How Schindler’s List May Reflect Our Struggle with the Dominance of Capitalism (article)

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s’ List is a moving Holocaust story whose creator understands the unconscious impulses of Americans as reflected in his direction of four of the all-time top-ten top-grossing pictures. This ability to profoundly tap into our shared emotions and fantasies makes his work important for psychohistorians. The film has awesome power and is beyond anything Spielberg has previously attempted, which is why it won so many Academy Awards. In it a womanizing Nazi war profiteer used his ill gained fortune to bribe officials to keep his work force of 1100 Jews intact and alive. The film raises profound moral, ethical and psychological issues. It is better at raising questions than providing answers, which in the end is left to the viewer and reviewer. For example, it provides no clear-cut explanation why Schindler saved these Jews. What were his motivations? As a psychohistorian strongly interested in the group fantasy implications of film, I ask why a major film on the Holocaust at this time? Why a Holocaust film at all? What in our culture mandates such concern?

Schindler’s List may use the Holocaust as a back drop on which to enact a different story. In contemporary America capitalists and the corporation wield incredible power. In my opinion, there are similarities between our modern workplace and the uncertain atmosphere of the Holocaust. Like the camp inmate, today’s worker has lost control and is at the mercy of take­over experts and corporate executives too ready to down­size their ^“operation” in search of profit without regard for the interests of their employees. Schindler went to great lengths to keep his workers alive and justified it as good business. It also allowed him a feeling of grandiose superiority over the Nazis. He recruits Jewish slave labor because they will accept exploitation in hopes of staying alive. Protesting their exploitation would have meant instant death.

Along with its power as a Holocaust film, Schindler’s List may also be a fantasy of apology for the current capitalist social order. Schindler enslaved Jews to keep them alive. This film may be a fantasy of the new capitalist millennium to come. Can we only be safe through slavery and unquestioning obedience to our employers? Spielberg depicts the Holocaust via a series of powerful and moving vignettes that are shown but not discussed. Among them are shots of a Nazi soldier by a pile of burning bodies, the camp commandant casually shooting prisoners from his porch, and the young girl at Auschwitz watching the glowing chimney spew forth black smoke and ash and knowing what it meant. Much of this Schindler watches in a voyeuristic fashion.

The problem of the world shown in this film and its emotional connection to our own world today, though depicted as fantasy, may be all too real. In this sense Schindler’s List may truly be a film for our time.

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