Category Archives: Movies

Savage Mistakes:  Climate Sense and Nonsense:

Movies

 

As PBS News Hour reported, “There were 27 US weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages in 2024.” You would think this would make it abundantly clear to American and Canadian conservatives that climate change is a serious problem now, because it is costing Americans and Canadians a lot of money—now. Not in the future.  If you thought this, you would have thought wrong.

 

As the second Donald Trump administration continues its barrage on every environmental protection measure created in the past half century, Climate change continues it siege on the world unabated.  And no one but the engery sector is happy, because they continue to make money Bigly.

 

We have been warned about the dangers and keep doing nothing. Now, at least in the US and Canada, we are going backwards in our efforts to contain this looming disaster. One of the thinkers who understands this process better than most is Bill McKibben who was interviewed on PBS News Hour.

 

Both in the US and now Canada too our political leaders are floundering, though the US more than Canada. In both countries conservatives argue strongly, that this is not a serious problem and that trying to address it only hurts the economy and puts both countries at a competitive disadvantage. Pierre Poilievre in Canada wanted to “Axe the Tax”, meaning the carbon tax designed to limit Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now the prime minister has done that at least for consumers.  In the US Trump wants to bring back coal to solve the energy. Both of these actions seem remarkably unwise.

 

Bill McKibben noted the actions of the American president are not only bad for the environment, they are actually bad for the economy too:

 

“We’re seeing an incredible rollback, pretty much, of all environmental regulations dating back to 1970. We’re just passed the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, and it was in the immediate aftermath of that we started basically regulating pollution, and now we’re deregulating pollution of all kinds. The most serious consequences are what’s happening around climate and energy, and they’re serious for two reasons.”

 

One, the planet is getting hotter and hotter and hotter all the time. And with environmental catastrophes.  As McKibben said about America,

 

“March was the hottest March we have ever measured on this planet. And, two, were making a series of extremely foolish choices about energy. We’re the only place in the world that’s decided that somehow coal is the future of the planet. And we’re going to have our lunch eaten by the rest of the world, which has quite rightly figured out that sun and wind and the batteries to store their power when the sun goes down or the wind drops are the cheapest, cleanest, easiest, fastest way forward.  So, on both counts, we’re making just the most savage mistakes.

 

 

On his first day in office President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, even though many heads of American corporations urged him not to do that. In Canada, on his first day as Prime Minister, Mark Carney axed the carbon tax as Poilievre had been demanding.

 

Trump has actually gone farther than Carney, because he has also rolled back what McKibben referred to as “an incredible rollback pretty much of all environmental regulation dating back to 1970.”

 

What makes McKibben particularly disappointed in America is that is where so much of the important science warming us about climate change has come, and now they are turning their backs on all of this knowledge and ignoring it.

 

As he said,

 

“U.S. was the place where we first understood what was happening. We were the first people to measure carbon in the atmosphere. The people that built the computer models that helped us gave us the warnings about what was coming. And those are precisely the programs that are now being chopped off. Even the programs where we measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or the temperature of the Earth are under assault, as if, by not measuring it, it might go away. But that’s not how physics works…. And willfully blinding ourselves to it is — has to rank high on the list of dumbest things that governments have ever done.”

 

But there might even be one thing they have done that is even dumber. That is ignoring the fact that is already well understood that the cheapest power now on the planet is solar energy and America is ignoring that, unlike its chief world rival China. China now produces 2/3 or the world’s solar power while America is ramping up coal production! As McKibben said, “they’re going to own the future and we’re going to have some coal mines.”

 

Doesn’t sound very smart does it?

 

Conclave: An Explosive Ending          

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Movies, Populism, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

For those of you who have not seen the film Conclave and expect to, perhaps you should consider reading this post after you have seen.  The scene is quite shocking.

 

In the film  Brother Tedesco is the favorite of the conservative Cardinals who believed that the most recent Pope was much too liberal. They believe the Pope risked shaking the Church to its foundation. It would be shook to its foundation if any one of a number of candidates for the Papacy were elected.

 

The actual voting procedure in the film is quite interesting. At the exact moment that Brother Thomas Lawrence is delivering a vote in his own favor, because he seems to be the only candidate that might be able to stop Tedesco, like a bolt of lightning from God, there is an explosion and part of the ceiling of the huge hall collapses onto him and injuring him. It appears a terrorist suicide detonated a bomb that killed himself and also killed 52 people. Hundreds lie injured. There were also reports of attacks in Louvain and Munich. Perhaps it was a bolt of lightning from the God or the devil?

Brother Tedesco is quick to rise with a shaking finger:

 

“Here at last we see the result of the doctrine of relativism so beloved by our liberal brothers! A relativism that sees all faiths and passing fancies accorded equal weight. So that now, when we look around us, we see we see the homeland of the Holy Roman Catholic church dotted with mosques and minarets of the prophet Mohammed.”

 

Brother  Bellini says Brother Tedesco  should be ashamed. Father Tedesco replies,

“we should all be ashamed. We tolerate Islam in our land, but they revile us in theirs. We nourish them in our homeland. But they exterminate us. How long will we persist in this weakness.? They are literally at our walls right now. What we need now is a leader who understands that we are facing a true religious war…We need a leader who will put a stop to the drift that has gone on almost ceaselessly for the past 50 years. How long will we persist in this weakness? We need a leader who fights these animals,”

 

as he points to the crumbled ceiling.  Like so many political leaders, including Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, he tries to take advantage of an emergency to grab absolute power for himself. Demagogic leaders love to take advantage of emergencies.

Sometimes, when people are fearful it is difficult to resist the authoritarian leader. Fear is a very poor guide for human conduct.

 

 

 

Conclave: Unholy Ambition

Catholic Church, Movies, Politics & Religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Ambition is complicated. I remember when I was young in school if you were nominated for a position, on student council or something like that. you were expected not to vote for yourself. It was not conisered seemly

The candidates for the papacy in the film Conclave, as in real life come from rough timber.  There is not perfection there. Everyone of them is flawed, just as we all are.

Early on in the film Brother Aldo says, “no sane man would want to be Pope.” There is some obvious truth to this statement. He says he has no interest in being Pope. He also says, “the men who are dangerous are the ones who want it.” Yet later he makes clear he wants it too. But later he says every Cardinal has a desire to be Pope. In fact each has already chosen the name he wants to be called.  Was he lying?

Is this the moth of holiness? Or unholiness?

Brother Aldo Bellini and Brother Thomas Lawrence argue about who should be Pope.  Aldo believes Thomas should vote for him. If the Liberals don’t unite, Tedesco (the arch conservative) will win and undo 60 years of progress. He is vehement about it so Thomas reminds Lawrence this is not a war.  To this Aldo replies, “It is a war. And you have to commit to a side… Save your precious doubts for your prayers.”

Father Lawrence throughout the film says he does not want to be Pope. In fact, he assures everyone, that just before the Pope died he asked him to release him from his role as a Cardinal, for he wanted to return to the role of an ordinary Priest. He does not want power or glory or status. He tries to convince others not to vote for him.

Yet, later, we see, he votes for himself, at least once.

 

 

 

 

Conclave: Faith, Doubt and Ceremony

Movies, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Skeptical Philosophy

 

Director Edward Berger who directed the film Conclave, told the BBC that the conclave was thought of as “an ancient spiritual ritual.”  We must remember that one of the wonders of the Roman Catholic Church is its ritual.  I remember that when I was young, a friend of mine, who was a Mennonite boy raised by an aufgelna (‘fallen off the branch’, Mennonite) whose father scandalously had weekly “Sunday School” in his little gazebo that included alcohol for those so inclined so early in the morning. Much to my surprise at the time, my friend told me he was attracted to the Catholic church because of its ceremonies.  I was surprised by that comment, as I had been brought up to think that ceremonies got in the way of faith.

The film demonstrates some of those ceremonies thrillingly in ways only good cinema can do. Watch it and be amazed. Clearly, ceremony can be part of a religious quest, no matter what us dullard Mennonites may think.

Another major issue in the movie is the question of doubt and its relationship to faith.  Can there be faith without doubt? It is an old and important question.  Brother Lawrence speaks warmly of doubt

Brother Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, gives an opening address to the Cardinals gathered in conclave which is a majestic homage to the twins, doubt and faith:

 

“Let me speak from the heart for a moment. St. Paul said, ‘Be subject to one another our of reverence for Christ. To work together, and to grow together, we must be tolerant. No one person or…or faction seeking to dominate another. And speaking to the Ephesians who were of course a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views which gives our church its strength. And over the course of many years in the service of our Mother the Church let me tell you, there is one sin, which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. My God, My God, why are you forsaken me? He cried out in agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing, precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.”

 

I think these are wise words for us all on our religious quest. Certainty is the enemy of faith, not its defender.

Is it even possible to have faith without doubt?  There is no faith in mathematics. No one has faith that 2 + 2 =4. That is a certainty. No faith is needed. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand mathematics.

 

Conclave: The Abyss calls Out

Movies, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the real-world conclave, which started one day after I watched the film Conclave, a majority of the cardinals who went to Rome right after Pope Francis die, were appointed by the late pontiff, within the past 13 years, and as a result had never experienced a conclave. Just like in the film many of those Cardinals came from small dioceses around the world and were not well known.  Apparently, some of the Cardinals, just like me, watched the film to learn some of the protocols of the Church.

 

In the film Conclave, one of the Cardinals was so obscure he had never been revealed to be a Cardinal. So at least he claims.  This was Cardinal Benitez a purported Cardinal from Afghanistan, who had been secretly appointed by the previous Pope, if you can believe that. Is he a real Cardinal? Can he be believed? No one there had ever heard of him before, but apparently the Pope appointed him in secret. Here is a very surprising candidate but in the first round he collects a vote.  Clearly some Cardinals had doubts about the legitimacy of the alleged appointment. Yet he received one vote, but perhaps he voted for himself.  Yet, he denied that he voted for himself.

 

Father Thomas Lawrence, who is managing the process of the Conclave, accepts this Cardinal Benitez for real and sees this as “a marvellous testament to the Universal Church.”   He also said, “so many men of different nationalities bound together by their faith in God.” It sounds miraculous, to use that word again.  It is a testament to pluralism. After all, if the Church is truly universal it must have leadership from every part of the world. Such as Africa from where many priests now come because the Church there is thriving. As it is in the Philippines. Why should the Pope not come from one of those places?

 

One of the brothers, Brother Tedesco, a very conservative Cardinal, who thinks the previous Pope was too liberal, insists the Pope must come from Italy. After all, looking around it is clear that each Cardinal naturally moves to his own circle. Africans to African Cardinals. French to French. And the like. He said what holds them together is the Universal Language—Latin. But sadly, The Roman Catholic Church, the Universal Church, has given up on Latin services and he thinks that is where their problems originated. The Church should go back to Latin. As he says, “Without the dead language…without Rome, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.” He uses the stirring words of W.B. Yeats to reinforce his point.  He says, pointing to the black Cardinals, “the abyss calls out.”

 

 

Walk beautifully on the earth

Movies, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Professor John Moriarty was always on a religious quest. In the lecture I listened to after all these years, he said he wanted to walk beautifully on the earth!

 

Moriarty describes the earth this way:

 “The universe is a continuous manifestation of wonder biding over, wonder overflowing any container it could be in…The only space journey we should ever take should be to take us home to  the earth, the great and sacred earth.”

 

Moriarty then refers to a story in Exodus Chapter 3 where Moses encountered a burning bush in the desert of Sinai. The bush kept burning and burning. It should be consumed quickly because it is a dry bush in a desert but it keeps on burning. Then Moses hears a divine voice—the voice of God—who tells him to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stands is “holy ground.”

 

To this Moriarty adds,

“all ground is holy ground. You cannot be standing anywhere on earth and not be standing on holy ground. And every bush is a burning bush. Like any bush in Connemara… They are burning with green fire in the spring. They are burning with red fire in the autumn… It took someone like Van Gogh to show us that every tree is a green column of flame. Is green fire.”

 

Moriarty wants us, each one of us, to take off our shoes and experience holy ground. He also wants each of us to take off our shoes of European thinking. We must get rid of European creeds. We must be open to new experiences. We must “walk the earth with a barefoot heart and a barefoot brain.” Like Elvira Madigan we must have the courage to get off of what is safe and experience the new and the dangerous.  We must experience a year of thinking dangerously. No, we must experience a lifetime of thinking dangerously.  Safety is a trap that can deaden the heart and the mind that should be open to the new.

As Moriarty says, he does not want to be interrogated after his last day on earth and be asked if he ever set foot on the earth. To say no would be heart-breaking, for “setting foot on the earth is to set foot in paradise.” This is what I have been calling a new attitude to nature. An attitude filled with wonder. Not a desire to conquer it.

Like Henry David Thoreau, he does not want to admit on that last interrogation that he never lived at all. That would be a heart-breaking admission.

 

Courage to Walk the Sacred Earth

Movies, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

 

Moriarty said that in our century human beings have walked on the moon and like Neil Armstrong said it was a small step for man but a big step for mankind. Moriarty denies this. He says it was a very small step for humanity.

“To walk on the moon is no big deal…Have we walked on the moon because like Elvira Madigan we haven’t yet had the courage or the grace to step down and walk the sacred earth?

 

Moriarty says sometimes he stopped in at a house in Connemara where he lived in Ireland and saw children watching television. They were obsessed with other worlds that they saw. The characters in the films often had completely clean uniforms that didn’t smell of the barn or the heather or anything real. The children didn’t see the real wonder around them—Connemara. They were fed on ersatz wonder instead. Is that not even more true now in North America.  Children are obsessed with watching things on their phones or monitors. No one has time for real wonder any more. Pity that.

 

According to Professor Moriarty,

 “We need “to take a space journey to the earth…we would never want to set foot on Mars we would never want to set foot on any solar system inside or outside our galaxy.”

 

Is Moriarty right here?  Why does nature stop at earth? Is the moon not part of nature? How about Mars? How about the Milky way?

If you listen to astronauts speaking about their experiences in space it is far from prosaic. Maybe Moriarty was wrong on this point. I wish we could ask him, but that is too late. He is gone. He no longer walks the sacred earth with beauty. But we can. This is all part of releasing a new attitude to nature. That too is a sacred goal. That should be part of our religious quest in the modern age.

 

 

The Beauty of Elvira Madigan

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Movies, New Attitude to Nature

 

In Moriarty’s talk that someone recorded on YouTube so many years ago, the good professor Moriarty talked about Canada and the time he had spent there as a young university lecturer.  This was very interesting to me because it was the only time I ever heard him speak since he left Canada until I came across his lecture on YouTube.

First, unsurprisingly, he was astonished by the cold that came over the land after autumn. It was like nothing he had ever experienced in Ireland.  He said “you had to respect that cold.”  He loved Canada, but he longed for the clouds of Ireland.  He was burned by the pristine white snow on the ground and the deep blue skies. He wanted to have the protective clouds. His eyes were hungry for colour by spring. He was struck by the colours that a young female student in his class was wearing. He longed for such colours.  This is very much unlike my visit to Ireland when I yearned for the clouds to disappear and give me the sun and blue skies sprinkled with happy little clouds.

When he was in Canada, a student then said there was a film downtown in Winnipeg that he should see and Moriarty said, I am going to see that film because I don’t care what it is I just want to see the colours in the film. He said the film was called Elvira Madigan and it was a wonderful film. Amazingly I had also seen that little known-film that same winter! I remember it well. I was struck too by the beauty in the film embodied by the beauty of the young woman protagonist in the film. She was beautiful. Of course, I was a young lad much impressed by what I saw. The film was beautiful and I have never seen it again. I must see it again. I too long for the beauty.

Moriarty said he was entranced by the green fields in the film. I was entranced by the beauty of the woman. He did not remember much of the story other than that it was a love story. So too with me. That is all I remember, but I don’t remember the green fields I only remember the beautiful young woman.

Moriarty remembered more though than I did. He said a respectable bourgeois man, a middle-aged man, a married man, fell in love with Elvira and they went out into those green fields and tried to catch butterflies with their hands, but each time they tried to catch one it flew away. But the man had fallen in love profoundly without economic considerations. As Moriarty so eloquently put it:

“They are walking in the paradise that nature is, but also in the paradise of their love for each other. But they had their wing at existence anyways. Their love has given them the wings of existence that as Plato and Plotinus said we lost on the way down.”

 

That is what Moriarty wants to recapture. That is what he thinks we have lost in this world in which we can see only use and benefit. We can get that back through nature and we can get that back through love and if we don’t get it back, we will become so desperate that we will destroy nature or ourselves or both. Is that in fact what we are now doing? Moriarty clearly thought so. I tend to agree.

 Some of us watching that film might wonder what Elvira saw in the older man, the respectable man. He asks her what she, this gorgeous woman,  saw in him, and she said that before she met him she had the courage to walk on a tightrope above the ground as that was her occupation but, he gave her the courage to walk on the ground.

I think he meant that he gave her the courage to walk beautifully in nature. That is what Moriarty thought. So many of us lack that courage and that is a dreadful pity.

 

The Oscars are Great

2024 Trip to South West United States, art, Movies

 

You may scoff at the title to this post. How could the Oscars be great? They are not good at determining which films and which actors or technicians did the best job?  No of course not. How naïve can you be?

But they are good at one thing. They point to some very good movies and, of course some dogs.  Yet they have made suggestions to me about movies I might not have notice otherwise. In fact, that I probably would not have noticed otherwise.

Every year I try to watch all the films nominated for Best Picture and this year, I believe for the first time I did it. I watched all 10 of those films so nominated. I watched 2 of them in Steinbach before leaving on our southern journey and then the other 8 in Arizona.  I watched 4 in one week since it was hard for me to find them all until a local theatre chain here had an Oscar film festival. They showed every film at theatres around this huge city and charged a mere $5 a pop. What a great deal!

As a result I saw films I would have never seen before. For example, I likely would not have seen Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall or Past Lives because of the heavy use of subtitles. I find subtitles difficult.  I would have missed each of these 3 films is a gem. Actually, I liked all 10 of the films. Some more than others, but all worth it.  Some were outright gems of civilization. I think I am a better person for seeing them. Isn’t that what great art if for?  I am still not good let alone great, but I am a little better. That is enough for me.

I wanted to blog about the films so I have reflected on them. In some cases I actually read the entire screenplay. That is sometimes a task. But I have learned a lot about the films.  I have enriched my life.

Is the Academy Award ceremony absurd? Absolutely. How can you compare films and say this is the best? It is an absurd task. But looking carefully at films is well worth the effort. I actually think it is part of my spiritual quest in the modern world.

Now what is the best Film? I don’t think the Academy Award ceremony will help us determine that. I don’t know which is the best. I know the pundits have a very hard time predicting too. This year most critics say Oppenheimer will win. Will it? I have no idea at all. So I will just say which of all of these wonderful films I liked the best.  That was The Holdovers!

I am writing this literally one minute before the ceremony starts. So soon we will know. I also really like Past Lives, Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon. I also liked Oppenheimer a lot but don’t want to vote for the favourites.

Let the show begin! Let the best show win!

The Oscars are great. They inspire me.

Zone of Interest.

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Fellow Feeing, Genocide, Mass killings, Morality, Movies, War

 

 

The greatest films and novels are those that change your life. That is the purpose of art.If seeing this film does not change your life, you should quickly make an appointment to see a psychiatrist before it’s too late.

This is the story of blind human indifference to the suffering of others. Not just by Nazis either! It is a story about all of us! It tells the story of an ordinary German family of a Commandant in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.  The family lived on the very edge of Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, unlike some of the other German Concentration camps during the Second World War,

“the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. In other camps, the death rate was lowered from 1943 in an effort to conserve the labor force. In Auschwitz, however, where new transports, mostly of Jews, arrived continuously and kept the camp supplied with labourers, human life never had any great significance.”

As a result, historians estimate that around 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. Of course, around 90% of these were Jews and it is estimated that the majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. Coming in a distant second were Poles. 70,000 to 75,000 of those killed were Poles and coming in third were approximately 20,000 Roma.

That are a lot of people who were slaughtered here, but this fact is ignored by nearly everyone in the film. The film is an examination of the way this carnage was ignored while people went about the minutia of their daily lives. The victims did not count.  They were outside the zone of interest. The Germans who lived their lives and tried to establish a civilized life next to the crematoriums were the ones who counted. How is that possible?

The German family of Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) presided over their family home immediately adjacent to the Concentration Camp, from which sounds are emitted from time to time but pleasantly ignored. The Commandant is in charge of a facility in which thousands of people are murdered each week, but he is more engaged by the fact that the locals have insufficient respect for his prized lilacs while Hedwig, his wife, has time mainly for her children and her lovely garden of which she is justifiably proud. Rudolf and Hedwig were like the Lord and Lady of the castle. Hedwig loved it when Rudolf called her “the Queen of Auschwitz.”

The family has no time to give attention to the people being murdered. They don’t see them or hear them. It is as if they are not there. The victims don’t count. Only the Höss family counts. That is as far as their zone of interest stretches.

The Höss family appreciates their privileges but assumes they are natural and fully earned. The film shows how easy it is to take for granted one’s privilege. Privilege slips on as easily and as comfortably as a glove.  The discomfort—and much worse—on the other side of the wall is not allowed to disturb the peace of the Höss family. There is a complete moral vacuum in the family.

Even if you see the smoke from the Crematoriums, as we do from time to time, and even if people are being incinerated, and even if you hear gunshots or snarling guard dogs, you can ignore them and make a comfortable life for yourself and your family. As a result, Hedwig is able to curate carefully the clothes that are available as a result of Jews dying. She takes a fur coat for herself and gives dresses to her staff. She was disappointed that she was outbid by others when she tried to purchase clothes that had belonged to her Jewish neighbour before she was carted off to be transferred to a Concentration Camp—perhaps even Auschwitz itself. Hedwig just tried to create the best life for her and her family. No one else mattered. She was not interested in any one else.

Someone called this a “cerebral” movie. In some ways that is accurate. It makes you think.  But in other ways, it is completely wrong. This is a movie about how people don’t think. They don’t think about those outside their zone of interest.

I was particularly struck by the German officers—including Rudolf Höss—who dispassionately discuss how to improve the efficiency of the killing machine of the camps. They are each eager to make their own camp more efficient thus improving their chances of promotion. The more people are killed the better for the officers. The effect on the camp residents is entirely irrelevant. After all, they are outside the zone of interest.

It is important to remember that the Höss family was just an ordinary German family. Really, they were like families around the world during the war and at other times.  Ordinary people—people like you and I—are often indifferent to the suffering of others. Those victims are outside our zone of interest. How many of us consider how indigenous people on Canadian Indian Reserves live? How many of us worry about how poor African Americans live in American cities? How many ordinary citizens were interested in how slaves lived on American slave plantations? They were all outside the zone of interest.

We can appreciate how the Nazis in the concentration camp were not monsters. They were ordinary people. They were people like us! And this makes the film even more disturbing. Ordinary people could turn themselves with enthusiasm to the task of making the murder of people more efficient. The spouse of the Commandant could cheerfully ignore that a fur coat she coveted was owned by a neighbour. She could feel the injustice of a minor privilege being taken away from her, but could not feel the injustice of an innocent person being murdered right beside her. And the really scary thing is that we would probably be exactly the same in such circumstances. Do any of us have the right to think for one minute that we would have acted differently?  What gives us the right to think that?

I watched an interview with Jonathan Glazer the director of the film on Amanpour and Company.  He pointed out how the significance of the German family beside Auschwitz was that “they were so grotesquely familiar.”  They, like us, were able to compartmentalize the suffering. Those people on the other side of the wall were “them” not “us.” Here on this side of the wall, the family (us), played in the pool, enjoyed the lovely garden while other people (them) were burning on the other side. This raises the question of how this is possible. How can there be such a grotesque disparity between the treatment of us, our family, and the others on the other side of the wall? Why are some lives more important than others?

The victims of the holocaust are never seen in the film. We hear some vague and disturbing sounds but they are invisible. Glazer said enough films had been made showing the victims and how we should empathize with them. He wanted to make a film where, “rather than empathizing with the victims, we have the discomfort of feeling like the perpetrators.”  Our perspective is from the garden side of the wall. As Glazer said, “It is a film not about ‘look at what they did;’ it’s a film about ‘look at what we do.’

The only element of hope in the film comes from a 9-year-old girl who lives nearby and fills small packages of food for the prisoners. Glazer actually met that girl, now an old woman, and talked to her. She still lives nearby. She demonstrated the best of humanity.

The deep horror is that the Germans living next to the concentration camp were people just like us. Not monsters at all. Ordinary people. They are us. We are them.

 The film establishes what Hannah Arendt said. Evil is not monstrous. Evil is banal. Evil is every day. Evil is ordinary. Evil is us and we are its cheerful and enthusiastic instruments. And that should scare the hell out of all every one of us. Sadly, our zone of interest is incredibly small. It is so small that we are moral pygmies.

Sometimes there is nothing more scary than us!