Getting history right

I came home with an A in history once, in my high school days. My mother beamed. "I loved history too," she said. "I was always good with dates."  Since I had discovered at that age that I knew much more than either of my parents did, I winced at her ignorance. "History isn't about dates," I sneered at her. "It's about things that happened in the past that we study in order to make sure they don't happen again." A precocious little shit, I was.

The older I get the more I wish I had multiple lives, and could live them all simultaneously. In one I'd be a lawyer, in another a writer, in a third a historian. I'd live one of my lives in France, another in Germany, a third in Japan. I'd be a much better linguist and anthropologist, I'd get a PhD in philosophy, and I'd put into practice much earlier the conviction that we all live like the blind men and the elephant, each of us describing the world we see from a different perspective, all of us failing at capturing the entirety of the big picture.

I grew up in a Christian home, firmly believing that I knew what God wanted me to be and do - never say "fuck," never touch myself "down there," be kind to strangers. I was five years old when the Second World War ended and my grandmother and I went out into the street when the whistles blew and there was dancing and crying with joy. I knew that the good guys had won and things were going to be all right now.

My German grandmother explained to me that the kids who had beaten me up on the playground when I revealed that I had a German background were wrong. "There are good people and bad people in every country," she told me. "The bad people had taken over in Germany, but things would now get better."

I held on to that belief for decades - that we Americans were the good guys, the Germans were the bad guys (not all of them) and I was incredibly lucky that my mother's family had all emigrated in the 20s and therefore didn't need to assume any guilt over being German. The lines between good guys and bad guys were clearly drawn. You just needed to make sure you got your historical facts right.

Fast forward ahead to the present day. I'm still alive at 83. And still living inside my head is the smart-ass kid who knew so much more than his mother did about history. And the wiser middle-age guy who had just become aware that there are multiple perspectives one can have on the world. And the would-be philosopher who struggles with the question of whether there is such a thing as objective truth or whether we are nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves and are unable to judge the truth of because there is no way to see truth anymore from a truly neutral perspective. This is an age when "narrative" carries - or seems to carry - far more weight than "truth" arrived at via the scientific method.

This is more than a debate for students of philosophy. It is an issue at the heart of the split between right-wing Republicans and the people they label as "libtards" - people I live among and share a worldview with. The right-wingers want to make politics all about things like critical race theory, which they understand as a bunch of lies invented by American socialists to tear this country down and make the next generation ashamed to call themselves Americans. The lefties (like myself) insist all critical race theory is really about is facing up to the fact that we - the good guys - have things in the history of our nation that need to be put right.  We began as a nation of mostly European immigrants who came to North America and effectively eliminated the native population. The taboo word is genocide. You know, the thing that the Germans did with the Jews. The bad guys.  No comparison.

And, say the lefties, that was only the beginning. Then came the slave ships and the legacy of slavery and segregation, redlining and gerrymandering and other tricks to keep power in the hands of the descendants of the white Europeans. 

Stop it. Just stop it, say the rightists. You are fouling your own nest.

I remember a time in Japan when I was visiting a friend in the boonies of Kyushu and found myself in a bar with an official of the Ministry of Education. Because we were both sloshed, I had no fear of asking him, "Why is it you are afraid to teach your kids about the colonization of Korea, about pressing Chinese and Korean girls into sex slavery,  the invasion of Mongolia, the experimentation on prisoners of war and all the other horrors of your military period?" To my astonishment, he had an answer at the ready. "Because we don't want them to hate their parents. They can learn about those things when they get older and have a better understanding of the complexities of life."

Because Hitlerite Germany was forced not only to surrender, in the end, but to agree to unconditional surrender, its victims as well as the people my grandmother would call "the good Germans" were able to carry out a denazification program and become, arguably, one of the world's best-operating democracies - effectively a nation of "good guys." Meanwhile one of the things that bothered me about the many years I lived in Japan was the denial that they had committed war crimes. I took a group of students with me once to see the Yūshūkan (遊就館 - "place to commune with a noble soul"), part of the Yasukuni Shrine, where when you first enter you see a giant map showing how the Japanese forces "liberated" China from European colonialism. My students had no idea this historical revisionism was so well-established. Chalk it up to the Japanese propensity for not making waves. The reason for the excursion was the fact that in my ethics seminar the question came up of whether we could judge history by present-day standards.  For me, it remains a troubling dilemma and I don't have a clear answer.  Many of them did. "The Nazis had a different moral system. We can't judge them by our standards." Because I don't buy into the view that there is no longer any truth, only narrative, I'm attracted to the idea put forth by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that we are effectively caught, like a spider, in "webs of significance" of our own weaving. Geertz' response, if I have read him correctly, is not that there is no truth (but only narrative), but that, like morality, truth has to be constantly defined and redefined as we learn from life experience.

I yanked my students up and out of the classroom and into the Museum. It worked. They came back with the view that some interpretations of history are better than others.  And I, of course, already perceived as a foreign enemy to some of my nationalistic colleagues, became an even bigger threat. Fortunately, such nationalism is taken seriously by only a small number of Japanese. Much smaller than the 33% or so of American Trumpists now ready to follow their leader, as opposed to the rule of law and the constitution.

To pick up on the notion that truth - and I would add understanding - needs to be updated with regularity, I got into a discussion recently about the topic of eugenics. Somebody sent me an article about the removal of the name Mead from the Mead Memorial Chapel at Middlebury College, my alma mater. I paid little attention to the story when it first came down two years ago, thinking it was just another example of America wiping clean some of its past errors. You know, like removing the statues of Confederate generals in the South. Or changing the name of the LeConte Elementary School a block down from my house, because LeConte, it turns out, was a racist.

But then Jeff Jacoby, a writer I greatly admire from his articles in The Atlantic, published one carried by the Boston Globe, in which he takes Middlebury to task for hypocrisy. How come they're all so high and mighty all of a sudden, he asks, when Middlebury has a history of supporting eugenics?

And that brought back the shock I first felt when listening to the defense of Hitler's judicial system in the film Judgment at Nuremberg.  I taught that ethics seminar for several years, and in addition to taking that class to the Yasukuni Shrine that one time, I regularly played the film, because it appeals so strongly to my sense of right and wrong. "You have to believe me," the German judge says (played by Burt Lancaster) to the American judge brought in to conduct the trial (played by Spencer Tracy), "I never thought it would come to this."

"It came to this," Spencer Tracy responds, "the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent."

Love it. Still makes the heart tingle. Such certainty about right and wrong. Such clarity.

But in the dozen or so times I played the film, I whisked right over the other great moral issue, the fact that the German lawyer (played by Maximilian Schell) asked the court why they didn't recognize that Hitler got his idea of eugenics - killing off "defective" people - from the great American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Middlebury story brought that home to me. How come? How come we were able to judge the Nazis so (appropriately but) harshly, but couldn't take the next step and provide an answer to that question?  How come we didn't have as strong an impulse to rid ourselves of the belief that we had the right to kill, or otherwise mistreat, segregate or ignore, human beings we found to be "lesser" than us somehow? Where is the American analogue to denazification?

I see it in Critical Race Theory. Not the absolutist version, the postmodern one which claims that we are nothing more than the color of our skin, but the essential version, which claims that we too, like the Nazis, like the Japanese militarists, like all the "bad guys" in the world, have stuff we have to face up to and take responsibility for. We can leave the details, like reparations, for another day (I'm not in favor, but that's a separate topic), but we should not be afraid to put history books into the hands of our children which tell the whole story - and not just the right-wing Christian nationalist narrative - that America is all about heroes who fought and died for your freedom to live in a country the whole world is dying to get into.

My two cents.  Or, as my friend Norm, married to a Canadian from Montreal (never mind that she's an English-Canadian) likes to say it in French, "Mes quatre sous."

From Ikiru to Living

Ikiru

  Think of it as a trilogy. In 1886, Leo Tolstoy  published The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In 1952, the Japanese film giant Akira Kurosawa came out with Ikiru. And just last year, in 2022, South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus teamed up with Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro to come up with an English adaptation of Ikiru. All of these deal with the perennial question of how to find a purpose in life.

It's not actually a trilogy. That would imply the three go together to make a single whole. But they do hang together in that Ishiguro was persuaded to challenge himself by expanding beyond writing novels to writing a screenplay because of his admiration for Kurosawa's masterwork, and Ikiru itself was allegedly inspired by Tolstoy.

I had seen Ikiru a couple times back in the day when I had the sitzfleisch to attend a Kurosawa film festival and watch a dozen or so of his films one after the other in about a week's time. I had forgotten what it was about, probably because in my twenties chasing after the meaning of life was pretty much a bore. Today, in my 80s, and living with a terminal disease, the theme resonates like a carillon in my head. "Is this all there is?" is no longer a trivial question.

Living

Ikiru is a cinema-lover's film, about as far from soap opera or shoot-em-ups as one can get.  How well you take to it depends on how much attention you pay to an actor's facial expression or hunched over body posture, to lighting and shadows, to music, to an acting style that requires a maximum amount of suspension of disbelief. Living is made in the same vein. In both cases the boredom of empty routine is so stark that it threatens to make you want to run out of the theater. It's like watching grass grow in places, driven home with little to no subtlety. Makes you want to criticize the film for the acting and the plot line until it sinks in how well you are being manipulated by talented artists and how much craft is displayed by sound and lighting engineers and a director's eye for framing.

I've been reading a number of critics have at Living. Some say it can't hold a candle to Ikiru, others that it's too English, somehow, missing the point that it's only too English in the same sense that Ikiru is too Japanese, and that's the point. Both filmmakers are social critics. They've exaggerated the stereotype of the way both buttoned-up cultures have succeeded in sucking the life out of their well-intentioned hard-working middle class. Replaced "living" with "going-along to get-along."  "Wake-up," it wants to say to you, in the modern-day expression, "and smell the coffee." 

The purpose of art - to those who believe it has one and is more than art for art's sake - is to rattle the senses. To provoke thought, emotion, to spark a reaction, to get you to focus, to change you in some way. Ikiru and Living are not a total success, at least not with me. I reacted negatively to the endless messaging in Ikiru that one can die without ever being understood, and to watching one of my favorite actors - Bill Nighy in Living - display a man's character virtually drained of meaning. Until, that is, I realized what a good actor (this goes, as well, for Takashi Shimura in Ikiru, in spades) can do with posture and facial expression - or lack of it.

Icing on the cake, for me, was - again, in both cases - the music that reveals the otherwise dead main characters - called a "mummy" in Ikiru, a "zombie" in Living - have a soul after all. They're not dead, it turns out.  Their contribution to life on this planet may be limited and largely unappreciated. But it's there. Look at these two films too casually and you'll see them as dark and depressing. But look closely. They are, in fact, beautifully uplifting.

In Ikiru the song is "The Gondola Song." Here's but one version among many.

In Living it's the Scottish folk song, "The Rowan Tree." Again, one version among many.

photo credits: Ikiru, Living

Chernobyl and Fukushima and the line between fact and fiction

 I have created a category of blog entries called "Film Reviews," but I probably should have labeled that category "Film Reactions" or "Film Responses," since I don't see myself as qualified to critique works of art, cinematic or otherwise. I leave that to the professionals. At the same time, I believe a work of art, performance, musical, pictorial, cinematic or otherwise, should be judged in terms of how people respond to it, so I make no apology for writing these bits and putting them under the rubric of reviews. I take comfort in the knowledge that one of the best professors I ever had in a literature course began each discussion of a new book not with the question, "What are its strengths and weaknesses?" but "Did you like it?"

I want to respond here to the series which Netflix posted on June 1 entitled The Days. "The Days" in question are March 16 and the days following, when engineers and administrators of the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, as well as employees of TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and government officials struggled to keep the earthquake and tsunami from becoming an even greater disaster, with consequences potentially ten times more severe than the disaster at Chernobyl. The story focuses on the heroic self-sacrifice of men who put the lives of others before their own, and on the bungling missteps of incompetent bureaucrats who often got in the way of their efforts. The resulting tension between these two opposing forces makes a gripping narrative. It is not a documentary but a fictionalized version of events played by talented actors.

Because the comparisons with Chernobyl are inevitable - they stand out as the two worst nuclear disasters in history - it is not surprising that the two fictionalized series (i.e. not documentaries on the topic but films packaged as entertainment first, history second) are also compared. Because Chernobyl (Netflix) gets better reviews than The Days (HBO Max), I felt obliged to watch Chernobyl to see why. Once again, we're talking about two different things: the historical significance of the events, their impact on the world, on the one hand, and a critique of the films as cinematic entertainment. 

That touches a chord with me. Offends me, somehow. Reminds me of the cautions one sees when one prepares to view a film or a series: Warning: rape, bestiality, genocide, smoking. It's like the producers of the film have lost touch with reality. Do you really not understand how ridiculous it is, I want to ask, to list smoking as something an audience might be concerned with when confronted with genocide? What the hell's the matter with you?  Here I want to ask, when you sit down to watch five or eight hours of gory terror, people facing a certain grisly death from radiation poisoning, and you want to talk about whether the actors are overacting in some of their scenes? Where are your priorities?

That's one of the reasons I write reaction pieces when it comes to social- or political-theme shows, rather than reviews. For me, when films take up critical political or social issues, it's those issues I want to give priority to in any discussion about them.

How do I put into words the problem of reviewing something like Fukushima/Chernobyl/Three-Mile Island as "entertainment" when my gut and my heart and my soul are all convinced it's obscene to fuss over script and scenery and acting quality when the focus should be on the event, not some artistic interpretation of the event.

The immediate answer, of course, is that just as Americans have come to prefer getting their news from the likes of Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow or the Republican truth-be-damned Fox News Network, the medium may not be the message, exactly, but it is no less consequential than the message itself.

So let me talk only briefly about the two depictions of the disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima and then get to what I take to be the real issue: what are the long-term consequences of these disaster events?

Chernobyl was made with English-speaking actors and I assume that means it also has an Anglo-American political orientation. In any case, the bad guy is the Soviet Union, and the KGB in particular. The blame for the accident is put squarely on the political class and the villains are real ones and found at all government levels, top to bottom. The hero of the series is a nuclear scientist named Valery Legasov and two colleagues who represent composites of professional engineers whose loyalty is to science and not to party hacks. Legasov comes through in the end to lay the blame on the people who made the decision to cut corners to save money and lie about the Soviet Union's capacities in order to maintain the illusion that the Soviet nuclear energy industry was second to none in the world. In contrast, in Fukushima, the bad guys are not a deceitful government but the essentially vertical structure of Japanese institutions, where one communicates within one's organization up and down, but not across organizations.  The problem is not a culture of deceit but a culture of in-group loyalty. With focus on authority over expertise, power company officials get in the way of the nuclear engineers instead of deferring to them. In both cases there are super heroes and super villains. Whether the filmmakers are reflecting real heroes and villains takes me beyond my knowledge - and, I assume, the average viewer's level of knowledge as well.

So what are we actually seeing in these two non-documentary but documentary-like productions? Are the conclusions we draw from them legitimate? Were the Soviets really this committed to "social realism" (depicting life as the way the Soviet ideology wants things to be rather than the way they are) where objective truth is not just a back-seat participant in the drama, but a back-of-the-bus participant, if indeed it is present at all?  The lies surrounding Putin's invasion of Ukraine certainly suggest that Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, has not been able or willing to escape that pattern of weakness common to authoritarian states. 

And are the Japanese really this easily divisible into two extreme stereotypes: self-sacrificing other-oriented heroes versus hierarchical ass-kissers? Or are these divisions milked because they match the stereotypes? How much is complexity simplified because stories with sharp conflicts make more dramatic plot lines?

We are living in an age when the media are no longer trusted. And that goes not just for the news media, but possibly for makers of pseudo-documentaries, as well. What should one expect from these two productions? A truthful explanation of what happened and why? Or an entertaining tickling of cultural and political stereotypes?

I don't want to write a review of fictionalized narratives because I fear they trivialize the impact of the actual events. But now I wonder if anybody can ever assess that impact properly, anyway, in an age when truth may have bit the dust.

I don't have a clear answer to that question.