Monday, December 26, 2005
Steven "Smalley" Spielberg
There was rumbling at the time that Spielberg's War of the Worlds was about 9/11. It really didn't matter because it was a failed scifi horror flick, so who cares what he, or anyone else thought it “meant”.
As noted earlier in this weblog, Spielberg's Munich is a disaster of another order — attempting to lecture about goodness sans moral compass in an arena where values are daily an issue of life and death. Spielberg's thesis is simply that they aren't terrorists at all — they are people with a valid cause. If we just listen to them (and by implication give them what they want — the Tony Judt formula) then peace will dwell on earth.
Edward Rothstein doesn't agree in this article in the NYT. Rothstein makes some cogent points:
[Spielberg's] theory asserts that terrorism is a violent and extreme reaction to injustice - the last resort of the oppressed. Typically, this injustice theory is used to explain left-wing terrorism. It not only coincides with the justifications offered by terrorists themselves, but it also accompanies a belief that a just cause lies behind the terrorist attack. The theory is never applied to right-wing terrorism - whether of the brown-shirt or Timothy McVeigh variety - and thus pre-selects its proofs.
…Moreover, the film, to make its argument about the cycle of violence, ends up treating the Munich massacre almost as if it were the original act of Palestinian terror. The elimination of context makes the Israeli response seem intemperate, while all future acts of Palestinian terror are treated as if they were responses to the Israeli assassinations. But…in the years before Munich, maniacal terrorists aligned with the Palestinian cause had bombed a Swissair jet, thrown hand grenades into crowds at Israel's airport, hijacked planes and associated themselves with other terror groups trained and partly financed by the Soviet Union. These, like the attacks that followed Munich, were part of a continuing war, not evidence of an amorphous cycle of violence that developed out of Israel's attempts to undermine terror.
Spielberg's movies are good at warming over cozy adolescent movie-derived conventions regarding morality and human (usually child-centered) feeling — he gives great fairy tale. But in real life Spielberg is surrounded by sycophants and a self-indulgent Hollywood community continually trying to prove it isn't just that in its self-conscious displays of ostentatious do-goodism. Without the self-check critical intelligence or a moral compass might provide, without a community that would tell him he isn't getting it, Spielberg, playing the fool, cluelessly devolves to braying.