Monday, April 10, 2006

The Tragedy of Munich

“Every victory has a price tag; every gain entails a loss, not merely the price of effort and blood to achieve a victory but the rejection, or destruction, of values which are incommensurable with the victory.” ---Robert Penn Warren

Perhaps Steven Spielberg exasperates his critics so because he tempts with the glimmer of a genius he never quite realizes. The formulaic sentimentality forever tarnishes the virtuosity of craft.

An insight literary critic Malcolm Cowley once had about Hemingway attests to the director’s sheer technical skill. Hemingway, Cowley observed, “accepted as a postulate that the function of a literary work is to evoke some particular emotion from the reader… Most writers were content to describe the emotion as it was felt… [Hemingway] could make the reader feel the emotion for himself.”

And by the measure of aroused sentiment, few filmmakers rival Spielberg. Whether it’s breathless awe before aliens and dinosaurs, blubbering pity for an oppressed black woman, begrudging sympathy for a spoiled, war-stricken child, righteous outrage at slavery’s evil or nauseated revulsion at Nazi barbarism, Spielberg is as skillful as any director alive in reproducing the exact sequence of images necessary to evoke the desired response.

Of course, where the world-renown novelist and the world-renown filmmaker diverge; where their aesthetics stand in diametric relief, in fact, is equally telling. For Hemingway, above all, strove to capture how he and in turn his characters really felt, shunning what one “was supposed to feel or had been taught to.” The author despised sentimentality—the very wet-eyed artifice that, in contrast, is the director’s lifeblood. Spielberg thrives on the sensational, on shallow, conventional, unctuous emotion. Our empathy needs affirmation; he wrings tears. Conscience demands horror; he induces revulsion. We want escape; he awes us. We expect solace, thence exhilaration. No ambiguities or ambivalences; no complexities or provocations. His films exist to please, to fulfill imaginative expectations, to affirm conscience and good taste. Spielberg entertains.

Even his serious films indulge us. Witness his supposed monument to gravity, Schindler’s List. The film adapts Thomas Keneally’s book of identical title. But in Spielberg’s hands, Schindler bears no approximation to the historical cipher, the man whose motives for saving Jews remain, to this day, inscrutable. Spielberg’s Schindler personifies the time-honored Hollywood hero—the endearing rogue guilt transforms into suffering savior. Worse, the director contrives for his messiah a penance he never sought. This way as Schindler drops to his knees and abases himself, begging for mercy and forgiveness, the audience can weep exonerating tears. After all, don’t we all avert our eyes from evil? Don’t the best of us callously profit from injustice? Didn’t the entire world fiddle while Jews burned? Well then forgive Schindler and excuse thyself. Holocaust rendered as tragic catharsis. (Don’t worry, bubbelah: a good cry and you’ll feel better about Auschwitz and better still, atone in the process.)

Well, Munich, for all its ambition to tell a story of “larger meaning” , reflects a similar vision, consigning it in the end to little more than, sometimes garish, sometimes banal, popular entertainment. For, again, the director alters history for sentimentalist consumption. Again, he projects moral gray in black and white. Again, the promise of lambent drama dissolves in glibness and bathos. Which is all the more frustrating because the story of Israel’s response to the massacre of its Olympic athletes three decades ago bristles with great tragedy’s ironies and paradoxes-- paradoxes which inform our contemporary predicament; paradoxes upon which a more faithful adaptation of Munich’s factual source, Vengeance by George Jonas, might have cast light.

II.
Munich begins in the chaos and bloodshed Palestinian fedayeen unleash on 1972’s 20th Olympiad. A terrorist group called Black September penetrates the Olympic Village compound, kills two members of the Israeli team, and holds nine more hostage for the next eighteen hours. Never is the film more concise, deft or mesmerizing than in this opening sequence. Spielberg captures the raid’s graphic brutality, the international uproar it sparked, and the rapt shock that gripped Israel. Cutting back and forth between the violent standoff inside, the media frenzy outside, and an international reaction ranging from grief-stricken Jews to exulting Arabs to criminally inept West Germans, he manages to recreate the crises’ tension. (Interwoven ABC News footage from ‘72 further sets the ominous tone and injects vicarious suspense into a narrative with a known ending.)

Manipulative editing nonetheless heralds the tawdriness to come. ABC news announces the remaining hostages’ deaths. But to juxtapose the carnage with the Israeli retaliations to follow -- the heavy-hand obscures whether to equate or to contrast the two —Spielberg unfolds the abortive German rescue effort in quick ten to thirty second flashbacks throughout the film, withholding a rendering of the bound athletes’ slaughter until its very end. And, whatever its earnest political intent, the effect cloys, reducing the tragic to the sensational and manipulative.

The histrionics pall further once the setting moves to Jerusalem and Munich’s raison d’etre unfolds—the retribution Israel pursues in response. Prime Minister Golda Meir convenes her cabinet to justify the assassination team she’s authorized. Later she summons Avner, the agent the Mossad have selected to lead it, to her home. Of course, Munich’s Golda bears no resemblance to the agonizing, ambivalent leader Vengeance reveals, a Prime Minister constrained even among subordinates to rationalize her decision: explaining that she previously had expressed profound misgivings with the wisdom and virtue of assassinating terrorists which only the dire symbolism of Jews murdered on German soil persuaded her to excuse. The film portrays the Israeli Prime Minister with a cynicism worthy of Ariel Sharon and the obtuseness of George W. Bush. “I don’t know who these maniacs are,” Spielberg’s Golda declares and later, with sublime bombast, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromise with its own values.” (But what democratic head of state would flaunt a Faustian bargain however much she conceded exigency had forced her to strike one?)

The latter represents only one glaring example of the screenplay’s recurring doggerel. Playwright Tony Kushner must have forgotten he was writing for the screen, where drama, perforce, springs from the succession of images, not the dialogue. Or as Arthur Miller warned: because on camera, the “lens magnifies everything,” often the less said, the better. Avner and his team, as such, engage in tedious debates about assassination’s ethics and Jews’ moral responsibility, with their respective positions conforming to stock stereotypes: Carl, the worldly cosmopolitan, invoking the Passover myth and Judaism’s taboo against reveling in your enemy’s demise; Steve the fervent tribalist, contending that he only cares about Jewish deaths. Apart from burdening the film’s dramatic action and stilting its tone, the mannered dialogue, more fatally, strains its characters’ verisimilitude. Avner and his team don’t epitomize the austere, taciturn, ruthlessly efficient stalwarts legend associates with the Israeli Mossad but rather the verbose, reflective, conflicted Yiddishe-kopfs Zionist theory attributes to the Diaspora.

In fact, when Avner’s team anguished or their morale wavered, it was their mission’s efficacy, not its morality, which preoccupied them. Jonas writes,
“It was not a question of remorse… Avner had no feelings of remorse for the mechablim [terrorists] and he thought that Carl and the others felt the same way. Speaking for himself, while he did not enjoy killing, he would have been willing to kill each and every one of the terrorists all over again. That wasn’t the question… Their mission was supposed to weaken and diminish anti-Israeli terror in the world… [But] the monster was growing new heads, almost if having then chopped off had stimulated new growth.”


But Spielberg and his collaborators, it seems, weren’t convinced. To a tragic drama about “targeted killings” equivocal value-- the retaliation and escalation, the infamy and martyrdom, the diplomatic backlash and universal weakening of international restraints it inexorably leaves behind—they preferred a sententious fable in thriller’s guise. Munich’s moral: Jews cannot murder without blackening their soul, betraying their identity, and/or suffering unassuageable guilt, however just their cause or surgical their means. Avner’s hands tremble during his first kill; and he suffers nightmares. He, along with Carl, develops a subconscious death-wish. Prior to assassinating Abad Al-Chir, Avner actually checks himself into the adjacent hotel room and nearly dies in the ensuing explosion. While Carl succumbs to a femme fatale’s lethal charms even though explicitly warned about the bar’s “honey-trap”—spy parlance for the seductive enemy agent. Even staid Hans resorts to drink. (Read: shicker is the goy.) And Robert goes so far to consider quitting altogether. “We’re Jews, Avner,” he admonishes, “Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong… We’re supposed to be righteous. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew. I’m losing everything that’s my soul.” We’re supposed to be righteous. Evidently, and self-righteous, too.

Ordinarily, poetic license intensifies a dramatic tension and resonance. But Munich’s embellishments and elisions actually succeed in bleaching Avner’s story of nuance and in narrowing its dimension. The much-maligned safe-house scene offers a perfect example. In Athens, Avner’s team ends up sharing a safe house with Palestinian terrorists who mistake the Israelis for European radicals. The lethal coincidence occurs because to find their targets, Avner’s team has to rely on a mercenary, French nihilist outfit called Le Group which not only supplies the Israelis but every other militia, revolutionary, and terrorist cell the world over, including Black September. But does Spielberg allow the poetic irony of the contretemps speak for itself? That is, to accomplish its mission, the Israeli unit increasingly had to assume their targets’ hermitic secrecy, fugitive suspicion, and suicidal reliance for weapons, information, and refuge, on a criminal syndicate which both sustained the very fedayeen the Israelis were enlisted to eradicate and which profited from playing the two against each other.

No, of course not. On the one hand, the film re-imagines Le Group, the nĂ© plus ultra of Continental realpolitick cynicism, as a romantic, paternalistic mafia family reminiscent of Coppola’s Corleones. On the other, it scripts a tendentious seminar debate between Avner and Ali outside the safe-house. The two argue about the Palestinian and Israeli claims to the land, the respective justice of their causes, and the origins of their persecution. “My father didn’t gas any Jews… We want to be a nation. Home is everything,” Ali lectures. And Avner evidently sympathizes because when he and the Palestinian terrorist subsequently cross paths, he hesitates before shooting. Naturally, the debate appears nowhere in Vengeance’s account of the safe-house encounter; from which Avner and his team actually gained renewed purpose and resolve because of how frightened the Arabs sounded about the recent assassinations.

III.
The episode also highlights another of the film’s misbegotten inventions-- the Holocaust motif. Throughout, Munich rehearses the platitude that the Palestinians are the victims of victims: pace the title, an implication that the true origin of Munich’s bloodbath lies with Hitler’s rise in that city during the 20’s and Chamberlain’s appeasement of him there a decade later. Thus, Ali argues, “my father didn’t gas any Jews.” While Golda Meir, almost in counterpoint, pronounces Black September to be “the same as Eichmann.”
The most strained reference occurs near the film’s conclusion. Where, in a kind of operational post-mortem, Avner confronts his former superior, Ephraim, and not only repudiates his mission’s legitimacy but actually goes so far as to argue that Israel should have apprehended the fedayeen and tried them for murder as they did Adolph Eichmann.

Critics have decried Munich for this scene in particular because Spielberg set it in lower Manhattan, framed against the backdrop of the World Trade Centers, which he had inserted digitally. To New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein the ominous Towers mean to suggest “that the 9/11 attacks may even be the consequences of Israel’s response to the Munich massacre.” To be sure, Spielberg’s pedantry didn’t help him any in this regard: “the Avner character, in the end, simply questions whether the response was right,” he opined in the Ebert phone call, “Sometimes a response can provoke unintended consequences.” Still, the conclusion that the Trade Centers intend to signify a causal connection between avenging Munich and 09/11 three decades later would seem more to bespeak Rothstein’s paranoia than the director’s. In fact, as a symbol and metaphor for terrorism’s enduring scourge, the Twin Towers seems entirely apt, wholly apart from their concession to historical accuracy, a prop apropos the era.

And in any case, the criticism misses the point. For the connection that compromises the scene is not that between Israeli reprisals and Islamist terrorism but the casuistic distinction between the “defensible” arrest and trial of Eichmann and the “indefensible” killing of the conspirators of Munich. First looms the obvious objection. Eichmann was but the single most notorious remnant of an extinct menace (the abduction of whom in Argentina, incidentally, sparked international condemnation.) Whereas Black September posed an active, immediate threat comprised of legion planners and perpetrators spread across multiple nations harboring and supporting them and aiding their operations. A difference in danger, and accompanying response, no Israeli intelligence agent could fail to appreciate. The spy, after all, is but an instrument of statecraft; where, as Machiavelli observed almost 500 years ago, virtue consists not in moral purity or benign intentions but in expedient means and practical results.
Hence Avner’s perception of his mission, in retrospect, as he relates it in Vengeance.

“Avner’s present views on his mission are devoid of second thoughts or regrets… he continues to regard their [the terrorists’] physical elimination as something demanded by necessity and honor. He fully supports the decision that sent him and his partners on their mission, and has absolutely no qualms about anything they did… He concedes that it no way eliminated terrorism or diminished hatred and tensions in the world, but on the whole he feels that more innocent people would have become victims of terrorist acts in Israel or in Western Europe if his team and other teams had not killed top terrorist organizers during the 70’s.”

Then, to add to the distortion, the Eichmann example both Golda and Avner invoke is an historical anachronism. The Holocaust and Palestinian terror only assume an identity in the Israeli imagination with Menachem Begin’s election two years later and the Likud Prime Minister’s repeated conflation of the two. As Israeli historian writes in Righteous Victims, Begin viewed “the PLO as a reincarnation of Nazism and Yasser Arafat as a latter-day Hitler. He was wont…to compare the PNC Covenant to Mein Kampf.”


IV
But whatever quibbles one can raise about the film’s political fallacies and historical errors, its greatest flaw is still artistic. For all its pretension to “larger meaning”, Munich, ultimately, typifies a familiar Hollywood brand-- the treacly fable of sentimental education. Ergo, assassins suffer identity crises and realize, after all, “thou shall not kill;” Mossad agents undergo moral conversions to espouse Christ’s command to turn the other cheek; and Zionists come to embrace a conception of Jewish identity no Israeli would recognize. Even the ending follows type: Avner, the noble, disillusioned hero breaks with the cynical, venal bureaucracy that used him for its own devious end, and reclaiming whatever integrity remains him, walks off alone but free into the sunset. See Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The irony is that so intent is Spielberg to invest “larger meaning”-- to show revenge dehumanizes and for the Jew, dissociates; and to embroider his parable with a synthetic Holocaust resonance-- that he overlooked the tragic implication his story already possessed. Those inextricable contradictions, Promethean wages, irreconcilable goods and dialectical consequences that make for rich, allusive drama and that mark the final chapter of his protagonist’s odyssey.

Avner, you see, does not quit the Mossad and forsake Israel and live happily ever after in Brooklyn. Still less do the paranoia and fear of the hunted; the guilt that he many not have killed the Palestinians responsible for Munich; or the material lure of an oversized Swedish kitchen drive this ascetic, fiercely patriotic, kibbutz-bred sabra to desert Zion. Neither does the Mossad just let him go.

According to Vengeance, when Avner declines his next mission and informs Ephraim he intends to remain in the U.S., the Mossad respond by emptying his bank accounts, leaving him a penniless illegal alien. Next, Avner receives ominous photographs of his daughter super-scribed with a rifle target. Finally, swarthy men speaking Hebrew show up at his daughter’s school and threaten to abduct her. Evidently, the Mossad decide that if Avner is determined to rejoin the Jewish Exile, they plan to ensure he lives the impoverished, insecure existence in which Zionist theory portrays it. Only this time, of course, with the Israel, rather than the goyim, tormenting the Jew and constricting his freedom.

Of course, no sabra would endure such persecution because killing terrorist suddenly offends his conscience. What motivates Avner to forsake Israel is, at once, more profound and because of what it reveals about the Jewish state’s predicament, more tragic. For, like the thousands of Israelis who emigrate annually, Avner, more than anything else, covets the freedom to determine his destiny. The obligation and sacrifice, the self-effacement, the Jewish state’s readiness to make him expendable, to treat him as a means to, rather than an end of, his people’s survival, has wearied him beyond relief. He has served his people. Now he seeks in America the very sovereignty, the ability to lead a fulfilling and normal life, that Zionism promised the Jew but Israel, the beleaguered garrison state, hasn’t the luxury to deliver.

Yet another of the cruel ironies that God has visited on his Chosen People: history has cast their state, writ large, to re-enact the embattlement, claustrophobia, internal strife, and self-constraint that once plagued their dispersion. Meanwhile, the closest the Jewish experience has come to normalcy is in a “Promised Land” founded by a people claiming to supersede Jewry as God’s Chosen, a Zion the Puritans called the “New Jerusalem”. As the Israeli journalist Shuki Elchanan tells Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s novel The Counterlife,
“Israel has become the homeland of Jewish abnormality…and we, Israelis, the excitable ghettoized, jittery little Jews of the Diaspora… While you [American Jews] are living interesting lives, comfortable lives, without apology, without shame, and perfectly independent… without real fear or persecution or violence, we are living the kind of imperiled Jewish existence that we came here to replace.”


But Munich’s missed opportunities don’t end with Jews and Israel; the tragic ironies reverberate closer to home. Indeed, as the U.S increasingly faces the terrorist menace that has plagued Israel for decade and adopts, to combat it, her forerunner’s methods, it would behoove us to consider beforehand Avner’s predicament. For the Mossad agent’s final battle, the battle to wrest his freedom from his own government dramatizes the danger to any democracy forced to fight a constant, open-ended war against a diffuse and insidious enemy. Namely, that the ruthlessness and extra-legality a liberal society deploys against terrorists abroad, just as easily, can redound inward. The war hypertrophies and unlooses the institutions built to wage it. Contempt for the law abroad breeds contempt for it at home. The line between foreign foe and domestic opponent blurs. Suspicion degenerates into paranoia; conformity, masquerading as patriotism, stifles dissent. And suddenly, a liberal democracy awakens to discover that gradually and imperceptibly it has sacrificed the very freedom it declared war to protect.

Look no farther than contemporary America: the excesses of the Patriot Act; the Bush administration’s suspension of habeus corpus for citizens it deems “enemy combatants”; its insinuation that opposition to the Iraqi war is treacherous because it abets the insurgency; and more recently, the President’s illegal NSA domestic surveillance program. Perhaps, Kant had it backwards: it isn’t democracy that secures, but peace that preconditions democracy.

Terrorists win by losing; democracies lose by winning: not exactly the unsparing dramatic vision likely to spur ticket sales or to enamor an audience. Still, if there ever was a Hollywood director capable of casting the spell that would suspend our disbelief and weaken our resistances long enough to heed it, it’s Spielberg. Unfortunately sentimentality must be for Hollywood what imperium is to Washington—a peril of success. A success which makes Munich, in the end, a far more poignant tragedy than Spielberg ever intended.