Hollywood and Genocide

I'm not excited about the title of this post, but it speaks to a real development. In today's (January 11, 2009) New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn presents a thoughtful analysis of recent films treating different aspects of the Holocaust. He's critical of stories that "exploit" the Holocaust only to construct a "narrative of redemption." He doesn't like how these stories "attenuate" the distinction between perpetrators and bystanders, how they come to play out as "escapist fantasy" or "action" films. These are familiar narratives that transform a uniquely horrible crime--genocide--into the familiar stories of struggle and coming of age.
I appreciated Heilbrunn's familiarity with recent debates concerning the nature of Holocaust studies, scholarship, and memorialization. It's certainly problematic when Daniel Craig's Jewish partisan is inseparable from his James Bond, and it has been equally problematic when historical treatments of the Holocaust neglect Jewish efforts at restisting the Nazis. Certainly, the Holocaust/genocide is too complex and too gigantic for successful treatment in a single 120 minute film. Nonetheless, narrative is how we process and make sensible collective identity. We have no choice but to simplify the past.
For my part, I can't imagine any Holocaust-themed film more trivial than Life is Beautiful (1997), and yet it won 3 Academy Awards. I was troubled that Benigni chose to set his maudlin comedy in a death camp. But people loved it. I assume that Benigni's story spoke to a collective need for redemption and hope, directing our attention to love and sacrifice as the most sublime and transcendent moments in a life so often dulled by suffering and isolation. I doubt that Holocaust survivors would choose to paint their memories in such mawkish, soft-focus strokes, but I don't think the film was really intended for them. In fact, I doubt it was even about them.
And I would say the same about this latest batch of films. The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Valkyrie, and Defiance are meant for us. They are not intended to recreate the totality of the Holocaust or fully define it. They are stories following in the tradition of all historical drama, to open a space for 21st century viewers to think about choices, and values, and shared fears. They are there to evoke catharsis, even if they only manage to provide escapism.
Historians, not directors and novelists, are the ones responsible for chronicaling the breadth and depth of those times. But I think Aristotle was right when he wrote that poetry can access deeper, universal truths that history's partiularity neglects. Raul Hilberg, Ian Kershaw and Christopher Browning will always succed in opening up to us the vast and terrible reality of the Holocaust, but it is more likely we'll come to recognize shared human experience in the eyes of Daniel Craig, Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise.