Commentary : Why the ‘Schindler’s List’ Backlash? : Charges that the Holocaust has been ‘Spielbergized’ may conceal the deeper belief that it shouldn’t be dramatized at all

“Schindler’s List” has won the best picture award from all three major film critics’ societies, so it’s not surprising a backlash should set in. Highly acclaimed movies usually inspire counterinsurgencies, and sometimes the back talk is even justified: Critics groups, along with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, have a way of favoring the safe and respectable over the innovative and the disreputable. But the “Schindler’s List” backlash is somewhat unique for appearing to be less a corrective to the overpraise than a cry of betrayal.

It’s one thing to argue that “Schindler’s List” is something less than a masterpiece. I would concur in that. As powerful as it is, it’s a bit too buffed and noble, it doesn’t have the clarifying transcendence of great art.

But the outrage goes deeper. What the naysayers are saying is that Steven Spielberg has, in the words of the Village Voice’s Jim Hoberman, “Spielbergized” the Holocaust. He’s made “a feel-good entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th Century.” Hoberman--who at least has the distinction, along with the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, of writing the film’s best knock--also writes: “The poster of a father grasping a child’s hand is not the only aspect of ‘Schindler’s List’ that recalls ‘E.T.’ ”

Frank Rich, in the New York Times, refers to the scene where Oskar Schindler “gives a sentimental speech to the Jewish factory workers he saved, and they look up at him awe-struck, as if he were the levitating mother ship in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ ” (Wieseltier’s piece is titled “Close Encounters of the Nazi Kind.”) Excepting Ben Kingsley’s Jewish accountant, Rich describes the other Jewish characters as “generic”--”as forgettable as the chorus in a touring company of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ or, for that matter, the human dino-fodder of ‘Jurassic Park.’ ”

One would like to put these critics to the test: If it could be rigged to show that an unremarked young American or British director had made “Schindler’s List,” would the references to the mother ship in “Close Encounters” or “E.T.” spring so readily to mind? One of the real-life Schindler survivors said of Schindler, “He was our everything, our mother, our father, our savior,” and her remark is representative. This closing moment in the movie is appropriately full of awe because so were the Jews in the presence of the man who finally saved them.

Can anybody look at this film and seriously assume Spielberg invested the same emotional energy in characterizing its Jewish protagonists as he did in knocking over the screamers in “Jurassic Park”? Rich wishes that the Schindler Jews were as “individually and intimately dramatized as Anne Frank or even Meryl Streep’s “Sophie,” but, of course, Anne Frank is symbolic if any human being ever were, and, as long as we’re overcorrecting, Sophie the Auschwitz survivor was Gentile, not Jewish.

This “generic” rap against the Jews in “Schindler’s List” doesn’t allow for its many piercing moments of human loss. How can it be said that the Jewish maid of the mad Nazi Amon Goeth is just a generic blur? Her hair-trigger terror around Goeth, her shuddering self-will, is entirely specific to her predicament. When the Jewish servant boy of Goeth is at first “pardoned” for failing to remove a bathtub ring and then, almost as an afterthought, shot in the back, the moment is casually horrific. Like so much in the film, the death belongs to the individual but it has a collective horror. There’s no way to dramatize the Holocaust without invoking this collectivity; each death assumes millions.

Behind these criticisms may lie the deeper conviction that the Holocaust should not be dramatized at all--by anybody; that however one does so is a disservice, an obscenity. This is not a new concept. Jonathan Kirsch, in his pan of “Schindler’s List” in the Jewish Journal, quotes Theodor Adorno: “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” That may be so, but isn’t it also essential? And can one rule out dramatizations of the Holocaust as somehow beyond the grasp of art without also ruling out all dramatizations of life’s horrors? Is “Schindler’s List” any less defensible than, say, “Gettysburg”?

Kirsch compares the scene in the film where a trainload of women are mistakenly routed to Auschwitz to “The Perils of Pauline.” Fearing they will be gassed, the women are shaved and herded into the showers. But they are not gassed. Hoberman calls the sequence, with its “thriller suspense and last-minute rescue,” the film’s “nadir.” So now Spielberg’s narrative gifts--the same gifts that brought him to the preeminent position to make a Holocaust movie, in black-and-white, in Hollywood--are being held against him. (Charles Dickens employed suspense and last-minute rescues for emotional effect too. Why the double standard?)

The sequence in question actually happened--it’s there in the Thomas Keneally book from which it’s adapted--but its expansion in the movie is denounced as a way of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. “Why,” asks Kirsch, “did (Spielberg) play out an elaborate scene in which the fundamental premise of the Holocaust deniers--no gas chambers actually existed--is played out in vivid and explicit detail?”

But Spielberg doesn’t deny their existence. As Kirsch himself notes, in the next scene we see the ashes from a crematory wafting into the night sky. Is there anyone who can watch this shower scene--which expresses the redemptive miracle these women experienced as “Schindler Jews”--in the context of the entire movie and believe Auschwitz was anything but a charnel house?

Well, the Holocaust-deniers could. But why frame your movie to refute them when logic plays no part in their thinking anyway? “Schindler’s List” may deal with a monumental insanity but it should not be faulted for speaking to the sane.

Spielberg comes out of a popular tradition of movie making that binds audiences with shared emotions--whether it be uplift or terror. There have been great renderings of the Holocaust--ranging from from the documentaries “Night and Fog” and “Shoah” to Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”--that were not pitched for the mass audience. Spielberg, however, at his best, is a popular entertainer with a gift--a genius--for moving audiences simply and directly. (At his worst he’s a nerveless enchanter.) There is nothing esoteric or ruminative about “Schindler’s List.” Like Keneally’s extraordinary book, the film works up its power by an inexorable accumulation of events that adds up to a complete vision of hell.

Spielberg’s popularized technique in this film is there to make us see more of that vision, not less. And he doesn’t popularize indiscriminately. We are never made to understand why Oskar Schindler, the Nazi war profiteer, risked his life to save more than 1,200 Jews; there is no defining Aha! moment that accounts for his heroism. It’s a mystery, and Spielberg, like Keneally, honors that mystery by refusing to “explain” it. He also doesn’t try to “explain” Amon Goeth, for to do so would be to “explain” the vicious riddle of Nazism--a riddle far greater than Schindler’s.

Writing of the film in the Jewish daily newspaper the Forward, Ilene Rosenzweig says, “Given a chance to project to the world an image of Jewish life, Hollywood’s undisputed box-of fice king chooses one of humiliation and death.” In a commentary on the film in The Times, Rabbi Eli Hecht wrote, “I am sick and tired of this generation identifying Judaism with suffering.”

In other words, it is bad PR to express the sufferings of the Jewish people; better to forget. This is a dreamland concoction far more dangerous and denying than anything Spielberg is accused of. (And, in this age of ethnic cleansing, it also implies the lessons of the Holocaust only apply to Jews.) As one Times reader wrote in response to the rabbi’s piece, “Does Rabbi Hecht propose that, as Jews, we let Passover and Purim rest along with the Holocaust?”

Should “Never Again” become “Never Mind”?

It’s also considered bad PR for a movie about the Holocaust to feature a non-Jew. “Unafraid to accentuate the positive,” writes Hoberman, “ ‘Schindler’s List’ necessarily focuses on Gentiles.” Rosenzweig writes, “A reluctant Christian rescuer is a curious choice for Hollywood’s definitive Holocaust hero.”

This is an argument based on the needs of propaganda, not drama. Schindler saved over 1,200 Jewish lives, and the survivors’ offspring account for many thousands more; he was honored as a Righteous Gentile in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. The concept of the Righteous Gentile in Rabbinic literature predates Maimonides--it needs no defense now.

Rosenzweig sums up “Schindler’s List” as a “feel good movie of Christian redemption and Jewish defeat.” But this assumes that Schindler’s fate and the fate of the Jews were not entwined; that their redemption was not mutual. Is it blasphemous to suggest that one can feel happiness at the end of a Holocaust movie if, in the end, thousands of Jews are saved? Their rescue does not deny the fate of the 6 million who were not rescued. Quite the contrary: “Schindler’s List” derives its power precisely from how abjectly exceptional its story is. The most damning criticism made against the film is that it gussies up the Holocaust by framing it as a scenario of salvation. But lives were saved. They, too, deserve--even require--memorialization.