Schindlers List criticism

Schindlers List.[Universal]

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom wasSchindlers List. In a brief blurb, I called it an astoundingly stupid movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a piece of shit and a neo-Naziall for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyones favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film,Schindlers Listneatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me werent expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look atSchindlers List. The films two main characters are Liam Neesons Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; its no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley ScottsAlien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in SpielbergsRaiders of the Lost Ark or the shark fromJaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies well only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Intelligent filmmakers, like Marcel Ophüls or Claude Lanzmann, long ago forged a cinematic language with which to talk about evil. Its two great grammatical principles are the context and the close-up: Cobble together as many sources as is possible to make a mosaic of meaning, then train the camera on one specific detail and demand an explanation. When it works well, we get moments like Lanzmanns interview in Shoah with Franz Schalling, the Chelmno guard, whose matter-of-factness about the killing process is more terrifying than any imperious expression Fiennes can conjure, particularly as it appears alongside testimonies by victims and bystanders who had lived through radically divergent versions of the same horror. This approach is superior from both ethical and artistic perspectives, giving every player in this brutal human drama a claim to agency and dignity.

Spielbergs approach, on the other hand, does not. Schindlers Jews do not matter. Theyre abstractions, spiritual currency so that our hero can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.

The films blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, himself a survivor. Schindlers List, he argued, was kitsch. I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life [whether in the private sphere or on the level of civilization as such] and the very possibility of the Holocaust, he wrote in his 2001 essay, Who Owns Auschwitz? Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.

Stanley Kubrick felt the same way. Abandoning his own Holocaust-themed project after Spielbergs movie became instantly iconic, Kubrick complained that the prince of Hollywood forever simplified one of the most complex occurrences in human history by crafting, in essence, a competing narrative. Think [Schindlers List] is about the Holocaust? he asked the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a friend. That was about success, wasnt it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed.Schindlers Listis about 600 who dont.

One can argue, of course, that there are many Holocaust stories to be told, and that Spielberg merely chose to tell his [adapted, as it was, from Thomas Keneallys book], and that his merely happened to have a hopeful ending. But that doesnt absolve him of responsibility. Writing of the moral and aesthetic problems art runs into when it attempts to represent pain and suffering, the 18th-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing theorized that visual artists follow a two-step process when creating their work: First they choose one moment out of an endless sequence of possible moments for visual representation, and then they submit that moment to the strictures of the artistic process. If the choices they make fit together nicelythe perfect moment represented the perfect waythe result is pleasing. If not, it terrifies. In choosing Schindlers story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. Its of little wonder that one of Seinfelds funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindlers List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindlers List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

But the real problem isnt Spielberg. He is an endlessly talented filmmaker who has directed a few of the worksfrom E.T.to A.I.that I consider to be among the finest ever produced. The real problem is the culture that spawned Spielberg, the culture of so many of us in the American Jewish community.

Theres no way to quantify what Im about to say next and many ways to dismiss it as inaccurate or subjective or untrue. But consider this: From a community that was, until three or four decades ago, not only emotionally equipped but also eager to hold difficult internal debates, weve allowed so many of our communal vistas to become splintered terrains of intolerance and mutual suspicion. Try talking about Israel to someone who sees the country in a very different light. Try bringing up conversion next time you run into someone from a different denomination. Chances are the conversation will soon descend into chaos, with each side claiming absolute moral validity for itself and casting calumnies at the other. Put differently, we used to see the world like Lanzmann, as a nuanced and complex place where even the greatest villains deserved a few quiet moments on camera to speak their mind. We now see it like Spielberg saw the Holocaust, in black and white, all feeling and movement.

Its an attitude we must do everything in our power to resist in every way, from commemorating the past to debating the future. Our tradition is nothing if not a yarn of complications; as appealing as simple images of victimhood [the little boy in the sewer in Spielbergs film] and redemption [the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall in the iconic photograph from the Six Day War] might be, its our moral, aesthetic, and historical obligation to choose the difficult, the subtle, and the obscure. This, if anything, is the life for which weve been chosen.

Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.

Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.