Black Book
March 2nd, 2007
When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn’t cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks. The word for this is Shoahxploitation.
How titillating is Black Book? At cliffhanger pace, Rachel (Carice van Houten) flees from her bombed-out hiding place, and Verhoeven runs down a comprehensive checklist of World War II tropes: endless narrow escapes through attics, trunks, and caskets, barges that get the Apocalypse Now treatment, resistance airdrops, backroom operations, midnight raids, botched kidnappings, prison breakouts, firing squads, and tense passport controls: “Papiere, bitte!” Oh no, we’re carrying secret microphones and suitcases stuffed with Jewish gold!
Plenty of machine-gun violence leads to gleeful close-ups of mass graves, and Verhoeven doesn’t skimp on the sex, either. When good men are imprisoned, it’s clear that somebody must sleep with the occupiers to free them. Graphic Jew-on-German action follows, and in one extended scene, our dedicated heroine colors her pubic hair to fool the Obersturmbannführer (Sebastian Koch). In turn, drunken fascist swine piss in front of their whores, and our heroine has to vomit a little. And you know if there’s a shitbucket, Verhoeven won’t be satisfied with a simple close-up: somebody has to dump it out over someone else, preferably a naked woman.
I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of movies where the murderous villains carry my father’s name, and the Nazis in Black Book are about as three-dimensional as the ones in Indiana Jones. With Starship Troopers, Verhoeven himself created a compelling satire of fascism. There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance, but is it asking too much that they grow more insightful rather than more graphic and exploitative? Black Book pretends to bring news about duplicity and treachery and the odd bedfellows that wartime makes, but it’s obvious that nothing gets Verhoeven as excited as the cold steel of a Nazi gun against hard Jewish nipples.
Zwartboek. Paul Verhoeven, 2006. *
March 4th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Dr. Fauth –
You write, “There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance. . .” but I am trying to recall which films that deal with this subject you haven’t blasted.
I know you hate “Life is Beautiful” (which definitely is polarizing) but you also hate “The Pianist” and “Sophie’s Choice” (two films I greatly admire.)
Have you seen “The Grey Zone” or “The Pawnbroker?” I’d give those two high marks as well. Also, although it does have faults, there is a lot of good happening in “Schindler’s List.” (Also, although it is almost exclusively “after-the-fact” “Enemies: A Love Story” is brilliant.)
Which films, other than documentaries, tackles this subject matter and wins your approval.
Yours,
Lt. Commander J.S. Hoffman (Ret.)
March 11th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
It’s a good question, and I’ve been thinking about it for a little while. It’s much too big for a blog comment really but I’ll take some stabs. First off, you’re right about me not liking a lot of holocaust movies. I think that’s fair–it’s only reasonable that standards should be high when it comes to making entertainment (or art) out of incomprehensible suffering.
There’s an argument that only non-fiction can be adequate to the Holocaust. Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, Shoah, S21 might be the only appropriate way to approach the topic of genocide. I do believe that fiction can deal with anything though–it might just be a lot harder. I see a number of problems for making it into drama:
That’s why I suspect that in my eyes, the most successful holocaust/WWII dramas are the ones, like the best anti-war movies, that deal with it somewhat obliquely, that come at the topic at an angle, that deal with causes or results without showing reenactments of what we’ve already seen in Night and Fog. Nowhere in Africa, Downfall, The Last Metro, The Night Porter, Safe Conduct, Das Experiment–these aren’t movies that are exactly “about” the Holocaust, but reveal something about it without being burdened by the problems outlined above. There must be many more; I’ll add them when I think of them. I haven’t seen Grey Zone or Pawnbroker.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:41 am
You’ve nailed a problem that Elie Wiesel writes and talks about frequently. He’s made it his life’s work to expose the holocaust and other genocides. He strongly feels that *no* work of art (and he includes his own books) could ever express what it was like to actually be there. He especially hates movies that deal with the topic, yet he also recognizes them for getting the message out. He realizes that Schindler’s List did more for his own cause than anything prior in history, even though he hates it.
You make an interesting case for the films that deal with this “off-screen.” The only problem, I suppose, is that people have an understanding of the actual horrors that went on. We’d like to think that everyone does. . .but the amount of ignorance would surprise you.
“The Pawnbroker” is a masterpiece in this regard — holocaust images are only shown in flashes — litte rememberances of a dead man walking twenty years later. “Enemies: A Love Story” I don’t think has any imagery at all.
“The Grey Zone,” on the other hand, may challenge the Wiesel position — and confronts (to a certain extent) Cynthia Ozick’s position as well. It is just about as brutal a film as I have ever seen — where the audience finds themselves rooting for the deviance of suicide. There are action elements, but I things are so horrible along the way it hardly feels like “adventure.” (I recently rewatched The Mission, and its laying-of-booby traps and battle preperation scenes also somehow magically lacked the “Dirty Dozen”-like feel, even though they were the same visual tropes.)