Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[Roy Gordon]

Steelhead wrote:

> >Spielberg undoubtedly should have beaten Goldhagen to it and tacked it on.
> 
> But that's just the point, Roy. Spielberg could not entertain a single
> premise of Goldhagen's argument (or Hannah Arendt's or Robert Jay Lifton's
> or TRP's)--to have done so would have resulted in a very, very different
> film--a film that might have tried to at least hint at some of the
> geo-political, social, religious, technological, and economic impulses
> driving the Holocaust.

I'm happy the subject has gotten out there at all in the mass media.

I don't hold Spielberg in a lesser light for not having included all the above (which 
I promise to do in whatever emails I now send) any more than I discredit _War and 
Peace_ because Tolstoy didn't get too into the plight of the peasants.

For some perspective, when John Ford's _The Grapes of Wrath_ was made there was 
discussion as to whether real social problems were a proper subject for movies at 
all!  This may be hard to believe but I read the original article years ago 
(reprinted from Variety?)

It doesn't seem to me to be too much an argument against a film or a book to say it 
should have been a different one, and for that reason the one produced is no good.

> At best, this movie is a simple and contrived Christian morality play-about
> tribulation, deliverance, redemption and salvation, right?, where Germany
> is redeemed for its little episode of mass pyschopathology

I guess I'm too dull of mind and imagination (it's ok, I've been accuse of it 
before), because I did not take the film as showing a redeemed Germany at all.
 
> > > [Bushs' father and grandfather lawyers for German and Nazi linked firms.  Bush
> > >   liked Schindler's List]

> >Very little would surprise me about George Bush, but I'm really surprised at
> >this argument.
> 
> What's surprising? That oilman Bush [ stuff related to Bush's politics, etc. ]

Well, I wasn't explicit.  What was surprising to me was the logic of the argument.  
Bush likes movie X, Bush is bad and has had dealings with things discussed in X, 
therefore X is bad.
 
					-- roy