Mulling over Munich
As details of Steven Spielberg’s new film emerge, I begin to see just how perfect a vehicle for him this is, allowing the film maker to do away with the thin veil for telling the story of Jewish conflicts and address one of the most serious and disturbing historical situations since Cain killed Abel.
Security is so tight around the movie, images from the sets are impossible to collect, although details of the script are no where near as hard to come by – despite the secrecy. Every element from the closed Swiss bank account and the former Mossad agents desire to shed his part in the controversial hit squad would be obvious even without hints to the story line.
Plagued by more than a decade as a member one of Mossad’s secret hit squads has left this agent in deep turmoil. He and the other underground team or teams managed to kill almost all of those members of Black September who plotted and killed the 11 Olympic Athletes. But the cost was heavy. Innocent people died along with the guilty, and the noble traditions of a democratic society seem to have been sacrificed along the way.
As this agent – who was motivated by the 1972 attack and the inability or perhaps deliberate bumbling of the Germans to handle the situation – joined Mossad with great righteousness, determined to protect Israel and avenge those who had committee such a crime. It did not matter that at least two of the athletes were actually agents for the Israeli security forces.
But in chasing down these terrorists, our hero began to see Mossad becoming more and more like the thing he had vowed to fight, this autonomous secret society that passed judgment on people sometimes without evidence, sometimes mistaking people, but always justifying their acts because of the higher goal.
But Yasir Arafat – the man who blessed the 1972 mission – is dead. Mohammed Dauod Oudeh wrote a book boasting about planning the operation, and the almost mythical Jamal Al-Gashey floats around Africa thumbing his nose at the hit squad and serving as a kind of inspiration for the new generation of terrorists, who are not only wiser, but have adapted their own techniques to the Mossad’s, the way the Mossad had to Black September – each side learning new ways to kill from the other side’s methods in an ever escalating war that our hero sees no resolution to.
Although our hero still hears the muffled cries in his head of the dead athletes, he also hears the voices of those he has killed, like ghosts asking him if there is no better way.
Stressed by the intensity of his role as one of two or three undercover hit squads that roamed the world during the years after the Olympics murders, our hero wants out. In seeking to quit, our hero tries to take his pension. – which he was promised would be deposited in a Swiss account. There money is there, but he can’t withdraw it. And the same people who recruited him in the first place are issuing less than veiled threats to him and his family if he chooses to quit.
But Commission X had given our hero access to the best instruction, creating the perfect killing machine. In his desperation to retire and to get his family free, our hero hunts down the people who threatened him, and after making certain they can no longer be a threat, seeks out his boss.
His boss does not want him to leave -- partly because our hero knows too much, partly because our hero was just too good a tool to allow to become inoperable.
While Spielberg is likely to introduce the film with a dramatic reproduction of the Olympic murders, highlighting the German incompetence at handling the matter, and pointing out the world reaction that included the Israeli member of the Olympic Committee refusing to force Arab nations to fly flags at half mast as well as the UN's outrageous refusal to honor U.S. legislation that would have condemned the killings (proving how little has changed in the world since its reaction to the Night of Broken Glass), the real narrative of the film will follow our hero’s exploits as he tries to stop being the killing machine he was and to take up a normal life with his family.
We will also likely see numerous scenes flashing back to his days on the squad, perhaps even showing the slow decline from super patriot to a man who sees his role as too much resembling that of the terrorists he hunts.
Questions of what is right and what is wrong will grow on him, and he will become something of an outcast even among his own group of elite killers whose view of the conflict is that of Israel must remain strong against an enemy so bent on destroying it and its people.
“We can’t ever show weakness,” his associates will say.
But this will likely be a narrative asking: “Why can’t there be another way?”
What mythology Spielberg brings to his film, how he presents his images, and above all, how big a role the hero’s home life plays in the film, are all details that often come after the script is written.
Stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll learn more as the film gets nearer to its release in December.