First impressions of Munich
While I won’t try and write any real reviews of Munich until I’ve seen it again, I have the ugly feeling Steven Spielberg’s latest film won’t make any side of the Arab-Israeli conflict happy – mostly because the film refuses to take a side.
While this might not be a problem for another film maker making any other movie, Spielberg presents us with a moral dilemma the film does not resolve.
Arguably, Spielberg is the most powerful and influential Jewish film maker in the last half of the 20th Century, but most of his works have been parables about the past, not the present. Munich is his attempt to get in on the contemporary conversation.
Like many Jewish artists, Spielberg and his close friend George Lucas tended to tell the same stories again and again.
These fall into two categories: Moses delivering the Jews out of Egypt and The Nazi Holocaust.
Until Schindler’s List, Spielberg retold these tales in parables, changing surface presentation, but not the essence, such as Close Encounter as the Moses tale and ET as one depicting the Holocaust.
So pervasive have these two themes become that they have taken on new life as modern myths.
Yet for any writer dealing in them, they are the safest of themes. Moses was good; the Nazis were bad.
Neither requires that precarious middle ground where there is no clear cut distinction, or that good has aspects of bad, and bad, redeeming qualities.
Spielberg until recently has played it safe by staying silent in his films on the contemporary conflicts and the third great Jewish myth of contemporary times: the Jewish state of Israel.
Munich changed this. But instead of presenting us with a parable the way Spielberg did depicting the historic Jewish Myths in his other films, he decided to jump right into one of the more controversial aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Yet the film also tests Spielberg’s range as an artist in particularly to present complex characterizations, and to tell a tale without having to take a side.
Like Steinbeck, Spielberg has always managed to create “good” characters that are rich and believable, but his evil often fell on his heroes like a pallet of bricks.
He appears to be aware of this explaining why he modified ET for its re release in 2000.
In all of his better films, Spielberg has a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong, and he always sided with those characters he believed to be in the right. The Color Purple is the perfect example.
In Munich, however, Spielberg appears to play Hamlet, looking for a common middle ground from which a positive dialogue can be started.
This, as his Arab critics rightly point out, ignores the historic backdrop out of which the conflict evolved.
To explain this, we have to go back in time to 78 A.D. when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews. The popularity of the Moses myth seems to have evolved from that moment, stirring in every Jew everywhere, a longing for when they might come back to the Promised Land.
Centuries of longing led some Jews – particularly the Zionists in the late 19th Century – to seek to make the myth real by settling back onto the land of their forefathers despite the fact that Palestinians also laid claim to that piece of real estate and lived there at the time.
Who fired the first shot is less important than understanding the resentment Arabs felt at the Zionist attempt to take back the land.
From then until the outbreak of World War II, hatred brewed between the two people. This was more like a tribal dispute than a war, with each succeeding generation seeking to gratify the grudges of the previous generation.
Full of hate for Jews who they saw as intruders, the Arabs mistakenly latched onto the demonic Nazi agenda, adopting the philosophy that a enemy of an enemy must be a friend.
This siding with Satan destroyed any claimed to moral superiority the Arab’s might have had. So when the world defeated the Nazi, it punished the Arabs by more or less handing over Palestine to the Jews.
While other Arab nations pledged to find new homes for the displaced Palestinians, they could not overcome their outrage.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, took the place of the Jews as the wandering people, displaced by the world court and discriminated against by public opinion. The Palestinians took up the mantel the Jews had abandoned as the persecuted people, and painted the Israelis as persecutors.
Outrage followed outrage on both sides. But once the state of Israel emerged as a result of the 1848 war, this became the symbolic target against which most Arabs took aim.
Each conflict that followed notched up the level of hate.
Arab nations closed in on the small state of Israel from all sides.
Jews vowing never to lie down and become victims the way some had during the Nazi era fought valiantly and viciously to keep their new homeland safe.
Hatred bred hatred. Valor on one side was labeled terrorism by the other, and Arabs, tasting a little of what Jews had experienced for centuries, fought back, each side growing more savage until Munich.
While this war grew even more vicious after Munich, the murder of the Olympic athletes made public what many in the conflict already knew: that the traditional rules of engagement no longer applied. Rage had caused both sides to devolve into a savage frenzy no reason would resolve.
This is one of the reasons why Spielberg’s Munich won’t make anyone happy because it superimposes the concept of reason on a situation that lacks any.
In struggling to bring us richer characterizations – the kind of which we saw mostly in The Color Purple – Spielberg’s film stirs up wrath from both sides.
Defenders of Israel will see Spielberg’s attempt to give voice to Arab’s as betrayal.
Arabs will see Spielberg’s guilt-ridden hit men as an attempt to put a kinder face on killers.
My first impression is that Munich needs to take a side to work – that some voice must say what is right and wrong. In some ways the film made me feel like a tightrope walker stuck in the middle of a chasm of hate with one clear indication to which side I should flee.
This impression may change as I view the film again – as other films by Spielberg have in the past.
We shall see.