The Evil of Banality

Hannah Arendt philosophized about the “banality of evil” when she reported on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, a man whose skill at scheduling train deployments helped send hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to their death. While much less lethal, there is also the “the evil of banality.” This occurs when an artist creates an extraordinarily hackneyed work that minimizes and distorts a really important and profound human topic; and it can be extremely offensive. Such is the case with Roberto Benigni’s much celebrated film, Life Is Beautiful.

I take the Holocaust seriously. As a college professor, I have taught classes, written papers, and given academic presentations on Shoah-related topics. I am also the son of parents who were the sole members of their families of origin to survive the destruction of European Jewry. My mother, a Hungarian Jew, was deported to Auschwitz with her six brothers, both parents, and a grandfather. My father, a Polish Jew, was sent to Dachau. My parents were on the same train of Jewish prisoners, headed deeper into Germany, that the American army liberated just weeks before the end of the war in Europe. They both died of cancer in New Jersey before they reached the age of 60. I find Life Is Beautiful a boring, stupid, and ugly film.

Somehow the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and won two major Academy Awards including Best Actor and Best Foreign Film for writer, director, and star, Benigni. The movie alleges to be a heart-warming, Chaplinesque tale that takes place in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The Italian film’s central conceit concerns a clownish Jewish waiter (Benigni) who convinces his five-year-old son that the concentration camp they have been deported to is part of an elaborate game. Benigni manages to turn the German stalags into not-so-bad places for his concept to exist. In other words, he turns Auschwitz into a factory where the laborers have to work hard, but there is no horror. The movie continually trivializes the misery of the victims of European fascism. This is inexcusable.

In Benigni’s world there are no screaming inmates, loud terrorizing brutes, or even just tumultuous noise, but enough silence for a recording of an opera to be heard drifting from an open door in the officers’ hall to a faraway women’s barracks for his character’s wife to hear. He depicts no starving prisoners, but a father who has enough food to share with his son. He offers no barbarous regimentation and strict regulations, but a place where a Jewish internee can transmit a message from the public address system without fear of punishment. Making a concentration camp a benign setting is morally reprehensible.

The Holocaust has been used as a simple metaphor for evil in a number of abhorrent ways. Anti-abortionists frequently compare the terminations of pregnancies with the destruction of a people. Just recently a local Christian leader

Page 9

came to the Iowa City synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath and talked about “Jesus on the cattle cars” and thus equated the suffering of Jesus with the extermination of millions of Jews. This type of generalization depreciates the magnitude of what actually happened. The devil, so to speak, is in the details.

Life Is Beautiful bills itself as a fable so as to eliminate the need for realism. Miramax (the motion picture’s American distributor) chief Harvey Weinstein suggested to Benigni that he add a voice-over at the beginning and the end of the movie expressing this fact, after Benigni had already completed the film. The film’s tacked-on explanations are as unsatisfactory and phony as Bobby’s season-long dream in the old television series, Dallas.

Benigni has made his reasons for making this movie clear: he felt it would be a challenge. “I felt an urge to play a comic character in an extreme situation, and what could be more extreme than this?” Benigni said in an interview published in London’s Sunday Telegraph. He made the movie to feed his own ego. Not only does he give himself all the “good” lines in the script that he wrote, he gives himself almost all of the dialogue and hams it up whenever possible. And Benigni’s vapid over-emoting isn’t the only thing that’s not kosher about this movie. Because he doesn’t show the horrors, Benigni also manages to make the film boring. The movie is dull as well as odious.

The enormous tragedy and inexplicable evil of the Holocaust inherently provides a difficult backdrop for a life-affirming film. However, if you want to see a deep and moving, dark Italian comedy about the Holocaust, rent Lina Wertmuller’s classic, Seven Beauties, from your local video store. Wertmuller’s more than 20-year-old movie addresses the horrors of Fascism and the Nazi concentration camps with an acerbic intelligence and comic passion. She reveals insights into the humor of the human condition, even amongst the depravity of the Auschwitz. Benigni’s much lauded new film, Life Is Beautiful, tries to find a simple answer in the face of such wicked misfortune. The horrible truth was that for the many victims of the Holocaust, life was ugly and too short.

I have published my views on Life Is Beautiful in Icon, the alternative news weekly serving the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area, which I serve as Arts and Entertainment Editor. Usually my movie reviews provoke little response. This one touched some buttons. I received five letters of complaint (one even addressed to “Horror-witz”) that basically said I should lighten up. They said Life Is Beautiful has made the Holocaust more accessible; the film offered a message of hope without all the gory details. That is the problem. The Shoah should not be sanitized. This trivializes what actually happened, and in a perverted way provides a false history. The movie does not add to one’s knowledge of the event on a material or spiritual level, but functions to deny the reality. I also received three letters of support. These eight letters generated more immediate written responses than anything I have penned before in my more than three years as Arts and Entertainment Editor.

Page 10