I agree Lochdale. I don’t agree with **Lissner **at all either.
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Why is this so often the default response to an artistic opinion in this forum, to attempt to extrapolate it into an inflexible law in order to disagree with it? Why can’t you see a specific response to a specific artwork as a specific response to a specific artwork? Is it because the default mode of analysis here is scientific? An interesting discussion perhaps. In any rate, Malthus, no: just because you can extrapolate from something I said something I did *not *say doesn’t mean it has any validity whatsoever.
Cite?
[QUOTE=even sven;10807749We are losing sight of what actually happened, and turned the Holocaust into a tidy little lesson about the good that hides in the midst of great evil (the ultimate moral of just about every Holocaust film.) [/QUOTE]
FWIW, there are some important exceptions to this, although all of the ones I’m aware of are European; the narrative disorder (for want of a better term) you describe seems to be uniquely American. Another byproduct of the Hays code, IMO.
Your twisted view–and Spielberg’s–in a nutshell.
God forbid a story of the Holocaust should be unentertaining. “Springtime for Hitler” anyone?
Please describe to me anything that has ever happened in the past in a fashion that uses no assigned point of view and has no arc or structure to speak of, and make it make sense.
Hey, say what you will, people will be humming “Springtime for Hitler” years after they’ve forgotten what the girl in the little red coat was.
So . . . someone makes a definitive statement suggesting that Homo sapiens is genetically predisposed (“hardwired”) to require a narrative in order to understand something; I ask for a cite for this definitive statement; and *you *respond that it’s *my *burden to disprove this definitive statement? What’re you, new?
I agree. And tragically, people will hold Schindler’s List up as “history” long after *Shoah *or Come and See are unavailable to all but the deepest-digging aficionado.
Nope, just saying that I’m not sure her point was really a scientific assertion. I think, instead, it was an observation of how we as people tend to deal with our pasts. If, indeed, she was arguing for the existence of a “narrative” gene, then sure, it’s on her to provide a cite. But if that’s the case, then allow me to soften the statement to a more ephemeral, anecdotal form that has a bit more relevance to the argument:
People tend to process historical events by couching them in narrative; it’s the default way that we interact with them and we tend to learn more from it than we do from sheer facts.
And if you still want a cite, then I hereby cite any educational history text ever written.
Mostly agreed, and that probably is a bad thing, but I would also contend that there is nothing inherently toxic about Schindler’s List’s message that makes its lasting memory detrimental to society.
sorry, if you use the word “hardwired,” it implies a biological imperative. No choice, in other words. I disagree, unless someone can show me a cite for such an imperative.
It’s HUGELY detrimental if it becomes the default narrative of the Holocaust, which already to many people it is.
Fair enough, then; I’ll let Alessan provide a cite of her more semantically extreme argument if she wants to make a point of it. In the meantime, I’ll stick by my philosophically similar but aesthetically different statement, and be interested to hear your thoughts on it vis a vis the conversation at hand.
Maybe we should create another thread for the Holocaust and Art/Films?
Who? i don’t know anyone who thinks the Holocaust was not that bad because they saw Schindler’s List. I think most people have heard or learned enough about the Holocaust to recognize that this is one story out of the many more tragic ones during that period.
Man, it’d really be great to have that other thread right about now…last one before I leave for work, I promise. I firmly believe that nobody thinks (or will ever think) that it is the default narrative of the Holocaust, and if you’re contending that people do then it’s my turn to ask for a cite.
What it is, and what people think of it as, is a narrative from the Holocaust, telling a very specific story about a very specific (true) event and making no attempts to take it farther than that. There is no, and never will be any, default narrative for the Holocaust because the Holocaust was just too big and inclusive of so many different events. And if we reach a point in history where it can actually be diminished to a single, universal narrative, I am positive that a) it will be hundreds of years from now and b) that narrative won’t be Schindler’s List.
My “cite” is simply that it’s taught in schools as history; that Richard Dreyfuss, in his speech at the Oscars that dreadful night, said something like “This movie isn’t just about history, it *is *history”; and the anecdotal evidence of seeing what movies rent to what customers and what questions they ask in this regard.
And even if it’s not diminished to a “single, universal narrative,” to have the default narrative; the most widely experienced narrative; be a narrative in which a Holocaust denier would find nothing to object to, is horrifying to me.
400 kms away from my birthplace - San Miguel de Tucumán - are located the ruins of Quilmes. Although smaller they are as spectacular as Machu Pichu and just as beautiful.
In 1666 the governor of Tucumán, Marquis Alonso de Mercado y Villacorta finished the final campaign against the Quilmes indians. Their city (now in ruins) was sieged and taken by assault, those that survived were sent away, 1500 kms to the south, to a place near Buenos Aires now called Quilmes.
The ruins, that city and a popular beer are all that remain of those indians. The few survivors of the siege and of the trip refused to breed and their race is now extint.
By saying “That’s the last time we let you do that to us” you show that you failed to learn about the holocaust (and history in general).
Who is you? Who is us? The victims were simply humans… just as their killers.