� Vietnam veteran William Marshall, interviewed in "Hearts and Minds"

"I know now that the domino theory was a false theory. I know now that we should not have become involved."

� Clark Clifford, Johnson�s Secretary of Defense, interviewed in "Hearts and Minds"

I wanted to say something today, if only obliquely, about Vietnam comparisons being helpful and instructive, but how those of us whose views on the war would incline us to make them in the first place should also be wary, because if we allow ourselves to be seen as making historical and military comparisons, then those master rhetoricians (I�m not kidding) with another kind of views on the war will be able to accuse us of being simpleminded, ignorant of history, and willfully glossing over the ways in which the two situations differ, making one of those, yes, facile parallels that make me so crazy: so let�s be careful out there, OK? More than that, though, I want to write about "The Pianist."

These aren�t big heavy original thoughts. I am not the first intellectual wanker to ponder the morality of Holocaust films. But here�s the thing: in "The Pianist," there is a long scene in which the Szpilman family is sitting with their suitcases and belongings in a fenced open area, like a holding pen. They�re there with hundreds of other occupants of the Warsaw ghetto who have been told to show up because they�re being relocated. Of course we the viewers know that they�re being sent to the camps. All the people sit and wait and wait and speculate, and finally the trains come and the Nazis force them aboard (this is the point in the narrative at which Wladyslaw Szpilman becomes separated from his family). A little while later, there�s a long, wide shot of the yard, the pen, and it�s desolate of people and we all know what�s happened to them. All of their belongings are still there, some in disarray and some stacked in neat order as if to suggest that they had been attended to by any normal person waiting for a train under any normal circumstances. All we�re looking at is stuff, and we know that the reason it�s still there is that its owners will never need it again, will never get to need it again. This makes the emptiness grotesque, and you have to give it up for Polanski, because the shot is terrifying and at the same time beautiful; it�s a supremely uncomfortable moment. But I looked at the screen, and what I was also thinking of was the production crew. For that shot to have been included in the movie, people � well-paid, well-fed people who were members of a union � had to go around the yard smashing some things up and leaving some things pristine, scattering clothes here and there, artfully placing a shoe or a scarf in the tableau. And to do the best job possible at this task, what they had to keep in mind as they were working was something like, Let�s see now, if this were really a yard in which starving Jews had assembled, maybe hoping that they were going to be sent out to the country to work in farm collectives and maybe gradually realizing as the trains pulled up and their friends and families were herded in like animals that what awaited them was maybe beyond their comprehension as human beings, what would it look like? Would the men�s hats have fallen off? Would people have been sitting in rows or clusters? What color family of suitcases will make the nicest contrast against the cement? And there is something disgusting about that, and I can�t get past it. I feel like those set designers participated in an activity that was immoral. Likewise the costume designer, Anna Shephard � in preproduction, when she was figuring out what Szpilman would be wearing at various points in the movie, she had to keep in mind how exactly months and years of no baths and hard labor would have affected Szpilman�s formerly natty wardrobe, she would have had to puzzle out what precise combination of rips and tears and dirt and cheap sackcloth spell "Holocaust" � you know, how to really bring that message home. At the same time, I don�t want to suggest that Anna Shepard and the production crew or anyone involved with the film are themselves immoral. They have to earn money to pay the rent, and more than that they presumably saw an opportunity to use their training in the service of something more lasting than a David Spade movie. They wanted to do work that would matter, and they did a very professional job. There were listings in the credits for Snow, Weapons, and Armor, and you have to understand that I�m trying very hard not to come off as the Savonarola of PCness here, but I wanted to know what a Holocaust survivor watching the movie might think of this, these things reduced to hey-presto special effects. Do movies like "The Pianist" pay proper tribute to the experience of survivors? Do they glorify it? Do they condescend to it? In tying it up neatly with the twin ribbons of opening and closing credits, do they dishonor and diminish it? Do they let us viewers off the hook somehow because to make a movie is necessarily to sanitize, so we can leave the theater feeling self-congratulatory because, yep, we sure did sit there and get confronted with the facts about the Holocaust, but also absolved of real engagement because subconsciously we know, for instance, that Roman Polanski is sleeping between 400-thread-count sheets with his hot much-younger wife and Adrien Brody is eating sushi in SoHo? Then again, hold on, what did I mean when I wrote "absolved," what am I getting at? What is our responsibility as thinking, moral beings with respect to keeping the Holocaust in our minds and educating ourselves about it � and who is anyone to presume the authority to spell that out for us; who am I to imply that we should be restricting ourselves to documentaries like "Hearts and Minds" (Is that what I�m implying? What am I implying?) � and how do you reconcile my prim aesthetically moralist distaste for what Polanski showed me with Polanski�s individual experience, having had to fend for himself in bombed-out Warsaw like Szpilman did but as a little boy, how he wanted to make this movie because of his personal connection to the story and these are the things he felt we needed to see, to know? What right do I have, in this case, to criticism? On the other hand, to suggest that movies like "The Pianist" are unassailable is itself a kind of fascism. The sense I have, then, of the waft of immorality about the whole enterprise � where does it come from? And when I say that I don�t think I want to watch another Holocaust movie ever again, are my reasons good enough? Am I talking out of both sides of my mouth when it comes to aesthetics and morality, am I doing the same kind of letting myself off the hook but finding a way to call it by a different name? I have no idea.

And the ironic thing about the movie is that there was a level on which it wasn�t even about the Holocaust, or the Holocaust was perversely superfluous to what it was About. Here�s the overarching drama: Szpilman likes to play the piano. Oh no! Something bad has happened and now he can�t play the piano anymore. Bad things keep happening and happening that prevent him from doing this thing he likes, and this makes him sad, and his actions show how much he misses it. Szpilman does not like bad things, but he is willing to undergo great deprivation just for the hope of being able one day to play again. When will this be? And then, of course, it happens, like everyone in the theater knows it�s going to, knows it *must* � a German soldier finds him hiding in an abandoned building, and when he tells the soldier he used to be a pianist (and here the script inexcusably extorts that second tear from of you, when Szpilman begins the statement with "I am" and then corrects himself to "I was"), the soldier leads him to a piano and challenges him, "Then play something." And as the viewer � I think this gets back to my grappling with the morality issue � you can�t help the lump in your throat, and because of the Wlady�s Un-excellent Adventure aspects of the film, the scrapes and chases and gee-whiz coincidences, the discovery of a can of pickles just in the nick of near-starvation time, you also can�t help thinking Oh at last, at last � like this is a resolution, like the reunion of pianist and piano is a happy ending. And you hate yourself for feeling that way, that wellspring of satisfaction (and self-congratulation for having sat through what is some very harrowing material as the price of arriving at it) is not conscionable when we are talking about the Holocaust here, but you feel that way because the movie wants you to, the movie makes the Holocaust ancillary. If you feel relief and release when Szpilman puts his palsied dirty fingers on the keys, then the movie has done its job just like the conscientious Anna Shepard and Polanski�s army of suitcase-arrangers have. You, your individual self, are nothing to them. It�s just business. (But what kind of business? Is the business of milking second tears ever moral, even if the tears are shot through with outrage over the larger extra-narrative context of the Holocaust?) The tagline on the posters for the movie is, "Music was his passion. Survival was his masterpiece." The movie tells a different story, though � survival is not something Szpilman engineers, it�s not his masterpiece at all. It�s this thing that just happens to him, one instance and one connection at a time. Is survival heroism when it�s the result of a series of accidents? The script, and Polanski, can�t seem to make up their mind whether "The Pianist" is the blackest black comedy in history or the inspirational story of a hero. What�s so heroic about not wanting to be shot or tortured, though, about the consistently manifested impulse to keep oneself alive? That�s just biology. A lot of other people, including Szpilman�s whole family, also didn�t want to be shot or tortured and wanted to stay alive, but they weren�t so lucky. Where�s their movie? How shall we pay tribute to them? (And why did that collaborator pull Szpilman out of the procession towards the trains in the first place? Szpilman had been rude to him before that and there was no evidence that this guy was a music fan or anything, so it makes no sense. If this was meant to suggest the sheer absurdity of Szpilman being culled by fate for survival, of anyone being singled out like that, then the collaborator should have been a stranger to him. Otherwise you�re sitting there thinking, Wait, did I miss something? and distracting yourself from the next few minutes of the film.) The Szpilman of "The Pianist" is not so much a living character as an object on whom forces are enacted. Here�s the sum total of what we know about his motivations: (1) He likes to play the piano, (2) he likes pretty girls and is vainly pleased when they notice him too, and (3) he wants to stay alive. The closest I came to seeing him as a three-dimensional human being was when, upon arriving at a temporary safehouse, he right away apologized to his hostess, with halting and remnant dignity, for how bad he smelled: this impulse was particular to him. Does he think of his family? Does he wonder what the world around him thinks of the Nazis, why they�re not doing enough? In what thoughts and memories and hopes, besides playing piano, does he take refuge? The movie is mum. There�s not even a clear sense of what his life was like before Nazi occupation, nothing for which we could feel his vicarious bereavement. It is frustrating, it is complicated and yet it is idiotically simple.

And then when you walk out of the theater, the person you went to see it with will say, "Wow, good movie." And how do you respond?

Um, weekend. I saw some movies and, on the first gorgeous Saturday of the year, went driving along the Hood Canal with Steve, and we parked the car by the side of the road and went down on the beach with a screwdriver and opened and ate oysters right there. The technical term for this activity may or may not be "poaching." I went running twice and finally put "Hearts and Minds" back in the mail to Netflix. A fight was picked and then happily averted. My bracket got hosed. Crossword puzzles were done. I put together a good outfit yesterday.

And now Todd is sending me e-mail again, this time to me directly. The subject header is "encounters." No, excuse me, the subject header *was* "encounters."

P.S. (a little later) Yes yes yes yes YES: go read what this guy wrote in my guestbook � he's absolutely right about having it both ways and also about "Au Revoir Les Enfants." Now that was a Holocaust movie that felt authentic aesthetically, morally, and narratively. (Are there others? I am going to think about this.)