Sherry Chandler

Brutality creates brutes

Reading this passage from Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I couldn’t help but think of Abu Ghraib and our general brutish defense culture:

A photographer began taking pictures of people before they were killed. It was May 1940, in a medieval castle in Austria. The people in Hartheim Castle who were being killed were mentally and physically handicapped; their bodies were burned in a cremation oven. “Hitler felt that by exterminating these so-called useless eaters,” one of the T-4 euthanasianists later testified, “it would be possible to relieve more doctors, male and female nurses, and other personnel, hospital beds, and other facilities for the use of the Armed Forces.”

The smell of burning bothered the photographer. Hartheim’s supervisor, a former police officer, said: Drink, you’ll feel better. So the photographer drank and took the pictures. The assembly-line killings led to the brutalization of the staff, writes one historian: “Reports abounded of drunken orgies, numerous sexual liaisons, brawling and bullying.” One eyewitness said that at the castle “almost all employees were intimate with each other.” More than nine thousand people died at Hartheim in 1940. [p. 174]

If you have not watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, I suggest that you do so. It was one of the most difficult films I ever watched. But we must not bury our collective heads in the sand about this stuff, lest we wind up giving tacit approval to something much worse.

Ulrich von Hassell, right-wing opponent of Hitler, wrote in his diaries about the war in Poland. It was October 19, 1939.

“Among well-informed people in Berline I noticed a good deal of despair,” von Hassell wrote. Germany’s good name was disgraced by the bombing of Warsaw and the anti-Semitic bestialities of the SS. “When people use their revolvers to shoot down a group of Jews herded into a synagogue,” von Hassell said, “one is filled with shame.” [p. 153]

Americans, too, are filled with shame I think. Certainly I am. It takes something more. I don’t know what. Maybe not being afraid.

Netflix adventures

I haven’t said much about movies lately. It isn’t that I’ve quit watching. Just that I haven’t had much to say about the movies I have watched.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is not a film I feel competent to review. It didn’t give me any new information but it gave me old information in a way that made me both sympathetic to the young soldiers involved and outraged at the lack of moral direction that seems to have marked the “War on Terror” from the very beginning. Is it a good documentary? I don’t know. It’s painful to watch but I think every citizen of the U.S. should watch it.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno) is also painful to watch but I do not hesitate to call it an excellent movie. It tells an edge-of-the-seat story of totalitarianism and resistance in Fascist Spain in 1944, remarkable perhaps because most of the resistance is in the hands of women and girls. It is visually gorgeous and, for once, computer animation is used imaginatively.

Ridicule is French, what can I say? It takes place in Versailles just before the Revolution, so there is plenty of decadence. But there is also sweet young love and idealism. Like I said, it’s French.

The Three Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is a black and white film of Bertoldt Brecht’s stage play of the same name, with music by Kurt Weil. It was filmed in Germany in 1931. It is dark and cynical and brooding. A masterpiece.

To understand why audiences didn’t like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in 1948’s The Pirate, you probably have to watch the pair in 1942’s For Me and My Gal, which audiences loved.

For Me and My Gal is Busby Burkeley’s recruiting poster, complete with vaudeville romance and hummable tunes. Garland’s voice lends strength to Kelly’s somewhat reedy tenor and the two harmonize oh so sweetly. Sweet being the key word. Nothing here to push either star. Garland is the dewy-eyed, stage-struck girl next door, her stock part. And Kelly obviously isn’t challenged by any of the dance routines.

The Pirate, on the other hand, is one long Hollywood injoke. Once again Kelly is a travelling performer but he mugs and rolls his eyes and does take-offs on those great swashbucklers Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Garland is once again wide-eyed and stage-struck but she is also lusty and smart, revealed to be more torch singer than girl next door. (She would have been even torchier but the censors said no.) Vincente Minnelli let Kelly have a free hand with lavish choreography, including one long pirate ballet with leaping flames that he parodies a few years later in The Bandwagon. Kelly’s costume in this dance is patterned on the one Fairbanks wore in The Black Pirate. The film is deemed a failure but it fails in an interesting way.

Butterfield 8 just fails. Its moral seems to be: If you bring a woman of easy virtue into your home and sleep with her in the marital bed, it is of course your wife’s fault for being rich and giving you a cushy job. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen on several levels. Performances wooden. Not a spark between Liz and Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher’s chubby cheeks are just too dull. The story is silly. And of course any woman living wild and free has to be punished.