The Pianist

Smart Boris: Good thing my people killed the one honest German between Goethe and the guys in Kraftwerk. Otherwise, with human beings to blame instead of unthinking puppets, we'd have no choice but to recognize the banality of evil, as Hannah realized after--God, I hope after--mistaking Martin Heidegger for a sturdy if somewhat incomprehensible dildo. Good people, bad people. People made this happen, and they made it end. And they remember. And despite their remembering, soon enough they'll reinvent atrocity to suit their idiot people-needs.

What can I say about it, or about the movie? Polanski is to Spielberg what The Wire is to CHiPS or Hawaii 5-0. Adrien Brody does a good job looking gaunt and pretending to play the piano. Warsaw seems cold, as I'm sure it's supposed to. And as usual, I feel caught between my utter lack of surprise, having heard this story many times before, and my cowardly impulse to think away this whole extermination mess by saying that history makes it gross, predictable, and vulgar. I suppose that's my way of dealing with it. If you take something too terrible to understand, something like civilized barbarism, and dwarf it with all the other impossible cruelties our sane, stupid species has inflicted on itself and on everything else, everyday life gets a little easier. Meanwhile, your mind gets a little more calloused and your body more unbearably light with forgetting.

While I admire Polanski and feel that his movie handles its subject as seriously and directly as any can, he does succumb to the same impotent logic that haunts all our thinking about the holocaust. Reflection is necessary; without it, we excuse with our distraction and disrespect what cannot be excused. But reflection also wants analysis; without it, confrontation becomes eulogy. If we plan to address what happened, and not just evade its implications as I do in my own guilty life, we need to move beyond remembrance; we need to understand. Maybe that means admitting that any of us is capable of anything. I don't know. Maybe not. But grief, though beautiful and right, can also be complacent.

Eulogy is a profound first step. Next we go to the place, as Bronowski did, and stick our hands in the mud, and in its vile shapelessness recover the ashes of the dead millions. Then, as he did, we ask the question: how did this happen? Finally, we stand in the shadow of our ignorance, and feel its cold. We don't blame races; we don't blame industries. We blame ourselves.