Saturday, January 20, 2018

Schindler's List


 No quips on this one.

 Reviewing the National Film Registry, I've seen a lot of films pitched towards the Male Gaze. I've seen a handful pitched towards the Female Gaze. Schindler's List is probably the only movie I've ever seen that I could classify as being pitched towards the Gentile Gaze.

  What I mean by that isn't any sort of betrayal of the fact that this is a film about the unspeakable tragedy that fell most heavily on the Jews of Europe, under the direction of a Jewish man. What I mean is that this movie didn't strike me as being about how people of Jewish heritage should reflect on the Holocaust period, but instead it feels like a film directly challenging the Gentile audience to really look. We spend most of our time with the imposing, booming-voiced opportunist and the fiercely handsome, winsomely childlike sadistic murderer. Other film critics have pointed out that the Jews in this film tend to be physically tiny. Liam Neeson towers over his workforce with more than a hint of paternal protection. But watching as a Gentile, I feel that is the challenge of the film. To see such large scale dehumanization and to see the desires of our worse natures dangled in front of us (the Nazis are almost always seen partying, enjoying expensive things, having sex with beautiful women, raking in piles of cash), and to make the right choice anyway. The breakdown at the end of the film has been criticized as maudlin, but it seems more realistic. This is a man who spent the first half of the war living large, and he saw his money transform into human faces. The pardon is in the fact that his "wasted" money got the Nazis to trust him, which enabled lives to be saved.

  It's not a film with easy answers about what makes people wake up and decide that some people are far less deserving of life... or even truly a film that answers what makes some people realize the "untermensch" are actually human beings and become willing to risk everything to save them. At three harrowing hours, what we get is a documentary-like focus. This is Spielberg's tightest film from a narrative point of view, and is his quietest film, as he rarely spells anything out for the audience.

 This is a movie that should be required viewing, but it's an experience above being a film.

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Rear Window


Another National Film Registry post. I'll tell you exactly what I saw and what I think it means.

So, here's another Hitchcock masterpiece, starring Jimmy Stewart being kind of a grump that everyone treats as way younger than he clearly is, and an ethereally lovely blonde, costumes by Edith Head. I guess why tamper too much with a formula that works (though Rear Window predates Vertigo by four years)? Especially since the plots manage to be different enough that you aren't constantly comparing L.B. Jefferies and Scottie Ferguson - even though you can tell some of the shots here were the forerunners of the later film.

Most people look at this movie through the lens (har) of voyeurism and lack of connection in urban spaces. Jeff feels justified in spying on people and having gossipy conversations with his nurse about what he suspects based on his observations, using the justification that they could watch him right back. This isn't the first time that Jimmy Stewart has been given a role more traditionally suited to a female character - in It's a Wonderful Life, we got him as the perennial martyr. Here, he's a Yenta, who is only missing trying to matchmake his neighbors and moaning that his kids never call. For a rather unusual twist, the women in this film are the active agents, doing for Jeff because he simply can not do for himself.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about: disability. We're introduced to Jeff as a man suffering the burden of a painful and deeply hampering temporary disability. He is swathed from hip to toes in plaster and can barely move out of his wheelchair. He is chafing at the restrictions of his formerly active life, and is angry that he has been dealt such an unfair blow as to have to spend seven weeks in a wheelchair. Our murder victim is also disabled - a chronic invalid who is rarely shown out of bed. She's also shown to be argumentative and probably rather shrewish. This is a parallel you don't often see when disability is represented on film: our hero is ticked off and snappish because he is dealing with a temporary disability, and no one faults him overly for it. Our disabled victim is not a suffering saint either - she is likely in pain and is as quarrelsome as the guy who is laid up. Yet at no point are we asked to feel sympathy for a murderer who kills disabled people... though rather tellingly, our for-sure turning point is when he murders a friendly little dog.

This is rather revolutionary, even now, where depictions of the disabled tend to indicate that we are much better off being dead and that no one will miss us. While Jeff may not feel much besides curiosity for the life of Mrs. Thorwald, he becomes as involved as possible in her death. I couldn't help but think of a connection from one crip to another. Our stories are so often overlooked and so little told that there's a spark of recognition when a disabled person on screen, even if that person has nothing in common with us, not even the same disability. I don't know if Hitchcock knew about that. I don't know if he was going for the connection between Jeff feeling disposable (we're introduced to him getting turned down from an assignment he had been cultivating because his disability will lay him up slightly longer) and Mrs. Thorwald being literally disposed of for her inconvenience. But society was having the conversation about whether the disabled have any rights worth speaking of, including the right to live, that we are still forced to have. Here, there's no excuse. A jerk of a disabled woman didn't deserve to be strangled and dismembered any more than the clever, kind, and beautiful Lisa Fremont deserved to be strangled by Lars Thorwald. Lisa is saved by the timely intervention of the police, but Mrs. Thorwald is ignored by all except the one disabled figure across from her bedroom window.

Even if this movie doesn't give you the same feels it gave me, I have no hesitation in strongly suggesting it. I'm a Hitchcock fan, true, and this is one of his A-Games.