Fascism and Representation

February 16th, 2009

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Posted by ChrisG at 5:22 pm

After Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, what to make of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? The impact of the much discussed ending gets you to the heart of why TBitSP is a better film “about” the Holocaust than either of the foregoing (not that Benigni’s tin-eared effort should detain anyone for long).

Why those quotation marks? The problem that films about the Holocaust have to face is one which Gillian Rose described, in commenting on Schindler’s List. What is the purpose of representing the Holocaust? Is it to imbue a new generation with a pious commitment to “never again”? Is it to document, impossibly, the Real of horror? Any film which introduces any kind of figurative element, dwells on the perspective of those who were not the victims, or manifests historical errors will be subjected to critical excoriation for its lack of “realism”. This has been the case with TBitSP in some quarters, most notably perhaps in this review from Linda Grant:

When I watched the film, my attention was drawn away from the unintentional death of the innocent Nazi child in the gas chamber to the extras without speaking parts, the grown-up men and women standing around him. The enforced identification with Bruno as an innocent victim of a taste for exciting adventures left a sour taste in my mouth. He isn’t in the camp long enough for him to be lost, swallowed up inside the system. At the point of death, he still thinks they’re sheltering from the rain. Nothing at all disturbs his innocence. The true horror would have been the child’s gradual starvation, the narrow moral choices open to the camp inmates, reduced to stealing a smaller child’s spoon to eat and live. He has a mercifully quick death.

The idea of innocence “in Nazi form” revolts Grant – it represents the failure of representation to get at the inner grain of experience, which is something she cannot forgive.

Yet what could “realism” really mean here? Grant writes like someone standing outside looking in, who is disappointed with what she has witnessed, is concscious of there being something missing. But to charge a film about the Holocaust with being “unrealistic” is a charge that ultimately stands in for the guilt of the observer: representation is, as Rose writes, a difficult business. Because there is no simple empiricism here: representation is not about bearing witness to an unspeakable reality. Representation implies more than witnessing, it implies identification. To represent, on the page or on film, is to re-present a perspective, to invite the reader or viewer to participate in a movement which bears us up and invites us to stage our own drama. To invite people to participate, in this sense, in the Holocaust, is therefore fraught with difficulty.

Who do we identify with? Do we identify with the perpetrators? But then we lose our assurance of our own goodness, which we are loath to do. So do we identify with the victim? But then we are invited to see the Real as present in the violence of the Nazis, and thus we dance our own version of fascism, in transforming Nazism into a natural force. Spielberg allows us the get-out clause of identifying with a hero, whose place in history and goodness are part of “common sense”. This saves us from having to acknowledge that we are identifying with anyone, as it sets things, morally speaking, on the right footing. It gives us licesnse to watch beatings, killings and degradations safe in the comforting knowledge that everything turned out alright, because, well, because Schindler.

OK, spoiler alert:

What TBitSP does, in its final 15 minutes, however, is to shift identifications in a way which dissolves our identification with Bruno, and demands that we identify with a different perspcetive entirely. And it is this shift, I’d wager, that leaves people sitting quietly in the cinema until the credits are over, rather than the death of a boy who has charmed us. There is a moment, a crucial moment, where the commandant father and Bruno’s mother are searching desperately for their child, where we are invited to identify with them, and to want them to find their child. In our promiscuous capacity for empathy, we will find ourselves seeing them as lifted above context, above history, above complicity – as, above all, a father and a mother. And that moment promises us, like the heroism of Schindler, an illusory escape – even the Nazis loved their kids. But then we ask ourselves: why should he, he alone, be saved? If we want him to be saved, then we care nothing for the fate of all those others who are to die with him. So, to maintain our integrity, we must want him to die, to be killed along with the others. In the absence of a hero who would save us from having to acknowledge the difficulty of representation by saving everyone, we must want Bruno to die too. And so we experience our own implication in the representation of fascism – it is no longer simply a spectacle.

The true horror is not, as Grant wants it to be, beyond the scrapings and scrabblings of representation at the dark granite of the Real. It is in the dramatic knot which takes us from identifying with Bruno to needing him to die with Shmuel and the anonymous Jews that surround them.