Silence and History
I watch a documentary and a feature film. I finish reading two recent books of nonfiction and a collection of bad newspaper comics.
Film Selections: A Medium-Length Documentary and a Feature Film
Screams Before Silence, directed by Anat Stalinsky, 2024. Sheryl Sandberg organized and conducted the interviews for this documentary about the sexual atrocities committed against Israeli women during the October 7 pogrom and afterwards in Hamas captivity. (Which are presumably ongoing, since the apocalyptic death cult who intentionally brought on the ensuing war are also willfully prolonging it by keeping civilian hostages in their dungeons and refusing to surrender or meaningfully negotiate.)
While it is urgent and useful viewing, Screams Before Silence is to some extent hobbled by the ongoing problem of showing the full extent of the October 7 crimes while maintaining respect and preserving some modicum of dignity for the victims, a moral quandary which has no single tidy solution. Sandberg and Stalinsky make a conscious choice to lean heavily in favor of eyewitness testimony and rely as little as possible on the copious amounts of footage, many of it recorded by the perpetrators themselves, that could have been used. It’s said often these days but is painfully true here: the people who need to see this film the most are mostly the ones who won’t.
Dream Scenario, directed by Kristoffer Borgli, 2023. This was recommended to me by Gordon Silveria while we were hanging out and drawing with some other artist friends. It’s a handsomely-composed and intelligently-written twisted comedy about a mediocrity of a professor, played by Nicolas Cage in probably the best performance I’ve seen him give, who starts to appear in the dreams of many random people for no explicable reason. What the broader public, his circle of acquaintances and those who know him intimately all make of this phenomenon becomes a series of shallow but entertaining musings on fame, ambition, cancel culture and self-loathing, carried along in episodic scenes that are funny, alarming and cringe-inducing in equal measure. While the coda stumbles with a rushed and mildly incoherent conclusion, this is mostly a well-made film that pushes ahead with intention and clarity, hooking the viewer with a poised aesthetic, great casting and a brilliant outing from Cage. Recommended for those who can sit with the unsatisfying and not particularly insightful closing chord.
Liberalism and Totalitarianism
I finished both of the nonfiction books referenced in the last entry. Both were published in 2023.
The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray was interesting, though I came away with a fairly clear understanding of what Gray is against and a fog of confusion about just what he is actually for. Calling Gray a “conservative” doesn’t seem to suit him because it’s not fully clear to me precisely what it is he wishes to conserve. He makes some fascinating and harrowing statements about how bad things could get in the not-too-distant future and how little he believes the classically liberal innovations of the West can do to protect and nourish human well-being.
The grim certainty of his gloomy prognostications certainly runs up against the brand of one-never-knows optimism practiced by my intellectual crush David Deutsch, who like Gray has at times been on the staff of Oxford University and who is a persuasive cheerleader for the interconnected set of ideas we call the West. I wonder if they have ever met and how I personally might go about arranging such a meeting. I would like to hear what they had to say to one another.
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is, as mentioned previously, the first scholarly history of the Holocaust I’ve read. Three main takeaways that were new information to me:
A key conclusion from Stone’s research is that the Holocaust “was never solely a German project but a crime in which Europeans from across the continent were implicated.” Local communities, occupied powers and civilians driven in some instances by ideology but in others by personal animus towards Jews were all too happy to join in the Holocaust, in many cases exceeding the Nazis’ demands and expectations.
I didn’t understand the extent to which the Holocaust was not confined to the camps. Much of it, especially in the Eastern European theater of the War, took the form of pogroms, forced starvation and mass shooting events on a conscience-staggering scale.
The Third Reich didn’t use genocidal Jew-hatred as a means to control their populace and consolidate power; it was pretty much the other way around. A mystical fixation on the Jews and the goal of their extermination constituted a “sacred narrative of redemption through annihilation,” and the Nazis were generally devoted to accomplishing the Final Solution even when it contravened their military and economic interests; of the victims subjected to brutal imprisonment and slave labor Stone writes that “the vast majority perished irrespective of their potential usefulness.” Antisemitic genocide was not a means, as is sometimes cynically said these days, but rather an end in itself.
Stone’s scholarship is mostly engrossing and informative. I have just two complaints to register. One is that Stone’s rather chalky prose style is not to my personal taste; some of his longest and more discursive paragraphs required a few readings for me to make sure I was grasping his point. In at least one case I’m still not certain I do.
The other issue is a critical error of a naively pre-October 7 sort. In assessing the legacy and memory of the Holocaust, Stone goes a bit out of his way to disentangle contemporary antisemitism from anti-Israel bias and fails to make an effective argument or to fully tie this point in to his scholarly expertise on the War and the Holocaust. I wonder if the fact that the October 7 pogrom perversely led, both before and after the current war began, not to a diminishment but to a skyrocketing rate of Western liberal antisemitism would cause Stone to reconsider quaint observations like “In contemporary debates over racism, antisemitism sometimes gets inadvertently left out.” A historian of Stone’s significance, and one so generally clear-eyed about the centrality to totalitarian movements of centuries of bigoted and xenophobic lies about Jews, simply cannot afford to mislead himself or his readers about this omission being inadvertent — about it being a feature of the current discourse rather than, as Stone claims to think, a bug.
And Speaking of Crimes Against Humanity…
As promised, I finished reading The Second Garfield Treasury, an early collection of Sunday-only strips by Jim Davis, a man second only to Scott Adams in instantiating the widest-ever gulf between a newspaper cartoonist’s level of talent and the merchandising success of his intellectual property. I don’t mean this to cloud the obvious truth that Adams and Davis are clearly brilliant marketers and businessmen, and from what I know of Davis it’s pretty apparent that he is an alright guy where Adams is an asshole to the point of seeming emotionally unwell. But on cartooning ability alone, Davis’s work is stunningly unimpressive for a brand that became one of the all-time most successful runaway hits.
The only novel insight for me here is that in the early years of the strip Garfield’s bachelor-loser owner Jon had a roommate, or possibly just a best friend who hangs out in his apartment to watch television, who may have been Odie’s original owner. From whatever later Garfield strips I’ve happened across growing up and from the Saturday-morning animated television series I don’t remember this mustachioed fellow named Lyman ever making an appearance, so I think it’s all too obvious what happened off-screen in the early years. Lyman and Jon both came home drunk late one Saturday night from failed dates and found themselves entangled in some diaphoretic sexual fumbling by the light of the television while Odie and Garfield looked on with mixed reactions.
While it went unaddressed thereafter, this episode introduced an untenable degree of awkwardness into Jon and Lyman’s friendship. Eventually Lyman quietly escorted himself out of Jon’s life. If I’m understanding correctly that he was Odie’s owner, he left Odie in Jon’s apartment and Jon, lonely and desperate sad sack that he is, simply took up the responsibilities of keeping Odie alive as a counterweight to Garfield’s raison d'être of littering Jon’s boring existence with torn-up cushions and neighbor-alienating late-night caterwauling.
Meanwhile I’m still reading those sublime E.C. Segar comics from the early Thirties. And, having finished The Complete Peanuts 1961 to 1962, I’m now also re-reading Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts 1989 to 1990 because it was grabbable from a library shelf. I seem to have become a person who just always has a partially-read Peanuts collection lying around. A bibliophilic security blanket for an insecure time.