Vox Nova at the Movies: The Reader and Defiance
I had the recent pleasure of viewing The Reader (USCCB rating: L) and Defiance (USCCB rating: L) starring the newest James Bond, Daniel Craig. These films join other recent films like Valkyrie (USCCB rating: A-II), portraying events in and around World War II. Before going too far, I should probably note that I’m surprised The Reader didn’t receive an O rating. I do believe it is a very good film. However, it does portray a sexual relationship between an older female and a 15-year-old boy/man. This portrayal is not sporadic, but is maintained for a solid 15 minutes of the film, going through countless sex scenes, although showing no act from start to finish.
The Reader portrays the life of the fictional Hanna Schmitz. The aforementioned affair happens at the beginning of the film. She is working on a street car when she is offered a position with the SS. She leaves her flat, breaking Michael’s heart. Later we meet her while Michael is in law school, and she is on trial for her work at Auschwitz. As the law professor notes to Michael, she was one of 15,000 workers at Auschwitz. While clearly having guilt in the Holocaust, there is an eerie disproportion that is felt by attempting to pin the Holocaust on her and some others. In certain respects she (and by implication several tens of others) are made into a Christ-like figures to atone for the sins of Germany in the war. This is made all the more difficult upon recognizing that she could hardly be considered a leading intellectual for she couldn’t even read. In the end she is condemned by orders she couldn’t have written, but was too proud to have denied.
Defiance is based on the true story of the Bielski family. Based in the Poland-Russia region, a number of Jews took cover in thick forests during World War II. Eventually the Bielski group managed to be over 1000. One of the better things about the movie is that it isn’t overly romantic. One of the sadder characters is the rabbi that at one point asks God to remove his blessing from the Jewish race and find another people to bless. The group also almost starves to death and seems at one point to be playing a game of attrition. As one of the Bielski brothers tells another, “We resist by staying alive,” when he is challenged for why they don’t focus their efforts on sabotage and leave the elderly and frail to fend for themselves. The movie also portrays the absence of lost love between the Jews and communists, even though one brother does end up working with the communists against the Nazis.
As far as take home lessons, not that all films need this, it is the idea that men that aren’t good are capable of good and even redemption. The Bielskis were considered little more than common criminals in the Jewish community. The reason they knew the forest so well is that they had experience hiding from the police there. The movie strongly implies that the women in the camp were expected to service the sexual desires of the men at the camp. Tuvia Bielski does not use his power as leader to demand that though. So profound is Tuvia’s example and stewardship that the rabbi on his death bed credits Tuvia for showing him the existence of God.
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The novel left me with a distasteful feeling — it is an appeal for sympathy for a Nazi woman guilty of mass murder.
The pedophile scenes are described with joyous abandon in the novel. It seems that the witch-hunt against pedophilia is taken seriously only when the clergy or gays come into its sights.
Having not read the book, I was wondering if you could extrapolate a little bit. In the movie, there is almost an absence of passion. The contemporary view of a sex scene in a movie is the culmination of love between the two partners. In the movie, the man/boy is quite passionate whereas the woman is almost anti-sensuous. She appears to me to be serving almost as a metaphor for Germany whereas the man/boy is analagous to Germany’s people.
I don’t believe we are supposed to feel sympathy for her. She is quite brazen, and one is struck with incredulity that she could be so brazen. She recognizes her crimes and doesn’t seek pity for them. Even when offered the key to acquital she stubornly refuses to take it. If anything, I think the guilt is a self-imposed one upon the viewer, because the viewer recognizes (as identifying with the German people) that we as a people are not recognizing our own fault in the affair. We lied in bed with her. We took her pleasure. Sure, we may not have recognized the totality of our actions, but we were competent enough to know what we were choosing.
After living in Germany for a while now, I’m beginning to feel that this culture was irreperably damaged by its twentieth century history. The aristocratic, mostly Catholic officers who plotted Hitler’s assassination believed that if it were not Germans themselves who ridded themselves of the tyrant, the nation would never be able to recover their belief in themselves. I believe that those officers were prophetic in so thinking.
There is a veritable cult of “politically correct” guilt that is going on everywhere–in the schools, in the mass media, absolutely everywhere. However, it is carefully focussed only on the Jews, and I think that that is for a very clear and specific reason: the social and economic injustices that continue to be perpetrated against Eastern European migrants and Turks may more easily be ignored, so long as one forgets that they or their ancestors, and not the Jews were, demographically-speaking, the majority of the victims of the Nazis.
As regards the “pedophilia” of the film, it seems to me that the modern obsession with what is, world-wide, a very common and well-accepted practice is fuelled more by the ordinary, quotidian anti-Catholicism of American culture than by anything else right now.
Do you folks have any idea of how many child-marriages are made every day–and willingly accepted, and even delighted in–in the Third World? Do you know that almost all of the aristocratic marriages of bygone ages in Europe were, essentially, pedophile relationships, in our modern terms? Do you know that some of the married queens who became saints in the Medieval period were decades younger than their husbands and barely pubescent when they were married to their spouses? “O happy Austia, who marry for power, while others war for it,” meant, in practice, that the Hapsburgs used their CHILDREN as pawns in pedophilic/dynastic transactions, and were saluted by the Church for it. The thing that baffles moderns is that most of those marriages were happy–just as most arranged marriages in the Third World are, as well. I once knew a Muslim teenager in Sri Lanka who was married to a 45-year-old haji against her will. Six months later they were completely devoted to each other.
And, before anyone jumps on me for supposedly advocating pedophile-marriages or disavowals of guilt for massacring Jews, let me make something very clear: I’m not trying to do anything but gore the American ox, who says to himself and to his students, over and over again in that country: “All the people of the world just want the same things as we do.”
NO, THEY MOST EMPHATICALLY DO NOT!
The world would be a much safer place if Americans travelled a little more–and I don’t mean to five-star hotels in Paris and London.
Digby,
My Irish immigrant grandmother was married at age 14 to a Norwegian immigrant man who was 18. No one, I am told, accused him of pedophilia.
I know a boy who was sent to prison at age 16 because he had oral sex with a 15 year old girl. He was released after five years of incarceration.
How many American lives have been ruined because of our nutty sex and drug laws? Too damn many,
Digby, keep goring the American ox. It needs something to get its head straight.
I read The Reader, and I found it brilliant, and I find the movie almost as good. If you haven’t seen/read it and wish to, I warn you that I go into details that you might not want to know before your own viewing/reading of it.
The Sex.
I had no problem with the sex. The age difference, however, becomes an issue within the movie/book itself. The question of how Michael is affected is central. On a side note, a friend of mine, who teaches the book to her high school junior English class, is the one who let me know about it. The book, like the movie, makes the sex real, but it isn’t titillating.
The other matters.
I have not lived in Germany, and so I speak as an outsider to matters that Digby knows at first hand, but to my mind, the issues raised in the book – and in the movie – are about a second generation of Germans, growing up and trying to come to terms with what had been done by those that they only naturally want to admire and to love –– essentially their parents and grandparents.
To this non-German, who learned German from a very fine German woman but still learned to love its literature from the outside, and thus probably has more of the Idea of Germany floating around in his mind than just Germany, the matter of literacy struck a chord. This is the nation that began the race to universal literacy as a means of salvation, while it is also the country famous for its rebel against the Law, in both the biblical and ecclesiastical sense: Luther. These two themes (reading and the Law) come together so brilliantly against matters of love and belonging and inheritance. I found that the book does a much better job of showing how her illiteracy affected her, and it does go into some detail about what the world is like for those who can’t read and want to keep it a secret. Most fascinating, however, was how Hannah finds herself in court because of a book, and that she for some reason could have such shame to admit her illiteracy but could be so honest about her actions in the SS.
Bildung — and the desire that Germany created for it even beyond its borders — was its great achievement, but how does it change a person, an individual? Does it do anything at all? Why couldn’t someone have thwarted Herder’s ideas of the Volk sooner? Why wasn’t it obvious? These questions have been asked before, but not from the side of the desire for education and cultural betterment denied. What does being excluded from a nation’s cultural capital (and the very skill of acquiring it) do to a person, especially one caught up in a national movement that even its cognoscenti applauded, and who later finds herself being cornered as the singularly guilty one among the many guilty because she takes the blame for having written a report to hide her illiteracy?
I think that this skillfully raises the question of her the extent of culpability, of how a justice system cannot remove self-interest. Neither the book nor the movie exonerates her or makes us look past what she did. The man who tells the story, Michael, lives out a tortured life because of his lost love, something that was real for him and (I think) for her (but her fear of being discovered illiterate made her throw it all away). During the trial, he struggles over what to do with his knowledge of her illiteracy. Is he culpable of omission? Her sentence would never have been what it ended up as if he had talked to the judge. Why he never lets the court know that she is illiterate is a question we are left pondering: does he need to get back at her in some way for what she took from him (their relationship)? And the reader/viewer is left with a decision to make about Michael’s act: is it a failure of character, is he giving into the underbelly of a former love (I mean the hate that only comes from having loved). In this, he stood for me as a symbol of Germany: ruined in his ability to move forward, to love openly and honestly, and stuck constantly returning to what they had done together when he was 15: read out loud (the German title is Der Vorleser: The Outloud Reader). For him, this is an attempt at redemption (how German, I thought, redemptive reading), but Hannah shoves away the idea that her learning to read could do anything to undo what she had done. She still condemns herself at the end of the film: “I’ve learned to read, kid.” That’s it. And that fact didn’t redeem her, just like it didn’t save Germany from its history in the 20th century.
That’s my take.
I think your analysis is very, very pereptive, ES, and this part, especially, makes me want to see this film:
In this, he stood for me as a symbol of Germany: ruined in his ability to move forward, to love openly and honestly, and stuck constantly returning to what they had done together when he was 15: read out loud (the German title is Der Vorleser: The Outloud Reader). For him, this is an attempt at redemption (how German, I thought, redemptive reading), but Hannah shoves away the idea that her learning to read could do anything to undo what she had done.
It also makes me want to discourage the young Germans I know from seeing it, however: they can’t deal with this kind of reflection on the past lives of their elders.
And if you don’t think these folks are emotionally crippled by this history, take a look at this idiocy:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,636570,00.html