Benigni’s Beast

Sometimes I have the impression that the Holocaust has become like a wild animal on the loose. Some chase it to see it safely locked away in history — or, better yet, dead and forgotten — so it can escape no more. Others seek the beast to study and understand. Entrepreneurs stalk it in the name of profit. With these in mind, I think of filmmaker and actor Roberto Benigni’s claim that the Holocaust belongs to everybody (“Interview: Roberto Benigni and Adrian Wootton,” The Guardian, Saturday, November 7, 1998). Yet, if he really thinks it belongs to him, why does he go to the Jewish community to get approval? I am not sure exactly what he means, though my intuition tells me, rather, that everyone belongs to history. After watching Life Is Beautiful, my sense is that Benigni suggests that if something belongs to me, I am free to use it as I please.

Laughter and humor are additional tools to feel empowered in the face of danger, even if one ends up getting shot. This applies to a movie audience, too, only that they cannot get shot, so laughter may indeed triumph. However, I can think of no humorous film dealing with the Shoah where humor is in actuality empowering to a degree that it overpowers the enemy, except for Life Is Beautiful. Here, the audience leaves the cinema feeling elated and appeased, as can be gleaned from various reviews alleging that the film is “a rare treat: a lighthearted comedy that tackles a very serious subject,” “a very enjoyable movie,” “exciting, wonderful,” and “a remarkably uplifting, rejuvenating experience.” That must mean that history had to undergo some major cosmetics, unless, of course, if what we are seeing has nothing to do with history but is actually a fable.

If the movie is a fable, then questions of whether a child would have survived under these circumstances in a concentration camp, or whether a prisoner could have accessed and manipulated the sound system in the camp, are as inappropriate as pointing out that a Jew could have never married a gentile in Italy in the early 1940s. What is historically plausible and what is not is relevant only in a situation that resembles history. Since the film is declared to be a fable, we must accept everything as what it is presented as being. Just as in a fairy tale we accept animals speaking or people flying, here too, we should accept the rules laid out by the movie.

Except that the circumstances portrayed do resemble a real-life situation: Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s; war; Jews as victims; Germans as bad guys; trains; bunk beds; chimneys with smoke; striped uniforms; heavy labor; mysterious showers; a heap of corpses; and soap made from humans.

Indeed, the cues read almost like a foolproof list of Holocaust attributes. Perhaps Benigni needed the Holocaust to lend pathos and significance to his movie. Yet, in order for the story he so much wanted to tell to be at all convincing, he also needed the Holocaust to be not quite the Holocaust. For instance, the father in the film protects the son, as Benigni’s wife and actress Nicoletta Braschi explains, so that the son “doesn’t have the shock, the trauma that otherwise he would have forever” (Sharon Waxman, “Embracing ‘Life’ in Death Camps: Filmmaker Roberto Benigni, Putting Comedy to the Test,” Washington Post, November 1, 1998: p. G01). I read “otherwise” also as “in a death camp.”

Benigni explains that he fell in love with the idea of placing the story in a camp: “I didn’t set out to make a movie about the Holocaust. I was looking for a new movie and … comedy comes out of extreme situations … the ultimate extreme situation is the extermination camp” (Carrie Rickey, “Italian Film Dares to Mix Humor and Holocaust,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 28, 1998: p. D01). Evidently, it was not a concern for history or memory that compelled him to place his fable in a setting reminiscent of the Shoah, nor was it any particular aspect of the Shoah he was motivated to explore. He was interested in achieving comedy and in reaching “some sort of poetry, or beauty” (Waxman: p. G01). Unfortunately, in order to tell an uplifting, life-affirming tale

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against a historical backdrop that has hitherto offered little or no redemption, historical accuracy had to be sacrificed.

Other films that use some form of humor and deal with the victims — in ghettos, camps, or during deportation — seem to have been prompted mostly by genuine concerns the filmmaker had regarding the Shoah itself. For instance, in Jacob the Liar (Jakob der Luegner) by Frank Beyer, the humor stems from the story itself, and the story, which takes place in an unnamed Polish ghetto, appears to grow out of the very situation of the ghetto. Written by Jurek Becker in 1969, the plot revolves around the protagonist Jacob’s overhearing a news broadcast indicating that the Russians are 300 miles away. In the face of disbelief among the other people in the ghetto, he begins his web of lies claiming that he has a radio hidden in his room. Suicides in the ghetto cease, courage and hope flourish, as he reports daily about the latest news. When he finally confesses his lie to a friend, the latter hangs himself. In the last scenes we see the faces of the people in the ghetto on a train. Inadvertently, Jacob had lied to overcome the lack of hope in the ghetto. The ensuing situation of his lying bears certain comical elements, as do other incidents that bespeak a degree of pride and distance as yet operative among the people in the ghetto. Although we are transported, along with the characters in the film, into sweet and short-lived hopefulness, we are not spared the exacting truth of history.

This holds true also, although by vastly different means, for Lina Wertmueller’s Seven Beauties (Pasqualino settebelleze). (The film was vehemently attacked by Bruno Bettelheim in his 1976 essay, “Surviving,” but was respectfully analyzed by Terrence DesPres in his Harper’s essay, “Black Comedies,” of the same year.) In the film, the politically indifferent dandy Pasqualino is plunged into the nightmarish, comically absurd, and morally testing hell of a concentration camp. The distortion that humor, by its very nature, inflicts on its subject is here so crass that its nature can at once be discerned as that of parody. For instance, in order to show Pasqualino’s problematic opportunism, Wertmueller creates a grossly overstated, cigar-smoking, and grotesquely repugnant female commandant with whom Pasqualino tries to flirt in the hope to save himself. The entire scenario of the camp appears so stylized and dreamlike as to leave little doubt that what we see is an artistic expression. Neither the humor nor the plot stands apart from the subject.

While it is true that Benigni sometimes creates humor out of real situations — like when Guido pretends to translate a guard’s instructions or when he mocks Nazi ideology by presenting himself as a perfect example of racial purity — I see him stumbling through his experiment with great awkwardness. Life Is Beautiful eliminates what is difficult to deal with, what may leave us in shock rather than tears. Thus, we do not know what ever happened to Guido’s uncle and we find the disappearance of all the children hardly deplorable.

Unfortunately, the film’s naive ignorance and sentimental universalism find their culmination in the enormous success the movie has had. Is it preposterous to expect that an author’s outlook transpires into his or her work, such as that expressed by Benigni in his Oscar acceptance speech, “I would like to dedicate this prize to those [who] … gave their life in order [that] we can say ‘Life Is Beautiful’“? Given Benigni’s frivolity and borderline innocence, what are we to make of the audience’s overall enthusiastic response? Perhaps Sander Gilman is right in suggesting that, in the “post-Schindler’s List world,” you no longer have to be powerless, but you can affect the future.

Although it may seem early in history, this film has lead me to imagine one child saying to another, “Let’s play Holocaust.” The difference from conventional games, such as “Cowboys-and-Indians,” is that you can pick the role of the Jew and still win. Using the Holocaust as a metaphor for extremeness and the concentration camp as a contrast for beauty, Life Is Beautiful insists at all levels on displacing knowledge with innocence.

Almost unwittingly, rather playfully, one can bumble into the Holocaust: “Sometimes with my screen writer I improvise a monologue like an ancient Roman or like a Russian woman, or, I don’t know, a Spanish dog, something by accident. And then suddenly, we were writing another kind of movie, very light and funny. And then I was improvising — suddenly, out of the blue — a monologue of a man in a concentration camp” (The Guardian). I find it fascinating how disconnected reality is for Benigni from his comedic vision. The success of the film may indicate a true desire for accepting history. It seems to be saying: if we must live with the Holocaust in our backyard, let’s make it at least a little jolly. Let us tame the beast.

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