Michael B. Oren, author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Oxford University Press), among other titles, and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem, recently wrote a review* of "The Pianist" for The New Republic. In light of recent events, I found this part of the piece especially interesting. (*Subscription required)
But I have my own suspicion about the reasons for the critical success of The Pianist, especially in Europe. Here is a film that conflates the Jew's identity as victim with the Jew's role as savior; that reduces Europe's guilt to a specific evil and purifies it. Here, at last, is the film that Europe has been waiting for: the one that gets it off the hook. In this sense, this film full of bad news is really full of good news. It holds out the possibility of absolution.
And Oren later elaborates:
. . . [N]ot surprisingly, The Pianist, in particular the Hosenfeld scenes, has been acclaimed throughout Europe. Filmed in Berlin and Warsaw, financed by French cable television, it is a perfect product of Europe, made for its benefit.
For Wladyslaw Szpilman is Europe's stereotypical Jew: cosmopolitan, artistic, child-like, godless, rootless, utterly unprepared for history, and averse to power. Those same adjectives describe a certain contemporary European ideal. (The unfortunate political consequences of that ideal have been analyzed sharply by Robert Kagan.) By conflating Jewish identity and European identity--note the interplay of classical and klezmer melodies in the score--The Pianist has the effect of absolving Europe of its guilt.
By taking these excerpts out of their much fuller context, I'm somewhat obscuring Oren's main focus, which has more to do with Polanski's personal identity issues in particular and those of European Jewry in general, as well as the overall dilutive effect of political correctness in public appraisals of Holocaust "art." But Oren has made a separate and timely point here, which bears closer focus. It's about this process of absolution in which Europe has been bathing itself of late -- absolution from responsibility for the many evils that it permitted to thrive in its midst barely more than half a century ago. This process is allowing Europe the indulgence of reliving its inglorious past. It has, in Santayana's sense, actively solicited and cultivated permission to forget. The consequences are already apparent.
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Postscript: In Googling around for other mentions of Oren's review, I came across this infantile critique, of which I'll share just a representative snippet:
In short, Oren faults Polanski solely for his choice to adapt this particular story, penned by this particular pianist. The only logical conclusion is that Michael B. Oren’s pianist is smaller than Polanski’s.
And, in the same issue:
"Is blogging all it's cracked up to be?"
You have to link for the photo. I won't waste the bandwidth.
