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.

Schindler's List - Spielberg does Shoa

This is the first of a series of posts about Spielberg's Schindler's List. I've been collecting material and formulating arguments for months now, and I've decided to just start writing and posting gradually - so bear in mind that this is a work in progress.

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.

back in black

can't believe it's been a year since my previous post... phew...
anyways, back with a vengence, armed by two Freud books, a Bruce Fink book about Lacan and quite a few films i feel like tearing to bits...
so, the coming attractions include: Schindler's List, Watchmen, and the biggie - Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight... also on the list - Gangs of New York, The Reader vs. The Piano Teacher...
true to my new bloggy motto "every film is a wish fulfillment", my analysis and interpretation are sure to be fine examples of pyschologically overreading the not-so-obvious messages and motivations in various pop media films...
in my research about Watchmen i stumbled upon this great blog, and while cruising the net and searching for Zizek and BHL at the New York Public Library, stumbled upon this here fine blog.
till then...

House of Dolls – Rock’n’Roll Suicides and the Holocaust

While watching the so-so film of Dutch photographer-turned-film-director Anton Corbijn Control, I was wondering whether there is any comprehensive and coherent theory of pop-culture success-story suicides.

The reason this question occurred to me was that a very common recurrnig motif in biographies and film-biographies of pop-culture heroes is the out-of-control turbulence that propells them onto stardom.

Again and again in all these popstar/rockstar bios, you run into the image of the agonized star, who starts to hate and despise his/her own stardom very quickly upon attaining that status. And yet, most of them start off by desiring stardom and recognition with all their might. But somewhere along the line, as they attain the longed-for status, they become disillusioned. This always happens once they realise that they’ve become stars for reasons entirely external to themselves, almost despite of themselves; and as they start feeling trapped in a position where they are obliged to provide the audience with what it wants. However, what the audience wants of them is not what they wanted to give (or be wanted for).

It is this sense of success-beyond-control that later drives popstars to all sorts of suicidal behaviors – frustration, depression, lashing out sprees, trashing hotel rooms, substance abuse – if not to suicide proper.

Seeing that these suicides are recurrent, they go beyond the individual circumstances of the Jim Morrisons, Kurt Cobains, Ian Curtises, etc. (and yes, here I assume that the sense of no control that drove these pop-culture success-stories to suicide is sth more than just a recurrent theme in the representation of popstar lives by various authors, i.e. I assume that the motif of the suicidal popstar is not just in the eye of the beholder, that it is a phenomena and not just an image). Therefore, we would be justified in looking for societal or systemic – structural – forces behind these suicides.

What would such a theory of pop-culture, out-of-control (anomic?) stardom suicides consist of?

Yes, Durkheim is probably going to be somewhere in the mix; can’t have a theory of suicide without your Durkheim;

But there’s also likely to be a Gramscian angle – the co-optation of subversive and creative elements by ‘the System’;

There’s gonna be some Adorno and Frankfurt School in there, too – the Star System…
I have to re-read some of this stuff, I’m not sure whether Adorno actually makes reference to suicide as part of the mechanisms that keeps the Star System going… he should have, anyway... cos nothing makes star-status more official than suicide, or at least a mysterious/equivocal/controversial death... and so, even (or especially) in their deaths, popstars promote sales and media distribution companies’ revenues, and thereby contribute or even constitute the complex system of celebrity-hierarchies, special collectors’ edition releases of rare presuicide recordings etc. etc.;

Probably some Barthes and the impossibility of true authorship could also explicate where the frustrations of pop-culture icons come from;

And definitely some Luhmann to round up the list – with his Ø-agency Systems Theory and the System’s voracious appetite for variability.

Seemingly unrelated – Czech TV made a courageous decision to air all of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah on the 70th anniversery of the Kristallnacht, on Sunday November 9th. Not only was this film likely to deter 99.9% of any potential viewers, but broadcasting it at one go also meant foregoing any commercial breaks for a time slot of more than 9 (!) hrs.

Now that I’ve watched this film again (we made it till about half past midnight, which is… about 7 ½ hrs through the whole thing), I realised that when I had first seen this film (I was about 15yrs old or so), and then when I’d read the transcripts about a year or two later, I probably completely misunderstood what it was trying to do/say.

Back then, I took this horrifying documentary on face value, i.e. as a film that was trying to recapture and represent the horrors of the holocaust by using testimonials, that is, to show the viewer what really happened, with testimonials of livings witnesses ensuring that the representation was as authentic as possible.

What I now realise is that another and by-far more important facet of this film is that it attempts to capture and represent how people (mostly people in Poland, but also in Israel, Germany etc.) perceived the holocaust in the 1980s. That is, to represent how the people who actually lived through the holocaust registered the events in their memories, and how they related them to the camera. Which is far more scary and terrible than “simply” attempting to represent the holocaust itself (an artistic goal that would have been futile, and which Lanzmann explicitly admitted was not his objective). One of the scariest moments in the film is when a Polish Jew (Simon Srebnik), one of the only two survivors from the extermination camp in Chelmno, stands among a throng of Sunday church-goers in this little Polish town.

He stares at the camera, speechless, as the people who openly testify to recognizing and remembering him from the war years start churning out the repetitive melody sung by most of the Poles in the film: the Jews somehow knew what would happen to them, they were somehow aware of what awaits them at the end of the train journey to the death camps. In other words, they knew it was coming, but still they did nothing - so in a way, they themselves are actually responsible for what happened. Their destruction was ineluctable, and they in fact embraced it. THIS is what’s really scary about the film – the way Poles (and a few Germans) explain the inexplicable, how they make sense out of what makes no sense. Is it a way of justifying why they never tried to help out anyone or resist? Is it a way of vindicating themselves after they took over their Jewish neighbors’ homes and property?

The Sonderkommando members who give testimonies in the film also reiterate a similar drugged-out, almost comatose perspective; perhaps not so much a feeling that their friends, relatives and co-religionists who got off the train knew where they were headed; but certainly a sense of things happening beyond their control and beyond the possibility of any intervention. It is the testimony of clogs in a Doom’s Day machine. Is it a way of quieting their guilty conscience for surviving even though so many people perished?

Another very scary aspect of the holocaust that arises clearly from this film is the total inability to grasp the scope and the extent of the operations involved in the Nazi death machinery. I was especially gripped by this feeling when watching the scenes shot at the sites of the death camps, as well as the scene in which Lanzmann interviews the amazing Raul Hilberg.

Leaving aside all moral considerations, bracketing any sympathy for the victims (and Jews were by no means the sole victims of the Nazi extermination policies) – one still finds it absolutely impossible to imagine how elaborate and overwhelming the whole thing actually was, from a strictly operational, practical point of view.

All those trains picking up “passengers” and taking them to the right destination, for example… can you just imagine an agency that would manage that for over four years in the middle of a world war, transporting hundreds of thousands of people from the Reich to eastern Poland or from god-forsaken tiny towns in White Russia to the Generalgouvernement… ensuring trains had enough coal, death camps had a sufficient supply of amunition and Cyclon B… it was nothing short of first-class Supply-Chain Management, operating in parts of the world where even today, in 2009, you could find it hard to get a train connection or buy a Gillett razor.

Though I hate to admit it, holocaust denial feeds off at least one aspect of what you would call “healthy” skepticism – the simple doubt that anyone could actually establish and successfully manage such an elaborate aparatus that would enable to systematically transport and exterminate 6M Jews. Quite simply, this is the inability to accept, or believe, that anyone could actually pull off such an extensive operation. And if you’ve worked longer than a week in any large organization, you probably know how difficult it is to translate strategy into a clear operating plan, and to turn an operating plan into reality. It sometimes seems that the harder you try to intentionally achieve an organizational goal, the slimmer the chances of actually achieving it. So much resistance, apathy, lack of coordination, errors, oversights, …

And this brings me to the most frightening aspect of the film, as I perceive it today.
Without detracting from the responsibility of the Nazis for the crimes and atrocities that they’ve commited, the film delineates the back-stage, behind-the-curtain side of the holocaust, adumbrating precisely all the forces at work that enabled the Nazis to carry out their plan. The quiet complicity and indifference of the Poles, the extreme and paralysing fear drilled into the Sonderkommandos, the apathy of the lower and middle rank SS members.
These are forces that were at least partially beyond the Nazis’ control or comprehension, forces that they could not have foreseen or taken into consideration in advance. And these forces amounted to nothing less than an army of invisible hands that pushed the 60-wagon long trains to the death camps. And the guiding force behind these invisible hands was people’s consciousness and their ability to comprehend and accept (thereby support and participate) the extermination efforts, to place the events set in motion by the Nazis within the scope of their reality, to tolerate these events as part of the real.

For if all that had driven the holocaust would have been purley intentional Nazi policies consisting (that is, consisted of nothing other than pre-meditated in-control efforts, or pure self-present agency, pure will), the Nazis would have never been so successful in destroying the living fabric of so many communities; they would have never managed to pull it off to such extent.

The success of the Nazi extermination policies (a success that was and remains partial, fortunately) was significantly reliant on the awakening and harnessing of countless individual and group interests, intentions, ambitions, inclinations, but also indifferences and inabilities… the holocaust was the collusion of thousands of wills and unwills that forged what for a period of time became an unstoppable force of destruction. The part played by non-Nazis was not insignificant at all - the non-Nazis were those that pushed the trains along the tracks when they were running low on coal, so to speak. The gaps in the Nazi death machinery that were made by resistence, bureaucratic inefficiency, apathy and so forth, were filled in turn by the willingness of non-Nazis to act and/or to suffer the Nazis to act upon them. I believe that the Nazi extremination policies, since they were more than just a single and isolated occurance, could have only taken place due to a certain allignment or elective affinity with the rest of the (non-Nazi) world. Therefore, I feel that it is justfied to say that these policies were successful in so far as it they were not entirely under control.