How
Dangerous is Fiction in Hindsight,
or
What Happens to Art if You Know Too
Much?
Part I
Norman Simms
There have been two most interesting essays posted on EEJH in the last
few days. Though they don’t seem to be
connected, they each raise important questions that overlap. First came the perennial (or perhaps we might
say biannual) discussion of how far one should blame William Shakespeare for
the anti-Semitic uses of his comedy The Merchant of Venice. The second
piece deals with the degree of blame to attach to Hollywood for its failure to
confront the rising menace of Nazis during the 1930s and whether or not this
moral, ethical and even one might say Jewish failure—since so many, though not
all—of the so-called Moguls were Jewish—constitutes outright collusion,
collaboration or abject submission.
The gift of hindsight allows us to measure Shakespeare’s play and the
weaknesses of the movie producers in the worst possible light: the flames of
the ovens at Auschwitz and other death camps of the Shoah. But I have argued several times in the past,
including just a few weeks ago, that Shakespeare should not be held to account
for the way audiences have perceived the character of Shylock in his
Elizabethan play, nor for the misreading or misinterpretation of various
actors, directors and producers. Yet now
the latest commentator wants us to accept that this comedy is more pernicious
in effect than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The only way to do
so, it seems to me, is to grant to a stage production of a four-hundred
year-old play—or to any work of art—greater impact than a document used by
governments and states to justify their persecution of the Jewish people.
That indeed is a backhanded compliment to the playwright or
artist. Yet the counter-argument lies
inside the second essay on the American motion picture industry when David
Denby in his New Yorker essay “Hitler in Hollywood” reminds readers that
to judge a single film or those of a decade merely by the explicit words there
or not there in the script misses out on all that defines film as a work of
popular entertainment or art. The total
effect or impression of a motion picture can be measured by the visual impact,
the actions and gestures of the players, the set-makers, the musical scores
appended, and the length of scenes, the repetition and development of motifs—in
brief, by the whole extra-verbal aspect of the production. For that reason, whether or not Jews are
mentioned, Nazi thugs depicted in uniform and enacting recognizable historical
crimes, or overt condemnation made in voice-overs, preliminary statements or
concluding remarks by someone within or outside of the fiction matters, but not
totally. Just as we are told that
wrongly projected meanings are infused into Shakespeare’s plays and he himself,
whether it was his intent or not, is ultimately responsible for the horrible
uses his play can be put to, so, on the other hand, we are to believe that, no
matter how subtle, artistically well-intentioned or carefully considered the
morality of the men and women below the level of producers and distributors,
the film industry as a whole or all the Hollywood movies of the period suffer
for the poor decisions of a few frightened and greedy men who kowtowed to
threats of censorship and external pressure.
Aside from this explicit and immediate failure supposedly at the core
of the aesthetic and political intentions and effects of artists whose work, in
retrospect, aid and abet the persecution or extermination of the Jewish people,
there is a question of how far it is allowable for authors, playwrights and
other artists to distort history in what purports to be real persons and
events. This question comes up in those
novels that pretend to be the diaries, confessions or lives of Holocaust
survivors, but also in those books which make no such pretence but attempt to
turn into more timeless fiction the experiences of men and women of another
time and place: this is an objection from the very inception of the novel
itself. But it is there too in the way
one receives Shakespeare’s history plays—crass acts of Tudor propaganda or
works of dramatic art that use historical events and personages merely as
metaphors; or the current objections to Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (and
the film made of this novel) and the real history and person of Mendel Beilis,
whose life it has been argued, has been overshadowed and even distorted by the
persuasiveness of Malamud’s artistry, whereas perhaps the only real “sin” the
author made was is in not making more evident inside and outside his book the
liberties he had taken to fictionalize the Blood Libel case in Czarist Kiev a
hundred years ago. Puritans and
sentimental purists demand accuracy, to be sure; legal experts, now engaged in
themes called “intellectual property” cases, demand meticulous documentation
and adherence to the “facts” of historical models. So on the one hand it may be true, that in
times of crisis and danger it is unwise to put on a play whose stage -and
reception-history portends calamity even now when anti-Semitism is at a boiling
point (albeit in the guise of anti-Zionism); while on the other, while it is
politically-correct to indicate the squeamish, slimy, mendacious way some of
the greatest Movie Moguls denied their own best interests and the now all too
obvious threats of the Nazi monster,
should we be airing all our dirty laundry in public and providing fodder
for the beats ready to spring forth again?
But let me look at the question in Denby’s essay I know best. He takes as a prime example;e of how awful
one of those big motion picture companies were the 1937 Warner Brothers version
of The
Life of Emile Zola.[i]
The film was directed by William Diekele and the script was
prepared by Henry Howard and Gezer Herzog based on a then recent novel by Matthew
Josephson (1899-1978) called Zola and his Times (1928). Though Josephson’s radical leftwing views of
the libel case are somewhat moderated in the film, they still shape the basic
themes, so that, we might say, the producers were willing to allow a
socialistic or even communistic perspective to show through, they capitulated
to pressure and removed three out of four references to Jews in the final cut
of the film.
As
was common in the 1930s before the first scene of a historical biography (“a
biopic” in current terminology), the producers present a written opening
statement to The Life of Emile Zola,
supposedly to lend gravitas to their
fictional version of the novelist’s career:
This
production finds its basis in history.
The historical basis, however, has been fictionalized for the purposes
of this picture and the names of some of the characters themselves, the story,
evidence and institutions are fictitious.
With the exception of known historical characters, whose actual names
are here used, no identification with actual persons, living or dad, is intended
or should be inferred.
This a rather pompous version of
the usual formula: “All characters in this film are fictional and should not be
understood as depicting any real persons living or dead.” It also may be a legal let-out from the
charges brought by legal experts and historians that the film bears very little
actual relationship to the life and career of Emile Zola, let alone to the
Dreyfus Affair of which Zola’s trial forms a part. Actually there were three distinct court
cases against Zola and the film version shows one, but this is normal practice,
an artistic license to condense and focus the script. But other ways in which
the Hollywoodized biography handles people, places, events and themes are less
acceptable.
[i] There is a three-act radio play
based on the film presented on 8 May 1939 on the Lux Radio Theater Broadcast. Paul Muni again plays Zola. The script is much condensed and makes
explicit things that are only seen or implied in the film. I will make a few comments on it in footnotes
like this. This play was presented four
months before the outbreak of World War II
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