Holocaust denial is a universally reviled sin, but the status of Holocaust embellishment offers a debatable conundrum. The issue arose last month when genuine Buchenwald survivor Herman Rosenblat revealed he had fabricated the central romance in his not-yet-published memoir Angel at the Fence. The book tracks the childhood connection he forged with a girl at the camp, and culminates with their marriage several years later. Faced with the inevitable backlash, the publisher, Penguin, won't release the book—but the producers of a forthcoming big screen adaptation plan to move forward with the fictional components intact. A great story is a great story, right?
It's hard to dispute such a project so long as the Holocaust movies exemplify dramatic license. But the genre has grown overpopulated of late to the point where things are starting to get embarrassing. In a tiresome barrage of media analysis over the last several months, critics have dissected the Holocaust movie phenomenon with a mixture of contempt and jaded resignation. Stuart Klawans offers a particularly forceful argument in Nextbook, calling for a moratorium on Holocaust films and suggesting that "these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate." A.O. Scott worried that "the sensations associated with the Holocaust have become perhaps too easy to evoke." In Newsweek, Annette Insdorf exhibited much less trepidation, proclaiming "Holocaust dramas are finally coming of age" for dealing with "new, morally complex territory."
This only rings true with certain caveats. The Reader is a Kate Winslet awards plea, not solely a study of one German generation coming to grips with the crimes of another. It's Kate Winslet stripping down and growing old. The troublesome issue of her character's deeds as a Nazi guard, and the plight of a German teen whose liaison with her leaves him endlessly conflicted, only arise if you can accept the baseline artifice. The fabrication works better in Good. Viggo Mortensen's performance as an academic swept up by National Socialism despite his constant resistance makes for an enticing experience, although there's hardly any lasting sense of dilemma outside of the character's limited perspective.
At least it's better than Valkyrie, where we never learn the motives behind a few rogue Nazis intent on assassinating Adolph Hitler. Instead, Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise in a relentlessly stilted thriller where each scene appears predicated on our blind willingness to believe in his character's heroic intentions. Adam Resurrected, with its wasted Jeff Goldblum performance as a psychotic Holocaust survivor locked in a sanitarium, takes a potentially enticing premise and merely toys with its surface inanity. By most accounts, Defiance is a solidly conventional survival yawn — er, yarn. And though The Boy in the Striped Pajamas backs away from a dopey happy ending for a somewhat realistic outcome, it still revels in its grim finality. As a result, it fails to approach the realism of the actual camps.
As the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, I was never forced to wear a gold star, waste away in cattle cars or burn in the ovens. However, I was spared from learning about these horrific traumas through their fictional manifestations. My grandfather suffered from a fatal lung disease that resulted from his close proximity to corpses while interred in the camps. His troubled breaths told a more authentic story than any cinematic construction. By comparison, Schindler's List was a melodramatic slap on the wrist, an order from Hollywood to stop feeling so bad about the whole affair. I did find some outlet for processing the Holocaust in Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah, a movie that consistently remains in the present, refusing to show any world other than the one we can access.
Now, I can take subversive pleasures for what they're worth. In Raiders of the Lost Ark and even Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, the Nazis are cardboard villains, points of identification to keep the good-versus-evil polarity intact, and nobody tries to hide the transparency of that set-up. In Frank Miller's execrable adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit, the image of Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson decked out in Nazi regalia only makes viewers wince because it has zero plot functionality, and because the movie sucks so hard.
A self-serious attempt to grapple with the nature of those bad guys, or the very bad things that they did, presents a separate problem. Perhaps the ideal Holocaust film shouldn't visit the era at all, but rather explore the ramifications of it. In a crucial scene during Waltz with Bashir, Israeli military veteran Ari Folman considers his guilt over actions taken during the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre as a function of his parents' Auschwitz survival neuroses. In moments like these, the Holocaust is neither a vague idea nor an element of the past, but a constantly changing entity that passes through time and forces each generation to endure its impact.
Anyone following the constant ruminations on Holocaust movies in 2008 must surely hope that the clamor dies down soon. Yet for all the talk about the Holocaust on the big screen, none of these recent works have impacted the national conversation. There are no grandiose reevaluations or historic revelations stemming from the cinema. A year of many Holocaust movies appears to be one in which they cancel each other out.
It's hard to dispute such a project so long as the Holocaust movies exemplify dramatic license. But the genre has grown overpopulated of late to the point where things are starting to get embarrassing. In a tiresome barrage of media analysis over the last several months, critics have dissected the Holocaust movie phenomenon with a mixture of contempt and jaded resignation. Stuart Klawans offers a particularly forceful argument in Nextbook, calling for a moratorium on Holocaust films and suggesting that "these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate." A.O. Scott worried that "the sensations associated with the Holocaust have become perhaps too easy to evoke." In Newsweek, Annette Insdorf exhibited much less trepidation, proclaiming "Holocaust dramas are finally coming of age" for dealing with "new, morally complex territory."
This only rings true with certain caveats. The Reader is a Kate Winslet awards plea, not solely a study of one German generation coming to grips with the crimes of another. It's Kate Winslet stripping down and growing old. The troublesome issue of her character's deeds as a Nazi guard, and the plight of a German teen whose liaison with her leaves him endlessly conflicted, only arise if you can accept the baseline artifice. The fabrication works better in Good. Viggo Mortensen's performance as an academic swept up by National Socialism despite his constant resistance makes for an enticing experience, although there's hardly any lasting sense of dilemma outside of the character's limited perspective.
At least it's better than Valkyrie, where we never learn the motives behind a few rogue Nazis intent on assassinating Adolph Hitler. Instead, Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise in a relentlessly stilted thriller where each scene appears predicated on our blind willingness to believe in his character's heroic intentions. Adam Resurrected, with its wasted Jeff Goldblum performance as a psychotic Holocaust survivor locked in a sanitarium, takes a potentially enticing premise and merely toys with its surface inanity. By most accounts, Defiance is a solidly conventional survival yawn — er, yarn. And though The Boy in the Striped Pajamas backs away from a dopey happy ending for a somewhat realistic outcome, it still revels in its grim finality. As a result, it fails to approach the realism of the actual camps.
As the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, I was never forced to wear a gold star, waste away in cattle cars or burn in the ovens. However, I was spared from learning about these horrific traumas through their fictional manifestations. My grandfather suffered from a fatal lung disease that resulted from his close proximity to corpses while interred in the camps. His troubled breaths told a more authentic story than any cinematic construction. By comparison, Schindler's List was a melodramatic slap on the wrist, an order from Hollywood to stop feeling so bad about the whole affair. I did find some outlet for processing the Holocaust in Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah, a movie that consistently remains in the present, refusing to show any world other than the one we can access.
Now, I can take subversive pleasures for what they're worth. In Raiders of the Lost Ark and even Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, the Nazis are cardboard villains, points of identification to keep the good-versus-evil polarity intact, and nobody tries to hide the transparency of that set-up. In Frank Miller's execrable adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit, the image of Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson decked out in Nazi regalia only makes viewers wince because it has zero plot functionality, and because the movie sucks so hard.
A self-serious attempt to grapple with the nature of those bad guys, or the very bad things that they did, presents a separate problem. Perhaps the ideal Holocaust film shouldn't visit the era at all, but rather explore the ramifications of it. In a crucial scene during Waltz with Bashir, Israeli military veteran Ari Folman considers his guilt over actions taken during the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre as a function of his parents' Auschwitz survival neuroses. In moments like these, the Holocaust is neither a vague idea nor an element of the past, but a constantly changing entity that passes through time and forces each generation to endure its impact.
Anyone following the constant ruminations on Holocaust movies in 2008 must surely hope that the clamor dies down soon. Yet for all the talk about the Holocaust on the big screen, none of these recent works have impacted the national conversation. There are no grandiose reevaluations or historic revelations stemming from the cinema. A year of many Holocaust movies appears to be one in which they cancel each other out.
