Unfortunately, I can’t totally be sure about all the plot points because it’s no longer in theaters anywhere in Western Washington (my home area) and the DVD won’t be out for a few months. You are right in that the doctor was the only one clearly implicated (in the scene at the mass burial pit). I assumed the lawyer had been involved in the robbery plot because in his confrontation with Rachel right before he was shot he admitted to collaborating with the Nazis. Plus, the likelihood that he would trust the man who sent the Jewish clients on the boat that was attacked by the Nazi patrol boat is much higher if he was involved in the robbery plot. With that assumption, I thought the lawyer had intended to keep the money himself but that the doctor knew about the black book and instead decided to take it himself. .
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
lissener writes:
> So if a person who spent his earliest years under a shadow that must surely
> have affected every aspect of the world he lived in, says that, as an artist, that
> memory has an effect on his art, I’m certainly going to take him at his word.
Verhoeven didn’t say that his memories of World War II had an effect on his art. You said that. Do you have any citation that he ever said such a thing? What you’re doing is attributing an idea to Verhoeven (that he was significantly affected, in some way that he still remembers, by the events of World War II) that you have no idea if he actually believes, and then you’re claiming that unless someone else proves that it isn’t the case, then it must be true because it sounds plausible to you. It’s possible that it’s true that it affected him in ways that he still remembers. It’s also possible that it didn’t affect him that much. Unless you have a citation showing that he’s ever addressed the issue, we have no way of telling.
[/QUOTE]
So . . . even though I introduced it into this discussion by saying, “Verhoeven has said, in interviews, that his childhood memories of the Nazi occupation of Holland are extremely important in his work,” you were still working from the assumption that it was nothing more than a personal theory of mine, which I dug out of my, um, hat for the purposes of this thread? He mentioned his childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland as an overarching influence on his work in the commentary track of Starship Troopers (which is, among other things, a parody of the pro-Nazi propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl). I also saw it in print when I was researching the biographical capsule I wrote for The Scarecrow Movie Video Guide.
O.K., I missed that sentence. What did Verhoeven say about his memories of World War II? What specifically did he remember about it?
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
O.K., I missed that sentence. What did Verhoeven say about his memories of World War II? What specifically did he remember about it?
[/QUOTE]
IIRC (I’m not going to re-screen the commentary track of Starship Troopers just for this thread; if I do so again in the near future I’ll post something here), he mentioned his memories of the Occupation as one of many influences; I don’t remember the details.
Meanwhile, Google offers a rich supply of references. Here’s one: The A.V. Club — Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
I have one memory that I can be sure is from when I was three years old, but it’s very fragmentary. I have some other memories from when I was six years old or less but not a lot of them, and they don’t say much about the state of the world of the time.
[/QUOTE]
At the time, were you living in an occupied city during the largest military conflict in the history of the world? Because I think memories of that would tend to stay with you a little longer than, say, nap-time at kindergarten.
[QUOTE=Miller]
At the time, were you living in an occupied city during the largest military conflict in the history of the world? Because I think memories of that would tend to stay with you a little longer than, say, nap-time at kindergarten.
[/QUOTE]
See, this is a point I was trying to figure out how I was going to address. My other clearest early memories–besides the one I mentioned, where I saw my mother in a wheelchair without any kind of preparation for this–was when my dad got beat up by a gang with beer bottles and had blood coming out of his ears, and when Bobby Kennedy was shot, when I was five. All pretty traumatic episodes; and none anything to compare to a Nazi occupation.