More Praise for Munich
Edesltein hails Spielberg's Munich, offering a fairly strong rejoinder to those who claim the film is an apology for Palestinian terrorism, and a vehement defense of The Beard as well:
I'll see this film this weekend; I hope Edelstein (my favorite critic) is right.Munich has been regarded in some quarters as an affront: How does Spielberg have the audacity to make a commercial thriller that questions the very concept of retaliation? And while we're on the subject, how does he have the audacity to make a sci-fi picture like War of the Worlds, which uses a Martian invasion to evoke the trauma of 9/11?
Well, it's too bad we don't have more mainstream narrative filmmakers with that kind of audacity. Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.
posted by Peter @ 12/22/2005 01:37:00 PM
2 Comments:
What Spielberg is saying is that less than thirty years after the events of Schindler's List; it was perfectly acceptable for Jews to be brutally murdered in Germany for the crime of being Jewish; and nothing to be done about it.
It's as if he said that really the assasination of Heydrich was as bad as Lidice. Perpetuating the cycle of violence. Well actually that IS what he's saying.
Munich is Speilberg's Birth of A Nation.
The historical record is that Western Europe allowed the perpetrators and planners of Munich to live openly without fear of arrest, the survivors of the terrorists at Munich were traded by the Germans in an "arranged" hijacking within a few months. Like bin Laden they had immunity from any justice and acted with impunity to plan more attacks.
Spielberg's film denies the existence of pure evil (the Munich architects had no objective other than to kill innocents in some ill-conceived view that they would provoke an uprising in Jordan that would allow them to take power from the King). It also denies the central lesson of Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, that evil has to be fought.
[Black September specifically eschewed any negotiation with Israel or any other goal but the destruction of Israel and the creation of a greater Palestinian state including Jordan, parts of Lebanon, and all of Israel. Their name comes from an abortive coup in Jordan where they lost. A fact Speilberg never explores: the planners of Munich were ALSO killing PLO members and running gangster-led shakedowns]
It's the denial of reality practiced by most in 1938 that an "accomodation" can be reached with evil men intent on killing you because you exist. It also dishonors the real men who risked a lot to bring those who evaded justice to some reckoning. Far easier to just cut a check and make them go away.
It's ALREADY being cited by Hamas supporters here for the need for violence against Jews to bring about "victory" ... like I said his Birth of A Nation.
I haven't seen the film yet, so substantively, I can't judge it yet. However, your last point is completely unconvincing. Just because an extremist group takes up a particular bit of art - a novel, movie, play, painting, whatever - and claims it supports their cause does not at all mean that it does. There are too many examples of this, from the Bible onward, to even list. That argument is a non-starter.
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