A Most Wanted Man

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man begs the question of how many cigarettes a spy can smoke and also how many drinks he can imbibe and still see straight. Spying is a form of perceiving and if your mind is clouded how are you supposed to pick up the clues you are looking for? Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt was plagued by the same problem of depicting a ponderous character carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. in Hannah Arendt the struggles of the title character, the author of the highly controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, were always depicted by shoving a cigarette in her mouth. The props, in this case the cigarette or bottle that is always being reached for, drown out the nuances of a character who sardonically describes his mission as making "the world a better place.” A Most Wanted Man is adapted from the John Le Carre novel and it’s almost impossible to parse the numerous moral dilemmas that the movie poses amidst the fog of smoke. Suffice it to say that the  conflict between fathers and sons, the murky line between victims and perpetrators and the question of means justifying ends all constitute the promising if unfulfilled palette of the film’s concerns. And it’s hard to tell whether to blame the novelist or the screenwriter (Andrew Bovell) for lines like this: “we are fighting the radical offcuts of a nation called Islam. You have crossed the line. You are on their side now.” The Hamburg of the movie is a cesspool. Hoffman meets his informants in bars where the customers pass out on tables. But on the other hand it’s as if ISIS had already taken over. Though the port is renowned for vice, there isn’t a sign of sex anywhere. From the beginning one has the feeling that the director was trying to create a city of shadows in the way Carol Reed did with Vienna in The Third Man and there are moments when Hoffman’s portrayal of overweight spymaster, Gunther, recalls Orson Welles’s tormented Harry Lime. But the phony German accents that Hoffman, William Dafoe and Rachel McAdams all sport fracture the gloom. 

Nazi Love

Heinrich Himmler

According to a recent Times story (“Himmler Papers Shed Light On Personal Life of a Nazi,” NYT, 1/26/14), Mr. and Mrs. Himmler lived a life that was no different than the average American couple then or now. Evan S. Connell wrote the Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge novels. Here we have Herr und Frau Himmler. The Times quotes Mrs. Himmler as writing, “There is a can of caviar in the ice box. Take it.” Okay for most of us it’s Spam, but here we have Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” all over again. The Times quotes another letter from Heinrich to his wife Margarete, “I am off to Auschwitz. Kisses. Your Heim.” Of course, the syntax of this last note to Margarete, or Marga, who the Times describes as previously divorced and seven years older gives pause. If one were to do a computerized analysis of all the times that the word kisses has appeared next to the word Auschwitz, the examples would undoubtedly be scarce and yet there isn’t an inkling from Herr Himmler that this little phrase, “Auschwitz. Kisses” may be one of the most outrageously horrific oxymorons in the history of language. What’s particularly interesting is that the German language is full of compound words. For instance, Vergangenheitbewaltegung means “the burden of the past.” Kisses may have skidded into Auschwitz, like a car on a slippery road, but one would think that even a murderer might have somehow moved one out of the way of the other before sending off a missive to his beloved wife. In her filmic portrait of Hannah Arendt, Margarethe von Trotta portrayed the controversial philosopher as arguing that Adolf Eichmann's pathology resulted from a failure of thinking. There’s something purgative about screaming at a killer, provided he or she is not in a position to strike back, but as a form of preventative medicine, it’s always useful to get an insight into the killer’s thought process—or in these cases, failure thereof. Which is something that these love letters enable us to do.

Hannah Arendt at Film Forum

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Barbara Sukowa ss Hannah Arendt

It is disconcerting how banal “the banality of evil” has become. It goes to show that even a profound idea can be overused to the extent that it becomes part of intellectual slang. Hopefully someday some less deserving candidates in today’s jargonese like “bipolar disorder,” or “narcissism” will elicit the same jaundiced responses as the term Hannah Arendt introduced in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil now does. Of course we can almost judge the strength of an idea by the reactions it creates. In as much as Hannah Arendt was the product of German philosophy, which included an early fling with her mentor Martin Heidegger, we should almost expect that an idea predicated on a certain similarity between opposites, between criminal and victim, would have provoked an exploration of its antithesis. Indeed may we venture to say that certain kinds of evil like certain kinds of genius defy explanation. “It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to be one of the great criminals of the 20^th Century,” Arendt is quoted about Eichmann in Margarethe von Trotta’s  Hannah Arendt, now playing at Film Forum, “He was simply unable to think.” Indeed thinking itself is the leitmotif of the film. We see Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) taking both lessons in thinking and love from Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) and we watch her ardently thinking throughout the movie—and usually with a cigarette in her mouth or hand. Hopefully Arendt won’t increase cigarette sales to impressionable teenagers in the way that Goethe Sufferings of Young Werther once led to a spate of suicides. Any movie about Arendt would be an enormously ambitious project, not only because film is usually not the province of philosophy, but because the filmmaker is really dealing with the history of ideas. Hannah Arendt attempts to portray ideas in the context of historical processes. It's a curiosity of the film which skirts the world of phenomenology that nothing seems particularly real. From a phenomenological point of view, was this intentional? The New Yorker offices replete with William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson), Bard College, a Manhattan apartment all look like stage sets. Remember The Man in the Glass Booth? Real footage from the Eichmann trial is used, but dramatic reactions it elicits from Sukowa are a mockery of something that’s always hard to depict—tortured thought.

Zero Dark Thirty

When you're about to make a trip to an exotic place that you’ve never been to before, your mind is spellbound and lays out a scenario that's a little bit like a fairytale. Then when you arrive at that place, the mind quickly encapsulates it and creates an indelible imprint, a roadmap made up of familiar associations from your own past. That’s a little bit what the experience of seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is like. Hannah Arendt famously coined the term the “banality of evil,” in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Zero Dark Thirty is the banality of good and evil. One can’t help comparing Zero Dark Thirty to classics of political cinema like Z, The Conformist or the film whose cinema verite style it most imitates, The Battle of Algiers, but Zero Dark Thirty falls neither into the categories of fiction like The Conformist, nor cinema verite (which uses non actors to enhance reality) like Battle of Algiers nor obviously, on the other end of the spectrum, documentary--though both its heroine, Maya’s (Jessica Chastain), unshakeable faith in her mission does recall the role Jodie Foster played in Contact, while curiously the analysis of photos recalls another cinema classic about discovering a murderer in a haystack, Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Still there are two looming issues at the center of the controversy around the film: the morality of using torture and its efficacy. A third issue relates to the whether the filmmakers did enough due diligence in description of techniques like waterboarding. Was it a cup of water or a jug of water that was used? To recall another film classic, Zero Dark Thirty is Dirty Harry on the stage of world history. When does the punishment fit the crime? When do the means justify the ends? Osama Bin Laden was killed and the order came right from the top. But are we ever justified in abrogating human rights? While Zero Dark Thirty isn’t journalism, it’s an odd hybrid of fact and fiction that succeeds in creating the feeling of what it might like to enter the world that we read about in the headlines. The figures are not larger than life. They do heroic things without seeming likes heroes and when the helicopters drop down into the compound to execute a piece of history, you feel like you're there and just like the soldiers on screen, just want to get out alive.

Eye in the Sky

In a recent story, the Times’ John Markoff described the creation of a fully automated data base which some weird sounding government agencies are supporting(“'Government Aims to Build A "Data Eye In the Sky'” NYT, 10/10/11). Markoff pointed out that Isaac Asimov had anticipated this kind of collaboration between "mathematics and psychology to predict the future" when he coined the term “psychohistory” in his Foundation series back in l951. The term “cyberspace" emanated from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the concept of the web was prefigured in Samuel Delaney’s novels so we shouldn’t be surprised at Asimov’s prescience. Markoff quotes someone named Thomas Malone, identified as director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at M.I.T. and  mentions Intelligence Advanced  Research Projects Activity or Iarpa, “part of the office of the director of national intelligence.”  Does this sound like something to worry about? Is such tech speak tantamount to the 'banality of evil'?  Should we be assured when we’re told that this system would be fully automated?  Is there such a thing a value free data collection? “The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption, and movement of populations,” Markoff reported. “It will use publicly accessible data,  including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic web cams and changes in Wikipedia entries.” There has always been a certain ambiguity about Big Brother? Was Orwell referring to a human entity or a  collective consciousness? Even Wikipedia, which puts forth the dichotomy, can't seem to decide. Was he anticipating some sort of artificial and transcendent intelligence, resulting from the kind of “data eye in the sky” that is being talked about—a more evolved form of the military industrial complex that we might term the academic/intelligence complex?  Or was he simply envisioning the E-Z pass?

The Banality of Evil

HuffPost News recently posted a piece about White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s correcting and updating of the circumstances of Osama bin Laden’s demise (“White House Revises Account of Bin Laden’s Final Moments,” HuffPost News, 5/3/11). “Carney also retraced the steps by which Bin Laden’s body was buried in the North Arabian Sea,” HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery wrote. “The body was washed, placed in a white sheet and in a weighted bag, at which point a military officer ‘read prepared religious remarks’ that were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body was then ‘placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, and the deceased body eased into the sea…’” The famous children’s prayer —“Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, pray the lord my soul to take”—somehow comes to mind in reading Carney’s account, particularly when you come upon the description of Bin Laden’s youth, which David Brooks provided in his op-ed column in Tuesday’s Times (“What Drives History,” NYT, 5/2/11). “He…was sent to an elite school, wearing a blue blazer and being taught by European teachers,” Brooks noted, crediting as his source Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. “As a boy he watched ‘Bonanza’ and became infatuated by another American show called ‘Fury,’ about a troubled orphan boy who goes off to a ranch and tames wild horses.” Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem.