A record of Munich

Jonah Goldberg adds to his recent criticism of Munich today with this remark:

I got the sense that what Spielberg and Kushner were trying to communicate was that "vengeance" is expensive not just morally, but financially as well. We could be spending the money on better things, in other words. But one has to wonder whether in the rest of the world that message (as intellectually and morally bankrupt as it is) will rise above the more superficial message that Jews are always concerned with money.

Well, sure, but I think that's a fairly reductively literal reading of the scene. Yes, clearly Kushner is trying to remind us that violent retribution has a physical cost – resources as well as morals. And I don’t doubt that he and Spielberg both felt mighty clever about how this half-alludes to the massive expenditures on our current fight in Iraq. But when I saw the scene, it seemed to me that it wasn’t so much about the cost of vengeance, but the records of it.

The primary moral issue in the film, as far as I’m concerned, is Avner’s attempt to reconcile his anguish with his duty. He no doubt understands that he is doing something that must be done – there can be no questioning its validity or necessity. But because he can’t question the actions he’s being assigned, he is forced to internalize them; thus every assassination tears him further apart. Even as his duty keeps his country together (look how his mother and the other soldiers praise him), it makes him less whole.

Subsequently, the receipt comment, it seems to me, is most poignantly about the permanence of Avner’s actions. Not only is he forced to do these things, but he is forced to live with them, forever. His country will honor him, but that honor – another sort of record – will stain his existence. The Israeli government forces him to keep records of his actions, and they are a symbol of that with which he cannot part. In effect, he becomes a living record, a human receipt, for the deaths he caused.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons to think that Avner’s equivocations are unrealistic, that his doubt, his guilt and his moral uncertainty aren’t what Mossad agents felt, but instead what Spielberg and Kushner feel, or think their audience should feel. And politically, I’m inclined neither to despise the film nor to praise it, for I think it teeters on the edge of some fairly unsavory ideas without fully endorsing them. And so I don’t want to judge the historic veracity of Spielberg’s narrative or characters, but I think that from a human standpoint, his movie does zero in on some rather potent conflicts.

The idea that duty – to country, family, God, whatever – could be good and necessary as well as personally painful, is present throughout the film, and it’s that aspect that I found most compelling. How, the film wants to know, can we do what we know we must do when it seems to be eating away at our very being? Undoubtedly, there is valor in heroic sacrifice of the self for a greater cause, and Spielberg dealt with this in Saving Private Ryan. But now he turns the focus inward: how do those making the sacrifice do it, and what must they be feeling, thinking, saying, as they let their duty claw them apart?

Munich is both a great movie – perfectly paced and executed – and a deeply troubling one. I have no praise for its sympathy for terrorists, and the film could’ve used a bit more healthy wrath, but neither can I ignore its anguished, wrenching portrait of a man in violent confrontation with himself.