The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Holocaust, Hollywood Style

Here's a guest post from Ben Crair, an assistant editor at The Daily Beast who wrote an article for Slate this week on Hollywood Holocaust films. 

I hoped that my article on Holocaust film would provoke some discussion, and now that some XX Factor contributors have gotten the ball rolling, I find myself unable to abstain from jumping in. (And thanks to XX Factor for the opportunity to do so).

Melinda, it's true that Holocaust film isn't "a peculiarly American phenomenon"—indeed, the subject is taken up more frequently in European film. And Europe has produced plenty of Holocaust dreck. (Life is Beautiful is from Italy.) But Europe has also given us films like Shoah, Night and Fog, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The first film, which clocks in at 9.5 hours, is a famous example of the difficulty and "inaccessibility" of Holocaust art, which might turn off your average moviegoer. But what about the latter two? Night and Fog is 32 minutes of more-or-less straightforward documentary footage, while The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a beautiful love story about Jewish teenagers in Italy.

Why has Hollywood failed to produce similar films? Melinda, your assumption is that a film, or a story in Herman Rosenblat's case, must be uplifting in order to be "accessible." You ask, "But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?" Even if we concede that the Holocaust was, in fact, "insane," why should artists "guard against" that truth, rather than open it up and explore it? The problem with Holocaust film in general is that, in order to be "accessible," it routinely sets up such guards via some of the tropes I mentioned in my article and then passes them off as real. What else are we to make of their incorporation of documentary footage or their incessant need to remind us that they are "based on true stories"? Hollywood films try to wear the moral weight and prestige of the Holocaust, but refuse to let it complicate established and sentimental formulas. 

Susannah is right: "Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed." What about fiction and, by extension, film? Cynthia Ozick writes that "when a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that the bridging is the very point, and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force." Hollywood, I fear, has been building faulty bridges.  

Lies, Damn Lies, and Memoirs

I'm having a hard time summoning a lot of outrage over the story of Herman Rosenblat, the Holocaust survivor who reimagined his stay in a subcamp of Buchenwald. In his (now canceled) and unfortunately subtitled memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, he told the beautiful lie that a girl who lived near the camp had kept him alive by chucking apples over the fence to him. He'd already gone on Oprah and told the world that years later, in Coney Island, he and the girl had improbably met again, on a blind date, and had married. But does that really make Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer? (She's the author of Love and Consequences, the 100 percent trumped-up "memoir'' in which, instead of growing up white and well-off in the San Fernando Valley, she's a half-Native American foster child gang-banger in South Central. Details!) Or does Rosenblat's fabulism put him on a moral par with James Frey, whose real adventures in addiction and rehab were wildly improved upon for his memoir-ish A Million Little Pieces? No and no. I guess there is a sense in which every lie is pathological. But there is also a pretty wide chasm between an addict lying to sell books, and a camp survivor lying, according to the statement released through his agent, "to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream."

You know how every time John McCain did something crappy—like oh, say, abandon the wife who waited for him the whole time he was a POW—we said, Hey, the man was in a box for five years; he's allowed! Why would the McCain Rule not apply to poor Herman Rosenblat? Of course passing fiction off as reality is wrong. And I get why Holocaust scholars are "fiercely on guard against fabrication of memories because they taint the truth ... and raise doubts about the millions who were killed or brutalized.'' But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?   

As Rosenblat's tale is still going to be made into a movie, maybe this is just another case, as per Ben Crair, of America's weird insistence on prettying up the Holocaust by focusing on resistance fighters or righteous Gentiles or especially inspirational survivors. I don't see, though, that this emphasis is either a peculiarly American phenomenon—ever been to France?—or particular to our treatment of the Holocaust. Isn't that what Hollywood does? Could be I am just reacting to Crair's jerky line about "the most wonderful season of the year.'' But while it's true that Schindler's List is no Shoah, making the topic accessible to the general public is no crime, either, is it?