[Marxism] Spielberg's "Munich"

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's an error, I believe, to look at a movie or a book or another
work of art as a political tract, and to expect that a movie will
perform the same role. Sometimes a movie just entertains, sometimes
it helps its audience to learn something about life or whatever as
is done by Steven Spielberg in "Munich". Spielberg's movie makes a
small number of points and makes them effectively, I thought.

Spielberg's "Munich" is a Jewish movie, even more, a Zionist movie,
but don't stop there. I've seen the film and enjoyed it very much.
I think that it speaks to a Jewish audience, in the first place, in
a cautionary tale whose message, as I grasped it was that blblical
"eye-for-an-eye" retribution not only doesn't solve the problems of
Israel, indeed, it destroys those who carry out the retribution.

It's been a long time since I've sat through a film that long with
out looking at my watch. Talk about the banality of evil: As "Munich"
opens, we see a nice man brought in to ask if he would do anything
he's asked, without questions. He agrees. Then he's assigned to the
task of finding, tracking down, and wiping out the perpetrators of
the Black September massacre in Munich in 1972. The Palestinians of
Black September are portrayed as scared young people carrying out a
crazy mission. The Israelis who track them down are a pleasant mix
of nice-guys (no gals, of course), one of whom waxes philosophical
at times, asking if his team is really doing the right thing. The
protagonist ("hero" doesn't fit this guy's activities) is shown as
a happily married man, soon-to-be father of a beautiful child by a
lovely wife. By the end of the film, this sabra who was completely
ready to do anything and kill anyone in revenge has left Israel to
never return, and is terrified of any unforseen sound in the street.
He knows he's made himself a marked man, just as he as an Israeli
assassin, had marked the Black September terrorists, and killed
most of those he was sent to kill, along with a few others who're
written off as "collateral damage".

There's plenty of violence, but none of it is gratuitous. And the
Palestinians who carry out the Munich attacks are portrayed here as
being terrified while carrying out the act, but later, when they've
become sitting ducks for the Israeli assassins, they're presented
as human beings.

The film, then, isn't addressed to a Palestinian audience, nor to
those of us already convinced Israel's policies are wrong, but to
those who feel compelled to support and defend Israel because it's
a Jewish state, and they think that the Jews SHOULD have a state.

Another film which makes similar points, though with much less
violence, was the Israeli film last year WALK ON WATER, which also
tells about a Mossad assasin who develops qualms of conscience and
can't continue performing the job he's so good at. The job finally
nearly destroys him so he has to get out, too. The director wasn't
well-known, and the film only made it to the art-house circuit, but
it indicates there are some thoughtful people in Israel who know
that cold-blooded state-sponsored assassinations don't help Israel.

When I was a youngster, in some circles the only political question
which finally counted, was "Is it good for the Jews?" In my opinion,
if the Jewish audience to whom the film was addressed comes out of
the movie wondering of Israel's policies are good for the Jews, it
has been a success.

And the political implications of such a film for a US audience not
Jewish, under Washington's policies of unilateral attacks on those
countries it chooses, well, discussion of such actions is all to
the good, in my view. I really like the way the screenwriter Tony
Kushner explains how he's seeing the film have an impact among the
members of his Jewish family. You can see by the lynch-spirit that
has evolved against the movie that it has succeeded quite well.


Walter Lippmann
===================================================================
NESTOR wondered:
According to press releases, the film has to do with the increasing
feeling of guilt (ah, this old Jewish guilt that not even Zionists
seem to escape!) that grasps the team in charge of revenge after the
1972 murder of the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympic games.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Spielberg says that he made the film from the Israeli (explicitly not
_Jewish_) point of view.  I am very much afraid that this part of the
story hss not been told.  This kind of "Jewish" search for justice
stops at the doors of whatever affects Israeli interest negatively.


>From the Los Angeles Times

Defending 'Munich' to my mishpocheh
By Tony Kushner

Tony-, Emmy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner's
works include "Caroline, or Change" and "Angels in America."
"Munich," written with Eric Roth, is his first screenplay.
<
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-kushner22jan22,1,730702
6.story>

January 22, 2006

AT A RECENT family gathering, my cousin-in-law, Janice, asked me to
respond to complaints she'd read over and over again about "Munich,"
the Steven Spielberg film I co-wrote with Eric Roth, which she hadn't
yet seen.

The movie is stirring up a lot of controversy, which I anticipated
when I agreed to work on it. I even considered it a side benefit that
my mishpocheh, my family, an occasionally argumentative bunch, would
have fresh subject matter for the discussion part of our next few
Seders. Matzo balls might be flung, but arguing is good for the
digestion.

In the last month, the co-creators of "Munich" have been accused of
being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel,
defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood
liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even
of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking
about receipts and handling money. We're morally confused, overly
complicated, simplistic. We're cowards who refused to take sides. We
took a side but, oops! the wrong side.

I wondered which of the charges Janice had in mind.

Is it the case, she asked, that "Munich" is based on a discredited
book, "Vengeance"? No, I answered, it's based on a book, "Vengeance,"
that has been challenged but never discredited - these are not the
same things. There is no definitive account of what was, after all, a
covert Mossad operation. But no one is challenging the central
historical fact in the debate that "Munich" is meant to catalyze:
Palestinians were assassinated by Israel, following the Palestinian
murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich.

Next question: Why does the movie show Mossad agents having doubts
and regrets about killing terrorists when apparently they never have
doubts and regrets? Why did you make that up?

I've never killed anyone, but my instincts as a person and a
playwright - and the best books I've read about soldiers or cops or
people whose jobs bring them into violent physical conflict - suggest
that people in general don't kill without feeling torn up about it.
Violence exacts a psychic toll, unless you're a sociopath, and who
wants to watch a movie about sociopaths?

"Munich" dramatizes the toll violence takes. This bothers a few
people at both ends of the political spectrum. I understand why those
who think Israeli agents are villainous, unfeeling killing machines
disparage our conscience-ridden characters. I'm confused by those who
think that a depiction of the agents as conscienceless would make
them more impressive and heroic.

Janice asked a third question: Why do I, her cousin-in-law,
apparently have a secret plan to destroy Israel?

I have indeed been critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza - well, Janice knew that already. I'm an American and a
proudly Diasporan Jew. I believe that the best hope for any oppressed
minority is found in the Constitution's promise of equal protection
under the law, in secular pluralist democracy. I believe that
governments - and our souls - are nourished by honesty,
open-mindedness and public debate, even of scary ideas and
uncomfortable truths. But my criticism of Israel has always been
accompanied by declarations of unconditional support of Israel's
right to exist, and I believe that the global community has a
responsibility to defend that right. I have written and spoken of my
love for Israel.

This inconvenient complication in my views has been carefully edited
out of the caricature of me that's being offered up by people whose
disregard for truth has informed their account of "Munich." The film
is neither the simple cartoon their distortions make of it, nor a
mirror image of its wicked screenwriter.

Janice wanted to know why I hadn't responded to my accusers. I
explained that I wanted the film to speak for itself. Janice, and
about 100 other people, suggested that maybe, in the midst of this
storm of opinion, I could venture to speak a little for the film.

"Munich" is not me or my politics masquerading as a movie. It's been
shaped with remarkable generosity by Steven Spielberg into a
historical fiction informed by several perspectives, including mine.
We have prescribed nothing more specific for understanding the
Mideast conflict, and the dilemma terrorism poses to civilization,
than that you allow your unshakable convictions a little breathing
room.

I think it's the refusal of the film to reduce the Mideast
controversy, and the problematics of terrorism and counterterrorism,
to sound bites and spin that has brought forth charges of "moral
equivalence" from people whose politics are best served by simple
morality tales. We live in the Shock and Awe Era, in which instant
strike-back and blow-for-blow aggression often trump the laborious
process of analysis, investigation and diplomacy. "Munich's"
questioning spirit is an affront to armchair warrior columnists who
understand power only as firepower. We're at war, and the job of
artists in wartime, they seem to feel, is to provide the kind of
characters and situations that are staples of propaganda: cleanly
representative of Good or Evil, and obedient to the Message.

Contradiction in human affairs, such as the possibility that
injustice can drive people to do horrible things, is routinely
deplored and dismissed in these troubled times as just another
example of the naivete of the morally weak (a.k.a. liberals and
progressives). But there will always be pesky people who, when
horrific crimes are committed, insist on asking, "Why did that
happen?"

This is a great annoyance to the up-and-at-'em crowd, whose
unshakable conviction is that the only sane and effective response to
terrorism is savage violence commensurate with the original act. To
justify this conviction they offer, as so many of the political
critics of "Munich" have done, tautologies on the order of "evil
deeds are done by evil people who do evil deeds because that's what
evil people do." If that's helpful to you as a tool for understanding
terrorism, you won't like "Munich."

In the film, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented not as a
matter of religion versus religion, or sanity versus insanity, or
good versus evil or civilization versus barbarism or Judeo-Christian
culture versus Muslim culture, but rather as a struggle over
territory, over geography, over home.

We've followed the lead of many Israeli historians, novelists,
filmmakers, poets and politicians who have recognized and described
the Israeli-Palestinian struggle this way - as something tragic and
human, recognizable. We've incurred the wrath of people who reject,
with what sounds like panic, an inescapable fact of human life:
People do terrible things in the name of a cause they believe is
just, even in the name of a cause that actually is just.

"Munich" insists that this characteristic of human behavior is not
meaningless in the struggle against terrorism. In other words, we
believe that one aspect of the struggle against terrorism is the
struggle to comprehend terrorism. If you think understanding the
enemy is unimportant, well, maybe there's a job in Washington for
you.

As I write this, Janice is watching "Munich," to see for herself what
all the fuss is about. It's long, I warned her; pee first. She'll
e-mail me with her reactions. I eagerly anticipate the conversation.
Like most cousins-in-law, we agree and disagree about many things.
When we agree, there's joy or consolation. When we disagree, there's
adrenaline - and occasionally a spark leaps a previously unleapt
synapse, and a new idea is made.




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