A.O. Scott writes the Holocaust Film, which has essentially become a genre unto itself and concludes:
For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic — part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting.
Scott offers several reasons why Holocaust narratives in film have become so popular — among them the severity of the tragedy is merely reduced to good source material for directors seeking Oscars, essentially the result of the success of Schindler’s List, which basically single-handedly created a new market for Holocaust films as Hallmark cards. There’s probably a reason why the literature about the Holocaust is on average so much better than the films — the author is singularly responsible for a novel in a way that no one is responsible for a film, and so fewer authors are willing to take on the risky license to produce art about horrors that are incomprehensible to most of us.
But I suspect it’s also much easier for Americans to latch onto the Holocaust because we are the implicit “heroes” in the narrative, although historically speaking that’s not completely accurate. We like Holocaust movies because we’re not responsible for the horror, and we can kind of take pride in wiping from the face of the earth the fascist empire that brought the Shoah to be. Meanwhile, we have much more difficulty coming to terms with our some of our own historical tragedies on film. Spielberg could make Schindler’s List into a great film but Amistad is no Schindler’s List. Glory is a great film but it isn’t really about slavery, and in both } the decency of white people in defying the norms of the day is central to the narrative. While we can enjoy Holocaust films because we know, beyond the screen, that at some point ‘America rides to the rescue,’ in films about slavery the hypocrisy of Americans must be the central villain, and we are therefore implicated in the tragedy in a way we can never be in films about the Holocaust.
We have to reinvent ourselves as heroes in order to make ourselves feel better. Most white people were not Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and most black people were not Cinque, and one of the more compelling aspects of Spielberg’s Schindler was that he was in many ways a weak person, despite being a great hero. Ultimately it’s impossible to leave the questions of why people do horrible things unanswered while we place exceptionally decent and brave people at the forefront of such narratives. But even though these times were not defined by the exceptionally decent, but we find a way to tell their stories at the expense of all others. This is understandable: In dealing with black characters there is an impulse to reverse centuries of rationalizing the reasons and fact of slavery through minstrelsy and stereotype, and it is comforting to imagine ourselves resisting, the way the black and white heroes of such films do.
Which is why it could be argued that it’s for the best that there are fewer films about slavery. As distance grows, the holes in our understanding of history are caulked with sentimentality, and it’s more likely that stories of life before, during, and after the Middle Passage would become kitschy cinematic props for ambitious directors looking for Academy gold rather than an honest exploration of human suffering. (The Hallmarking of the Holocaust has occurred despite the fact that there are people who are alive to tell us the details.) At the same time, the lack of films about America’s own genocidal behavior means that the small, desperate details about lives of slaves — the kind of wrenching details that Spielberg rendered so well in his depiction of the Krakow Ghetto — don’t have a similar place in our popular consciousness. It’s easy to come down on either side of this issue — part of me is relieved that the story of American chattel slavery has not become feel-good holiday nonsense, and I’m not sure any of us should be comforted by the fact that narratives of the Holocaust have. It is, as Scott writes, a kind of forgetting, and some things are too important to forget.
— A. Serwer
