Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” has haunted my heart since I left the theater last evening. I feel so terribly fucking sad and the feeling will not go away. So, I thought I’d write about it. Rattle and hum on the keyboard for a little while to shake the mental sheets. Exorcise a demon, maybe.
Spielberg’s getting a lot of credit for Munich, and that credit is deserved. Munich is powerful, disturbing, sorrowful filmmaking. But much of the credit also goes to Tony Kushner’s screenplay. It allows no easy resolutions, no pat moralizing, and no redemption. The circle of violence is unbroken, and Kushner and Spielberg remind us of that with Munich’s final shot – actor Eric Bana left standing alone in a desolate, deserted playground with the Twin Towers hovering like ghosts behind his solitary shape.
On its face, Munich is about the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists. But like most of the film’s I find most affecting, Munich is about far more than any one event. It is about the way that violence degrades and dehumanizes us all. It is about the way that vengeance – righteous or otherwise – delivers the slimmest of reassurances.
Like George Clooney’s similarly admirable (though far less involving) Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich is about the present as much as it is about the past. It reminds us that History repeats itself. That history repeats itself. It questions the results of “eye for an eye” retribution. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” goes the old saying, and there is no one left unblinded in Spielberg’s film.
What begins as a clearly monstrous terrorist act devolves into a moral and ethical quagmire of immense and frightening proportions. The surety of righteousness melts in the heat of cordite and plastique as a mission of deceptive simplicity becomes a killing floor of unanswered questions and uncoiling fear.
Munich dares to ask what the results of retribution – justified or otherwise – truly are. Eric Bana’s broken Mossad agent finds himself tearing into mattresses and lying awake in fear despite all he’s done, and despite Israel’s “strong stance” against Palestinian aggression, their actions appear only to have increased the violence and conviction of their enemies.
But to both Spielberg and Kushner’s credit, and despite their inarguably firm end-position, they give all sides of this too, too pertinent argument a clear voice. When Daniel Craig’s coolly loyal fellow agent defends their actions by saying, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood,” he means it and his character stands for millions of people who believe that the interests of their nation come before all else. When Bana’s Avner shares a stairwell smoke with an unsuspecting Palestinian, that Palestinian’s motivations for what he does are laid out in such a way that only the hardest and most narrow-minded of people cannot understand what those motivations are.
No one in Munich is a two-dimensional monster. They are simply people fighting for “Home;” a concept as abstract and misleading as it is comforting and desirable. Some folk have already called this approach into question, maintaining that “evil” does exist in the world, and that “evil” is definable.
I would suggest, with humble trepidation and an awareness of my own “liberality,” that if “evil” exists, it does not choose sides any more than the Lord chooses sides. Evil exists everywhere. It is our nature to succumb to the temptation to do harm – to wreak bloody vengeance upon those who have done us harm – and so long as there are men and women who meet escalating violence with violent escalation, evil continues unabated.
For all the shocking violence of Munich (and there is blood in spades – not the cartoon violence of an action film, but the disquieting crimson interruptions of real carnage), the most appalling act comes during a quiet conversation between a Mother and her son. When Avner returns “home” after years spent pursuing an ever-receding conclusion to his appointed task, he meets with his mother in the hospital. She tells him that she’s proud of him for what he’s done for their country.
“Do you want to know what I’ve done,” asks Avner, his tone suggesting that he needs to share the horrors he’s perpetrated and endured. “No,” answers his mother.
Avner’s mother wants vengeance, or retribution, or justice, but she wants it on her terms. Would hearing about Avner’s actions alter his mother’s perception of his heroism? Would the knowledge of the betrayals, the insecurity, and the blood muddy her convictions and her passion? It very well might, and Avner’s mother chooses the comfort and philosophical security of ignorance over the troubling, gruesome specter of her son’s new reality.
It is Avner’s mother – his true, original home – who stands in for every man and woman who just wants to be told that they are safer, better, stronger, without worrying about the costs and future implications of what has been done in order to give them those feelings. Avner’s mother does not truly want understanding. She does not want a world without violence. She only wants a world she can understand without moral equivocation.
And that world, safe and comforting as it is, collapses once Avner moves beyond the frumpily dignified setting of Golda Meir’s living room. It dissolves into a frustrating shadow land of convenient economic allegiances and fervent mistrust. No one and nothing is what it seems when you are playing on the world-stage. Was Avner’s bomb-building compatriot murdered in an act of retribution? Was he killed by his own work? Did he kill himself in grief over what he had helped to do? The answer is unavailable to us. Only the symbolic import of the moment speaks – showing us how his past literally blows up in his face.
There is no safe harbor for Avner or his family in this world. There is no righteousness when we become the thing we fear. The sense of community and belonging, so important to Jewish culture, is decimated in this film. “Will you break bread with me in my home?” Avner asks this of his Mossad “handler” in the film’s final moments. He tells his handler (played with great skill by Geoffrey Rush) that breaking bread is what Jews do. He asks in a moment of personal, private desperation. And Rush’s answer to him is as mournful as it is utterly chilling. “No.”
When Avner's "source," the enigmatic and supposedly non-political "Papa," calls to tell him that if Avner or his family are harmed, that harm will not have come from him, that promise rings slight and unconvincing. After all, "Papa" knows Avner's real name. How? And why? And even if his words are sincere, they are selective. Simply because "Papa" himself will not harm Avner does not mean that he has not sold Avner out to a third party. Midway through the film, Papa tells Avner, "You could have been my son. But you are not." With two seemingly sentimental sentences, Papa lets Avner know that this is simply business. And he plays no favorites in business.
Munich paints a world in which brotherhood, be it by blood or country or experience, is an illusion. In a world subsumed by the impulse to revenge – to right wrongs by committing other wrongs – brotherhood is a bedtime story told to keep people like Avner’s mother feeling safe at night while the world grows ever wilder and more terrifying outside her door.
Spielberg and Kushner’s film is a masterpiece, made more powerful for having such direct implications for our present-day existence. It is strong, moving work guaranteed to provoke discussion and thought. I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay it. It’s my fervent hope that watching Munich will encourage us to break bread with one another – to put to shame the isolation that Avner ends the film in.
I believe in community, and in communion. I have hope for our world. As utterly devastating as Munich is, it leaves me with the desire to confront its thorny moral briars. Those who believe that discussion is pointless and that violence is the only language that certain people understand would do well to remember that for Br’er Rabbit the briar patch ended up being the safest place of all. Toss us into it, I say. We may be scratched, and bruised, and bloodied by the experience. But in the end we may find that home lies directly within it – at its center.
Spielberg’s getting a lot of credit for Munich, and that credit is deserved. Munich is powerful, disturbing, sorrowful filmmaking. But much of the credit also goes to Tony Kushner’s screenplay. It allows no easy resolutions, no pat moralizing, and no redemption. The circle of violence is unbroken, and Kushner and Spielberg remind us of that with Munich’s final shot – actor Eric Bana left standing alone in a desolate, deserted playground with the Twin Towers hovering like ghosts behind his solitary shape.
On its face, Munich is about the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists. But like most of the film’s I find most affecting, Munich is about far more than any one event. It is about the way that violence degrades and dehumanizes us all. It is about the way that vengeance – righteous or otherwise – delivers the slimmest of reassurances.
Like George Clooney’s similarly admirable (though far less involving) Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich is about the present as much as it is about the past. It reminds us that History repeats itself. That history repeats itself. It questions the results of “eye for an eye” retribution. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” goes the old saying, and there is no one left unblinded in Spielberg’s film.
What begins as a clearly monstrous terrorist act devolves into a moral and ethical quagmire of immense and frightening proportions. The surety of righteousness melts in the heat of cordite and plastique as a mission of deceptive simplicity becomes a killing floor of unanswered questions and uncoiling fear.
Munich dares to ask what the results of retribution – justified or otherwise – truly are. Eric Bana’s broken Mossad agent finds himself tearing into mattresses and lying awake in fear despite all he’s done, and despite Israel’s “strong stance” against Palestinian aggression, their actions appear only to have increased the violence and conviction of their enemies.
But to both Spielberg and Kushner’s credit, and despite their inarguably firm end-position, they give all sides of this too, too pertinent argument a clear voice. When Daniel Craig’s coolly loyal fellow agent defends their actions by saying, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood,” he means it and his character stands for millions of people who believe that the interests of their nation come before all else. When Bana’s Avner shares a stairwell smoke with an unsuspecting Palestinian, that Palestinian’s motivations for what he does are laid out in such a way that only the hardest and most narrow-minded of people cannot understand what those motivations are.
No one in Munich is a two-dimensional monster. They are simply people fighting for “Home;” a concept as abstract and misleading as it is comforting and desirable. Some folk have already called this approach into question, maintaining that “evil” does exist in the world, and that “evil” is definable.
I would suggest, with humble trepidation and an awareness of my own “liberality,” that if “evil” exists, it does not choose sides any more than the Lord chooses sides. Evil exists everywhere. It is our nature to succumb to the temptation to do harm – to wreak bloody vengeance upon those who have done us harm – and so long as there are men and women who meet escalating violence with violent escalation, evil continues unabated.
For all the shocking violence of Munich (and there is blood in spades – not the cartoon violence of an action film, but the disquieting crimson interruptions of real carnage), the most appalling act comes during a quiet conversation between a Mother and her son. When Avner returns “home” after years spent pursuing an ever-receding conclusion to his appointed task, he meets with his mother in the hospital. She tells him that she’s proud of him for what he’s done for their country.
“Do you want to know what I’ve done,” asks Avner, his tone suggesting that he needs to share the horrors he’s perpetrated and endured. “No,” answers his mother.
Avner’s mother wants vengeance, or retribution, or justice, but she wants it on her terms. Would hearing about Avner’s actions alter his mother’s perception of his heroism? Would the knowledge of the betrayals, the insecurity, and the blood muddy her convictions and her passion? It very well might, and Avner’s mother chooses the comfort and philosophical security of ignorance over the troubling, gruesome specter of her son’s new reality.
It is Avner’s mother – his true, original home – who stands in for every man and woman who just wants to be told that they are safer, better, stronger, without worrying about the costs and future implications of what has been done in order to give them those feelings. Avner’s mother does not truly want understanding. She does not want a world without violence. She only wants a world she can understand without moral equivocation.
And that world, safe and comforting as it is, collapses once Avner moves beyond the frumpily dignified setting of Golda Meir’s living room. It dissolves into a frustrating shadow land of convenient economic allegiances and fervent mistrust. No one and nothing is what it seems when you are playing on the world-stage. Was Avner’s bomb-building compatriot murdered in an act of retribution? Was he killed by his own work? Did he kill himself in grief over what he had helped to do? The answer is unavailable to us. Only the symbolic import of the moment speaks – showing us how his past literally blows up in his face.
There is no safe harbor for Avner or his family in this world. There is no righteousness when we become the thing we fear. The sense of community and belonging, so important to Jewish culture, is decimated in this film. “Will you break bread with me in my home?” Avner asks this of his Mossad “handler” in the film’s final moments. He tells his handler (played with great skill by Geoffrey Rush) that breaking bread is what Jews do. He asks in a moment of personal, private desperation. And Rush’s answer to him is as mournful as it is utterly chilling. “No.”
When Avner's "source," the enigmatic and supposedly non-political "Papa," calls to tell him that if Avner or his family are harmed, that harm will not have come from him, that promise rings slight and unconvincing. After all, "Papa" knows Avner's real name. How? And why? And even if his words are sincere, they are selective. Simply because "Papa" himself will not harm Avner does not mean that he has not sold Avner out to a third party. Midway through the film, Papa tells Avner, "You could have been my son. But you are not." With two seemingly sentimental sentences, Papa lets Avner know that this is simply business. And he plays no favorites in business.
Munich paints a world in which brotherhood, be it by blood or country or experience, is an illusion. In a world subsumed by the impulse to revenge – to right wrongs by committing other wrongs – brotherhood is a bedtime story told to keep people like Avner’s mother feeling safe at night while the world grows ever wilder and more terrifying outside her door.
Spielberg and Kushner’s film is a masterpiece, made more powerful for having such direct implications for our present-day existence. It is strong, moving work guaranteed to provoke discussion and thought. I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay it. It’s my fervent hope that watching Munich will encourage us to break bread with one another – to put to shame the isolation that Avner ends the film in.
I believe in community, and in communion. I have hope for our world. As utterly devastating as Munich is, it leaves me with the desire to confront its thorny moral briars. Those who believe that discussion is pointless and that violence is the only language that certain people understand would do well to remember that for Br’er Rabbit the briar patch ended up being the safest place of all. Toss us into it, I say. We may be scratched, and bruised, and bloodied by the experience. But in the end we may find that home lies directly within it – at its center.
