Schindler's List - Valuation Matrix, over-and-out

THE fundamental valuation/exchange scheme in Schindler's list consists of three consecutive scenes in which Schindler rescues/redeems four of the Jewish characters who eventually survive. In all three cases, Schindler rescues the persons involved by securing them a job at his factoryt, and he does this by giving Stern a valuable object that is exchanged for the Judenrat official's collusion.

The first person thusly rescued is Lewartow. Stern tells Schindler about the "make me a hinge" Goeth-Lewartow incident, and Schindler tacitly gives Stern his lighter and walks away.

The following shot shows the Judenrat official lighting his cigarette with Schindler's lighter, as he writes Lewartow onto his list (reassigning him from the metalworks inside Plasow, where he was too near to Goeth, to the list of people who work in Schindler's D.E.F). In the following shot, Lewartow thanks Schindler, as the latter walks down the factory floor.

Just a skirmish of things to come in the next posts: in the Goeth-Lewartow near summary-execution scene, we again see the close connection between Goeth's libidinal outlet and unproductive persons - here with the inverse effect than in the case of Helen Hirsch. However, Lewartow's life, about to be taken by Goeth as punishment for his subpar performance/productivity, is saved only thanks to the subpar performance of two pistols that fail in Goeth's hands.

Moreover, when watching the scene closely, the expressions on Ralph Fiennes' face invoke a reading that locates the episode within Goeth's subpar performance (i.e. not the guns are to blame, but the Kommandant). The libidinal aspect is clear here: Goeth is unable 'to fire his gun', he is not in full control of his 'weapon', and his impotence is made worse and more irritating by the presence of two other male SS officers (and a Jew, who isn't a male per se in Nazi terms, but is supposed to affirm the Nazi's masculinity by being a victim - which he fails to do). And so the filmmaker sketches a libidinal backdrop to Goeth's professed pursual of productivity. In other word, Spielberg draws here a clear connection between Goeth's image of himself as a man, his ability to perform, and between the administration of the camp through violence that is directed against lazy and unproductive persons.

The next person rescued by Schindler via a barter is the so-called Chicken Boy (actor Adam Siemion). The sequence remains virtually identical to the first case: the viewer is presented with a short scene that takes place within the Plasow camp, in which Goeth runs amok with a rifle, and the camera and the narrative focus on the child.

Then Stern accosts Schindler while walking hurriedly through the camp, supposedly describing the bloody scene and implying the urgent need to remove the boy from Goeth's destructive vicinity (Stern's words advocating the boy's cause are "He's very gifted..."). Wordlessly Schindler gives Stern a cigarette case, and the following shot shows us the very same Judenrat official in possession of the cigarette case. This is ensued by the boy thanking Schindler on the factory floor.

The third and final scene in the valuation/exchange sequence is a variation on the previous and established formula.

The initial trigger to Schindler's action is an incognito young Jewish woman who manages to gain an audience with Schindler (she first has to go home and dress up in a way that spells out more money and sex before Herr Direktor is willing to see her), reveals to him what is by then common knowledge about his factory and begs him to rescue her parents, the Perlmans.

("They say that no-one dies here" she tells him... Schindler's suprised look at this turn in the conversation, as his whole demeanor spells out an obvious and intuitive expectation of easy sex, reminds one of Lacan's famous maxim about love: 'To love is to give what you haven’t got, to somebody who does not want it', only turned on its head - Schindler's suprise is caused by the realization that the woman does not want what he thought she wanted (sth which in his arrogance and self-assured Don Juanism he is certain that he has), but rather she is attracted to him for something he does not have, she wants him in other ways than he expected and due to things that he is and does in spite of himself, so to speak).

Schindler scares her away from his office, and goes to confront Stern.

(Here I must digress and again get ahead of myself before returning to the valuation/exchange theme).

- "People die, it's a fact of life", Schindler hurls at Stern.

This tendency of Schindler to proffer platitudes to his Jewish filmic affiliate is mirrored by Goeth ("The truth is always the right answer, Helen", Goeth tells Helen in their violent celler scene). This patronizing and infantilizing of the Jewish protagonists suggests, in my opinion, a comparison to conversations held by parents and their children. But I'll have to leave more detailed discussion of the Gentile-Jewish relationship as it is postulated by the film, to a later post.

Schindler goes on to defend Goeth, in a way, by pointing out the pressure he is under ["You know, daddy's been under a lot of stress lately, with all the work and everything..." you could almost hear him saying]. "Think about it, in his situation... the whole place to run... a lot of things to worry about..."

Then another platitude: "And the war... it brings out the worst in people, always the bad, never the good" ('We still talking about Goeth?', the viewer finds him/herself wondering...)

I'll encroach on the forthcoming libidinal-economies post by pointing out that he defends Goeth by affirming the latter's mainstream/macho heterosexual masculinity ("He likes good food, good wine, the ladies, making money..."). Sounds like Schindler is diligently reciting the mainstream credo of what it means to be a man.

Later on in the film, when Schindler is thrown into prison for kissing a Jewish girl, Goeth mirros this gesture by defending Schindler on similar grounds ("He likes women... he has so many women... he sees a pretty woman, he does not think...", Goeth tells the Gestapo officer).

Stern 'talks back' by suggesting that Goeth also likes killing, and induces a flashback in which he tells Schindler, and shows the viewer, how Goeth shot 25 people at short range.

- "What do you want me to do about it?!" Schindler hurls another parent/child platitude.

- "Nothing, we're just talking", says Stern.

- "Perlman, husband and wife", says Schindler, in a strange screenplay non-sequitur (his words are echoed by the Judenrat official during call-out at the camp), and hands Stern his wristwatch. "Have Goldberg bring them over".

The familiar sequence ensues, whereby we see the wristwatch on the Judenrat official's hand as he calls out the names of the Perlmans, and the next shot shows us how they enter the factory gates.

There's a couple of significant differences between this rescue scene and the previous two.

First, and this is crucial for the geography of the narrative, we can locate here the first explicit and conscious instance of Schindler's acting on selfless grounds in order to assist Jewish prisoners of the Plasow camp. In the previous two cases, Stern kind of forced his hand, and he tacitly, almost reluctantly, played along. Here Schindler had full liberty to suppress the Jewish girl's appeal, or even to use this case to prove to Stern that he disapproves of his practices.

Second, the scene concludes by the incognito Jewish girl's almost infatuated glance in the direction of Schindler's office window, after she sees her parents being led through the gates of D.E.F. Much like the female characters discussed in the previous post, she too is shown to clearly register not so much the mechanism of the exchange, but its outcome. This feminine knowing point-of-view, the representation of the woman who sees and knows, is significant, and I shall return to it later.

Within the valuation/exchange analytic framework, it is amusing to note the juxtaposition of the names PE(A)RLman and GOLDberg in the above scene.

Whereas one could protest and say that Spielberg is bound here by the real-life names of the non-fictional persons involved, the final scene of the movie (again, getting ahead of myself... ) offers another amusing Freudian choice of words/names, that cannot be explained away by historical necessity.
While Spielberg (mostly, but not only) uses contemporary sources in the film's soundtrack, his choice of the song 'Yerushalaim shel Zahav' to accompany the closing scene is the most discordant audio anachronism in the film. The song breaks out as the survivors, still in black-and-white, walk across the meadow and the medium gradually turns into color. The song can be heard as we see the real-life Schindler Jews, accompanied by the pertinent actors, filing past Schindler's grave on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.

There is some justification in using this song - yes, the film does relocate physically to Jerusalem; yes, the film does fast-forward into the 1993 present, in which this 1967 song is not an anachronism per se. But...

Already the black-and-white survivors, walking in the meadow in Moravia in 1945, appear to be singing this song (Spielberg did not use one of the well-known versions of the song, sung by a solo female voice, but uses a choir version, which creates an effect of the actual Schindler Jews apparently singing). This clearly is an anachronism, and is by no means called for by any historical or factual reasons. What I'm trying to emphasize here is the element of the filmmaker's fully free choice of using the song for the closing scene.

(That this song is extremely political and has an interesting history in and of itself, must be left as a topic for another post...)

The titles running across the screen in this scene places us firmly within the valuation matrix: the viewer is informed that in 1993 there were fewer than four-thousand Jews in Poland; while there were more than six-thousand descendants of the original 1100 Schindler Jews. The transitive theorem logic obviously applied and implied here is that Schindler's acts had a scope and long-term effect greater than all other rescue attempts related to the once glorious Polish Jewry (3.3M prior to WWII).

What is amusing and somewhat uncanny here is that the valuation matrix even invades the soundtrack - for the song's title literally means 'Jerusalem of Gold', and its famous refrain runs 'Jerusalem of Gold, and of Brass and of Light'.

A Jewish filmmaker, who's shooting a Jewish-themed film that is full to the brim with instances of comparative materialistic valuation and exchange, and picks this song to close the film, necessarily brings up a wry smile - as one cannot escape thinking about the so-called "Jewish" preoccupation with money, valuables, etc. Of the many 'returns of the repressed' in the film, this is by no doubt the funniest :-)

If you've read this post so far you may be yawning and thinking, well what's the big deal and what the heck am I trying to say... In other words, what is the meaning of the valuation matrix in Schindler's List?

I'm making a big deal out of the Valuation Matrix, as the viewer must not forget that true to the film's Talmudic motto, it is in fact an exploration of a person's worth. The very question is literally posed by both Schindler and Goeth towards the end of the film, when they bargain for the price of the "workers" that Schindler would take with him to Brünnlitz.

From the DVD cover, to the very last "historical" (black-and-white) scene of Schindler with his Jews, to the closing titles, the film works by and through valuations and exchanges. THIS is more than THAT, A in exchange for B, X is the value of Z. To make a computer analogy, the valuation matrix is the operating system within which the film takes place. As such, it does not determine the content of the film, but it does shape the manners in which content is processed, related to and represented.

Obviously, there can be multiple interpretations of the valuation matrix and of its meanings and functions in this film.

To make things nice and comfy, let's narrow things down to two basic types of meanings/functions - subversive and mainstream.

The subversive reading of the ubiquitous valuation and exchange going on in the film would perceive it as an attempt to represent what standard and current Holocaust-jargon calls the 'dehumanization': the vicious, unremitting decimation and extermination, rendering the individual an abject 'thing'. As I fully accept Yehuda Bauer's comment about how inappropriate it is to think that the victims were dehumanized, while actually the perpetrators were the ones who willingly shed their own humanity, I believe that a more apt name to describe this reduction is 'reification' - the turning of human beings, in this case, Jews, into things. Another example of an artistic representation of this reductive process is  the painful, petty, ridiculous and cruel exchange market in Primo Levi's Lager, for example.

As human beings were reduced to mere objects and evaluated merely on the basis of their use-value (whether or not they were essential to the war effort), Spielberg has structured the Schindler story in a filmic form that constantly foregrounds the price paid for survival, the ineluctable nature of the murderous Nazi machine and the constant weighing and measuring up of things and persons. The valuation/exchange formula becomes a method of representing the horror of the Holocaust. As a method of representation, it carries a subversive potential only in as much as it posits valuation as imoral when relating to human beings. As a protest that strictly rejects a 'THIS in exchange for THAT' when it comes to human lives, it stands a chance of disrupting cooptation into the system of exchange and valuation.

And this is where the film dangles between two interpretations of a paraphrase on the motto - human life is a price too high to pay

However, I would claim that several elements in the film stand in the way of such an interpretation, or rather, detract from its viability and weight.

First of all, the dual aspect of the valuation (always putting two objects/persons one against the other, or, exchanging one for another), the structuration of the rythm of the film on a seemingly duple meter is superceded by a broader and more sweeping movement. What do I mean here:

In contrast to the static character of the film's motto, the movie itself, by nature, is dynamic.

Moreover, beyond the inherently dynamic aspect of the motion picture, certain objects that appear early in the film recur later on, thereby enhancing the sense of object moving around, changing hands, exchanged.

Examples:

In the black-and-white opening scene, when Schindler is dressing up, we see the wrist watch that is later exchanged for the Perlmans' D.E.F. working permit.

Another object from the opening scene reappears late in the film: the Schindler's NSDAP lapel-pin, regarding which he comments when taking leave of his Jews at Brünnlitz ("This pin... I could have saved another person for this pin...")

In a way, the entire opening scene is mirrored by the last "historical" scene in which we see Schnidler - whereas in the beginning we see Schindler dressing at ease, picking the right tie, chosing the right cufflings, at the end of the film the Schindlers pack up hurriedly, tossing clothes into suitcases, and eventually dressing up in striped concentration camp prisoners' overalls.

Yet another example of a valuable object that appears early in the film and recurs later on is the handful of diamonds that we see in the warehouse of the deportees' belongings (right after Schindler narrowly rescues Stern from the moving train); and then later again, a very similar shot of the diamonds appears when Schindler bribes the Auschwitz official to release the women's transport to Brünnlitz.

The point I'm getting at is that the valuation and exchange are not a mere ping-pong of pairs of objects that stand in hermetic relation to the rest of the world. Rather, the reappearance of valuable objects throughout the film creates a sense of flow and of circulation. The valuation/exchange is therefore not a stand-alone comparative aspect but a fully fledged system: an economy. This is in fact the overarching principle of the film, which frames it and enables all movement and narrative development. So the underside of this story of the Holocaust and survival is actually the economy.

The above realization could potentially lead the way to an even more radical reading of the film's message. After all, a market/economy based on flow and circulation is more dehumanizing and vicious than a mere A-for-B exchange/valuation scheme.

So one could say that identifying the economy as lying at the base of the film allows us to interpret Schindler's List as a severe critique of the fundamental compatibility of capitalism/market economy and the genocidal policies of the Nazi state. By showing the close interrelationship between the economy and the bureaucracy/administration behind the elaborate system of concentration and extermination camps, the film could be said to demonstrate that the market economy (which is the stock-in-trade of progress, democracy and human rights in the current late-modern everyday discourse) was not a sufficient safeguard against the murderous policies of the Nazi state; on the contrary, it played along and facilitated the implementation of the ideology of exclusion, imprisonment and extermination.

(Spielberg is of course not basing his analysis on research - his methodology is his filmic storytelling: that he is able to represent reality as such, is proof and evidence to the factual feasibility of such a horizon)

Nevertheless, such an interpretation is rendered very tenuous by the spillover of the valuation/exchange matrix into the present - for the valuation logic crosses the historical, black-and-white threshold, into the present. As mentioned above, the titles in the closing scene give us facts and figures the compare and contrast the size of contemporary Polish Jewry vs. all the many descendants of the Schindler Jews.

In this manner, the spillover belies and deflects the subversive reading and implies the ultimate continuity of the valuation axis - the economy was uninterrupted by the Holocaust and retains its function until today; it overarches the pre- and post-war realities.

We are then left with the mainstream, conformist interpretation of the function and meaning of the valuation matrix: the film thus does not rebel against or dispute the morality of the economy, but rather celebrates a localized and small-scale victory gained by means of using the system against the declared Nazi goals, so to speak.

To take this further - by stretching the valuation axis to encompass the present, showing that it is a perpetual ordering element of society, Spielberg provides the viewer with another reassuring wish-fulfillment, in as much as it affirms the indestructibility of aspects of reality that the viewer is intimately familiar with from today's world.

There is a dialectic here, of course, in as much as the continuity of same unreformed and value-neutral (i.e. potentially susceptible to abuse) economy still engulfs the present. So to go back to the radical reading of the film, Spielberg could in fact be seen as pointing out to the viewer the yawning abyss that still very much exists.

Still, seeing that Spielberg has willingly self-ascribed to himself a main-stream, blockbuster Hollywood director-and-producer status; and seeing that he's never made any comments whatsoever that could be read as fundamentally critical of the market economy as such - this radical interpretation is probably a case of reading Schindler's List very much against the grain.

What we could claim is that the film documents quite accurately the ways in which the economy (as a system of circulation and valuation, of things and people moving around within a self-referential and comparative continuum of material value) permeates the imagination of late 20th century filmmakers. To put it differently, I guess what I'm trying to demonstrate throughout is that if Schindler's List can be said to hold merit as a document(ary), then it is only by being viewed as a primary source - telling us much more about the people who have made the film than about the historical events which it takes up as its subject matter.

Now to lay the groundwork for the upcoming posts.

The centrality of the economy within the film, which I hope to have demonstrated, is encapsulated in the film's motto. As mentioned above, the motto as well as the Schindler-Goeth dialogue towards the end of the film ("No, no... what is a person worth to you?") make the movie an exploration of a person's worth.

At the same time, we should also understand this as an exploration of a MAN's worth - for it explores not only the worth of one person's life, but also Schindler's worth as a person (moral being) and as a man, i.e. a male (and here the whole libidinal Schindler vs. Goeth duo comes into play).

To briefly point out the obvious in how the valuation/exchange axis and the libidinal economies model are closely knit and interrelated - first and foremost, of course, the representation of competing libidinal economies is in itself a comparative and evaluative dynamic. 

Second, to work off the material discussed in this post and to demonstrate how necessary is the excursion into libido land - think about the objects that Schindler exchanges via Stern for the jobs, and subsequently for the lives, of the Jews. They are all personal belongings, objects which he carries on his person, that is, extensions of his self. Moreover, a lighter, a cigarette case and a wrist watch are a few of the (symbolic) things that make a man A Man.

What I'll try to demonstrate in the following posts is that wherever we look in Schindler's List, we are never too far removed from representations of libido and sexuality at work.