Sex and violence

Via Ross Douthat, NY Press film critic Matthew Zoller-Seitz’s blog talks about the hotly debated sex scene in Spielberg’s Munich. I still don’t know what to think of this movie, exactly. I’ve written positively about it here, with some hesitation, and I know I found it as chilling and overpowering as anything Spielberg has ever filmed. While its certainly on shaky ground as a message piece, I'm not sure it's really as reprehensible as some have suggested, but neither am I, at least at this point, ready to mount a full defense of it. There are strong points to be made either way.

I do know, though, that when I walked out of the film, the two things that stuck in my mind were the final shot of the Twin Towers and the sex scene. The sex, to me, was distracting, out of place, showy in that it was so over-the-top and timid in that it felt like Spielberg, now long married, was still a little bit embarrassed dealing with sex. But thinking about it, and knowing that this wasn’t just Spielberg, but also Kushner, it seemed to me that, while the scene may have been awkward during the film, it worked much better after the fact—it’s a scene designed to be understood primarily in retrospect.

Seitz gets a lot correct in what he writes:

I think the sex scene is the heart of the movie, the point where it (pardon the language) takes its clothes off and shows you what it really is. Avner truly loves his wife, truly loves having sex with his wife (an unironic expression of heterosexual domestic ardor, one that almost has a hearty peasant quality; only Spielberg would dare be so cornball, and so true to the feelings of men who married well). When he fucks his wife he feels safe. That this sacred moment would be invaded by images of Munich is at once appalling, sad, funny and true to the experience of anyone who has suffered violence or watched powerlessly as it was inflicted on someone else.

But there’s more to it than that. This is clearly a scene designed by the symbolically-obsessed Kushner, and it seems to me that it’s not just, as Seitz suggests, about the way the violence has interrupted and soiled the good things in his life, but about the generational legacy the film believes has erupted out of the Munich violence.

When Avner is having sex, he’s literally creating new life. What Kushner and Spielberg are saying is that the following generations of Israelis are literally born of that violence, that struggle, that it has been bred into them at a genetic level. Avner’s anguish—and subsequently the anguish of the Israeli people—isn’t just confined to his own mind, it’s being passed on to his children and, indeed, the children of all Israelis. By the time the final image of the Twin Towers oh-so-delicately broadsides you, the message they’re trying to send is utterly clear: The taint of violence (and its ensuing pain) is passed on, and it still lives with us today.