STEVEN SPIELBERG BRAVELY CONFRONTS HIS FUNDAMENTALIST CRITICS.
Even Steven
The New Republic Online
by Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR.
"So many fundamentalists in my own community, the Jewish community, have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue." Thus did a self-pitying Steven Spielberg, in Newsweek this week, explain the opposition to Munich. Fundamentalists! Is there any greater curse? And those who admired Munich, they are--what? Rationalists? Progressives? Children of light? Since I was one of the children of darkness who wrote cruelly about the film, and since I do not take kindly to being called a fundamentalist, theologically or politically, a few more cruel words may be in order. For Spielberg's outburst confirms my view that he is an intellectually confused individual, and that his confusion, like his cinematic work, is standard-issue Hollywood.
It is rubbish to suggest that the animadversions (or most of them) against Spielberg's movie have been animated by nothing more than primitive tribalism, and some sort of mystagogic solidarity with the Jewish people that would deny even a voice to Israel's enemies. What serious critic of Munich believes that the Palestinians should not "have dialogue"? They should and they do, in the movie and in the real world. Spielberg has the bizarre idea that his movie is an exemplary act of defiance, a courageous expression of dissent, against the Jewish community's pitiless and monolithic denial of the rights, and even the reality, of the Palestinians. He needs to understand that there are people who were offended by his film who need no lessons in dovishness from him (or from Kushner). The fate of Palestine does not hang upon the fate of Munich. And the Jewish community, not the one that is supposed to have turned on the lonely truthteller from Dreamworks but the actually existing one, the Jewish community in Israel and in America, is in large measure fervently hoping that Ariel Sharon's rejection of the illusions of Greater Israel carries the day in Israel's forthcoming elections, the disgusting results of the Palestinian election notwithstanding.
Spielberg's problem is that he wishes to provoke, but not to offend. Finally he practices the politics of the box office. Thus he insists in Newsweek that "Munich never once attacks Israel," which is correct, but also that it "barely criticizes Israel's policy of counterviolence against violence." The latter claim is preposterous, as anybody who has seen Munich knows: The film's very subject is the dubious moral legitimacy, and the dubious practical efficacy, of counterterrorism. If Munich is not about that, it is not about anything. And then Spielberg delivers himself of the oldest weasel words in Hollywood: "It simply asks a plethora of questions." An innocent Socratic exercise, for the consideration of the Academy. No answers, just questions--as if certain kinds of questions are not themselves certain kinds of answers. But Munich asks its questions in ways that make its preferred answers perfectly clear. Spielberg will not own up to any of this. He wants the glamour of seriousness without the responsibility of seriousness. People should not engage the perplexities of morality and history if they are prepared only to be loved.
Reading Spielberg's intervention in Newsweek, I wonder whether he even knows what he is talking about. "We were accused of the sin of moral equivocation," he says. No, he was accused--rightly or wrongly--of the sin of moral equivalence. That is not the same thing. Moral equivalence is the antithesis of moral equivocation. And Spielberg sorrowfully denounces "the Luddite position people take any time the Middle East is up for discussion." He seems not to know what Luddism means. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is disfigured by many varieties of ugly reaction, but the hatred of technology is not prominent among them.
One of the comedies of Jewish life in America in recent decades has been the emergence of Steven Spielberg as a figure of Jewish authority. He owes this unexpected status to two things: Schindler's List and personal philanthropy. I recognize that Schindler's List is sacred to Jews, and the successor to Exodus (though it looks to me like only Hollywood and not nearly as shattering on the subject of the Holocaust as--to choose only among American films--The Pawnbroker and Judgment at Nuremberg); and there can be no doubt that it was a pedagogical force for good, and on a global scale. Then Spielberg very generously gave of his profits to Holocaust-related projects and charities, almost as if they were tie-ins. Some of those projects, such as his vast (52,000 interviews!) video archive of Holocaust survivors, seemed like a squandering of resources to me, a wrong sort of panic about oblivion; but never mind. The really interesting question concerns the moral authority of rich people. In recent years, as a consequence of the spectacular fortunes that were made in the 1990s, Jewish communal life in the United States has become increasingly dependent on the largesse of a small group of individuals and families and their foundations. For many reasons, this is not a good or sustainable arrangement. But the important point here is that personal wealth has no bearing upon personal wisdom. And neither does personal influence. Steven Spielberg may be the most powerful man in Hollywood, and on some of the most urgent matters of our time the least interesting. |
