SPOILER ALERT: IN CASE YOU MISSED THE TRAILER, AND ALL THE REVIEWS, THIS DIARY REVEALS WHAT PLOT TWIST THE READER POSSESSES.
As art-house smut goes, The Reader churns along adequately enough – but 45 minutes into it, we discover that this is a film with Higher Purpose. Kate Winslet’s character isn’t just a seductress of a 15 year old boy in Germany of the late 1950’s: she’s a woman with a Hidden Past as an SS concentration camp guard.
This poor movie’s problem is that it can’t quite get straight whether it’s a holocaust pic, or a steamy bedroom tale set against standard-fare ambiguities of modern history.
Kate Winslet, her brow knitting so slightly as she fakes orgasm in tempo with the wallpaper pseudo-classical soundtrack, a concentration camp guard? Could an SS murderess lift her knees to her ears so tenderly?
Apparently the creators of the film didn’t think so either. Winslet’s character is eventually convicted of locking Jewish women inside a church set afire by allied bombers. Her crime is softened from of the actual SS practice at the end of the war of cramming victims into buildings, and standing outside with machine-guns as the buildings were burned down.
(While serving in WWII stepfather discovered one such assembly of corpses in a smoldering building in a German hamlet called Lanceburg. I'd never heard of this practice, but apparently it was common. I've never seen a reference to the murders in Lanceburg anywhere.)
Deferring some of the responsibility for the deaths of Winslet’s victims onto the Allied air force softens the viciousness of the SS, and makes the eroticism of the movie more marketable, no doubt. This is a kind of progress. The holocaust art film genre is many generations into its evolution, and given the combination of available funding and Seriousness attendant to the subject, we are likely to see many more.
It’s a coincidence that the release of The Reader occurs as the Israeli Defense Force bombs and invades the Gaza strip. Credit for the coincidence goes to Hamas, which provoked the crisis with blind rocket launches from Gaza into Israel.
But The Reader and the IDF’s Gaza assault have something more than timing in common, namely one-more casual invocation of the holocaust. The Reader is Oscar-hopeful smut which one critic has already hailed as "This Year's Atonement". The Gaza assault is a disproportionate and militarized response that will lead to thousands or tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and likely only deepen the legacy of violence and failure in the middle east.
US media coverage, predictably, offers sober images of the handful of funerals and damaged homes that are the result of the Hamas rockets. Graphic images of the slaughter in Gaza will remain off screen. Our politicians – their eyes on their checking accounts, evangelical support, and electoral votes in Florida – will pledge to "stand firm with Israel", no matter how misguided and driven by local political considerations Israel’s policies of the moment will be.
No one will go quite as far as George Bush did, and claim full Moral Clarity and Churchillian courage for doing the easy thing in abdicating leadership, and turning a blind eye to the violence in Gaza. But the patina of earnest anti-Nazi moralizing remains.
The issue, for me, is less one of a question of justification of Israeli action; but the obscuring of what is actually happening. Morality begins with perception. Brutality, in what passes for the civilized world, requires a veneer of justification and asks that we avert our eyes.
In The Reader, Winslet’s lovely breasts and air-brushed crime blocks the actual horror of the holocaust. In today’s political discourse the reverse is true: it is the holocaust itself that serves as the anesthetic.