Thought I’d break this into a new discussion, to continue riffs from the earlier thread on Syriana and (less so) The Constant Gardener. I am tempted to rave and ramble, but I went for a run to clear my head after seeing Munich early this afternoon, and I have just a few short ideas I want to get out there–I promise no spoilers ’til the last part (and I’ll warn you), but–go see this. It’s as good as people say; I’m tempted to call it a great film, and I want to discuss it.
Great film? Yeah. At a brisk 2h44m, it runs–gallops–along, and is never less than gripping. I want to say thrilling: there are moments of bravura tension and action, frequent flashes of wit and humor (the revengers’ crew resembling, at odd moments, Quint and Brody and Hooper, out waiting for that damned shark). But it is also a starkly emotional film–a dread and desperation undercutting thrills, moral horror offsetting the pleasures of the wonderful sequence.
As an example, following the film’s prologue in Munich, we see the mechanisms of revenge kick into gear; when the protagonist Avner (a fantastic Eric Bana) comes aboard, he is run through the paces about his mission, and it’s funny, exciting, fun. And–adroitly, not heavy-handedly–the film flashes back to Munich (for the first of a couple of pointed recollections), and this time we see more extensively and violently the taking of the hostages in the Olympic compound. This contrapuntal play–of pleasures and message, of spectacle and debate–establish a kind of cinematic dialectic that is … well, there are few films like it.
Spielberg. I’ll extend my dialectic idea a little. We riffed elsewhere about the problems of the sentimental in many of Spielberg’s spectacles; I’d like to propose that for this filmmaker, there is no fruitful distinction between grand blockbusterly spectacle and the intimacy of the personal. This seems obvious if you look back to Close Encounters or ET, or perhaps even obvious–in the worst ways–in his most grandiose failures (like Always or 1941).
We were complaining about the conclusion of War of the Worlds, which seems in line with the botched endings of AI and Minority, too–leaving behind the glorious cinematic thrills for cheap hokey fantasies of domestic recuperation. As if he’s made a choice (the wrong one), and given up on the stuff that was really cooking to clean up, to resolve the morally-suspect pleasures of destroying the world (say) for the morally-certain homilies of a dad rehabilitated and reunited with his family. But I find it fascinating in Munich how confidently Spielberg gets us to enjoy the “operations” pleasures of the series of assassinations — and yet how confidently he also employs the iconic touchstones of a child at home, of a family separated, to give a moral heft and a greater sense of urgency/purpose to that action. (I think it helps me re-see some of those earlier films… )
[Added later:] Clarification: In War and elsewhere, the thrills of destruction are offset or even criticized by the final desire for domestic safety. (And I’m likening this to spectacle vs. intimacy; it seems like Spielberg can’t make up his mind which as a filmmaker he ought to prefer.) In Munich, I don’t think we do–or can?–make the choice. It’s not either/or: the thrills of the action are not displaced by the moral terror or the desire to go home, they are honed. I felt like I was being pushed into a subtext about how the pleasures of violence (cinematic and real) can not simply set aside the moral issues, or be forgotten once we turn toward home–instead, they co-exist uncomfortably throughout. [End addition.]
And briefly the film is amazing to look at. The first revenge closes with a shooting and shots of the corpse that recall Coppola and Bertolucci; there are echoes of other films sounding in but never superseding the story we’re seeing. (There’s a wonderful shot with a poster of some French trifle with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s huge head, juxtaposed with a medium shot of Bana, looking far less jubilant.) There isn’t a stray surface that doesn’t prompt interesting play with reflections, distortions through windows–we’re constantly having the clarity of what we’re seeing thrown off center. (The movie opens with lots of news footage of the Munich attack, and we actually watch people watching–in Palestine, in Israel–and we’re invited to examine how the audiences perceive the events so differently, an opening that resonates through the whole film.
Kushner. Another dialectic riff: in the posts on Syriana, we batted around the notion of power and politics–that film, Chris argued, avoided the individual because it was so resolutely concerned with institutions of power, seeing politics (perhaps) as an institutional field in which individuals matter little. I say all this to set up a brief take on how Kushner’s writing for this film seems to build on his own works’ obsession: for TK, there is no useful distinction between the personal and political, or, rather, any distinctions we want to draw will be shown as false, fables, or worse. Even the matter of who we fuck–who we desire–is resolutely political; similarly, the most abstract of political dilemmas (economic systems, the grand dialectic of Hegelian history, the collision of East and West before and after 9/11) is revealed and recognized best through people arguing on a stage.
I won’t say much more. There’s a scene where Bana and Ciaran Hinds, two of the revengers, argue over scripture. That is a very Kushner scene–Talmudic, not just dialectic, debate underpins everything in the film. How do we interpret and act in a manner that is right, or as another character says, “righteous.” I think Spielberg is a brilliant director–visually and sensationally and emotionally–but he’s never been particularly concerned with smart talking. This film, on the other hand, is effortlessly, endlessly provocative in its conversations.
SPOILER–
I want to close with another return to the Syriana and Spielberg discussions: the problem of returning home. This film ends with the mission closed (not accomplished), and Bana retreats to Brooklyn where his wife and daugher reside. But home is no longer a safe haven; he is ceaselessly paranoid. That alone would complicate some of our discussions about domestic closure in those other films…. but Munich goes further. As Bana makes love with his wife, we keep cross-cutting with the ‘end’ of the Munich attacks, with the attempted rescue and ultimate, pointless deaths of all the hostages and all the terrorists. The climax of the film tries–and fails–to substituted desire and domesticity for the violent conflicts ‘outside’ the home–but it’s invaded. There’s no escape, because now there’s no place like home. In a last coda, Bana meets at the edge of Brooklyn with his more Machiavellian case officer Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), and the two debate about “coming home” to Israel, about what was accomplished. After some argument, Bana says–come to my house. It’s what we do, we Jews, we argue, but then we invite the stranger in the strange land to come into our homes and break bread. Rush says, softly, No, and leaves… and as Bana walks away, the camera pans over the NYC skyline and we see the twin towers, in the background. It’s a breathtaking moment–cinematically, but even moreso culturally.
So… I promise to keep my mouth shut now, until after others see it and post.
One should only comment on movies one has seen. having said that, I am now going to say something about Munich, having not even seen a preview for it–but simply based on Mike’s remarks. Does the film tend toward the middlebrow moral equivalency in which one side is as bad as the other? everybody has their reasons….everybody’s got a family, etc.? Does that pose any particular problems? I mean here’s a guy who made a movie about a Nazi industrialist saving Jews and now (apparently) a film about Jews going wrong in taking “revenge.” oy, one might say the boychik has some self-loathing issues, unless, like Krusty, he hasn’t been bar mitzvah’d and is therefore just a plain old anti-semite. I don’t understand the summary of the ending–is the implication that it’s the failure of Jews to break bread that causes something like 911? please, don’t get me wrong, I am not turning into Christopher Hitchens, a former “leftie” who imagines that the same people who work at the top levels of the, pardon my archaic expression, “military-industrial” complex are somehow trustworthy in their aims and competent to “democratize” a country while contibuting to anti-democratic forces in their own….nevertheless the Left has somehow lost some of its affiliations with the Enlightenment and with its tradition of anti-fascist action. Are we to see the terrorists and the Israeli assassins as merely two sides of the same coin? That seems rather glib. As does the metaphor of ‘breaking bread’ in the context of fundamentalist violence on a large scale. I wonder about the validity of the “personal is political” mantra when it makes history and complex forces play second fiddle to individuals and families.
All of us at the university have seen this doctrine take shape and evolve, not as a challenge to power anymore, but as a rather blinkered idea that what one does in one’s own little province is not only the best thing one can do, but the most effective. In this way, one gets their essay on Gramsci published in Social Text, while not giving enough of a shit about the janitor’s strike to stay on campus past the end of class time. Or, one “teaches’ Adorno and when one sees the ideological techniques of the Frankfurt School applied to the academy,one takes refuge in the most timeworn cliches of liberalism and the purported “dialogue” at the university.
but I rant…back to Spielberg. I do not always feel good taking shots at him, because it’s rather a culture snob sort of thing to do—and it’s not possible to doubt his filmmaking skills at all–AI and Saving Private Ryan, to cite two examples, are stunning. If Saving Private Ryan had been melded to the sensibility of Cross of Iron, it would be the greatest war movie of all time. But it’s always his ideology that we come back to–one that seems to sweep across every element of history to bring it back always to the same point, the node of the family, as though family relationships exist outside of all history and individual subjectivity is a priori. I’d have to go back and see it, but the force of the ending of Schindler’s List seems to be horror at Schindler not being able to save more Jews, not the irony of an industrialist saving Jews at all (was he a supporter during the years of the Nazi’s rise to power; how does one stay a successful industrialist under such conditions?), and the productive contradiction that brings up.
And it’s not an accident that many of his films seem to share a similar point—huge catastrophes are merely the means to reunite families and redeem individuals. Conforming to generic expectations only excuses this so far. As I’ve said before the whole fucking world gets torched in War of the Worlds, just so Tom Cruise can finally learn what it means to be a good father. And he kills the only character whose “extreme” reaction to extreme events seems highly appropriate, rather than his weird macho silent-strong posturing. His scenes of reunion and reconciliation are so blatant and simplistic as to appear almost to be their opposite, as in AI–that is, ironic critiques of happy endings of ideological closure.
The personal moral conundrum is often a way of containing the question of morality in the domestic sphere and to prevent its escape into an analysis of larger forces. One reason I like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York so much (and it’s always instructive to pit Scorsese against Spielberg–both are master craftsmen and total filmmakers, but with very different results)is that the “personal is political” doctrine is not merely a statement that private life embodies political forces in miniature but a statement that both forces are in a dialectical relationship (oh boy).
There is not a scene in Spielberg that I can think of that matches in any way Butcher Bill’s (corrent name?)weird speech while wrapped in the American flag or the scene where Bill throws an axe into Brendan Gleeson as “the minority vote.” I believe at one point he even says, “I don’t give a tu’penny fuck about your moral conundrum,” an explicit rebuke of the attempt to reduce morality merely to a matter of subjective decision-making.
Even Spielberg’s great technical facility poses some problems for me, when it comes to the “great topics;” the single image of color in Schindler–the young girl in red–seems to me hopelessly sentimental, even offensive, as the horror of the holocaust is reduced specifically, by filmic means, to an elegy for dead children. I am afraid to say it but I think for Spielberg the horror of mechanized genocide is not so compelling as the destruction of “innocence”–another ideological cliche imposes itself on one of the events you might think would shatter such cliches. Of course, as I’ve lamented elsewhere, Private Ryan turns out to be a well-scrubbed and decent American boy, so that the whole prelude of destruction and combat seems merely the necessary procedure for uncovering American pride, and, again, reuniting the family–a goal achieved in a strangely single-minded way by the real grit of Tom Hanks’ conventionally “heroic” character. The planned randomness of horror–obtained in events like WWII and the Holocaust through the paradoxical achievement of controlled technology out of control–has no place in Spielberg, as every event fits into a causal sequence so tight it must inevitably lead to a reconciliation of some kind at the end. Though I admire his films, I balk a bit when this kind of conventional narrative causality is applied across the board to prehistory, outer space, war, genocide and geopolitical conflict.
Does any of this hold water for Munich? Does Spielberg really want to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of his film–let’s give him credit, he knows he won’t do this, but the statement reveals something suspect in his idea of the relationship between a film and its audience, the outward form of the inward ideological mechanisms of his films.
but, of course, I could be wrong–I haven’t seen the damn thing yet.
I just got back from ‘Munich’ and, as someone who is considerably less enamored of Spielberg than many on this blog, I have to say that it is a very, very fine film. Is it the best of the year? Who knows, but it is a model of intelligent film making. Mike R. has said most of what needs to be said, but I would simply reinforce that the pacing is near perfect: the action scenes and the scenes where morality is debated are not discordant. The actors in the Mossad cell seem genuinely at ease with one another, and humor leavens the horror. The use made of original footage, laced with new footage of the Munich events is touching and powerful without trading in “cheap sentimentalism.†For what it’s worth, I think Anthony Lane’s critique of the ending as kitsch is just plain wrong. The only false note, for me, is the way the camera holds on the World Trade Center towers right at the end of the movie as the credits role.
On Mike F.’s question of the politics: well, this will be in the eye of the beholder but for my taste, Spielberg gets the politics pitch perfect. There is no argument about moral equivalency, or at least it is never taken seriously by the movie. The critique of Israel’s action in these assassinations is two-fold. First, their toll on the assassins. There is the personal cost that Bana and the other characters pay, to their families and their sanity. Second, that the assassinations did not work; they were futile because replacements for the people that are killed spring up faster than they can be killed, and Black September retaliates to the retaliation in ways that ensure a far higher death toll. Mike F is quite right that we see a certain inane kind of moral equivalency argument made on college campuses today, but, in this movie at least, Spielberg is not guilty. It is a nuanced, sophisticated politics. Certainly, I cannot see anything in this film that suggests Spielberg thinks his film can help solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem: there is not even a hint of some sort of resolution.
So much good acting, and it was a joy to see Michael Lonsdale reprising his ‘Ronin’ role. With Syriana, that makes two great movies in one week: it almost makes one hopeful for American film making.
I think the reason this film works against impulses toward closure has at least in part some relation to its writers, particularly Tony Kushner. “Angels in America” and, particularly a propos here, “Homebody/Kabul” are plays where humanism does not swell like the string section every time someone gives a speech, and isn’t the engine driving the narratives–they are plays caught up in and embodying political conflicts, and their humanism is far more complicated than some sweet can’t-we-all-get-along, brothers-under-the-skin sentimentality.
Chris has already defended the film, so I needn’t say more. Yet. A couple of things strike me, however. One, the previews I saw for MI3 and some thriller with Harrison Ford relied upon explicit threats to family to get the heroes motivated. That fear–and/or the revenge upon those who have hurt the family–is endemic. To see a film directly exploit and yet undermine such narrative impulses is interesting.
Two, the press about the film is sometimes very interesting–a NYT article by Edward Rothstein critiques the film’s theory of social justice/terrorism–the film can inspire smart, significant debate. (I compare it favorably, then, to Syriana–which you might like or dislike, but I’m not sure you argue about its central premises. You either buy them or you don’t.)
On the other hand, some people (Leon Weseltier in the New Republic, Anthony Lane) seem to have seen some other film than me, and rant about its “kitsch” in ways that make no sense to me. Intriguingly, Weseltier never mentions Kushner, instead lumping this film into (as Michael F does) an overarching challenge to Spielberg.
One last note (3): I’m with Frisoli on Scorsese, particularly on Gangs, which I, too, thought was a great (well, near-great) film. But MS can be seen, as well, as the exact flip of SS–while Spielberg conflates cinematic spectacle and a vision of human intimacy and individualism, Scorsese tends toward spectacle and visions of human brutality and ambition. They’re still, generally, personal stories. (Even Gangs tries–‘though that aspect of the film, its personal dynamics of father/son and triangulated blonde, is its least successful.)
Good point about the difference between Syriana and Munich being that the latter invites debate while the former does not. Having just read the Rothstein article I have to say, though, that much of the debate is more or less deliberately misreading the movie. To propose a reading of the final scene of the World Trade Center, as suggesting that perhaps Spielberg is arguing that 9/11 was a legitimate response to social injustice in the Middle East is perverse. As Mike noted, I just don’t think Rothstein saw the same movie I did.
just returned from munich. (we’ve been on a bruising movie schedule–something like 7 movies in 5 days.) i liked it a lot and i think sunhee did too. someone (possibly kushner?) must have held a gun to spielberg and john williams’ heads in post-production. i can’t remember when either has ever been so restrained. i think the credit has to go in large part to the script–things are rarely spelled out in exposition, lines and motivations echo subtly across the film.
i don’t have a whole lot to add to mike and chris’ discussion of the political narrative. michael’s fears are not well-founded but the comparison they evoked to gangs of new york is a fruitful one. mike refers to the personal narratives of that movie as the least successful, but i think the film’s ending comments on that–as bill the butcher and amsterdam vallon (why do i remember his name?) and their personal, libidinal narrative are literally blown away by the forces of history. spielberg doesn’t get quite that far from sentiment in this film (and nor does he aim for the levels of sublime absurdity that scorsese reaches) but he gets further than he has since duel.
speaking of which, i’m not sure what to make of the home stuff at the end of this film. yes, mike is right that this home is not a safe refuge from the world of dirty details; but there is also a twinning of avner’s self-imposed, uncertain exile in brooklyn with the palestinian loss/lack of a national home (as made explicit in his conversation with the palestinian terrorist ali in athens). this might be progressive, complex political identification but i’m not sure if it works as political allegory. i don’t think i’m making sense–perhaps someone can tease this out. i’m also not sure what to make of the intercutting between avner thrusting into his wife and the machine-gunning at the munich airport.
oh, and i actually liked the held world trade center shot at the end. now to read the criticism.
From the Slate discussion on this year’s movies, a paragraph from Scott Foundas that gets at the final shot, and some of our own discussion of the text and its critics:
“In the case of Munich, as many reviewers have pointed out, the final scene of the movie unfolds against the skyline of lower Manhattan, circa 1972, with the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming distinctly but unobtrusively in the distance. They don’t dominate the frame and Spielberg does nothing to draw our attention to them, and in talking about Munich, I’ve found that many people—including some very smart people—don’t notice the towers at all. Of those who do notice, some are deeply moved (as I was), while others see the scene as a horribly didactic move that confirms for them all of Spielberg’s weaknesses as a director. Opinions about the movie as a whole seem to split along similar lines, which reminds me of something wonderful the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami once said to me in an interview: “I make one film as a filmmaker, but the audience, based on that film, makes 100 movies in their minds. Every audience member can make his own movie. This is what I strive for. Sometimes, when my audiences tell me about the mental movies they have made based on my movie, I am surprised, and I become the audience for their movies as they are describing them to me.” I think that’s true of what the majority of the most interesting filmmakers hope to achieve with their work, whether or not they could articulate it as eloquently as Kiarostami.”
Check it out here.
I will hold back further comment until I see the film. but can I just say–oh lord, John Williams! his music reduces rather than enhances any movie that includes it
OK, I just want to go on the record and confess: killing is bad, home is good, kitchens are mystical and significant sites, children are beautiful and pure. Whew . . . that’s a relief. Munich, however, is a mess. It’s a solemn, lugubrious, didactic, shapeless mess. Simon, you must resist! Sure, Spielberg pays homage to William Friedkin and John Frankenheimer and himself (I swear that scene where the accountant demands receipts was lifted directly out of Schindler’s List), but the film gathered little momentum for me over its four hour running time; it was just an endless series of set pieces without a center. Where do I start? Should I point to the two egregious “child in peril” sequences or that ludicrous scene where Bruce Banner confronts his Palestenian doppleganger in an Athenian safehouse? How about the “money shot” at the end (and I’m not talking about the World Trade Center)? I wish I had something intelligent to say like the rest of you lot but I found the film to be dull. There were some things I did like: Hans! That character was truly interesting and he left me wanting more (a rarety here). Geoffrey Rush is good. I liked the sly reference to The Sting (a movie poster hangs in a window during a scene set in London); if you remember The Sting well, you will recognize a similar plot point shared by the two films (which leads me to the magnificent house boat scene which is disturbingly cold and clinical and Spielberg at his best). I also really liked Ciaran Hinds’ work (and did not recognize him from Rome until after I returned home). And I’ll point to Mathieu Amalric’s, who gives one of the year’s greatest screen performances (unfortunately he does so in Kings and Queen, but he is good here too). I do wish I was as smart as Frisoli; he nails this film’s faults (and its filmmakers’) so well and he didn’t even see the damn thing.
It’s official–we have different tastebuds. No big surprise there.
I didn’t realize you’d be home so soon–just spoke with your wife a while ago, and assumed (wrongly) you’d be out ’til the wee hours with this long film.
And, yes, Arnab, we have email. To the matter: I think the disagreements over this film run to some intriguing issues perhaps opened up on another heading on our respective approaches toward the mainstream. Jeff and I, for instance, have disagreed about television–I have almost no patience for television shows, but he has infinite generous willingness to engage seriously and substantively with network commercial series. That said, I have a tremendous perhaps not so much generous as deeply-ingrained pleasure with the mainstream genre film.
[I hold Spielberg almost in awe; if I run into Jaws or Close Encounters flipping through channels, I cannot help but stop and watch for ten minutes. (I’m perhaps overly-willing to see the good in everything he does, a flaw I plead to with Elvis Costello, Philip Roth, and Arnab Chakladar, as well, although I’d point out in each of those cases they always reward me with returns to glorious form at some point in their later careers…)]
These exact same debates–or differences in reaction to this film, among others–pop up in Slate. Rosenbaum, like our friends Frisoli and Turner, is bored; Foundas and Edelstein, like me, are thrilled. And they seem like they’re pivoting on aesthetics (the object’s actual merits) or politics (the subject’s treatment and ideology), but… it seems like so very much a matter of pleasures. Munich echoes some of my pleasures in the mastery of dialogue and dialectic in Kushner’s play, but it’s equally a pleasure along the lines of spy thrillers, heist films, revengers’ narratives –and I’ve read/seen thousands.
But to hear Jeff (or the folks at Slate) go on and on about this avant-garde Chinese filmmaker… well, it leaves me cold.
I gotta run.
Taiwanese.
excuse me…did you say, FOUR HOURS! only Antonioni and Tarkovsky can get away with that length. and for them you must put yourself into a trance-like state. I’m not bored, as I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’d better bring a donut for my ‘roids, when I do.
and, Jeff, thanks for saying that I’m smart, but it’s really the mind-altering drugs that help me–otherwise I can’t tell ideology from opthamology.
no doubt I will be lambasted for saying this—but I find Close Encounters really hard to take. the scenes with Truffaut make me want to put my head through a wall…almost as much as Truffaut’s own film The Last Metro, though it at least had Catharine Deneuve.
so many words on this film (i’ve been reading for half an hour!). i daren’t add many more. but i really really liked munich. and i am a most certainly NOT a spielberg fan — lately, since shindler’s list, say, i’ve found him so heavy-handed as to be unwatchable. well, not this time. this is a subtle movie. it doesn’t solve a damn thing. which makes it rather desparing, just like syriana is desparing. except, syriana is despairing because the forces of the world (corporations & corruptions) are just fucking invicible; wheares munich is desparing because the forces within us are invicible. the “spared child” shot is meaningful and not corny because it happens at the beginning. so do other scenes in which attention for untargeted victims prevails over recklessness. but as the lust for violence and revenge (these being the invicible forces within) excalates, so does the body count. our heroes become less fun and more icky. they become icky to themselves.
very often movies where there are more than three male charaters tend to go heavy on the male-bonding theme. i dislike that, because it’s an insidious way of cutting off women as irrelevant (or sexual, or whiny, or whatever). so i was a bit tense at the beginning when the squad eats together for the first time and the music takes over while the guys laugh and smile fondly at each other. but that, too, diminishes with the progression of violence. the men become tense, lose their cool, break apart. so i think that was interesting, too.
SPOILER
i thought the love scene at the end would have made more sense against a replay of the violence avner and his partners had perpetrated. that it played out against the munich massacre made it, well, a bit corny, and preachy. he is not tortured by the violence that occurred there, i don’t think. he’s tortured by the violence he himself has been drawn to do. so that was unnecessarily didactic (and very spielbergian, one might add).
to be fair, the film runs at a leisurely two hours and forty-four minutes
it obviously felt like four to you! i think you scared michael good.
That’s a great comparison to Syriana, Gio!
What did you make (SPOILER) of the assassination of the female assassin? Jeff called it chilling, and I thought it underscored the dissolution of the male-bonded team–or even foregrounded the violence of the rejection of women.
MORE SPOILING:
well, yeah, it was a very powerful moment. maybe, indeed, the most chilling in the movie. that’s when they really can’t stop themselves any longer: they are totally possessed by this desire to avenge avenge avenge. they have become killing machines. but i wouldn’t read it as a dissolution of the male bond. the reason why they go after her is that she kills one of them, after all! so i think in that specific moment the pack is getting tighter, not loser. at the same time, that is also the moment when the mathieu kassovitz character decides that it isn’t right, or righteous, any more, and leaves. so there is some gentleness there, which i actually liked a lot. altogher, though, i’d like to read that scene more as a getting out of control of male violence than as anything else. this is reinforced by the sexual overtone. they don’t rape her, but, maybe, it’s as if they had. and it is the machoest among them, avner and steve, who do the killing, with the older guy giving the mercy shot.
well, it’s all rather complex, but i liked it. it underlined the idea that it’s a boys’ game, and women are not really (shouldn’t be) a part of it. this specific statement, of course, can be made in a more or less feminist way, but in this case i think it works quite well, because it’s a movie that is very sensitive to the place violence springs from, and the place where it boomerangs back.
going back to the Syriana vs. Munich brand of desperation, i personally find it more dispiriting when i’m presented with the global/conspiratist approach than when it’s about our being beasts towards each other. of course, spielberg is not insensitive to the power of history and global forces, but this film is sensitive to individual responsibility in a way in which Syriana wasn’t. i find that less crushing, spiritually and morally. but it may be a function of the genre — of how conspiracies are meant to make one feel trapped.
Great couple of posts, Gio. My original post about Syriana was trying to make the point you make much more clearly: that it harks back to 1970s conspiracy movies precisely in its hopelessness. There is no point of entry, no place for human action. I would only say that depressing may be more honest than uplifting.
Was the older guy administering a mercy shot to the female assassin, or was he actually more cold and clinical while Steve and Avner fumble with those bicycle pump guns? His justification for leaving the robe open was to leave a message.
I have a lot more to say and without the snarky tone of Thursday’s post, but I’ll make one quick comment. This idea that conspiracy narratives are meant to make one feel trapped is an interesting one. Something I thought the script pointed to but the filmmaking (camera work, light, sound, editing, etc.) did not accomplish was that dizzying feeling of paranoia that wants to creep in during the film’s final third. As I was watching I felt like Speilberg was offering up a gritty, street-level, hyper-realistic style during the first two/thirds (not something he is used to doing which made it feel novel and, therefore, visible), but he missed a chance to explode that generic style during the final third when our band of brothers start to unravel. Here was an opportunity to get a bit more expressionistic, surreal even. It was an opportunity to make the audience more uncomfortable and disoriented (what is our role in this ideologically conflicted narrative anyway).
Something else I want to add. In the screening I attended, the most vocal audience responses occured during the first “child in peril” sequence with the piano playing French girl (and during the Olympic Village scenes). There were many audible gasps which I read as great fear that our boys would kill this innocent girl (no such concern for her father but I guess that’s to be expected). The audience did not want to see such carnage (they only wanted guilty dead Palestenians). Now, while I thought this sequence (like many others) was over-baked (it could have been much leaner), what I really was thinking was that assassins can’t be worrying about collateral damage. I guess I was projecting the end of the film onto the boys before they even started. So, for me, there were no discoveries to make. The minute these guys came to the table to break bread, the became killers (very Old Testament). The fact that they (somewhat comically) tried to avoid wearing the mantle of the hired gun (at least Avner’s oh so noble leader seemed to want that) for the first few set pieces didn’t complicate matters for me.
But doesn’t Mata Hari also exist to tempt Avner, who seems tempted long enough to establish her presence but not long enough to actually complicate his role as superdad and super-husband? He’s also super gorgeous. Well, hell, he’s just plain super for a murderer (even if his murders attempt to reach the heights of Greek tragedy).
Also, the film seems really interested in fathers and their sons, yet I don’t know how that relates to Israel or Munich or Black September. It may, however, relate to Spielberg’s Arizona childhood.
Finally, when Avner reaches climax at the end (and Gio I so agree with you about the corniness of the cross-cutting there) what the hell is flying off his body? Sperm? White sweat? Beads of light?
Indeed, why does Spielberg always have to dial things up to 11 when 7 would do just fine. I’m thinking of that damn accountant again, who, when he closes his big book, we get this highly theatrical puff of dust. Or the mist of blood and milk that explodes from the first assissination (Coppola and Bertolucci would have been a bit more subtle, yes)? Or the little girl holding Avner’s hand and walking him to the car at Papa’s farm? Or the Rube Goldberg suicide kit? And what’s up with all the ceiling fan love?
Finally, why did so many of these sequences strike me as inherently comic (like something out of Ealing Studios)?
Some reactions:
–Dialing things up to 11: the exploding milk/blood scene is a fine example of something I saw as quite conscious. (But, before we get to that, you can’t seriously be citing Coppola’s restraint, can you? I point you toward the death of Sonny in Godfather 1, and ask you to see if the claim still holds.) Compare the choreography and cinematography of the first assassination with the first flashback to Munich, where we see some of the actual killings, resistance from the athletes that includes a knife to the head. The assassinations are PRECISELY filmed as exercises in pleasure, at least early on; the flashback is PRECISELY an alternative, a vicious, gritty resistant-to-aesthetic brutality. As I said too briefly in my too long first post, I think the film is consciously playing the form of the thriller (the male bonding, the elaborate Hitchcockian killings) against the realities. Slowly, as the film proceeds, the assassinations are both poorly executed and more dissonantly filmed, until by the death of Mata Hari we have a cold and unexciting and almost-nihilistic execution, and then the attempted assassination of the big-fish who got away in London–where, after shooting a teen who sounds the alarm, the two remaining crew members run–and we simply flash forward to Avner walking out of the airport in Jerusalem. No escape. I think Spielberg is playing to the audience, but then he disconnects us from pleasure, or better put he re-entangles those aesthetic pleasures (of revenge, of violence, of the well-made plot) with political and psychological contexts that deeply unsettle.
–The death of the female assassin: I put it poorly, Gio, when I called it a potential dissolution of the male bond. I meant dissolute in the sense of decadent, disconnected from moral purpose, disorderly–what seems like the bonded group of virtuous (and likable!) guys, doing good guy work, is by this scene shown to be uncomfortably centered not on righteousness (as the toymaker notes) but on efficacy. And I was trying to suggest that the film might be subtly tying ALL male-bonding violence/caper/action flicks not just to an indirect exclusion of women but a violent attack on women.
Hans doesn’t give the mercy shot–he gives the kill shot, the head shot. And he leaves the gown open not as a warning–it’s a punishment. How dare she, in effect, fuck with the men? Don’t just kill her, make her naked, remove all of her defenses, violate her. (And this is why, scenes later, he’s so self-loathing.) And I’d note–she is the only one of their targets/victims (I hesitated there, unsure which to write) who is female AND is disconnected from a larger “purpose” or alliances. She’s a free agent; she doesn’t get the speech the PLO terrorist gets. And what I think works so well about this scene is that rather than pumping up or valorizing the team’s counter-strike against her, the scene emphasizes how any sense of bonhomie or moral purpose is evacuated from the team’s actions.
(That doesn’t displace the film’s–and its generic antecedents’–misogyny entirely, but it does comment on and critique such male bonding.)
–Paranoia as politics: I think I have a little to say about this. But I’ll keep it semi-brief,
a) American political history is chock-full of a paranoid style (as Richard Hofstadter called it). But whereas Chris would read the paranoia about an external system/structure as indicative of a refutation of the ability for “human action” (or that liberal society’s citizen-self) to do a damn thing, and that does seem to have some political oomph, my own reading of the American style is potentially counter-reactionary: rather than displacing human action, it reemphasizes that all one can do is KNOW the conspiracy. While the characters in the film fail to act, the audience member–inspired to a certain systemic paranoia–may bask in the “knowledge” of the system, which in some limited way protects them from both ignorance AND the need to do anything. They get to be smart, savvy, yet do nothing. (I would not be the first to note that this vision of paranoia is acutely familiar to, if not professionally demanded for, those who work in academic cultural studies.)
My own work on JFK’s assassination would suggest that such paranoid stylings/narratives do have some anti-institutional resonance that a more traditional Mr.Smith-fights-against-oil-tycoons narrative might not, but that in American culture this kind of paranoia is merely the mirror image of the domestic, return-home-’cause-you-can’t-fight anyway quietism we all complained about in Syriana’s end.
b) Where a paranoid style CAN seem to have some effect–or so I argue–is if we shift the emphasis from figuring out or KNOWING the system/conspiracy to the problem of knowing, the never-fully-exposed problem of what we don’t know. If the conspiracy is never revealed wholly, then the systems remain shadowy, and we remain on guard trying to figure things out. My favorite ’70s films do that, sort of; Parallax ends with the investigator pulled in, but our sense of things still confused and anxious. Syriana, on the other hand, strikes me as a little to intent on a clear, closed vision of the way things are–while I’d complained initially that I found its moral certainties less aesthetically interesting, I’ll say here that I think such certainties deflect or at least degrade some of the political efficacy such systemic visions of power might otherwise offer. The goal is not to give the audience a sense that a shadowy body keeps control, and that human action is insufficient, but… keeping alive the problem of what we know, so that further investigation (and endless re-tellings of the story) are demanded.
‘Nuff said.
Mike, a Google Scholar search for Reynolds and JFK assassination yields no hits. Can you offer a citation?
Zing!
An interesting rant:
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html
Interesting the lack of love Munich is receiving: Nothing from the Golden Globes, nothing from the Writers Guild of America, nothing from the Screen Actors Guild of America, nothing from the Producers Guild of America. Today Speilberg received a nomination from the Director’s Guild but too little too late? Also interesting that Crash is picking up a lot of end of the year love. No comments here; it is certainly no longer in my best of the year list, but I still think it’s culture import is rising. If you are in to this kind of the thing visit: http://www.oscarwatch.com
Of course you didn’t find it, Chris. Tsk tsk. First, I’d never use my own name. Second, the world wide web? C’mon–world wide brotherhood of allseeing eyes, more like. I ain’t signing my own death warrant. In fact, even on this site, I post under many names: reynolds, jeff, 3handrevenantbackwards, and Simon.
Is it work if it’s not published? Fuck, I hope so. But a little piece of it was published, and you’ll never never find it. Unless you try the MLA database, but that’s not really like being published.
On this occasion I wasn’t actually being an asshole, though I can see how one could read the post that way. I just wanted the citation.
This film finally came to Charleston. Along with Brokeback Mountain which I hope to see soon. So sorry for the last post (not that you missed me).
When one joins such a long and rich string of comments such as this, there’s not much one can add. I’ll try. I enjoyed this film very much and, unlike a lot of other films I’ve seen lately, I can’t get my head around it–in spite of everyone’s insightful comments.
The question that Michael raises early on is: “are we to see the terrorists and the Israeli assassins as two sides of the same coin”? Yes and no. On the one hand, how can one make a film like this without addressing the “eye for an eye” logic of the Israeli/Palenstinian struggle? The film is saturated with visual references to what Arnab calls “twinning.” The Twin Towers themselves being one unexplored example. Foundas says some notice the Towers, some don’t. But if we do, what are supposed to do with the image? Do we all have the same response as the one he describes? “Moved”? How? To what? Around what? I thought that, given the “twinning” going on all throughout the film, that this was a pretty daring and ironic ending. My personal favorite example of “twinning” is a shot early on in the film, just before the massive explosion that almost kills Avner in the hotel room next door. It’s a long shot from the street, looking up at Avner peering nervously over the ledge of his balcony, just as one of the Palestinian terrorists did for national television in one of the most famous images from that event. If we didn’t get the “twinning,” Spilberg widens his shot to reveal the name of the hotel: “The Olympic Hotel.”
On the other hand, we never really see the other side of the coin. The Palestinian’s retaliatory strikes happen offscreen and are listed off one by one (the Lufthansa hijacking, etc.), and we get only a few interesting lines from someone (I can’t remember who): “we’re in dialogue now.”
Anyway, I am constantly in awe of just how cruel Spielberg can be as a filmmaker. The scene where the three remaining assassins kill the Dutch woman is shocking, and the way Spieilberg lingers on this moment is painful. Her instinctual yet meaningless cuddling with her cat was very powerful. It seems random and absurd (as does Adam Goldberg’s perfectly rational plea, “wait, wait” when the German’s knife goes through his chest), but it resonates with the film’s larger issue of homelessness imposed or self-imposed: she has no ties, no family, no homeland (she’s on a houseboat). Does the cat give a tu’penny fuck that she just got shot?
All the younger women in this film are stripped by violence (literally). The newlywed in the Olympic Hotel, the Dutch assassin, and Avner’s own wife (at the end of the film. I’d hardly call this, as Reynolds does, “lovemaking”–it’s a rape). Avner’s first instinct after the explosion is to cover the newlywed’s nakedness. He has the same instinct after murdering the Dutch assassin. I don’t know what more to add to this observation just yet.
Overall, I was not prepared for the depictions of violence. But I should have known. I’ve learned by now that Spielberg knows more than any other filmmaker how to torture his audience with the camera. He really can be cruel.
Don’t make fun of my lovemaking ever again, John. Good comments, and worth the waiting. This is a strong series of reactions and debate. Spielberg’s cruelty is crystal clear in the early films, eh? Duel and even Sugarland Express have some vicious moments; you’re right to zero in on it. You also wrote one of the best examinations of his vision of family (in Close Encounters)–noting how callous Roy is to his wife/kids. You should write something on the Steven. Something that isn’t just here.
How can you not notice the Towers and when you do, how can you not notice how much that moment is lifted straight out of Gangs of New York?
So I saw a film tonight that did everything I had hoped Munich would accomplish: the Palestinian Oscar nominee Paradise Now. Imagine Munich‘s grandiloquence destilled into an eighty-eight minute geopolitical, ideologically conflicted, edge-of-your-seat thriller. The film’s narrative efficiency coupled with complex characters who surprise and engage and a relentlessly aggressive rhythmic build that demands the viewer to keep watching made this one of the most succinct statements on terrorism and oppression I have ever seen.