermore, the film represents the wish that one person really could make a difference, in the face of adversary, danger, indifference and hate.

Another wish embodied in the film is that people would get what they deserve – Schindler is remembered, Goeth is hanged and damned, the Schindler Jews survive. The film is strewn with instances of senseless, haphazard death/punishment, but the central narrative that emerges does reassure the viewer by re-establishing of a world in which the basic just-rewards system is valid.

All of the above wishes are part and parcel of the basic main-stream popular culture tenets derived from triumphal humanist, progressive, Enlightenment, modernist ideals. That is, they all represent versions of the deep-rooted belief that mankind is capable of change and of improvement, that things are inevitably and consistently getting better and better. I guess Spielberg could not think of a better way of making the Holocaust - the single most devastating historical event that belies all of the above ideals - palatable to main-stream audiences.

Still another wish, slightly less obvious though located on the very tip of the viewer’s nose, is the wish that the past could be washed off/shed very easily. This is a somewhat counterintuitive wish in a film that explicitly aims to commemorate, and yet it’s right there spank in your face: the film starts out in color (good), fades into black’n’white (bad) and warms into color (good) again at the very end. The transition from the past to the present only takes a simple flick of the special-effects button. This is counterintuitive yet in another way – the ‘bad’/past cannot be washed off in the simple sense of the word, as it is colorLESS, it is an absence; whereas the ‘good’/present is colored, i.e. tainted. In this inverted signification scheme, the real/good/present is a covered up (painted over, colored) version of the not-entirely fictional/bad/past, which is bare and colorless, in other words - clean. This is an interesting point, as Spielberg relies on a specific set of viewer perceptions and expectations regarding the established visual-media boundaries between the real and the fictional - similar to countless other conventional narrative tools, like flashback, fade-to-black, etc. I’ll return to deal with color and the way this film allocates it, as it is a very important feature within the entire structure of the film.

Finally, the very making of this film constitutes a wish that the Holocaust could be REpresented, i.e. that as an event it were representable – that it could yield to elucidation, articulation, narration. This touches upon a whooooole array of literature about the Holocaust, so I won’t do much more than take a little dip into it.

The orthodox artsy-fartsy approach to creating works of art that attempt to deal with the Holocaust stipulates a strict Bilderverbot, that is, a prohibition to attempt to directly visually represent the Holocaust, as the event is understood to be of such overwhelming magnitude and horrifying nature as to preclude any representation. One of the earliest proponents of such Holocaust piety was the otherwise extremely perspicacious and unyielding Adorno, who said that writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.

This means two things: on the practical level, if you are bold enough to think that one could represent it, you must be an oversimplifying, pretentious twit and a non-artist by definition; on the moral level, it is unethical to attempt to recreate/represent horrors of such scale, in that the very attempt is impious to the singularity of the Holocaust, and is bound to have a trivializing effect. In film, this paradigm of non-representability has found its quintessential form in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah – which consistently refuses to attempt to reproduce or represent the Holocaust directly; so it relies exclusively on contemporary documentary footage from the 1980s, rather than on an attempt to stage the “original” (Miriam Bratu Hansen does a great job in explaining this issue, and providing many additional interesting insights in her article "Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah", included in the volume Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, which can be viewed on google books).

Spielberg transgresses the representation prohibition with the gas-chamber/shower scene, where he shows us what no other film dares to show. This is where the Shoah turns into Show-Us. But it isn’t just this one single scene, for the entire film goes against the prohibition, in as much as it is a story of survival – showing us what IS, what remains, focusing on presence and sidestepping any artsy attempt to capture what is absent, destroyed, gone. Thereby it defies the very holos in the world 'holocaust', claiming that not all was destroyed, that there (always) is a remainder, which yields to representation. Moreover, it implies that the Holocaust could be sufficiently and aptly narrated via presence rather than lack - telling the story of the survivors rather than painting the contours of destruction.

If I say that Schindler’s List is not about the Holocaust, it is to a large degree because of this promise-to-Shoa(h)-Us that the film holds out. I would claim that Spielberg uses the lure of this promise, which is most pronounced in the gas-chamber/shower scene (a scene that impells the viewer to occupy a voyeuristic position, in a way wishing to be taken across the threshold of the gas-chamber and to witness the asphyxation of the victims), in order to pull off the old “now you see it, now you don’t” trick. For he doesn’t really show us the inside of a gas-chamber during an actual gassing of victims (to the viewer's relief, but also to the effect of frustrating the voyeuristic wish), and he doesn’t really show us the Holocaust and WWII throughout the film. Instead, what we get is a cast of semi-fictional WWII characters acting out battle scenes from a late-modern/post-industrial metropolitan American family life (revolving around divorce, abuse, sexual promiscuity, parent-child relationships, etc.), wrapped inside a ubiquitous market-mechanism that allots each person and thing its proper place, based on an all-encompassing matrix of valuation.

Phew, and I didn’t even get to the Valuation Matrix… well, next time.