ST. JOHN, U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS — The camera always lies. That is
one of my most dearly held beliefs, and an early screening of
Steven Spielberg’s Munich, which I saw last week, provides
me with more evidence. The camera always lies — and Steven
Spielberg lies quite a lot too, at least when he uses a camera
pursuant to his Art.
Not long ago he did a movie, Shark Tale, in which all
the bad guys spoke with Italian accents and were supposed to summon
up visions of the mafia. This movie was for children. Spielberg
covers himself on this sort of thing by speaking out against
stereotyping even as he stereotypes. Now he has committed another
simplistic botch. In Munich he portrays a hit team of
Israeli agents ordered to kill the Palestinian terrorists
responsible for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympics as morally equivalent to the terrorists. That, of course,
is untrue. The act of the Israeli agents is morally justified as an
attempt not only to eliminate murderers but also to demonstrate to
the terrorists’ leaders that kidnapping private citizens will not
further their political goals. In the anarchy of terrorist war what
the Israelis did is, alas, for the good and morally defensible.
But Spielberg’s camera lies in other ways. The movie begins with
a chaos of scenes exploding across the screen and lasting far too
long. This is an assault on the senses, not an engagement of
intellect. In fact the whole movie is an assault on the senses and
hardly ever an engagement of intellect. And the assault — which is
to say, the movie — lasts far too long. After enduring
Munich the normal viewer will be in need of a drink or
some other sort of “coping mechanism,” as they say.
I attended the movie with a veteran law enforcement officer who
sneered at howlers committed by Spielberg’s camera. Almost
everything was exaggerated. Bullet holes on the lovely body of a
beautiful naked actress were far larger than they would be with the
caliber guns used to shoot her. The body of a knifed Mossad agent
was perfectly and dramatically filmed as sitting upright on a
bench, to the snickers of my friend who pointed out that the knife
wound would have caused the dead person’s muscles to relax and the
corpse to fall over. Action was everywhere. Explanation was almost
nonexistent.
What the agents did to hunt down and kill the terrorists went
completely unexplained, as did the training they underwent to
become so proficient in their grisly arts. Munich of
course is a modern movie. That means there is very little
explanation. Dialogue is kept to a minimum. That might be for the
best. What dialogue there existed was banal and at times, as with
all else in the movie, devious. There is one ludicrous scene where
the Jewish hit team and a Palestinian terror squad spend the night
together. Call it their sleepover. A conversation follows between a
Jew and a Palestinian. It is perhaps the intellectual denouement of
the movie. It is also an attempt by Spielberg to demonstrate moral
equivalence between the two, which does not come off very well.
Those who know the history of this conflict understand that the
Israelis are defenders. The terrorists are aggressors and
particularly brutal aggressors at that.
Yet this simple-minded scene, the sleepover scene, is the great
piece of wisdom Spielberg hopes to impart. Munich is, as
Spielberg told Time magazine, “a prayer for peace.”
Actually it is just another example of the camera’s lies. Aided and
abetted by sound effects, it jolts the senses with huge hands or
other appendages thrust across the screen, towering men and women
filmed from the ground up, from other weird angles, all to convey
impressions that are dramatic but very unreal. Colors are brighter
than real or darker than real. Sounds shriek, howl, and explode at
the viewer. My friend from law enforcement has covered crime scenes
and crimes themselves. She assures me the real thing is much less
entertaining.
According to the British newspaper the Guardian,
Spielberg insists that “the biggest threat to the Middle East was
neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis but intransigence on both
sides.” Given the Sharon government’s generosity in its
negotiations with the Palestinians, I guess we can understand
Munich’s errors. Spielberg is a Hollywood ignoramus. But
he has another problem in his treatment of such serious issues as
peace in the Middle East. His favorite artistic instrument is the
camera, and the camera always lies. Maybe he should give up the
camera for a lump of marble and a chisel.
