Sunday, November 6, 2005
One of the problems I have with blogging is that if I sit and think about my reaction to an article or an issue too long, I often end up going back and forth so much that I start to see it from both sides and the passion goes out of me...and that doesn't make for very interesting writing. Sometimes I end up not posting at all.
Tonight I went to the Coolidge Corner Theater and watched Protocols of Zion for a second time, this time with a much larger (packed house) audience and a question and answer session with Director Marc Levin. I wanted to see if my initial negative reaction (initial review at the links) would remain, what it might be like with a different audience, and also if my thoughts would change with what I heard from the director from his own mouth.
I'll say that perhaps some of my distaste for the film was blunted...a bit. Certainly as the movie started and during the initial...I dunno...twenty minutes or so, I actually thought I was too cruel in my review. The fact that this audience was a bit more quiet, and there wasn't as much inappropriate giggling (something I had a very negative reaction to) as there was the first time I saw the film helped I think. Then he hits The Passion stuff and from there my distate grew back again.
I still say Levin makes a very hypocritical sleight of hand move -- certainly unwittingly, though. One of the dangers of the Protocols and the Passion is that the Jews of today should be held responsible for the killing of Christ -- that is, that Shmuely down the street should be persecuted and pogromed for what the Sanhedrin did two-thousand years ago. Levin addresses that issue. But then he turns around and does exactly the same thing to the Evangelical Christians. He seems to desperately want them to take responsibility for what Christians in the past have done to Jews (and that at a time when there were no Evangelical Christians), and prevent them from having the enjoyment of their religious story -- Christ and Him Crucified. I can't help feeling that no matter how many times the Christians he speaks to tell him they understand the awful truth of Christian history and are laboring to make sure it never happens again, he just doesn't want to believe that they really mean it. (That's quite a Jewish "thing" -- 'You say you like me, but do you really like me? Really? I don't know. Do you really, really?')
Here is the audio from the question and answer session (Right Click, Save As...). He's a pretty articulate guy. Apparently they'll be using this for the DVD extras, so here's a sneak-bonus for you all.
See? There I go again. I softened toward the film, but still end up going off negative. I'm really not always like that.
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Lame and wrongheaded.
You are right about the first 20 minutes being pretty funny. He makes the believers in the Protocols look like the fools they are. Evil fools. But fools.
The director is a liberal/left Jew shaken by 9/11, and shocked by the burgeoning of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, he has little to add to the conversation as he meanders aimlessly in search of enough material to fill 90 minutes.
As for the politics, it’s a little weird.
For one thing, this is a movie about people who blame the Jews. And it includes a sequence of shots of Israeli military actions against Palestinian terrorists, and Palestinian terror attacks on Israeli civilians. The voice over explains that the “cycle of violence†is the leading cause of anti-Semitism in the world today. Actually, of course, the violence is caused by an implacable Arab refusal to concede to the Jews the right – to self-government in their homeland – that Arabs claim for themselves.
Then there is the absurdity of this director criticizing anti-Semites for having a simplistic, conspiracy theory-based interpretations of history. Anti-Semites, you see, blame it all on the Jews. In two truly funny sequences, the director expalins to anti-Semites that they have it all wrong. All the evil in the world is actually the fault of the big corporations. It’s not the Jews, it’s the capitalists.
And where does Levin go to look for anti-Semites? Mostly to all the wrong places. Yes, he does look in Arab neighborhoods around New York. And documenting the irrational anti-Semitism of Arab immigrants is interesting. But then he spends lots of time interviewing Aryan-nation types. Who cares? American Nazism is not a growth industry.
His great failure is an unwillingness, apparently due to lifelong leftist identification (witness his father’s livingroom decorated with a large lithograph of Che) to look at left-wing anti-Semitism. And left-wing anti-Semitism is a big scary growth industry.
Yes! The "growth industry" metaphor is a good one.
Did you ask any questions of this guy?
No, I didn't. In order to ask my questions, I would have had to concisely articulate my concerns (picking one of the many) and I wasn't certain I could do that well.
"That's quite a Jewish "thing" -- 'You say you like me, but do you really like me? Really? I don't know. Do you really, really?"
That is funny. Many stand-up comedy routines are constructed around our largely benign insecurities. Personality quirks can be great fun.
Beyond that I'm in complete agreement with Anna.