Lurker Rants, Too!

[Mark.Novitz at ny.ubs.com]

     The lurker rises again...if not only momentarily.
     
     I really like this list.  You guys and gals are all pretty damn smart 
     (smarter than me, I'm almost sure) and very well read (more than me).  
     I glean a heck of a lot from things I read here...and enjoy it.  Thank 
     you.
     
     But as the dumber and more illiterate amongst us, I want to remind you 
     all of one thing that I feel is heavily ignored by all your arguments:
     
     Speilberg may be manipulative, even pandering to you and I, with his 
     various gas/water whatevers, but the film is quite a piece for 
     standard Blokbuster Hollywood (as someone else said) and that, well, 
     that is exactly my point.
     
     People watch this movie (and they did, in a BIG way--check the ratings 
     released today--more folks watched the film on TV than the entire 
     theatre audience over the course of its run).  Because of "his" big 
     name, because of his fame, because of his success, people will watch 
     it and continue to watch it.  And they will be educated; they will 
     learn.  Perhaps something they never understood before.  Perhaps 
     something they never even knew, or cared about before.
     
     While watching Sunday I looked out my bedroom window into the wall of 
     apartments across the alley.  I saw many TVs tuned into the same 
     intermission screen that I was watching.  And the people who live in 
     back of me (on West 97th Street), for the most part, are not Steelys 
     or davemarcs, or Mittlewerks.  They are mostly blue collar; many are 
     non-white.
     
     None of them know who the f**k Riefenstahl is.  They'll never pick up 
     anything called "Hitler's Willing Executioners".  I'm not making a 
     definitive "call" here, nor am I intentionally trying to stereotype, 
     but I'm going on a pretty good hunch.
     
     But, I know, because I saw, that they'll watch "Schindler's".  They 
     might not even really understand what's going on in the selection 
     scene--but they can tell it's pretty harrowing.  They've probably 
     never seen anyone eat diamonds and bread before.  They might even 
     extend themselves by trying to imagine what someone expects to do with 
     diamonds that they've eaten.  That's pretty harrowing, too.  As such, 
     SL will leave a mark on the memory of any everyman who watches it.
     
     So I'll hit the bookstores and look for Steely's booklist--and I'll 
     read.  But not everyone does.  There's only a few hundred people on 
     this list discussing the finer aspects of Nazi filmmakers and whether 
     they understood their own place in the Holocaust.
     
     But there's 55 million people (note: not factchecked, I could be off) 
     who watched SL on Sunday night.  And they went into school and work 
     and to dinner and their nighttime bars to discuss it. Some might even 
     follow it up with a little reading--a little Wiesel maybe, perhaps 
     thay'll even find their way to the very readable Tadeus Borowski 
     ("This Way To The Gas...)--maybe SL's not truthful enough for you, too 
     manipulative, perhaps some of you P-Listers can even say it's a bad 
     film.
     
     But a lot of folks watched that bad film--and that's a good thing. 
     Don't forget that while you're all hashing it out.
     
     /mark/
     /nyc/