Last week, I got a letter from a postgraduate student at Melbourne University. She’s conducting research into my novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, and wanted me to answer some questions. To date I haven’t replied, which seems churlish of me, but I get these requests – on average – about once a month, and the amount of detail they want is often considerable. It’s fair to say the quality of my responses varies, too, although they’ve crystallized over the years. This process was helped when I found some notes I wrote to myself while I was writing the book. Under headings like ‘what effect am I trying to achieve?’ and ‘How much violence is okay?’ I’d tried to work out my own system.
Requests used to come more regularly, and from time-to-time I’d get a batch of thirty similar questions. These would be from high school students, usually year 12, sometimes younger – the book was obviously a set text somewhere. The youngest group to write in was a class of year 10s, and I have to admit I confirmed with their teacher that the students’ emails were ‘approved’. You see, I wrote a determinedly NC-17 book. I did so because I thought (and still think) that the Final Solution was an NC-17 sort of event. My answer to the ‘how much violence’ question was as follows: lose anything that doesn’t drive the story; don’t hide what’s left; readers don’t necessarily have darker imaginations than writers.
No more gas in the rig – can’t even get it started
Also last week, I learned that John Boyne‘s fascinating The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has been made into a film. Having written what I did, I’ve since dipped into various literary interpretations of the history – Boyne’s is just the most recent. Some of this material is – obviously enough – written by survivors, some by perpetrators, some by bystanders. It varies from the excellent – like Primo Levi’s or Pery Broad‘s writing – to the dreadful, which I will not identify. Other stuff has been written by just plain old writers – people like John Boyne. Or me. It tends to be similarly uneven, although usually readable. The readability comes about because (despite what dills like Adorno tell you), the Holocaust is surprisingly easy to write: the historical events impose a conventional tragic narrative arc on one’s writing. This tends to work rather well in practice. The neatest definition of tragedy I’ve ever heard comes from my niece (a Goth and serious Macbeth obsessive): ‘first there’s an exciting story, then everybody dies’. This applies to the Holocaust as much as to Macbeth. I remember when I wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper I despaired at my inability to make the sections set during the Ukrainian Famine ‘fly’. ‘It’s harder when they’re just starving away’ wrote Bruce Dawe, years ago. ‘Digging a hole in the not-so-good-earth’. No exciting story first, I guess. In the end, I gutted the historical context and opted for a Tarantinoesque discontinuous narrative. At least it gave my characters motive, apart from driving the story forward.
Nothing heard, nothing said – can’t even speak about it
As you no doubt know, I think that most of us are rational. That includes criminals. Heath Ledger style Jokers are pretty damn rare, although I did encounter one true agent of criminal chaos when I was writing. He’s known to history as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ (no, not the Russian Czar), and his reputation is richly deserved. Like Gitta Sereny, I’m also most interested in perpetrators and bystanders (spot the future criminal barrister, natch). Because I appreciate the fundamental rationality of criminals and their capacity to respond to incentives (however perverse) I’m in awe of one character in Boyne’s novel: SS Lieutenant Kotler. He’s so artfully constructed I despair for the actor (Rupert Friend, Mr Wickham of Pride & Prejudice fame) who has to play him in the film. Cinematic advertising focuses almost exclusively on Bruno’s improbable friendship with Shmuel, one of the camp’s inmates. Friend appears at various points in the trailer (and appears physically well cast, even though he’s 25 and has to play a 19 year old). I’ll see the film next week and report back on how he goes.
Put on your brake lights, you’re in the City of Wonder
For those unfamiliar with Boyne’s novel, it’s told largely from the perspective of nine-year-old Bruno, the Camp Commandant’s son. Bruno is unhappy about being uprooted from his comfortable home in Berlin and then sent to the boondocks of rural Poland with mum, dad and his 12 going on 21 sister Gretel (‘The Hopeless Case’). From the moment the family arrives, the beautiful but sinister Kotler wages a one-man ingratiation campaign on the women of the household, seducing the Commandant’s wife and zeroing in on the (by now) 13 year old Gretel. Boyne writes Kotler out of the narrative thirty pages from the end, perhaps because his presence was turning what is a relatively simple moral fable into Cape Fear in a concentration camp. I must admit when I read the scene where Bruno interrupts Kotler charming his sister (he’s even partially stripped off), for an instant I expected to see Max Cady’s backful of Biblical tattoos.
It’s like the darkness is the light
Unable to exert his sexual charm on Bruno (who is astoundingly stupid, but fundamentally morally decent) Kotler systematically makes the boy’s life miserable. This process starts slowly, with pointed teasing about Bruno’s reading preferences (can’t have the Boss’s son reading that perfidious text otherwise known as Treasure Island). It culminates in the destruction of his friendship with Shmuel and the killing of Pavel (one of the household servants) in what is one of the most impressive (and understated) scenes of intimate violence I have ever read. Invited to a dinner-party in the Commandant’s quarters, Kotler overreaches with his sexually-charged inveigling and then really goes to town when creating a diversion.
Understatement in Holocaust fiction (both cinematic and literary) impresses me, because it’s so seldom well done. Usually, it allows the reader to substitute anodyne Hollywood images for what (bleakly) happened: a clear case of the reader’s imagination rendered weaker than the writer’s. Much of this stems from a tendency for films and books concerning the Holocaust to be constructed with their audience’s moral improvement in mind. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is no different, although (thankfully, in terms of literary skill), Lieutenant Kotler almost gets away on John Boyne.
A disease of the mind, it can control you
Kotler works thanks to Boyne’s deft handling of his sexuality. I think it’s fair to say that most Holocaust fiction doesn’t address the sexualised evil Nazism traded in, despite the fact that the reference is well understood in popular culture (think of the kinky Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo or – if you can stand it – Max Mosley’s recent escapades). Susan Sontag pinged it in 1974 in a famous essay (Fascinating Fascism), and Spielberg sailed close to the wind when casting the rather ‘pretty’ Ralph Fiennes as the notorious Amon Goeth (no Oscar for Mr Fiennes that year, despite the fact that he stole the show). Sontag observes:
A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the “feminine” masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.) Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism (which is not to the Nazis’ credit, but rather shows something of the nature and limits of the sexual imagination).
Of course, most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did, if indeed they have more than the sketchiest idea of what that might be. Nevertheless, there are powerful and growing currents of sexual feeling, those that generally go by the name of sadomasochism, which make playing at Nazism seem erotic. These sadomasochistic fantasies and practices are to be found among heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, although it is among male homosexuals that the eroticizing of Nazism is most visible. S-M, not swinging, is the big sexual secret of the last few years.
The acuity of Sontag’s comments is remarkable in light of the growing interpenetration of gothic/s&m imagery in popular culture, not just among subcultures. The clip for Rihanna’s Disturbia is a signal example. Even as recently as 10 years ago, only metal/gothic/industrial outfits would deploy this kind of imagery. Rihanna is a fairly conventional R&B singer with Caribbean tinges (she’s Bajan); the song is uptempo and poppy, albeit with creepy lyrics (mildly NSFW):
Spielberg, however, was trapped by his own weakness for saccharine endings and Hollywood’s general fear of the dreaded NC-17. Memo to moviemakers and writers: books and films don’t morally improve (or degrade) people. If you want to learn something off the box, take out a subscription to Discovery Channel. No-one has ever found a link between cinematic/literary/televisual violence and violent crime. There is a link between the introduction of television and minor property crime – various studies noted burglary rates climbing as television first swept across Britain and the USA. And in those days people were watching Dixon of Dock Green. Dangerous and subversive telly, what what.
All my life on my head (don’t want to think about it)
One of the reasons I wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper the way I did was to do what horror writers do every day: horrify and – if possible – frighten. An effect of Hollywood (and fiction’s) ‘morally worthy’ treatment of the Holocaust is that we’re now in the absurd situation where IT and Misery are scarier than Auschwitz. This is self-evidently ridiculous. Stephen King makes shit up. Auschwitz is true. Sure, I remember drama classes where I was told about Greek tragedy and how all the nasty takes place off stage. This (allegedly) was based on the idea that the viewer’s imagination is worse than that belonging to Messrs Sophocles and Euripides. What this forgets is that Greek audiences knew their own culture’s literature backwards, and Homer and friends don’t spare the reader (listener). If you are unfamiliar with Homer’s penchant for lashings of the old ultra-violence, I suggest you read the Iliad.
Two directors (both with solid reputations) approached me with a view to optioning my novel. If I recall correctly, my response to both was along the lines of ‘Wear your RC (refused classification) with pride!’. I suspect this would still be the case, even though I’ve maintained contact with both. At the time, I remember being irritated when various critics described what I’d written as ‘a pornography of violence’, but I’m rather more sanguine about the descriptor these days. Watching critics complain about the impossibility of a major premise in Boy in the Striped Pajamas (a pre-teen not going straight to the gas chambers) or registering shock at ‘light’ treatments like La vita e bella or Jakob the Liar has convinced me that it’s not possible to use fictionalised genocide as a means to moral improvement. Worse, doing so robs it of its horror, actively weakening the effectiveness of understatement and irony in other contexts. This doesn’t only apply to WWII-era films: it was also a major flaw in Hotel Rwanda. Seriously, a million people died in 90 days, killed with Chinese-made machetes imported especially for the purpose. And we turned it into PG-13.
Your mind’s in Disturbia
Since I’m more interested in cinema than literature – I write with reels running in my head, bathing what I write in what one critic described as ‘television’s cold, cathode light’ – I’ll use movie metaphors, but I think the principles apply equally to writers.
For me, if people want to mine the Holocaust’s tragic narrative arc, it’s time they stopped running in fear from the old NC-17. Some focus on perpetrators would also be welcome – think of the creepyfying power of the perps in Se7en or Goodfellas. People seem to think that their natural good fortune will save them from becoming victims. What, however, will save them from being Lieutenant Kotler? Or the brutal but hapless Vitaly in my own book? I think a conscious decision to be less precious about the subject is also on. This means admitting that gangster films (Colors) or straight-up war pics (Saving Private Ryan) or science fiction (Alien) can teach us a thing or two about pure terror. Borrowing metal’s use of gothic imagery and sound may also come in handy - System of a Down shouldn’t just be scoring sci-fi flicks. It’s fair to say that the Nazis first used stadia in a way that rock would recognise – playing on that link has real potential. This isn’t a call for historical accuracy, either. As I said earlier, if you’re into that, watch Discovery Channel. It is, however, a call for honesty in our appreciation of just what makes the Final Solution or the Rwandan genocide significant. It’s the violence, stupid. Violence that is more often than not ritualised and sexualised, creepily attractive as well as utterly repellent.
63 Comments
My own fascination has not been about the Kotlers of the world, but about the seemingly ordinary people who commit atrocities. Kotlers are psychopaths, genocidaires waiting to happen. But how do ordinary seemingly “decent” people get drawn in?
I think you are right, and that perhaps the rather repellent “glamour” of Nazism is part of the answer. Perhaps when one dresses up in uniform, one is freed of normal inhibitions.
This is why armies make such an insistence on uniforms (and also to enforce a sense of lack of individuality, thus making people less likely to protest when orders are given).
There has been suggestions by some that Nazis should not be portrayed as human beings, but I think that this kind of an attitude misses the point. The point is that it is, by and large, “normal” human beings who commit genocide.
I also think that to downplay the violence and sheer horror of what happened in the Shoah is dishonest. Unfortunately, there was no happy ending. I guess the concern of movie makers in portraying violence like that is that somehow it might be seen as gratuitous or some in the audience might revel in it. But it’s really bad to airbrush that violence away.
Personally I like the technique of giving some hints as to the violent action taking place, but not necessarily showing it all in gory detail. This is because I am one of those people with a seriously morbid imagination and my imagination fills the gaps with terrible things. I think this is one of the reasons that old fashioned horror movies are better than new fangled ones with CGI which show the gore. Somehow it doesn’t seem as scary to me.
I’d disagree, LE. Kotler may be a nasty piece of work – violent yes, sadistic sure – but hardly psychotic. If he were, he wouldn’t be able to be so manipulative as this requires a fair amount of putting yourself in the place of others in order to predict their response.
My favourite criticism of SL was the one from Dershowitz for making “Ukrainian killers look like comprehensible, ordinary human beings rather than monsters”. Monstrous acts don’t require a monstrous nature, but until we can get past the assumption that this sort of violence is the unique realm of the mentally ill we’re no closer to discovering what IS required for them to happen. It’s why I find Ordinary Men a lot more informative than Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Christopher Browning explains how Hamburg policemen were turned into a death squad in stages, whereas Daniel Goldhagen writes about anti-semitism like it’s an evil vapour that roamed Europe randomly possessing people.
One of the main Nazi tricks that helped ensure participation was very simply ‘passing the buck’. In the same way that responsibility in the military lies with those who issue the orders rather than those who follow them, Nazi institutions were set up so responsibility was spread quite widely – T4 was a great case in point. At the end of the process you had a nurse giving a disabled person a lethal injection. But before that you had a doctor ordering her to do so, a hospital administrator sending him the list of patients to die that week, a board of medical specialists at T4 HQ who read the patient files submitted by each hospital (by law) and decided which should be included on the death list, the international eugenics movement that argued that there was such a thing as ‘life unworthy of life’ and ultimately Hitler who declared that the only way to strengthen the German body politic was social darwinism with the removal of physical or mental weakness by sterilisation or murder.
“No-one has ever found a link between cinematic/literary/televisual violence and violent crime.”
False. Have you forgotten the fallout from Romper Stomper? One example- a car load of Asian youths in the Melbourne CDB bashed a young white male because he had a skinhead style hair cut days after the film was released.
The real question is should we value freedom of expression highly enough to accept some “collateral damage” from the odd provocative film.
Sure mel, as long as I’m not the collateral damage!
SL – sometimes I get the feeling the whole world would be more comfortable if history was only done on the Disney channel. Which would do a dis-service to the victims.
Attributing a single incident to a single film is nigh on impossible, Mel – you’ve got statistical training, you know that (problem of n=1). Some people (especially morals campaigners) have large investments in proving such a link, have funded vast studies into this stuff, and got nowhere. Some studies even show a negative correlation (more violence on the teev, less violent crime). To my mind, the two are likely completely unrelated, and the question is probably not worth pursuing.
That said, I’m interested in a slightly subtler debate – the idea that movies or books can (or should be) (a) morally uplifting and (b) that cinematic moral uplift is a useful or worthwhile thing. In the case of films about genocides, the answers appear to be (a) yes and (b) probably no.
The studies are there, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry- http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for_families/children_and_tv_violence
Obviously the relationship isn’t straightforward.
I’m not sure “cinematic moral uplift” is useful or worthwhile, but it’s probably been a feature of storytelling in every culture from day one. I can’t see that changing.
I suspect unremittingly bleak films without some type of moral message could act as a catalyst to violence for an already unhinged, adult or teen mind.
DEM, I think there’s such a thing as a socialised psychopath – sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t think it is. They understand enough about people and their emotions to manipulate them, but their emotions are not engaged enough to care about other people.
Interestingly, stockbrokers have been identified as having a higher than usual proportion of “functioning psychopaths.” They are said to be people who are much better at controlling their emotions or, perhaps, do not experience emotion with the same intensity as others. In a field where risk taking results in success, this is an advantage. It’s possible that this is also the case in other fields where risk taking is a benefit (eg, entrepreneurs).
So I would put Kotler in that category – not a Hannibal Lecter, but someone who can function in society, understand how to manipulate others and even succeed in areas where risk taking is rewarded.
DEM, I think there’s such a thing as a socialised psychopath – sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t think it is.
There was a fascinating study on this many years ago. Some psychologists decided to “rehabilitate” the psychopaths through specific training about social skills etc. A complete failure, as one of their patients stated: all they did was give me tools to better manipulate people.
Not just stockbrokers, there are other studies indicating that management attracts more than its fair share of assholes. Understandable, psychopaths want power. More understandable when we hear management types extolling the virtues of “The Art of War” as a guide to management and how business dynamics is often couched in language similiar to that of military tactics.
BTW: just because psychopaths are assholes does not mean they are not subject to the basic fundamentals of conditioning processes.
I suspect unremittingly bleak films without some type of moral message could act as a catalyst to violence for an already unhinged, adult or teen mind.
It is obvious in a way, if the mass media can effectively change public opinion, as some people from the Right like to complain about the Left dominance in the media, then why should we think that violence and negative messages through the mass media and arts do not have an effect? Can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Yes Mel, there are a number of studies indicating that movies etc do impact on how people behave.
Hmmm, while there are studies supporting the idea of violent video games causing violent behavior, there are also many studies finding contrariwise.
Hmm, I remember when I was an articled clerk someone described litigation to me in terms of The Art of War, so I went and read it. Some of it does transfer fairly well to litigation, which has an undeniable warlike aspect, but I wouldn’t think it would go so well as a management tool!
Other bits don’t translate so well to litigation – for example, Sun Tzu places a lot of emphasis on spies – there’s no way I would plant a spy in the opposing firm!
I did find reading about Julius Caesar useful – not so much his tactics, rather the fact that he planned meticulously, but didn’t get too wedded to the plan. If the situation changed, he threw out the plan (and usually the care with which he prepared it in the first place meant he could easily make up another). I think that’s a good way of thinking about oral presentations and teaching…plan meticulously for class (or a presentation or a court case), but if the situation changes, throw away the plan and make a new one on the spot! If you’ve planned well enough in the first place, you should be able to be adaptable.
At a certain law firm which shall remain nameless (at which I once worked), there was a big ‘war room’ on every floor. I kid you not. It was even labelled thusly on the fire escape plan!
JH: when I was a young and keen statistics student (now I’m just an old and cynical statistics student) I did one of my papers on the media -> violence material. The really good studies are pretty damning when it comes to showing any sort of link. That said – newer research has been able to separate out some other effects, particularly with gaming. While there doesn’t seem to be a violence link, there does seem to be a link to other addiction characteristics – ie playing WoW can have some very perverse impacts on some people, including producing behaviour one more commonly associates with hitting the turps, smoking or playing the pokies. Sam Ward (aka Yobbo) and LE are both no doubt familiar with this process (it blew a huge hole in Sam’s earnings from his online business).
I guess another way to look at all of the media/computer violence creates violent people literature is to accept that even if the studies that do happen to find a link are correct, then the effect size we are talking about is exceptionally small. This means that if people were worried about violence, then the opportunity cost involved in trying to somehow stop media violence would be vastly outweighed by using the same resources to try to stop/reduce violence in other ways.
Thanks SL,
While there clearly are a number of interesting physiological changes occurring with games, I agree re the potential for increasing violence is very weak or absent. In fact one meta analysis I looked at, dated 2007, repudiated any linkage at all.
However there is an addictive component to these games and Yobbo is not alone. I have also wasted a great deal of my life on computer games, though I must state I have also greatly enjoyed that “waste”!
I have so despaired of many statistical studies, particularly epidemiological studies, that in my own areas of interest I have created my own set of rule for determining the path to truth. It is very demanding but it does work well. Put simply: I look for concordance across biochemical, cellular, physiological and epidemiological studies.
There is a wonderful comment by Steve Jones the geneticist: There are two kinds of scientists, those who use mathematics and those who understand mathematics. I’m not a scientist and I’m certainly no maths maven, yet I am consistently disappointed at the way many scientists and purported maths competent individuals draw so many silly conclusions from studies. So I am pleased that someone of your calibre shares my cynicism.
Here’s some positive effects from some games: can increase visual-spatial skills, may even enhance working memory capacity, and can be used to improve concentration.
Mate, I only use mathematics too, and I’m only good at one ‘branch’ of it. Stats. That’s it. I did once do a ‘set theory and logic’ subject, but my mark was so crap I never touched ‘real’ maths again.
This thread’s got kinda off topic, but I’m curious if anyone else think the ‘family values’ representation of the Holocaust/other genocides has/have diluted its/their impact?
I also remember being shocked when I first saw footage of people jumping out of the twin towers, and then feeling faintly ripped off when I learned that the media coverage had airbrushed out that particular detail.
I think it’s fair to say that most Holocaust fiction doesn’t address the sexualised evil Nazism traded in,
Joy Division: a division of the SS that was directed to engage in sexual crimes.
Yes, this aspect of the Holocaust does seem to be ignored.
If we accept the movies and books have little if any impact on human behavior, what is being diluted?
My personal take is this:
In my teenage years one scifi novel had a profound effect on me: The Drowned World by JG Ballard. A psychological novel. Give Ballard credit, prescient perhaps!? Another was The Inheritors, William Golding. I loved these novels because the authors explored the psychology of the characters. TV really can’t do that in a way a good novel can.
A typical reaction from Holocaust movies etc is “How can those people be so evil?” My retort is: “How can we be so evil?” One holocaust survivor quipped: If a tragedy brings people together it hasn’t been that tragic. The implication is that in times of horror we quickly throw our morals out the window. This is something movies etc fail to explore. It is much easier to suggest that there is something intrinsically wrong with people who commit such acts, people are always ready to point at the evils of others, thereby suggesting some moral superiority residing in themselves. In The Undiscovered Self CJ Jung plays on this aspect of our nature.
The problem I have with many Holocaust movies is not a dilution of impact but a misrepresentation of the causes of such behavior. We, en masse, need to become much more aware that given the right circumstances most of us can and will become complete bastards. For example, during WW2 the Japanese interned some monks from a monastery. These monks turned out to be amongst the most untrustworthy and ruthless of prisoners.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments strongly illustrate the power of authority figures to change our beliefs and behavior. An interesting aspect of his studies was that Catholics were more inclined to administer potentially lethal electric shocks. Why? Catholicism will attract those who are more prepared to accept the judgment of authority figures. A striking illustration of this propensity is revealed in a psychology experiment. An individual is asked, “Are these two lines of equal length.” Alone they will answer yes, put them with a group of people stating otherwise and they will change their mind. Both of these experiments are powerful illustrations of how easily our behavior is modified by those around us. For myself, that is what is sorely missing in many movies about horror etc.
For a deeper exploration of holocaust behavior you might want to read: “Man’s Search for Meaning” Viktor Frankl, and “Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp” Cohen. Warning: that last book is deeply distressing. I read it once and will not read it again. It lies on my bookshelf, I approach it with trepidation.
Given the topic and in case anyone is interested, I know that Philip Zimbardo is in Australia (or very recently was) and just gave a talk at RMIT on dehumanization and the like (why good people do evil things). Given this, he may well be giving talks in other states, and he’s well worth seeing if you can make it (he’s a great speaker). (RMIT may have a video of the talk — I also think there is one of a similar talk on the http://www.edge.org somewhere)
Great post Skeptic – the eroticism of fascism is possibly its most unexamined attribute by political writers that is.
Indeed the only director in the entire world who could make a movie about the Holocaust and end it with a group hug. (Vomit).
Kubrick was working on his own holocaust flick – Aryan Papers which given Kubrick’s predilection for very black High Comedy and drastic Apollonian cold-mindedness would probably have been the feel-dreadful flick of the century.
dills like Adorno
Snark.
Zimbardo is teh awesomeness, Conrad, and pretty much nails the psychology of human evil (along with Stanley Milgram, of course). You’d struggle to get ethics clearance for half that stuff these days, but the point’s already been made.
Didn’t know that Kubrick was onto the Holocaust, but seeing as Spielberg destroyed the ending of AI, he’s probably sighing with relief from worlds beyond that the Holocaust flick wasn’t the one left half-finished.
And yes, Adorno spouted rot. Once Milgram and Zimbardo utterly debunked his ‘F-scale’ crapola, he was pretty much rendered an empty suit.
I went to the Sleaze Ball back in the day with a mate who wore an SS uniform. The variation in response from the punters was fascinating. But in that highly sexually-charged atmosphere, he was far from unnoticed.
DEM
The difference between Browning and Goldhagen was the former was an historian, the latter a mere Political “Scientist”.
Spielberg destroyed the ending of AI, he’s probably sighing with relief from worlds beyond that the Holocaust flick wasn’t the one left half-finished.
I used to follow the production news on AI. For ten years it went Pre-production: Kubrick. That was it. Kubrick had a unique lifetime patronage type deal with Warner Bros signed after his studio sense defying hat-trick.
When I watching the movie I felt that Spielberg was wrestling with Kubrick for control. Some bits were Kubrickian, some straight-up Spielberg, including the ending – another fucking group hug.
What is it with this guy and group hugs? That’s what’s good about Indiana Jones. He’s not a group hug kinda guy.
Yeah it’s a really good post Skeptic. Just read it again.
That includes criminals. Heath Ledger style Jokers are pretty damn rare
One of the best film critics I ever read with is Ian Penman in the days when he wrote for The Face. He wrote with a straight razor and challenged you not to feel like a complete idiot for liking just about anything.
In his review of River’s Edge he made the comment that people prefer movies like Nightmare on Elm Street because the horror is fantastic. River’s Edge represents plausible horror. Banal, everday, it’s happening in your neighbourhood horror. They don’t like that.
There was a related objection to The Bunker when it was released. Many critics objected to the Ganz’s portrayal of Hitler as human. An insensitive, meglomaniac nutbag yes – but human. Some critics thought this immoral and even went so far as to demand that Hitler be portrayed specifcally as not human, as monsterous.
Bernd Eichinger, the film’s writer/producer defended his ‘human’ Hitler saying: “Of course he was a human being. You have to make clear to people that he was a human being, and that’s the dangerous thing.”
Exactly.
People are still afraid of exploring the Shoah from a disintersted perspective. The dual and mutually contradictory accusation that The Hand That Signed The Paper was at once ‘pornographic’ and ‘cold’ attest to that. As does Manne’s ethnically typical denial that his hostility stems from the distortions attendant to someone of his background.
As comforting as it might be Freddy Krueger doesn’t exist. The real killers are simply people. People like those you walk past every day. That’s truly frightening. And that’s why horror and violence are usually so stylized. Ironically when it is unstylized, when the reality of it is given fair airing everyone will come out and condemn it as ‘immoral’.
It’s only ‘immoral’ insofar as it challenges the herds’ assumptions about its own virtue.
Memo to moviemakers and writers: books and films don’t morally improve (or degrade) people.
Have you read The Culture of Complaint? Hughes’ rundown of this argument is incisive and extremely witty.
Robert Hughes was about ten years ahead of his time with that book. It changed my politics forever.
Manne also fell (badly) into the n=1 fallacy Mel, Conrad and I were talking about. He really believed that I (a mere novelist) could influence behaviour, and that evidence of my influence on one person constituted evidence full stop. Stuff like that brings the humanities into disrepute, but it’s very common, alas.
If we took n=1 seriously, no-one would ever leave the house, because everything could potentially influence one person negatively. Imagine what it’d be like – ‘Dear Mr Choo and Mr Blahnik, we can’t have you making those any more as some BDSM types use them as fetish aides…’
But both were up for the Chair of Holocaust Studies that Lipper offered to fund at Harvard in the late 90s (which the university eventually turned down but was the subject of some pretty heated debate for 18 months there).
Sleaze Ball, John? Do tell…
I think a book or a film can change the way in which one thinks. That’s something which shows it’s an effective book or film.
But it can’t “make” a person more violent – I do think that a person has to decide to become more violent. Saying a film made a person violent is like saying “The devil made him do it.” No, he chose to be violent himself.
Nonetheless, it may be that a film changes the way a person thinks about violence, and gives him reasons to choose to be violent, or to relax the ordinary societal constraints which we have around violence.
Still, I definitely don’t think one can say that just because one person reacted in a bad way to a book or film that it must necessarily be “bad”. That person may have read the book or film in a way which was totally unintended by the author, and 99.99% of other people wouldn’t read it in that way. As SL has indicated above, n doesn’t equal 1.
The argument that books or films make you bad or good is popular with idealist totalitarians everywhere. Plato thought it, so did Hitler, so does Andrew Bolt as well. He’s always using the word ‘improving’ to denote things of which he approves.
I think fiction can be very useful in exploring moral philosophy but it doesn’t make you good or bad. It can however provide the predator with a style guide.
There are studies however that show that cultural products can have a visceral effect on one’s behaviour. Computer games can likewise. Doom is famous for increasing unconscious aggressiveness.
Grand Theft Auto contrawise is cathartic.
But I think the relationship is complex and highly individualistic. Manne’s objections to The Hand That Signed The Paper were irrational and based on the fact that he’s a Holocaust descendant. I’ve met enough of ‘em to know they get very antsy if a Goy even brings up the subject in any way that isn’t unambiguous condemnation. Can’t say’s I blame them but it does get a bit ridiculous. I once had a friend (granddaughter of Shoah survivors) who suspected me of anti-Semitism because I was discussing the relationship of Sumerian theology to Judaism.
I mean for fuck’s sake!
But she’s pretty honest. She says: I’m Jewish I have a persecution complex.
That person may have read the book or film in a way which was totally unintended by the author, and 99.99% of other people wouldn’t read it in that way.
I’m always highly amused by religiously chauvanistic types who want to ban hip hop. You want text based violence you just can’t go past the Bible.
And there this. Living proof of just how truly batshit people are. The Beatles make Gandhi look like a stormtrooper.
I’m always highly amused by religiously chauvanistic types who want to ban hip hop. You want text based violence you just can’t go past the Bible.
Yes, you’ll never hear christians quoting Ezekiel chs 38 & 39.
I didn’t have much exposure to Christianity until I was 13 – and I was amazed to see how much violence, sexual intrigue and the like there is in there (particularly in the Old Testament). Lots of smiting and lust and other stuff.
Great chunks of the Old Testament and the Koran are definitely in NC-17 territory.
Crucifixion ain’t so pretty, either. Passion of the Christ, anyone?
As someone smarter than me once said, ‘there is no such thing as an immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written.’ Or something like that.
Though Adrien, I don’t think the folks who choose books for high school kids agree with you. They’re pure Stalinism.
“If we took n=1 seriously, no-one would ever leave the house, because everything could potentially influence one person negatively. ”
You misunderstand me. I simply highlighted a well known “blood on the floor” anecdote then followed up with the verdict of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that is apparently based on a large volume of studies. I happen to value the evaluations of such bodies much more highly than those to be found in agenda driven, ideologically charged publications like Reason.
BTW, I’m not suggesting a simple cause-effect relationship between violence and films/media etc.. Obviously the relationship is complex and very difficult to study.
Did anyone see Hostel Part II ? I’d be worried if we started to see films as depraved as that one being made in large numbers. But I doubt it will happen because most folk prefer a moral tale mixed in with their blood and guts. Hopefully this “in built” corrective makes heavy handed censorship unnecessary.
Must go plant something …
John G – It’s from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey. This was an aesthetic manifesto in reaction to the Naturalists who were of the opinion that literature was and should be morally redeeming.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all..
I’m reading a bit about 19th century literary criticism at the moment. The debates between the Naturalists and the Aesthetics was very heated. Huysmans who was part of Zola’s crew and then turned against them with Against Nature in the 1880s has an excellent summary of the course of 19th century literature in his next novel The Damned.
In it the hero is revolted by Naturalism because it maintains that Art is “something democratic” (Culti Studies take note or not). He also dismissed Romanticism as ‘hysterical pyrotechnics’. (Aw c’arn Stendhal was good).
That said I like Zola as well. Taught Tom Wolfe quite a bit.
I was amazed to see how much violence, sexual intrigue and the like there is in there (particularly in the Old Testament). Lots of smiting and lust and other stuff.
That’s the way Catholicism works. Load up the senses with porn and violence albeit executed by great artists. Then make people feel really guilty for getting off on it. And charge money.
The NGV’s 17th century rooms separate the Dutch and Italian schools. The Dutch paintings are in brown and grey and black and show lots of plain people. The Catholic rooms are full of glamour and colour, amazing personae and lust. Go figure.
most folk prefer a moral tale mixed in with their blood and guts.
In A Clockwork Orange when Alex goes to jail he gets into reading The Bible which the chaplain mistakes as part of an intent to reform, but…
ALEX:
He’s getting off on it.
A Clockwork Orange was deliberately made to exclude the morality from the bloodlust. Kubrick believed that the morality in violent movies was simply a mechanism to rationalize our need for violence. In A Clockwork Orange audiences feel pleasure but are also disturbed by their feelings because there’s no moral loophole.
Kubrick believed that the stylization of the film would serve as an alienating effect preventing the urge to imitate. According to popular lore however he turned out to be dead wrong. Whether A Clockwork Orange was responsible for imitation violence is an essential anecdote in this debate.
I used to hate the film until I got what he was trying to do. But I’d go and see it every time it was on. It was like a drug.
The copycat theory led to litigation against Oliver Stone and others associeted with the making of Natural Born Killers.
Apparently the two teen killers watched the flick end on end over a whole week-end. They dropped acid the whole time as well.
Of course it’s all Oliver Stone’s fault.
DEM
Further revelations on the Sleaze Ball would not be appropriate on such a family values channel as SL.com.au!
But I have viewed some wicked lesbian porn featuring chicks in SS uniforms (well they start in said uniforms). One shudders at what left-wing lezzie porn would be like. Somehow 2 chicks in a pool of jelly with T-Shirts screaming “Save Our Public Schools” and “Not Happy John” doesn’t produce quite the same frisson, does it?
I guess socialism is fascism for ugly people.
One shudders at what left-wing lezzie porn would be like.
Hentai, presumably. Guaranteed no women exploited in the making of this sexually explicit cartoon.
SL
Slightly OT, but did you know that you – or “the Demidenko affair” are the focus of a UNSW compulsory 3rd year History course on the historian’s “ethics”? I’ve reproduced a bit from the course handout below.
This seminar takes place in Week 4. The previous three weeks having been spent castigating KW’s alleged ethical transgreesions and defence of the poor lambs, Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds! Who’d have thought? Tenured left-wing history academics indoctrinating students that other tenured left-wing history academics are the bees knees!
Background Reading: Plagiarism and Sloppy Evidence.
[Module design team: Assoc. Prof. Jürgen Tampke, Assoc. Prof. Bruce Scates, Dr Sean Brawley]
Section A: Plagiarism
Fraud has long been a feature of artistic life in Australia. Some ago there was the case of ‘Helen Demidenko’ who ‘adopted’ a Ukrainian name and identity, wrote an ‘autobiography’ of her family’s life under the Nazis, and was awarded the prestigious Miles Franklin prize for literature. More recently, an artist of Sri Lankan descent posed as a member of an Aboriginal community in Central Australia, and painted the ceiling of the Mary McKillop chapel with his own ‘Aboriginal’ images.
What fraud is to art, plagiarism is to history.
Makes you wonder if they’ve actually got a copy. I still have the original edition … you know, the one with “Allen and Unwin Original FICTION” (my emphasis) all over it.
DEM
I actually went into bat for “Helen”!
Not having a go at you John, (I also went to bat and got patronised by Chris Mitchell for my pains – loathsome git that he is) just wondering if those stellar academics at the history faculty actually have a clue. If you’re studying it, my condolences.
DEM
I dropped the course after that seminar, as there was no way I could hold back any longer. The next week was my absolutely most loathed pox on academic history – Edward Said’s Orientalism. The students who are recently out of school – in their early 20s – have overwhelmingly been brainwashed into the whole Luvvie/Black Armbandit Cult.
I drew attention to Lyndall Ryan’s argument about “genocide.” They all jumped on saying “ah, but she never said, she meant ‘cultural’ genocide re the ‘stolen generations.’ I replied very smart-assedly,
“well in my copy of the1st edition of her book published in 1981 she uses the phrase ‘conscious policy of genocide. ‘ From memory she uses this phrase 3 or 4 times, most notably at the end of chapter 10. The same usage appears unchanged in the 1996 second addition. In fact not once does she use the phrase ‘cultural genocide.’ Which is just as well as there is no such thing. It is Robert Manne and Bain Atwood who have subsequently concocted this lie. And besides none of that changes my original point: Lyndall Ryan describes Tasmanian history as genocide. Period”
They were all quite angry with me. As you can probably guess from my not caring about sacrificing truth for popularity
if I had stayed in that class I would have blown my stack: At the professor!! 
Nice to know that academic standards Oz-side are still what they were…
I know its off topic but since JG has raised it I’d like to ask if SL agrees with those elements on the right who label the Stolen Generations a hoax.
Mel, you’ve just reminded me that I’m supposed to be reading Greer’s book On Rage, and rather than do two separate posts, I’ll try to work the two together somehow.
John G,
I am at a loss to understand why modern day historians which to interpret history through some over arching theoretic paradigm. History is life, both are messy. We cannot roll the universe into a ball to some overwhelming question(sorry TS Eliot!) so that whole approach has never made much sense to me.
I would have been throwing bricks at them.
Sorry,
historians wish to ….
DEM – Original FICTION
No you are lying.
This is the greatest crime ever perpetrated by anyone ever. Forget the Holocaust, forget the pogroms, forget the gulag, forget the Inquisition (the Inquisition dah dah dah)…
This was much much much worse!
It made fools of those noble, fine, upstanding fighters for truth, justice and the anti-American way.
It made a mockery of the righteous cause of literary critics who know man. (What do they know?).
They know that a book’s value doesn’t lie in stupid things like words on the page. A book’s value is judged soley by the locale of the author’s parents’ birth.
And this made them look… well, like they are. My God! Have you no human feeling? They don’t deserve this. They were trying to change the world into a really nice place by writing copy for the Green Guide.
They didn’t expect this.
I am at a loss to understand why modern day historians which to interpret history through some over arching theoretic paradigm.
You should know John, that history serves two functions: The first and primary function is to create a myth by which present day society justifies itself; The second: the accurate interpretation of the facts of past activity, is relatively new.
The contemporary vogue for blatantly ideological history is a consequence of the slow dawning on us of the inevitability of the first function. The ‘postmodernists’, having looked at the ‘scientific’ history of ‘bourgeois’ capitalism have (to some extent) shown it to be ideological as opposed to ‘objective’. And they therefore set out to produce their own critical view of history – the Story of Oppression.
This has produced the inevitable backlash – the Story of Great Great Things.
I tend to prefer the earlier historians of this critical mode. The pre-postmodernists like EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. They made silly excursions into Stalinism in private but as classically educated, well-disciplined (and Marxian) scholars they’ve added to the historical arts (ironically by producing history in the scientific mode).
Facts before ideology. Social History before Ideological History. The history I was taught in high school was the history of the elites.
I am fascinated by how people lived way back when. Why the social structure of those times existed should be only be investigated after being informed about how people lived in those times. Would I be correct in saying that modern history teaching predominantly seeks to explain the why and too often ignores the how of how people lived?
Would I be correct in saying that modern history teaching predominantly seeks to explain the why and too often ignores the how of how people lived?
Nuh. There’s the ‘historians’ of the CultiWars. But it’s a field and like most academic fields it’s not given to making its practitioners famous. The art and science of history is quite alive despite the attempts of the ‘latest coolest trend’ in whateverism to trump it.
The thing about Thompson and Hobsbawm is that their history is ideological in the sense that they’re both telling the ‘other history’ ie the history that’s not about the elites and their Great Figures.
But it’s not propaganda it’s proper scholarship. They might be commies but they were wired English first.
Funnily enough I think that Capitalist societies got much better value out of Marx than Communist ones. Something to do with competition I guess.
Don’t look now Adrien, but you seem to be channelling Graeme Bird.
Nup. You can’t Torquemada anything…
John H,
“I am at a loss to understand why modern day historians which to interpret history through some over arching theoretic paradigm.”
John, you have raised a few issues here. The first is that all scholars try to synthesise seemingly chaotics pieces of information, whether they are physicists, statisticians, archaeologists, linguists, neuroscientists, etc. Your phrase “interpret history through some over arching paradigm” captures a great deal of what is debated at the ‘pointy end’ of historiography. The burden on the historian who consciously chooses a priori a “theoretical paradigm” must immediately be expected to be able to validate that choice.
Unlike Mathematics, which can rely on reason, science which can rely on controlled experimentation, history and social sciences do not have recourse to some fabulously reliable epistemology. So whenever an historian makes a decision to include this or that and exclude this or that, some epistemological context emerges, even if the historian is not aware of it.
In fact, historians have obdurately refused to bring their discipline into line with other social sciences by adopting explicitly theoretical frameworks. This began to be challenged by Marxism in the early to mid 20th century.
Adrien
“You should know John, that history serves two functions: The first and primary function is to create a myth by which present day society justifies itself; The second: the accurate interpretation of the facts of past activity, is relatively new. ”
Adrien I hear where you are coming from, but I am going to slightly disagree. I think it is true to say that Herodotus and Thucydides were very explicit in developing history writing as a new and distinct ‘scientific’ enterprise with different aims and methods than poetry and mythology. Neither was necessarily motivated to transcend myth. I think they were quite happy for myth to play a role in Greek culture and society, but historiography was designed for different purposes.
Now, of course it is a fantasy to think that even in the modern world these two can be so easily demarcated. Thus, I argue that concern with objectivity and facts were the defining features of the birth of history-writing 2,450 years ago and have been a constant ever since, the recent attempts to re-merge myth and history over the past thirty years or so by the post-structuralists.
“The contemporary vogue for blatantly ideological history is a consequence of the slow dawning on us of the inevitability of the first function. The ‘postmodernists’, having looked at the ’scientific’ history of ‘bourgeois’ capitalism have (to some extent) shown it to be ideological as opposed to ‘objective’.”
I am not so persuaded by the triumphalism of the postits to have exposed the innate ideology of ‘scientific bourgeois history’.
Firstly, the notion of ‘bourgeois’ history/well-anything-really is a Marxist judgement, and thus reliant on the cogency and legitimacy of that Marxist epistemology. I am not persuaded that the Marxists achieved much more than
wow, look. None of these ‘bourgeois’ historians ever said that capitalism and modernity suck. None ever said we need a proletarian revolution, so ha, Gotcha! They are clearly ideological windbags blind to realy ‘objective’ historiography, which of course, as everybody knows is only achieved by application of historical materialism.
Don’t get me wrong I have an immense amount of respect for Marxist historiography. Having been raised an atheist, historical materialism was the first real guide to “life, the universe, and everything” and I was thus a Marxist from the age of 17 to about 25. But it has some major, major problems:
It is basically Judeo-Xianity with a few substitutions:
1.Rather than heathen/pagan/Jewish masses who need to be ‘shone the light’ and accept Jesus Christ as their saviour before Christ will even think of returning, the Marxists see their mission as evangelising the proletariat. It is only the proletariat who represent the suffering of everyman, and it is only when they shed their false consciousness that the Garden of Even of communism can come into being;
2.Pre-communist life is always a vale of tears;
3.The past is always ignorant, just like Jews and pagans were to Xians, and everybody to the Muhammadans. Just as Xianity’s utopian eschatology provided succour for those doing it tough, so Marxism’s promise of the Revolution kept the proletariat from topping themselves.
Of course, depite the marxist’s leaders constantly banging on about this “immiseration of the masses,” the great unwashed never shared this enthusiasm preferring “footballs, meat pies, Holden cars, airconditioning, overseas holidays, nice clothes” and so on. Enter the postit Luvvies.
Oh crap, someone’s at the door. I’ll finish up anon.
Of course, depite the marxist’s leaders constantly banging on about this “immiseration of the masses,” the great unwashed never shared this enthusiasm preferring “footballs, meat pies, Holden cars, airconditioning, overseas holidays, nice clothes” and so on. Enter the postit Luvvies.
Under capitalism the great unwashed have seen their living standards raised almost beyond measure. A very small minority go without the necessities of life but for most the gains have been great and satisfying.
We all aim to be happy, and if meat pies, sport, and holidays make people happy that is a good thing. My personal tastes are different, I have long since lost my enthusiasm for sport and overseas holidays hold no real attraction for me. However I am most certainly not refined and cultured!
It is not beholden on anyone to become more “cultured” or more “refined” in their tastes. This is what I previously touched on regarding the Latte Left, under all that pompous talk there is too often a disdain for those who enjoy the simple things of life. Stuff ém, better to be happy than cultured and refined.
The Marxists were sadly mistaken, they never could accept that for a great many the goal was not for everyone to be equal but for everyone to be able to enjoy life. Perhaps the Marxists were the forerunners of the Latte Leftists for both presumed to know what constituted the “good life”. Most people are much wiser than that.
John G, I agree that there is a religious aspect to Marxism. I once went to a debate between modern Leftists and old-fashioned Marxists. At the end of the debate, some Marxist guy came up to me and started trying to convert me to his gospel. I felt slightly panicky, and realised that the last time I felt like that was when a Student for Christ cornered me in the University cafe. There is a definite “redemptive” feeling to both streams of thought.
Anyway, I ran away from both the Student for Christ and the Marxist. I hate people attempting to proselytise me.
I think we all presume such knowledge the difference is do you make that presumption for yourself only or for others as well.
There’s a lot who do the second and they’re not just of the Left. Unfortunately the Left is plagued with ‘em however.
Who Me Adrien?
………
…. 16 year old Satsu, Hakuin had given her a lesson in a difficult sutra and he asked,
“Do you understand?”
“Please, could you explain it again?”
Then, just as he was about to open his mouth, she got up and left the room, leaving behind a laughing Hakuin who shouted,
“I’ve been made a fool of by this girl!”
……….
Life: a collection of molecules furiously shaking their fists at the second law of thermodynamics.
Who Me Adrien?
No. Why would you think that?
Life: a collection of molecules furiously shaking their fists at the second law of thermodynamics.
And thereby accelerating the process that law describes.
And thereby accelerating the process that law describes.
Ironically the more I read about longevity the more I realise that energy expenditure could be a key component. The more energy we expend, the more oxidation we create, the quicker we die. This is why I am inclined to the view that our very culture, while giving us the tools to live long and prosper, demands a lifestyle that guarantees we can’t.
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