Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist”

I recently heard someone say that he didn’t like Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” because the hero just sat around for four years growing a beard and peeling potatoes. Boring.

Aside from the fact that many things of great interest happen in “The Pianist” (including the disastrous Warsaw Uprising), I think this person sounds like he wishes it were more of a Hollywood type action adventure film.

Polanski made a point of not telling an action adventure story.. He was responding to films like “Schindler’s List” which, in his view, propagated the lie that good people were able or willing to heroically oppose the Nazis where they could. I guess he would argue that certainly some remarkable– really remarkable– individuals opposed the Nazis and were active in the underground, but the reality was that these people were very few in number and had no real impact.

A film like “Schindler’s List”, because of it’s focus on a sympathetic hero, Schindler, gives a false impression– that there were substantial forces for good in occupied Europe that made a difference. In reality, even the Warsaw uprising, as magnificent as it was, had no effect on the outcome of the war (at least partly because the Soviets waited outside the city while the Nazi’s repressed the uprising and executed thousands of partisans.)

His “truth”, that he wished to convey in “The Pianist”, was that for most Jews, the reality was that they were swept up by a massive force and that the survival of any of them was more due to fortuitous circumstance and luck than the moral acts of any individual. That’s why Szpilman doesn’t “act”– he reacts, and struggles to survive.

It is also Polanski’s own story– he was separated from his family at the age of 10 and survived by his wits, and good luck. Who are you going to believe? Polanski or Spielberg? I didn’t find it boring at all. I did find “Schindler’s List” offensive because Spielberg had so much contempt for reality that he took an amazing true story and changed it to make it more “Hollywood”– and preposterous. He couldn’t bear to stick to the known facts. He had to clobber you over the head with sentimentality to be sure that you had the “right” feelings about everything. The audience walks out “feeling good about feeling bad”. They liked Schindler. Liking Schindler is a reflection of your good taste. If a party like the Nazis rose up again, they would be sure to choose the right side!

[added January 2011] More importantly, Schindler allows the audience to feel that, had they been in the same situation, they too would have done the right thing. The truth is that millions of people like you and I did nothing, and we are fooling our selves if we think it could never happen here, because there are too many people like us who would resist. We would resist, of course, if the threat were presented to us as Spielberg presents it to us: snarling, distasteful Nazis vs. the elegant, empathetic Schindler. It wouldn’t look like that to us. It would look more like Mitch McConnell.

An insidious little note: the original book “Schindler’s List” was classified by the Library Association as “Fiction”. After Spielberg tied into it, it was re-classified as “Non-Fiction”.

Of what value a heroic tale that isn’t true? Is it “essentially” true? How essential is it, that, in reality, nobody quite understood Mr. Schindler or what his exact attitudes and beliefs were? His own wife thought he was an asshole. Spielberg didn’t know what to do with that information.  Yes he did– he created that ridiculous scene at the end with poor Mrs. Schindler having to participate in his consecration by putting a pebble on his gravestone.

I cringed.

He should have shown us that sometimes “assholes” do more good than pious preachers.

Hollywoodized Fantasies

And we really can’t expect Hollywood to give us the stark reality that we see in psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric outpatient clinics.

Dr. Glen Gabbard, psychoanalyst and author.

Why not?

And does it matter?

“A Beautiful Mind” is a wonderful film, if you like inspiring stories. It’s the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia. In the movie, John Nash attends Princeton University, develops some brilliant theories about economics while skipping most of his classes, begins teaching at MIT, and marries a beautiful student, Alicia. Then his life begins to break up. He begins having delusions– he sees people who don’t exist. He becomes paranoid and irrational. Alicia supports him through all of his struggles, however, and, eventually– after twenty years– he pulls himself together. He is nominated for a Nobel Prize (for work he did as a student) and makes a speech in Stockholm thanking his loyal wife for standing so firmly behind him.

Wonderful story, isn’t it? On a Christian website, the movie is given almost acclamation, “thumbs up” for it’s “inspiring” story. Is it inspiring? Do you watch this movie and think, wow, it’s wonderful to know that his wife was so loyal and supportive– I know I could be like that? The fact that it is a true story makes it oh so compelling! And so uplifting! That’s the kind of film some Christians feel that Hollywood should produce.

“A Beautiful Mind” is mostly lies and blather!

Oh, it is a “true” story. Other than the fact that John Nash married and abandoned a wife (and a child) to poverty before he met Alicia. And other than the fact that Nash didn’t “see” people (he heard voices). And other than the fact that Alicia actually did divorce him. And other than the fact that he went to Europe and joined an anti-American organization for a time. And other than the fact that he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s room in San Francisco (and that’s why he was fired from “Wheeler” — in real life, the Rand Corporation.)

Yeah, other than a few small details…

Some people I know say, “I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s true or not– it’s a wonderful story. Why can’t I just enjoy the movie without having to know the truth?”

Then you’re going to tell me to keep my chin up– if I only look on the bright side of things, life will get better.

The trouble is, in a few years, the movie will replace the real facts of the life of John Nash, just as “Schindler’s List” has begun to replace the real facts in the life of Oskar Schindler.

The funny thing is, in both cases, the real stories are far more compelling, far more interesting, and more “inspiring” in a true sense than the ridiculous Hollywood versions.

It’s worth a thought or two about Spielberg’s revisionist “Schindler’s List”. The original book was labelled “fiction” by it’s publisher until after the movie was released. It is now labelled “non-fiction”. So, who’s going to sue over the difference? There is no Association for Honesty and Truth to finance a legal challenge to this arbitrary conversion from fiction to projection.

And after all, what’s wrong with Schindler’s list?

Spielberg’s villain, Amon Goeth, likes to shoot at Jewish workers with a rifle, from his balcony. You see that he is a monster. But …

To pathologize Göth as Sadist, to demonize him and make him a monster is precisely to miss the most disturbing knowledge we now have of the average Nazi perpetrator: that he was, in an overwhelming majority of the cases, not a sadist, a “deviant” or an “aberration,” but rather a dutiful, law respecting civil servant carrying out his orders.  Robert S. Leventhal

And that’s the truth.

Added 2024-02-05

I saw this wonderful example of exactly what Leventhal is talking about:

Who is the greatest movie villain of all time?
Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List has to be way up there.
There’s a scene where he’s sitting in a room with a rifle, killing people in the street for fun because he can yet is totally nondescript in his dealings with Schindler. His portrayal still makes my blood run cold when I watch the film. He is ruthless and unfeeling throughout the film until he meets his fate at the end: but even then he remains fanatical and without remorse.
What’s worse is there were plenty of fanatic Nazis like him. Scary thought.
I’ve watched attempts at copying devils like Slobodan Milosovich and Ratko Mladic from the Balkans Wars; and others like Mengele and Auschwitz commandants and savage guards. None come close. What Fiennes was able to accomplish is both exemplary and more than just a little unnerving. But credit to Fiennes for showing modern audiences what Holocaust survivors, families and murdered victims faced in that war.
There was no behind the lines with men like him roaming free.

From “Movie and Entertainment Sphere”, one of those obnoxious Facebook inserts from who the hell knows where.

For a really effective corrective, see “The Zone of Interest”.  It’s brilliant and does exactly what Leventhal asks movies to do.  It reveals, brilliantly, just how the worst evils in the world can be committed by people who outwardly appear to be “normal”, functioning, average people.  Like us, if we allow it.  Like Trump supporters who blindly parrot their leader’s idiotic blather and joyfully march in his grievance parade.

Artificial Stupidity: Software That Weeps

I have never liked Stephen Spielberg even when he thinks he’s being oh so serious and profound, as in “The Color Purple” and “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan”.  I think he is a brilliant technical director, but he always feels that he has to slug you in the face with the emotional crux of his drama so you don’t miss it.   Spielberg, as is less well known, is also a shameless plagiarist.  He steals from other films, ones that are usually not well known (see the tank scene in “Saving Private Ryan” compared to Bernard Wicki’s “The Bridge”).

And he often employs the worst film music composer in history in John Williams.

I don’t think I have ever heard a piece by John Williams that I found moving in the slightest respect.  Yes, he is universally acclaimed.  He wins Oscars.   I don’t care.  On my side: he did “Star Wars”.  If you really think he’s that great— he did “Star Wars”.

I have always liked Stanley Kubrick who, in my opinion, created the greatest movie ever made in “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.

So it was with stunned disbelief that I learned that Spielberg was the designated heir of Kubrick’s last film project, “AI”, about a boy created with artificial intelligence who wants to become a real boy. Pinocchio with silicon.

I am baffled by some of the early reviews of the film. The New York Times and Salon both made it sound like this was a really interesting film that might have failed on one or two points but, ultimately, represented an advance on Spielberg’s career. Well, Salon was a bit ambivalent and thought Spielberg was a true genius– when he stuck to entertainments like “Jaws” and “ET”.

Anyway, I found “AI” a big disappointment. The last hour– which seemed interminable– is Spielberg at his worst, wringing mawkish, overwrought tears from the virtual viewer with “heartrending” scenes of loss and grief.

But the real problem with this movie is the same problem countless sci-fi films have faced in the past: how to make a robot interesting. If a robot is nothing more than the sum of it’s programming and hardware, then how can it display the big emotions Hollywood regards as essential to the blockbuster film? How can software weep?

This is Spock, remember. Spock, in the original Star Trek, was supposed to something of a logic machine. He represented Reason, the ability of man to analyze and judge without the corrupting influence of emotions. But Star Trek couldn’t bear to leave Spock alone. When the captain was imperiled, the emotionless Spock would take absurd chances with the lives of the entire crew in order to save the one man he… loved?

It’s like claiming that the girl who seduced you in high school was the only virgin in your class.

If the original Star Trek had had any guts, Spock would have said, “tough luck” and instructed Scotty to plot a course to a sector of space not inhabited by gigantic amoeba’s or deadly Klingons. “It would not be rational to endanger the lives of 500 crew members in order to embark upon the marginal prospect of saving the captain’s life when I have calculated the odds against his survival to be 58,347 to 1. Furthermore, the odds of finding a replacement captain of equal or superior merit among current members of the crew are approximately 2 to 1…”

So we’re back to a robot, in AI, a little boy who replaces a seriously ill little boy in the lives of a young couple. When the real boy gets better and returns home, the mother drops the robot off in a woods somewhere and then drives off. Heart-wringing tear-jerking scene number one, and it’s milked for all it’s worth in classic Spielberg style.

We, the viewer, are supposed to feel something that the flesh-and-blood mother in the film–who cared so much about a child that she adopted an artificial one–does not.  But this is bizarre– the primary signal here, of what we should feel about this abandoned child– would normally come from the parents or siblings or friends of the child.  If they feel nothing, why should we?  Why would the mother demand a replacement for her seriously ill boy if she was going to care so little for it that she would drop it off in the woods?

The twist here is that the mother is right to feel nothing for the little robot.  He is a robot!   The deceit foisted on the viewer is that anyone would think she would feel anything for the robot in the first place.

The robot boy sets out to find the good fairy– I’m not kidding– who will turn him into a real boy. He has some adventures during which Spielberg, as is his habit, shamelessly pillages the archives for great shots, including the famous Statue of Liberty shot from “Planet of the Apes” (the first one), and various scenes from “Blade Runner”, “Mad Max”, and, well, you name it. Originality has never been Spielberg’s strong suit.

The truth is that no robot will ever have a genuine aspiration to be anything. What you are talking to, my friends, is a piece of machinery. And it is logically impossible for a machine to behave in any way other than the way it is programmed to respond, no matter how complex or advanced the programming is.

The only way around this conundrum is to imagine the possibility of incorporating organic elements into the robotic brain, something I’m sure Spielberg believes is possible. But then it’s not a robot. It’s an organism, and it may well be heartwarming to some of us, in the same way that “My Friend Flicka” and “Lassie Come Home” are heartwarming. [2011-04]

So when a robot says it wants to be human, what you really have is a human telling a machine to say it wants to be me. Is there any concept in Science Fiction so wrought with Narcissism?  So shallow and pointless?

The problem with that idea is that you would have to believe that humans would someday create sophisticated, powerful machinery that would behave in unpredictable– and uncontrollable– ways. You would also have to believe that humans would feel emotional attachments to these devices the way they attach to pets and social workers in real life.

Anyway, it’s hard to care about what happens to the boy when the premise of the film is fundamentally absurd, and Spielberg is entirely concerned with dazzling visual effects and contrived set pieces. The film opens, for example, with one of the lamest q & a sessions ever imagined, between a brilliant scientist (William Hurt) and a group of docile graduate students who lob softballs at Hurt (and the audience) in order to convey information that isn’t required by the audience anyway.

It is impossible to imagine Kubrick working with this kind of slop and incoherence. “AI” is 100% Spielberg.