Why do a movie about the Olympic slaughter?
My best friend, Pauly, loved War of the Worlds.
“It’s great science fiction,” he said. “Aliens and everything.”
Of course, Pauly is someone who looks forward to the end of the world, one of those soothsayers who constantly predicts doom. I can rely on him to have the latest news on the ozone layer, global warming and approaching commits.
He also has good tastes.
Dave, my associate from the newspaper, says War of the Worlds is all about World War Two.
“It’s so obvious, you can’t help but notice,” he said.
Meanwhile, I’ve been spinning my wheels in claiming it loaded with mythology, all the time wondering in the back of my head how much Steven Spielberg intended and how much is simply the product of good story telling – since universals such as motherhood and the rise of evil tend to touch on the myths intended or not.
A few people have questioned the wisdom of Spielberg’s next
film project – he is over in
I had just survived three years on the run from the police and had settled down with “a real job,” made regular visits to my probation officer, and kept free of drugs for the first time in years. Not long earlier, I was living in Portland, Oregon under an assumed name at the time, hanging out with a guy that had made the FBI’s most wanted for a brief period earlier that year and whom I accompanied on a car chase with police through the streets of Portland after he was discovered delivering massive amounts of marijuana to local drug dealers.
I had spent spent most of my time worrying how to keep from being caught by the cops (which would have resulted in me losing my child) and being dragged back East for trial and jail.
By turning myself in later, I was allowed to walk free.
Yet having had dealings with The Hell’s Angels, The Manson Family, The Weather Underground and other such weird institutions of my era, I thought nothing could shock me. I was wrong.
Less than a week after I started my new job in
The Israeli-Palestine conflict puzzled me (as it still does) because it is one of those conflicts that beckons back to primitive society of eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, a Hatfield & McCoy feud that had no beginning and apparently no end, each side’s reaction leading to a new round of reactions that in turn lead to more reaction and still more.
But this event stunned me for several reasons. I always believed the Olympics served as an avenue for possible world peace, the one place where we could gather and compete without viciousness.
The fact that the slaughter occurred in Germany only a few decades after an equally and more systematic slaughter of Jews had taken place only made it seem as if no progress had been made at all in stopping the worst and most brutal habits of human kind.
Of course, as a stoned hippie hunted by the police I did not articulate this or work it out logically in my head – it was a gut reaction, one made worse when the German police killed the nine remaining hostages in a shootout with the terrorists at the airport.
What were the police thinking?
Or had old habits not quite died yet? Did they see the athletes as expendable?
I was also somewhat taken back by Avery Brundage’s decision
to continue the games, although to me the seven Gold Medals won by Jewish
swimmer Mark Spitz equaled or surpassed the 1936 accomplishments of Jesse Owen
as a symbol of defiance – a bold and positive response to outrageousness. While
Spitz eventually had to leave the country for fear of becoming yet another
victim of the new holocaust, he sent a message that I heard loud and clear back
in
So for me, in these more modern days of terrorism, a Spielberg movie depicting such courage in the face of such outrageous insensitivity and violence seems more than appropriate – although I’m sure we won’t be seeing the 42-year-old Tom Cruise playing the 22-year old Mark Spitz.
This is the script of my next video project (subject to changes in production)