Spielberg's Munich simplifies
DiManno: Spielberg's Munich simplifies
Jan. 4, 2006. 06:29 AM
In Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg managed to sentimentalize the Holocaust and create a heroic protagonist out of an Austrian businessman who used Jews as slave labour.Not that Oskar Schindler lacked for moral courage, albeit belatedly — he did save some 1,100 Jews from the concentration camps by using money earned from his factory to bribe Nazi commanders and protect his ever-expanding pool of labour. In that Oscar-winning movie, Spielberg didn't ignore the backstory, otherwise there would be little in the way of character conflict to propel the narrative.But in Munich, the gifted director's latest cinematic release "inspired by real events" — which has provoked considerable controversy on all sides of the political equation, with both Israel and Palestinians feeling hard done by — Spielberg jumps into the murky melodrama of the Middle East at the point where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches are murdered at the Munich Olympics by members of Black September, an über-militant offshoot of Fatah, which was already the avowedly militant arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization.Movie-goers unfamiliar with what is quite recent history might indeed conclude that Israel, on the orders of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, acted precipitously and out of a pure desire for revenge by assigning a team of assassins to track down and eliminate all the Munich operatives still at large.I do not underestimate the human need for vengeance, a powerful impulse that most people widely condemn while submitting to it, in small doses, in their own lives. And these Israeli Olympians were Jews, slaughtered in Germany. Everything about the atrocity resonated and the crime could not go unanswered. Israel couldn't afford to be perceived as weak, so it would fight back, with extra-judicial vehemence if necessary, and despite the disapproval of even its allies, in order to emphasize that Jews could no longer be slain with impunity.They're not the only country to do so, to red-light targeted assassinations, but the perceived rules are always different for Israel. The country is generally held to a higher standard of state-moral conduct, in part because Israel has defined itself by righteous ideals, some of which have been squandered.Munich, the event, brought terrorism to television screens around the world, at a time when most people still viewed Israel as a gallant and plucky nation, barely a quarter-century removed from its creation by the United Nations.Munich, the movie, devolves to Israel — not its attackers — the phenomenon of terrorism unbridled — surely that's an oxymoron — in the tit-for-tat spiraling of evermore horrific and ideologically self-justifying violence. It doesn't overtly blame Israel for the arc of escalating, zealous nihilism that led to 9/11. But it does more than tacitly connect those dots — with the World Trade Centre looming behind the disenchanted leader of the Mossad's alleged assassination team, living with his nightmares in Brooklyn and renouncing the country of his birth.Spielberg allows his characters to inform us, in passing, of the Palestinian backlash against the assassinations, with further terrorist acts committed, ostensibly as reprisals for killing killers. What's not clearly delineated is how those reprisals shed the blood of innocents, of civilians, in bombings at airports and aboard city buses, wherever Jews gathered, and this even before the dystopian era of the suicide bomber.Nor does Spielberg make reference to searing events that preceded Munich and which help to explain why Meir allegedly authorized the assassination project, because this was not an isolated act of butchery against Israel. There had been, in the years prior to 1972: The bombing of a Swissair jet by terrorists aligned with the Palestinian cause; grenades tossed into groups of people milling at Israel's airport; numerous hijacked planes; the endless shelling of civilian targets inside Israel; the wars launched (or being prepared for launching) against Israel by its neighbors in 1948, 1967, 1973, and an incessant flow of state-supported anti-Semitism from the Arab world.Perhaps none of these occurrences justify Israel's response to Munich or, more latterly, Israel's aggressive response to those it designates as militant firebrands in the array of state enemies — which still includes, on the evidence, targeted assassinations.But Spielberg has simplified and air-brushed the complexities, the dilemmas, of the Middle East, even as he insists his film is a politically neutral canvas that just might further dialogue and understanding.To be truthful (or maybe I'm just missing the nuances), most of Munich seems tilted towards justifying Israel's response, at least until the third hour, when sudden doubts and paranoia seize the main character. Spielberg himself has said in interviews that "every act of terrorism requires a strong response" and that "understanding is not approval." He has firmly rejected accusations of moral equivalency, an overused term for equating grievances and rationalizing brutality, even the slamming of passenger planes into New York towers.But the message in Munich, it seems to me, is that a righteous reaction that embraces killing ultimately demeans and renders ignoble everyone involved. It implies that every effect has a reasonable (to somebody) just cause, that terrorism and counter-terrorism are ultimately indistinguishable and that reaction — or re-reaction — is inevitable spawned by action.So, do nothing? Well, no. The solution, Spielberg seems to posit, is to remove the injustices that breed the hatred, as if the real Middle East were scripted in Hollywood, with a Spielberg-ian happy ending in the final reel. But that reinforces the premise that injustice is the root cause of terrorism, thus lending it a nobility it doesn't deserve. The bromide is that all this blood-soaked turmoil can be avoided by diplomacy, dialogue and understanding, which ignores the fact that all of these tactics plus critical concessions have not blunted ill will against Israel or convinced many militants — in defiance even of elected Palestinian Authority leaders — to cut Israel any slack.In one scene of shared feelings — suggesting shared proprietary legitimacy — Spielberg has a Munich terrorist wax movingly of motherland Palestine, a nation of one's own, just as the Jews waited for millennia for their Israel.Which might also be true and right. But in Spielberg's fantastical Munich, it comes off like E.T. pining for home.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
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