First Impressions – Au Revoir Les Enfants

Au Revoir Les Enfants tells the story of a boarding school’s struggle to keep three Jewish boys safe during the Nazi occupation of France.  The main plot line follows Julien Quentin, who develops from an intelligent but surly student at the school to a better, more ethical character who conceals one of the Jewish boys’ identities.

This plot alone makes for a mediocre movie, and mediocrity is the very worst that films concerning the Holocaust can worry about achieving.  Along the lines of Godwin’s Law, it is easy to invoke intense emotion over a charged subject, and so, little credit is due.

A more interesting theme did not fully emerge on first viewing: how does the placement of the film’s characters during the Holocaust contribute to their moral status?  Would we perceive the characters differently if we judged them only by their more mundane moral decisions?

Several examples may merit interesting discussion upon another viewing of the film:

1) Quentin: Quentin bullies other students.  He is curious, but too lazy and arrogant for his academic studies.  He views other talented students with hostility and jealousy.  In Au Revoir, his courage in facing the Nazi intruders redeems these flaws.  In the present day, perhaps every schoolyard bully would evince the same courage against Nazis.  But how many receive that chance?  Why should Quentin receive a higher judgment than the average bully, when his behavior differs only as a result of the caprice of time?

2) Père Jacques: The headmaster seems to run an indifferent school, with too many students, poorly supervised and disciplined.  Everything seems to be on the cheap.  In one moment, Quentin, looking at a fattening pig, remarks to the effect, “They’ll serve this on parents’ day, to give them the impression that we eat well.”  Would the stinginess and neglect of the headmaster be forgivable if he were not also a hero of the Holocaust?

3) Joseph: The kitchen helper is a mere boy, and takes abuse from the other boys because of his lowly status.  On the side, he sells items the students receive from their parents and gives them things they want instead.  When he is caught, he takes the fall.  Au Revoir leads us to condemn him because of his involvement with the Germans, but excluding this, one suspects that the beatings he receives would make him more a martyr than a traitor.

The debate over how circumstances affect a moral evaluation of these characters leads to quite an Aristotelian tangle (do actions matter, or intentions? etc.), but even if not morally enlightening, it is an interesting thought experiment.

Beyond merely contrasting transcendent moral characteristics with mundane ones, our thought experiment might also lead us to ask whether these transcendent characteristics outweigh the mundane ones.

For example, certainly Père Jacques’s heroism is laudable, and its cost is mortal.  But it is easy for a courageous man to exhibit courage when the situation clearly calls for it.  Transcendent struggles often have black and white answers.  What is murkier is how the père ought to act in day-to-day life.  Clearly he has a moral obligation to his students, to teach them, and raise them to be bright, principled, and capable youth.  But how hard must he try?  Must he spend every minute of every day on his task, or just a few?  Perhaps he should spend as many minutes as necessary to give the boys an average education.  But what if this number of minutes is impossibly hard to achieve?

In this character, as a man struggling, and perhaps failing, to overcome the banal challenges of everyday life, Père Jacques is much more familiar to us.  Perhaps many of us could hold our heads high in the face of the Gestapo.  But every man, staring down the barrel of a forty-hour week of drudgery and toil, from time to time turns on a subconscious cruise control, and fails to try his best.

And who knows what the consequences of such cruising might be?  Perhaps mundane moral failures differ from transcendent ones not in their consequences or importance, but only in their frequency.

Review – Labor Pains

Lindsay Lohan stars in a movie about a secretary who tells her boss she is pregnant to stop him from firing her.  The movie mixes some hilarious and awkward moments with some awkwardly boring and hackneyed filler.  Ms. Lohan’s acting is perfect as usual, though her decision to die her hair is something like deciding to paint your shiny new BMW dirt brown.

There is perhaps little to be gained from a mostly-hackneyed made-for-tv comedy, but the story does follow a common literary motif, which I shall call the “comeback motif”.  Ms. Lohan’s character, Thea, after spending the time preceding the movie as a secretary living beyond her means and doing a poor job at everything finds, while living her new lie, that she now has a second chance at everything because of the different way that people view her.  She spends much of the movie “putting her life together”.  The motif is common: the hero has a dark and repugnant past, often criminal, usually “wasted” from the perspective of the audience.  Given a second chance, he seizes it and begins to act in a “virtuous” way, again from the perspective of the audience.  Often, the central conflict of the story is that even as the hero virtuously improves his lot in life, his repugnant past stalks him and eventually he must face and defeat it.

The motif is of interest because, if used properly, can perhaps be used to gain insight into the way a society views virtue.  For instance, Thea’s road to virtue is working late (till 9:00!), getting promoted, doing good work, and finding a faithful, upwardly mobile partner.  These are the classic American materialistic virtues, the Protestant work ethic in art.  Work hard and you shall find success.  There is little emphasis on any inner transformation in Thea.

This may all be a case of circular reasoning: how can we identify the motif unless we first label some part of the hero’s behavior after his second chance as being virtuous self-improvement?  But perhaps this misses the point of identifying literary motifs in the first place.  The application of a motif is to understand and frame a story, to model it and reduce it down to its parts.

Whatever the purpose, I find the materialistic framing of Thea’s steps to rebirth after her second chance interesting, even if “Labor Pains” was a dubious use of my time at best.

Review – Cabaret

“Cabaret” is a film based on a musical based on a book based on a play based on a novel, according to Wikipedia. I shall provide some brief reactions to the film.

My first thought after finishing “Cabaret” was that someday, someone will write a movie like this about global warming. Many movies and stories have been written using the rise of Nazi Germany as a setting; notable ones that come to mind are “The Sound of Music” and “Schindler’s List”, both great dramas in their own right. But I have yet to encounter a movie that treats the subject as subtly, and as realistically, as “Cabaret”.

In “The Sound of Music”, the Nazi takeover is, in a way, the driving engine of the plot. We do not know how the love story between Maria and Captain Von Trapp will end, but we can sense the progress toward the climax, and its proximity, because it draws closer with the rise of the Nazis.

“Cabaret” features the same menacing Nazi undertone that “The Sound of Music” does, at least at first. As in “The Sound of Music”, the Nazi presence grows with time, starting with a few isolated young thugs performing criminal acts, and growing in organization, membership, and social acceptance as the movie goes on. The key difference between the two movies is that at the end of “The Sound of Music”, the Nazis take over. At the end of “Cabaret”, nothing happens! The Nazi takeover is not omitted, but rather truncated.

This way of telling the story reflects the way the characters see themselves. Captain Von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” is an early, ardent, and heroic opponent of the rise of the Nazis. Brian Roberts, the male protagonist in “Cabaret”, shows the same disgust for the Nazi party that Von Trapp does, verbally accosting Nazis on the streets and calling their doctrines “crap”. Unlike Von Trapp, though, he does not see his actions as part of a larger story. He hates the Nazis when he sees them, but thinks nothing of them when they are absent. He does not know that they are about to start the greatest war, and the greatest genocide, in modern history.

Brian’s moral vacillation, contrasted with Von Trapp’s determination, can be seen either as weakness, or as failure of vision. He is either largely indifferent to the moral abyss toward which Germany is steering, or he does not see it. I am more inclined toward the latter view; Brian, being a mere man, does not see the world in terms of moral absolutes or historical trends. Von Trapp, being a hero, does. Von Trapp leaves Austria to escape Nazism; Brian leaves Germany to escape a failed love interest.

Clearly, Brian represents the experience of the average human better than Von Trapp. Individual lives are stories of individual pursuits, of the emotions and instincts that determine our own happiness or despair. We rarely see the decisions we make as the movements of foot-soldiers in a cosmic battle for good; we see them as decisions made in the pursuit of our own happiness and advantage. Like Brian, our vision of the contemporaneous world is not large enough to identify what, to historians, will be the central events of our times.

Von Trapp is more of a symbol than Brian. He is a symbol of nations, of peoples, whole masses of action and forceful movement. As Tolstoy might have argued, such great historical events may drive some men to greatness, but rarely are those events driven by great men. Von Trapp is the United States, Great Britain, the French Resistance. Few mere mortals, if any, can hope to achieve his degree of purpose and moral clarity.

Even so, Brian’s lack of moral clarity, and resulting lack of effective moral action, is not something we would seek to emulate. We would prefer to approach Von Trapp’s behavior as nearly as mere mortals can. Perhaps for this reason, “Cabaret” is critical of its own protagonist, this small man obsessed with making his rent, making a buck, and winning a woman. What in any other setting would be a touching tragic romance – the story of a man who found himself through a woman, who won her heart through pain and generosity, and then who lost her – this tragic romance is brought into sharp relief by the swirl of world events around it, and revealed to be so much scurrying of ants. The closing song, “Life is a Cabaret”, provides the essential theme: we can party all we want, and our happiness is our own to achieve. But the setting provides the caveat: the day of reckoning is coming, and it will not judge us by how happy we were; it will judge us on its own terms. The Kit Kat Club, from which the movie’s name comes and where Brian’s beloved performs, and Brian’s life in Berlin in toto, are merely examples of Nero playing the fiddle as Rome burns. Brian lives his life, and the moral abyss of Nazism beckons.

Is it so in our own times? Humanity seems to face two potential threats to its continued existence: massive environmental changes and the proliferation of man-made weapons with enormous destructive power (be they nuclear, biological, or other).

Most of us (at least this writer) lack even the knowledge to judge whether these issues pose genuine threats or not… such is the way of life when one is a Brian Roberts, and not a Captain Von Trapp. Moreover, we, too, have to pay the rent, and what of finding love and having children? We are not heroes as Von Trapp… we are men of limited abilities and limited attention. Will history judge that we have been living in a cabaret?

Review – The Squid and the Whale

Review

I had originally thought that The Squid and the Whale was a new, mature production from the whimsical mind of Wes Anderson, but it turns out that Mr. Anderson is merely the producer, and that the film was in fact written and directed by Noah Baumbach.

The film contains many awkward moments, a few even disgusting and disturbing, but in the end, it manages to tell a coherent and interesting story. While this is more than most films today can manage, it remains true also that the film fails to deal in what I would consider to be the greatest themes of life. Instead, it narrowly focuses on the fallout of a divorce, a phenomenon that in a world of honorable people would never occur.

Analysis

The main character of the film is a boy named Walt, who must come to grips with his parents’ divorce. He quickly passes from denial to anger, and blames his mother for the divorce. He is apparently correct, since it appears that his mother has had affairs with several men over the years, and it later appears that her husband knew about this and suffered deeply as a result of it. The movie unfolds to make the argument that, despite these facts, Walt’s father is in fact impossible to live with, being self-centered and withdrawn from the rest of the world, communicating with people only to satisfy his own needs. The movie demonstrates that Walt, in attempting to emulate his father, picks up several nasty habits, including plagiarism, snobbery, and philandering. It concludes by bringing Walt to realize that it was his mother who stood by him in his childhood, and it is his father who is at fault for their divorce.

To many, the narrative of the movie might not seem like an argument, but the implication that divorce is ever justified must needs be contentious to some. Marriage is, after all, a promise. That which is promised ought to be permanent. While marriage vows differ, several things seem to be common across modern society, and it seems reasonable to assume that Walt’s parents promised each other, among other things, never to cheat, and to remain together forever. It seems that it is Walt’s mother who violated these promises, and for this reason, his father cannot be blamed for any of the actions in the story.

It is possible that Walt’s father also broke promises… grey promises of support, love, and cherish. Such promises are often made, but with words so vague that they are impossible to keep or to break. Whether Walt’s father could be held to account for violating such promises is an open question, us not knowing the precise promises, nor the precise history. Perhaps Mr. Baumbach would argue that it does not matter. We would disagree, a woman’s promise being a promise, and Walt’s mother’s promise being broken.

Nonetheless, by the end, The Squid and the Whale clearly focuses our sympathy on Walt’s mother and the pain that she has undergone. If we must sympathize with her, can we divine why she got herself into this situation? She remarks at one point in the movie that when she met Walt’s father, “He was unlike anyone else.” She may have loved him… should she then have tied herself to him forever? Perhaps she did not think though the consequences of making promises to a fickle heart, to a force that, as she herself admitted, was beyond the range of her experience. Reach for the sun and you will be burned.

This is a harsh interpretation, a harsh perspective, but it is real. Imagining ourselves in Walt’s father’s position, at the end of The Squid and the Whale, we have learned the harsh lesson that our sole source of emotional comfort in the future will be ourselves, when we had counted on trust, and a promise, to forestall such a situation. If breaking promises is sometimes justified, who can avoid that lesson? Perhaps the true moral of the Squid and the Whale is that we had best all watch our backs.

A final note: the title of the movie refers to a pivotal scene that leads Walt to see the truth about his mother and her love for him. I must express my skepticism that this a proper practice for naming things. This is a minor flaw, though, and I am no author. Perhaps something more modest might have done, though… unless squids and whales were symbolic of the relationships in the movie. I have devoted this extremely little thought, but if it is the case, the symbolism should have been more obvious. If it is not, did the five words the whole world would see really need to be The Squid and the Whale? Was there nothing more important?