First of all, nothing in what follows concerns the real, i.e. historic, person of Oskar Schindler. What I write must be understood as relating exclusively to the depiction of Schindler and the representation of his story in Spielberg’s film; that is, what interests me is the Schindler that was created by (author of the book) Thomas Keneally, (author of the sreenplay) Steven Zillian and (director) Steven Spielberg.
Second, I will completely sidestep any discussion of the film’s oft-mentioned detrimental effects on the shaping of public memory of the Holocaust. No one needs any more Spielberg-bashing of that sort. As legitimate and important as analysis of how the film shapes perceptions of the past among the broad public of mass-media consumers, I forfeit any such politically engaged stance, and rather choose to look at the film as such, consciously ignoring any and all of Spielberg’s outrageous ad ridiculous comments about making the “ultimate” Holocaust film, or shooting a movie that is “near-documentary” in its qualities, or thanking the six million when he got the Academy Award for best director (!). If this film has any merit – and I believe it does, even though I first approached it with considerable repulsion, which accounts for why it’s taken 16 years before I was willing to watch it – then it carries merit despite of everything Spielberg and the Hollywood hype-producing machinery have said of it and about it.
Furthermore, I’m not going to pick bones about the film’s historical accuracy or lack thereof. The very few references that I will make to anachronisms and to elements that don’t add up from a historical, “realistic” perspective, will only serve to emphasize the moviemakers’ artistic/narrative choices that are clearly intentional – as in spots in the film that were not overdetermined by historical facts, but rather constituted artistic decisions to diverge from what is known regarding the events as they actually happened. In as much as these moments give full freedom to the moviemakers to fill-in the gaps and shape the plot, unhindered by “facts” as it were, these very same moments could be regarded as ‘free associations’ of the moviemakers, and as such they carry greater significance and afford us a glimpse that goes deeper into the moviemakers’ artistic/filmic psyche.
In as much as the filmic personae of Schindler and the rest of the cast are fictional (though not entirely fictitious – let’s not forget the movie pertains to tell us a true story, a story that really happened), we can make inferences regarding how Keneally-Zillian-Spielberg construct reality, and specifically, how they (re)construct the past. By reading (and overreading) their projections backwards, we can chart the topography of their subjective stance. That is, my attempt to understand the motivations of the fictional characters is only meant to clarify how KZS perceive the past and to demonstrate how the characters in the film function as alter-egos that embody the ideal-world image of the filmmakers. In other words, Spielberg (heck, he’s the director, I’ll pin this on him) posits the characters in the film into subject-positions that roughly correspond to how he sees himself and the world around him.
Based on the preceding premise, it should come as no surprise if I claim, right off the bat (if you’ll concede that right-of-the-bat could mean “four long and winding qualifying paragraphs later…”) that in my opinion this film is primarily NOT about the Holocaust. Schindler’s List is as much about the Holocaust as E.T. is about extraterrestrials. Very much like E.T. (which I think is the most suitable of Spielberg’s films to compare with Schindler’s List, although many critics cited Jurassic Park and retrospectively Saving Private Ryan as most aptly comparable with Schindler’s List), the film deals first and foremost with two things: the economy and the norms (specifically sexual norms, unlike in E.T., which is more PG13 in its exploration of the underside of familial patterns) of the late-modern/post-industrial bourgeois nuclear family.
If you find the E.T. comparison far-fetched, just check out the following images. Conincidence? Me thinks not. Uncanny is more like it. I never even realized there were so many visual parallels when I thought of this comparison. I won't go further into this comparison, as I intend to demonstrate my claims regarding the "true" content and concern of the film (i.e. the economy and libidinal pre/proscriptions) in detail later on , and going into E.T. would just take me off on a tangent. So I'll settle for this suggestive poke in E.T.'s direction, and leave it at that.
Structured as Schinlder's List is around two scenes that depict Jewish religious rituals (the opening scene with the Sabbath candles, and the wedding scene in the women’s barracks roughly in the middle of the film), Schindler’s List consistently deals with the economy (labor being the foundation stone of the economy and of all material – as well as moral, viz Locke – value, the Sabbath is a recurring ritual that opens up a space of non-labor and non-material value) on the one hand, and with permissible vs. deviant libidinal outlet (a distinction clearly symbolized in the wedding ceremony), on the other hand.
Thus I claim that the film operates on two basic levels – the first, which I will call the Valuation Matrix; and the second, a comparative study of competing systems of libidinal economies.
I'll pick up on the Valuation Matrix in my next blog.
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