24 November 2007
Bent (1997)
The most interesting question I had after watching Bent was this: was it really ‘better’ to be Jewish during the Holocaust than gay? It’s a rough question and of course the movie doesn’t even approach an answer let alone barely suggest the question, and anyway are there really different degrees of bad when talking about what the Nazi party did to Germans/Europeans in the forties? But another question I have now, and I really don’t know the answer to it is: can you make a movie (or a play, such as Bent was as originally written by Martin Sherman, and then rewritten by him for this form) about the Holocaust that isn’t about the Holocaust?
In grad school at SLC, I was taken to task for tangentially sliding 9/11 into my novel and my fellow writers looked at me like I was crazy. It wasn’t that it was too soon, or anything. It can’t be too soon to take something on seriously, but you have to take it seriously. So by using 9/11 to create context — i.e., a statement that suggests what kind of world these people inhabit, but not necessarily stating how that world’s been changed — was I misusing it? Abusing it? A couple years later, I have come to the conclusion
that I didn’t really get it. After wrestling with it, and always constantly finding it to be a black hole (how exactly do you represent a fictional Theodore Roosevelt in Midwest Musical Theater singing about the war on terror and not have that completely run away with the story and themes you’re trying to explore?).
So here I was, arguing with Eugene about how I thought he was completely mad to suggest that Bent isn’t really a Holocaust movie. Condescendingly I raged, “Well if it’s a Holocaust movie, it’s a terrible Holocaust movie. And if it isn’t, then I have no idea what to think about it.” A cooler headed typed response from myself would say: Can you have a human story where the Changing Political Landscape of Germany causes your characters to abandon their lives, hide in the woods, beat on each other to stay alive and then ultimately cause their fall not be what it’s about? You had the deus ex machina in Greek tragedy, sure, but was Greek tragedy ever about reality? (Or, at the very least, corporeal reality?) Or was it about philosophy and morality first, and as such, one needed the kind of out-of-the-blue exigence said deus could provide?
Now, I don’t know if Bent would have been more effective for me on a stage. I would like to find out – there’s a raw urgency to theater that’s impossible when people are within their realistic settings dressed realistically looking starved / beat down, etc. It’s not just Make-Up either. But I think the no-touching sex scene might have made for captivating theater where in a movie it just seems weird. An effective scene of fireworks that doesn’t really do anything but keep the gears churning (and pursuant to the above statement: can a movie where the CPLoG makes it so your characters can’t touch each other not be what it’s about?). And even as Eugene rightfully pointed out – this place they’re in looks nothing like a Concentration Camp (see Night & Fog). Now my cynical first response is of course budgetary. Once you make your mind up about a movie, everything else slots in to back it up. But could they have been intentionally creating this weird, foreign environment to make people disassociate the movie with a Concentration Camp so we could focus on the Human drama, thus elevating it to tragedy when that rusty Deus drops in (unexpectedly, admittedly) at the end to set things in motion?