Disconcerting Forms: Uneasiness and the Dislocation of Holocaust Cinema

Ten DISCONCERTING FORMS: UNEASINESS AND THE DISLOCATION OF HOLOCAUST CINEMA Todd Kesselman 1. The Temptation of Moral Redemption Since the early 1940s there have been a number of attempts to approach the topic of the Holocaust from a comedic perspective: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968), and the television series Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971)—just to name some of the more well-known examples. Commentators such as Slavoj Zizek have argued that the resurgence of the Holocaust comedy in the late nineties [e.g. La Vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), Train de vie (Train of Life, 1998), and Jakob the Liar (1999)] should be read as an expression of the underlying failure of the standard “tragic” genre of Holocaust films (Zizek 2001, 68). Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), a film that Zizek criticizes at length, is paradigmatic of this failure. Spielberg’s strategy is to present the past as directly as possible, transporting the audience into a world of frenetic violence via a reconstructive hyperrealism. This approach rests on the naïve assumption that the past can be best understood by recreating it as if it were immediately present for the viewer. But instead of accomplishing this aim, the attempt to produce the truth of the past in its immediacy results in a cinematic representation that denies its own role as representation and conceals its ideological superimpositions. Instead of the past as such, the film amounts to a projection of contemporary ideology onto the place of the past. The redemption narrative that drives the plot is a symptom of the hyperrealist style. Schindler’s questionable lifestyle (his philandering and excessive consumption of alcohol, along with the economic exploitation of his desperate Jewish workers) comes to be redeemed through his eventual appreciation of individual human life. His insight carries with it the broad ethical statement that underlies the film and serves as its tagline: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” This moral posturing can hardly be taken seriously in the face of the millions that perished at the hands of the Nazi’s. The moral 214 TODD KESSELMAN triumph in Schindler’s List effectively acts as if narrative form is indifferent to history. The arrogance of Hollywood is to think that no topic is immune to a heart-warming tale; it clings to this precept even in the face of world- effacing violence. The failure of the Holocaust tragedy that Zizek diagnoses can be summarized in two central points: Firstly, framing the systematic annihil- ation of European Jewry in terms of the internal ethical dilemma of individual subjects ignores the complex system of socio-political relations that devised and carried out an unprecedented use of technology in the service of genocide. Secondly, the redemption narrative conceals the more fundamental questions that such violence poses: Does the Holocaust repre- sent for us that limit situation in which redemption, reconciliation, and the philosophical aufhebung are no longer possible? Even further, does this part- icular historical event inaugurate an irrevocable breakdown in the communal conditions that underlie meaning? As Zizek’s reading relies upon a contrast between Holocaust comedies and Holocaust tragedies, it is worth noting that the use of the term “tragedy” to describe a film such as Schindler’s List is not entirely accurate with regard to the classical definition of the genre. In his Poetics, Aristotle locates the essence of tragedy in its power to “elicit strong emotions of fear and pity” (Heller, 2005, 10), which give rise to an emotional purification (catharsis). What makes a work of art tragic (and cathartic), as opposed to say, a sad or upsetting drama, is that the protagonist undergoes specifically unmerited misfortune (Aristotle 1997, 23). The suffering which will befall the central character is not a consequence of some bad decision(s) they make, but rather, an unavoidable fate imposed upon them from the outside (an outside that could be named fate, or the gods). While Schindler’s List intends to elicit a therapeutic effect, Schindler is not a tragic figure, per se, since his economic downfall hardly constitutes tragic suffering. Schindler’s fate remains intricately linked with the decisions he makes, which is why the film can operate as a narrative of moral redemption. Yet, there is nonetheless a plausible tragic reading of the film. The unmerited misfortune of the hero in classical tragedy is a symptom of the conflict within communities (for instance, in Antigone, the conflict between the role of the family and the role of the state), and the resolution of this conflict requires the suffering or even death of the protagonist. Schindler's List rearranges the standard terms of tragedy, in that the unmerited suffering of tragic misfortune is not undergone by the hero, but displaced onto the Jewish workers. Thus, in contrast to the appearance of his ethical beauty, one can read the exchange of material wealth for “moral wealth” as just another form of sacrificial exploitation. Schindler’s moral achievement, like his economic success, comes at the expense of Jewish .

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