// literary & arts //
Spring 2006
Not Just Another Munich Rant
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Munich
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Munich is one of those works of art that touches on matters related to current events, politics, and history just enough to prompt all manner of pundits, activists, and politicians to seize upon it for their own purposes. But does Steven Spielberg's latest film merit anywhere near the amount of media coverage it has received so far? To begin an article about Munich with that question, of course, risks the charge of hypocrisy. It is, however, a necessary first consideration if one wants to gain some perspective and avoid blithely throwing one more log onto an already raging fire.
Munich tackles two very contentious issues—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more implicitly, US foreign policy since September 11. It provides a fictional account ("inspired by real events," as we are informed at the outset) of a notable counter-terrorism operation: the troubled series of assassination missions undertaken by Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, against people closely linked to Black September, the Palestinian nationalist terrorist group responsible for the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Since its December 23rd release, Munich has elicited a stream of intense responses. And by now, they have taken on a life of their own, becoming part of the movie's cultural context. For that reason, a survey of the most prominent and heated reactions is in order.
First out of the gates was Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic who has proven to be Munich's most tenacious critic. Over the course of two articles, one from mid-December and another from early February, he has come down hard on the film for what he sees as its unconscionable equation of terrorists with counterterrorists—"the sin of moral equivalence"—and its insufficient support for a Jewish state because it questions Zionism. Munich is "soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness," he says, and only depicts "cruel Israelis with remorse" or "cruel Israelis without remorse." He bristles especially at the movie's marketing and interview comments by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, one of the film's two screenwriters, which together expose "the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film" and its hypocritical "wish to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time."
Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor at Commentary, identifies the same political shortcoming of an immoral moral equivalence in his more sustained and even more scathing feature in his magazine's February issue. It turns out he sees less of an equivalence and more of a systematic move to show the "evil of the Israelis" (who come across as "heartless and methodical," as well as "sloppy") as juxtaposed with sympathetic Palestinians (who, he feels, are unrepresentative, unfortunately not "your stereotypical terrorists," but rather are shown as passionate and principled). Additionally, he denounces the film's "radically tendentious reading of history," which casts the Israeli counterterrorism operation as "the root cause" of all subsequent Palestinian terrorism. Like Wieseltier, Schoenfeld reserves the most opprobrium for Spielberg's and Kushner's press statements, which make clear the "treacherous" purpose behind "the most hypocritical film of the year."
Similar points, expressed in a similar register, have been made by respected major opinion columnists like David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer. Limiting himself to the issue of historical accuracy, Aaron Klein--Time's Jerusalem correspondent and author of a new history of post-Munich Israeli counterterrorism, Striking Back—explained in Slate how "artistic license overwhelms" in the movie. He judges "fanciful" its portrayal of "disillusioned, guilt-ridden, and paranoid" Mossad agents, who are part of a single, off-the-books team attaining intelligence from a mysterious French organization.
But criticism has come not only from those who view the film as slanted against Israel and therefore worthy of condemnation. For example, The New York Review of Books saw fit to have Henry Siegman, a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, review Munich. For him, the movie never raises the issue of moral equivalence, and if anything, it leans in favor of Israel by neglecting to depict its "decades-long occupation" and by focusing overwhelmingly on Israelis, "who inevitably emerge as more real, personally appealing, and morally attractive than the Palestinian terrorists, whom the viewer never gets to know much about."
Finally, one very notable critique of Munich from this same perspective has been that of Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia. His article, published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and online at electronicintifada.com, indicts the movie for its exclusive focus on "the souls of Israeli Jews," so that, like "Zionist propaganda," it presents Palestinians alone as having compelled Israel's "choice of terror." Spielberg, he argues, "humanizes Israeli terrorists in Munich but expectedly not the Palestinian terrorists who are portrayed as having no conscience."
All told, the commentaries offer up a showdown of diametrically opposed interpretations, a reaction predictably divided down partisan lines. The writers, whether tending to the left or the right, find consensus only in the view—almost presupposed—that Munich does indeed have a forthright political perspective, one that demands our moral indignation.
It would be unfair to characterize the whole dynamic of Munich's reception as one of cut-rate political opportunism with everyone seeing what they want to see, confirming views already held. However, far too much space has been given over to those who are more than willing to reduce a work of art to a simple political message, stripped of texture, which can be deemed either supportive or opposed to a cause, then marshaled conveniently into ongoing debates.
It is hard to come up with a less illuminating way in which to treat a film, however distinctly political it may be in its own presentation. A facile and obtuse form of evaluation, it renders fundamental questions of aesthetic value and distinction entirely secondary, if they are broached at all. And engagement with the film's political aspects devolves into the crude detection of supposed allegiances and a tallying of discreet signs. It is no wonder, then, that the films that whip up the most controversy in our society often are blown entirely out of proportion to their stature and receive superficial analysis. In this respect, the debates over Munich have been as unproductive and as misguided as those over The Passion of the Christ were, to take simply the most recent prior case. That these two movies can claim approximately mirror-image distributions across the political spectrum of champions and detractors only goes to show how formulaic this mode of reception is. In short, the present political controversy over Munich, conducted so far on impoverished and sensationalistic terms, needs to be rejected.
This tiresome approach ignores how a film's politics are inextricably enmeshed in its formal qualities, developing in large part out of them. An analysis along this line sheds new light onMunich. It serves to reframe the discussion on a level commensurate with the movie itself, a level that political commentators largely discount, so eager are they to score debating points.Munich still comes out flawed, but the reasons can no longer be chalked up to either of the two dominant criticisms aimed at the movie: historical inaccuracy and an alleged establishment of moral equivalence between the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli assassins. Instead, it becomes more sensible—above all, more true to the experience of the work—to deflate Munich's self-importance by acknowledging just how odd and confused it is. As expressed through the film, Spielberg's approach to politics emerges as not necessarily worth the outrage.
Munich is deeply divided against itself and often entirely muddled. It combines serious political topics, energetic thriller genre trappings, and discordant directorial pet themes into a blend of competing tendencies that fail to link up. This mixture reaches some sort of gloriously bombastic apex of incoherence precisely during its climax. In a frenzied montage, Spielberg juxtaposes our Mossad agent protagonist, Avner (Eric Bana), making ardent yet tormented love to his wife with a culminating flashback to the final horrific chaos of the Munich hostage situation. As Avner reaches convulsive orgasm, images of explosions and gunfire fade into the frame in psychosexual unison with laughable gravity. It is a moment emblematic of the film's jumble of strained solemnity and personal idiosyncrasy: Spielberg orchestrates a bizarre conflation between the violent political drama and Avner's own intimate family issues. Munichoverlays a set of broken-home and daddy issues onto Avner's moral dilemmas, complicating one's ability to extract a political meaning. Spielberg has been mulling over these themes for years (at least since E.T., and as recently as War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise's redeemed deadbeat-dad character), indulging them no matter how trivial they seem compared to the weight of the larger political matter at hand.
Yet there is an even greater tonal problem that trips up Munich. A basic tension arises from the attempt to craft a balanced portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the confines of the thriller genre, whose dramatic conventions are both inherently unbalanced and morally un-serious in their logical unfolding. Spielberg's impulse and talent for rollicking entertainment leads the film to embrace the structure of a deft, globetrotting thriller full of kinetic intrigue and incident, but it constantly runs up against his inclusion of sober political monologues and bits of humanizing characterization. The thriller structure ensures that the viewer identifies with the Mossad agents throughout, carried along by frictionless dramatic clichés that encourage the viewer to root for a side. The competing urge to express a morally reflective posture ends up registering only momentarily before being undercut.
For example, each assassination attempt consists of some brief prepackaged effort to humanize Palestinian targets, followed by reassertions of the standard sympathy with the protagonists and of the thriller's relish for action. And then these episodes are bookended by stilted moral discussions among the Mossad assassination squad back at their hideouts, sections that play out like an informal Israeli debate club with each team member representing a different schematic personality type in the Jewish state and the diaspora (the mensch, the muscle, the neurotic, etc.). The overall effect of these elements is not so much a sense of moral complexity, which might touch on ambivalence or equivalence, as it is a sense of incoherence and botched integration. Though Spielberg, armed with Kushner's screenplay of awkward oratory, probably intended to make a work with a clear political message—something about the gradual erosion of Israeli moral high ground—that is not what resulted.
If one overlooks all of this as a political commentator, then it is easy to cherry-pick moments and aspects, building a case for one's position. Throw in a preoccupation with citing statements extrinsic to the movie, and the critique comes to rest entirely on an abstracted idea of the film's potential meaning rather than on a sincere reckoning with what resulted on screen.
As it turns out, those who have been most worked up about Munich, most affronted by it, have also inadvertently given it the most undue credit. So let them seethe in empty righteousness. But the rest of us should have the resolve to dismiss that reaction, and to dismiss Munich, a film that merely purports to be provocative and serious. There are too many other contemporary films that engage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with political acuity, formal rigor, and conviction to let Munich continue to clog up public conversation. Be sure to check out Amos Gitai'sKippur and Kedma, Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi's Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, and Avi Mograbi's soon-to-be-released Avenge But One of My Eyes.
Munich tackles two very contentious issues—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more implicitly, US foreign policy since September 11. It provides a fictional account ("inspired by real events," as we are informed at the outset) of a notable counter-terrorism operation: the troubled series of assassination missions undertaken by Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, against people closely linked to Black September, the Palestinian nationalist terrorist group responsible for the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Since its December 23rd release, Munich has elicited a stream of intense responses. And by now, they have taken on a life of their own, becoming part of the movie's cultural context. For that reason, a survey of the most prominent and heated reactions is in order.
First out of the gates was Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic who has proven to be Munich's most tenacious critic. Over the course of two articles, one from mid-December and another from early February, he has come down hard on the film for what he sees as its unconscionable equation of terrorists with counterterrorists—"the sin of moral equivalence"—and its insufficient support for a Jewish state because it questions Zionism. Munich is "soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness," he says, and only depicts "cruel Israelis with remorse" or "cruel Israelis without remorse." He bristles especially at the movie's marketing and interview comments by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, one of the film's two screenwriters, which together expose "the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film" and its hypocritical "wish to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time."
Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor at Commentary, identifies the same political shortcoming of an immoral moral equivalence in his more sustained and even more scathing feature in his magazine's February issue. It turns out he sees less of an equivalence and more of a systematic move to show the "evil of the Israelis" (who come across as "heartless and methodical," as well as "sloppy") as juxtaposed with sympathetic Palestinians (who, he feels, are unrepresentative, unfortunately not "your stereotypical terrorists," but rather are shown as passionate and principled). Additionally, he denounces the film's "radically tendentious reading of history," which casts the Israeli counterterrorism operation as "the root cause" of all subsequent Palestinian terrorism. Like Wieseltier, Schoenfeld reserves the most opprobrium for Spielberg's and Kushner's press statements, which make clear the "treacherous" purpose behind "the most hypocritical film of the year."
Similar points, expressed in a similar register, have been made by respected major opinion columnists like David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer. Limiting himself to the issue of historical accuracy, Aaron Klein--Time's Jerusalem correspondent and author of a new history of post-Munich Israeli counterterrorism, Striking Back—explained in Slate how "artistic license overwhelms" in the movie. He judges "fanciful" its portrayal of "disillusioned, guilt-ridden, and paranoid" Mossad agents, who are part of a single, off-the-books team attaining intelligence from a mysterious French organization.
But criticism has come not only from those who view the film as slanted against Israel and therefore worthy of condemnation. For example, The New York Review of Books saw fit to have Henry Siegman, a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, review Munich. For him, the movie never raises the issue of moral equivalence, and if anything, it leans in favor of Israel by neglecting to depict its "decades-long occupation" and by focusing overwhelmingly on Israelis, "who inevitably emerge as more real, personally appealing, and morally attractive than the Palestinian terrorists, whom the viewer never gets to know much about."
Finally, one very notable critique of Munich from this same perspective has been that of Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia. His article, published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and online at electronicintifada.com, indicts the movie for its exclusive focus on "the souls of Israeli Jews," so that, like "Zionist propaganda," it presents Palestinians alone as having compelled Israel's "choice of terror." Spielberg, he argues, "humanizes Israeli terrorists in Munich but expectedly not the Palestinian terrorists who are portrayed as having no conscience."
All told, the commentaries offer up a showdown of diametrically opposed interpretations, a reaction predictably divided down partisan lines. The writers, whether tending to the left or the right, find consensus only in the view—almost presupposed—that Munich does indeed have a forthright political perspective, one that demands our moral indignation.
It would be unfair to characterize the whole dynamic of Munich's reception as one of cut-rate political opportunism with everyone seeing what they want to see, confirming views already held. However, far too much space has been given over to those who are more than willing to reduce a work of art to a simple political message, stripped of texture, which can be deemed either supportive or opposed to a cause, then marshaled conveniently into ongoing debates.
It is hard to come up with a less illuminating way in which to treat a film, however distinctly political it may be in its own presentation. A facile and obtuse form of evaluation, it renders fundamental questions of aesthetic value and distinction entirely secondary, if they are broached at all. And engagement with the film's political aspects devolves into the crude detection of supposed allegiances and a tallying of discreet signs. It is no wonder, then, that the films that whip up the most controversy in our society often are blown entirely out of proportion to their stature and receive superficial analysis. In this respect, the debates over Munich have been as unproductive and as misguided as those over The Passion of the Christ were, to take simply the most recent prior case. That these two movies can claim approximately mirror-image distributions across the political spectrum of champions and detractors only goes to show how formulaic this mode of reception is. In short, the present political controversy over Munich, conducted so far on impoverished and sensationalistic terms, needs to be rejected.
This tiresome approach ignores how a film's politics are inextricably enmeshed in its formal qualities, developing in large part out of them. An analysis along this line sheds new light onMunich. It serves to reframe the discussion on a level commensurate with the movie itself, a level that political commentators largely discount, so eager are they to score debating points.Munich still comes out flawed, but the reasons can no longer be chalked up to either of the two dominant criticisms aimed at the movie: historical inaccuracy and an alleged establishment of moral equivalence between the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli assassins. Instead, it becomes more sensible—above all, more true to the experience of the work—to deflate Munich's self-importance by acknowledging just how odd and confused it is. As expressed through the film, Spielberg's approach to politics emerges as not necessarily worth the outrage.
Munich is deeply divided against itself and often entirely muddled. It combines serious political topics, energetic thriller genre trappings, and discordant directorial pet themes into a blend of competing tendencies that fail to link up. This mixture reaches some sort of gloriously bombastic apex of incoherence precisely during its climax. In a frenzied montage, Spielberg juxtaposes our Mossad agent protagonist, Avner (Eric Bana), making ardent yet tormented love to his wife with a culminating flashback to the final horrific chaos of the Munich hostage situation. As Avner reaches convulsive orgasm, images of explosions and gunfire fade into the frame in psychosexual unison with laughable gravity. It is a moment emblematic of the film's jumble of strained solemnity and personal idiosyncrasy: Spielberg orchestrates a bizarre conflation between the violent political drama and Avner's own intimate family issues. Munichoverlays a set of broken-home and daddy issues onto Avner's moral dilemmas, complicating one's ability to extract a political meaning. Spielberg has been mulling over these themes for years (at least since E.T., and as recently as War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise's redeemed deadbeat-dad character), indulging them no matter how trivial they seem compared to the weight of the larger political matter at hand.
Yet there is an even greater tonal problem that trips up Munich. A basic tension arises from the attempt to craft a balanced portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the confines of the thriller genre, whose dramatic conventions are both inherently unbalanced and morally un-serious in their logical unfolding. Spielberg's impulse and talent for rollicking entertainment leads the film to embrace the structure of a deft, globetrotting thriller full of kinetic intrigue and incident, but it constantly runs up against his inclusion of sober political monologues and bits of humanizing characterization. The thriller structure ensures that the viewer identifies with the Mossad agents throughout, carried along by frictionless dramatic clichés that encourage the viewer to root for a side. The competing urge to express a morally reflective posture ends up registering only momentarily before being undercut.
For example, each assassination attempt consists of some brief prepackaged effort to humanize Palestinian targets, followed by reassertions of the standard sympathy with the protagonists and of the thriller's relish for action. And then these episodes are bookended by stilted moral discussions among the Mossad assassination squad back at their hideouts, sections that play out like an informal Israeli debate club with each team member representing a different schematic personality type in the Jewish state and the diaspora (the mensch, the muscle, the neurotic, etc.). The overall effect of these elements is not so much a sense of moral complexity, which might touch on ambivalence or equivalence, as it is a sense of incoherence and botched integration. Though Spielberg, armed with Kushner's screenplay of awkward oratory, probably intended to make a work with a clear political message—something about the gradual erosion of Israeli moral high ground—that is not what resulted.
If one overlooks all of this as a political commentator, then it is easy to cherry-pick moments and aspects, building a case for one's position. Throw in a preoccupation with citing statements extrinsic to the movie, and the critique comes to rest entirely on an abstracted idea of the film's potential meaning rather than on a sincere reckoning with what resulted on screen.
As it turns out, those who have been most worked up about Munich, most affronted by it, have also inadvertently given it the most undue credit. So let them seethe in empty righteousness. But the rest of us should have the resolve to dismiss that reaction, and to dismiss Munich, a film that merely purports to be provocative and serious. There are too many other contemporary films that engage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with political acuity, formal rigor, and conviction to let Munich continue to clog up public conversation. Be sure to check out Amos Gitai'sKippur and Kedma, Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi's Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, and Avi Mograbi's soon-to-be-released Avenge But One of My Eyes.
PHILIP FILERI is a Columbia senior majoring in history, with a focus on modern European political and intellectual history. He is a staff writer and former Film section editor for The Columbia Spectator and a contributor to The Blue and White. In the fall, he will be in graduate school for history, location to be announced.