The Fickleness of War
He's quiet now. Endlich.
Verhoeven's Black Book can only be described as an epic tour de force retelling the factual experiences of a once-popular Jewish singer who watches her family and friends being slaughtered in front of her eyes in 1944, during the time of the Nazi occupation of Holland. She barely escapes, joining the Dutch Resistance forces and goes undercover by seducing an SS officer. Sounds like Lust/Caution, doesn't it?
The latter had erotica plastered all over the posters, trailers and whatever merchandise was associated with it - therein lies the powerful appeal of witnessing a dance with death, toeing the line between triumph and despair. There is something undeniably attractive about testing the limits of one's courage, determination and willpower - it is a subconscious desire to let others know and recognise that one is prepared to die for one's ideals, interests with nothing to lose. Do the female protagonists/seductresses enjoy such a task - sleeping with the enemy as his heart beats under the slender hand she places on his naked chest, his throat within biting distance from her heaving breaths, the muscular arms that have pulled triggers and levers of execution, now caressing her trembling body with the vulgarity of religious desecration?
*SPOILER*
What is the sin that Ellis (Carice van Houten) the singer accumulates when she decides to sleep with Muntze, the SS Hauptstammfuhrer? We tend to berate the films of today as cliched whenever the slight whiff of unlikely romance turns up ever so predictably and in such an uninspired fashion. Yet it does not seem predictable that Ellis would fall in love with Muntze - not unless she could employ psychological denial amidst the anguished wails of tortured men being dragged into dungeon cells, the execution orders signed by SS officers lying on her desk every morning, the diabolical plans hatched in the dragon's lair of Franken's office with the sole aim of slaughtering innocent after innocent.
And yet her innocence forced her to reason that not everyone implicated within the Nazi outfit was culpable of the bloodshed, not even the murder of her own family before her very eyes. William Golding, who wrote Lord of the Flies, would have pointed at that scene of carnage and triumphantly exclaimed "Aha! The loss of innocence!" Yet that is surely premature, for her innocence is preserved in fragility, emerging from her desire to find something redeemable in Muntze in order to save him from certain hell. Muntze held something familiar to Ellis' heart - that of rebellion against the entity that arrogantly demands that its judgement is faultless and must be obeyed. All must conform and none shall desist. For Muntze, that was Hilter and his SS thugs such as Franken. For Ellis, it was the Resistance movement.
Ellis' affinity to Muntze stemmed from something more fundamental: the man possessed the intellect to look beyond the labels, something even the Resistance's leader Gerben did not acknowledge until the Black Book was revealed. And most people would choose not to know because labelling is simply too easy to live one's life. A label carries with it prejudices and stereotypical judgements that are packaged, distilled to the crudest essence and bottled for consumption. The label of a Resistance fighter to Hans, and his culpability in the engineering of a plan to kill the wealthiest of Jews would vanish. While the film did not go further as to show the reaction of the Dutch public to the revelation of Hans' involvement in the crime, I'm sure a significant proportion of them would choose to ignore those facts and not believe that a hero like Hans was capable of such unadulterated malevolence.
The label of a Nazi to Muntze conveniently sidesteps the complicated powerplays within the confines of the SS bureaucracy between the factions of Muntze and Franken; the struggle of one man - who shared at least part of the desire of the Resistance to minimise bloodshed - to make his voice audible above the panic-mongering cacophony stirred up by power-hungry, sadistic men fixated on milking the victims of the war till the pips squeaked. Observe the calls to off Muntze once he was captured on the streets right after the war, or the disbelief of Gerben and the rest when Ellis requested that Muntze be rescued as well.
The label of a collaborator to Ellis/Rachel Stein is the key enabler that facilitates the Dutch public to seek vengeance after the war in a frenzied attempt to de-Nazify and deliver justice to the occupation's victims. If the true figures for collaboration actually were revealed - they wouldn't be, since governments and citizens once under occupation would not honestly own up to helping their enemies to repress their fellow countrymen - then one can appreciate the absurdity and blinding hypocrisy of most of these people, so ready to condemn the "collaborators". As someone remarked in the film, it is easy to choose to collaborate when the alternative is a bullet through your head. In their small and un-noticeable ways, people acquiesced, ignored and turned a blind eye or two when the Nazis were committing atrocities right next door.
I do not blame them, since it is unfair to judge those who have endured what I have not experienced. Yet is it too much to ask them not to judge individuals such as Ellis, who have basically done the same only to survive? The means must be as moral as the ends, you say? That creed means nothing in war, when men have decided that judgement must be made at the end of the barrel of a gun. How can one choose the means that give his or her adversaries the distinct advantage of bypassing those self-attributed limits of morality? Is that not suicide? Should Ellis have killed Muntze when she had the chance, or Franken, or van Gein instead of keeping them ever closer to infiltrate the inner circle? Should she have chosen to die instead of collaborating - what good would that do? Would her death have inspired the Dutch to come out of their acquiescence, to rebel and join the Resistance, to champion her as a martyr who died for Holland?
No. She would be dismissed as either an unfortunate casualty of the Nazi occupation, a fool who risked her life for nothing - who did she think she was, one woman trying to stop the SS? - or a collaborator who finally was undone by someone able to substitute her as a middleman. The greatest sin of Rachel Stein as judged by the people was not fitting snugly into the label of anything concrete.
She was a Jew - the Dutch felt they needed to protect them, yet they could not bring themselves to believe the people they wanted to save could be so deceptive. It probably horrified them even further at the thought that the Nazis, for all their propagandistic rhetoric, could have been right about Jews.
She was a Resistance fighter, yet she slept with Muntze the "enemy". Hans secretly harboured hatred towards Rachel not because she had chosen to bed Muntze (that would be too superficial) but because she had seemingly escaped death despite the many close calls. He perceived Rachel as a fellow collaborator and deduced via rational thought that one collaborator would only benefit from the demise of another when the war was over. And so he decided to off Rachel for personal gain, and as a testament that he could play the game of deception so much better than Rachel. Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. He scorned Rachel's "promiscuity" right till the end, to his last dying breath, and yet he judged her value as a human being on that same basis.
This film certainly helps to dispel the comfortable stereotypes of war. There is no absolute dichotomy between good and evil; people - however virtuous - tend to straddle this line if they wish to survive; for the oppressor to successfully oppress, the oppressed must agree to play the victim. No institution is ideologically monolithic, not even the infamous Nazi apparatus. War is the present arbiter, but only for societies is the result clear. Individuals affected by war have to endure a constant struggle to define for themselves what they have sacrificed in order to survive. Individuals who can persuade others that they have not sacrificed too much of their morality/identity/integrity (arbitrarily defined) can band together, but they seek out to demonise those who do not meet their exacting standards in order to reaffirm what they are not.
As such, Muntze and Rachel fell victim to the fickle judgement of Kautner and Hans. Kautner sought a personal vendetta against Muntze, who almost succeeded in picking the right side to support even before the war was over. Kautner's sadistic triumph in ordering the execution of Muntze betrays his true motive: not to punish the ex-SS officer for disobeying the military command, but to flaunt the fact that he was better at straddling the line between good and evil.
Rachel's decision to basically kill Hans at the end is justified because she has chosen to embrace retributive justice for all the innocent lives lost for the greedy profiteering schemes of Hans, Franken and van Gein. Why should she not have the right to seek vengeance against those who so readily condemned her for her sacrifice? If not for her, criminals like Hans would escape true judgement from the law. Society needs heroes like Rachel and Muntze as constant reminders of the value of integrity and staying true to one's moral creed, yet disposes of them as fickle as circumstances change.
The latter had erotica plastered all over the posters, trailers and whatever merchandise was associated with it - therein lies the powerful appeal of witnessing a dance with death, toeing the line between triumph and despair. There is something undeniably attractive about testing the limits of one's courage, determination and willpower - it is a subconscious desire to let others know and recognise that one is prepared to die for one's ideals, interests with nothing to lose. Do the female protagonists/seductresses enjoy such a task - sleeping with the enemy as his heart beats under the slender hand she places on his naked chest, his throat within biting distance from her heaving breaths, the muscular arms that have pulled triggers and levers of execution, now caressing her trembling body with the vulgarity of religious desecration?
*SPOILER*
What is the sin that Ellis (Carice van Houten) the singer accumulates when she decides to sleep with Muntze, the SS Hauptstammfuhrer? We tend to berate the films of today as cliched whenever the slight whiff of unlikely romance turns up ever so predictably and in such an uninspired fashion. Yet it does not seem predictable that Ellis would fall in love with Muntze - not unless she could employ psychological denial amidst the anguished wails of tortured men being dragged into dungeon cells, the execution orders signed by SS officers lying on her desk every morning, the diabolical plans hatched in the dragon's lair of Franken's office with the sole aim of slaughtering innocent after innocent.
And yet her innocence forced her to reason that not everyone implicated within the Nazi outfit was culpable of the bloodshed, not even the murder of her own family before her very eyes. William Golding, who wrote Lord of the Flies, would have pointed at that scene of carnage and triumphantly exclaimed "Aha! The loss of innocence!" Yet that is surely premature, for her innocence is preserved in fragility, emerging from her desire to find something redeemable in Muntze in order to save him from certain hell. Muntze held something familiar to Ellis' heart - that of rebellion against the entity that arrogantly demands that its judgement is faultless and must be obeyed. All must conform and none shall desist. For Muntze, that was Hilter and his SS thugs such as Franken. For Ellis, it was the Resistance movement.
Ellis' affinity to Muntze stemmed from something more fundamental: the man possessed the intellect to look beyond the labels, something even the Resistance's leader Gerben did not acknowledge until the Black Book was revealed. And most people would choose not to know because labelling is simply too easy to live one's life. A label carries with it prejudices and stereotypical judgements that are packaged, distilled to the crudest essence and bottled for consumption. The label of a Resistance fighter to Hans, and his culpability in the engineering of a plan to kill the wealthiest of Jews would vanish. While the film did not go further as to show the reaction of the Dutch public to the revelation of Hans' involvement in the crime, I'm sure a significant proportion of them would choose to ignore those facts and not believe that a hero like Hans was capable of such unadulterated malevolence.
The label of a Nazi to Muntze conveniently sidesteps the complicated powerplays within the confines of the SS bureaucracy between the factions of Muntze and Franken; the struggle of one man - who shared at least part of the desire of the Resistance to minimise bloodshed - to make his voice audible above the panic-mongering cacophony stirred up by power-hungry, sadistic men fixated on milking the victims of the war till the pips squeaked. Observe the calls to off Muntze once he was captured on the streets right after the war, or the disbelief of Gerben and the rest when Ellis requested that Muntze be rescued as well.
The label of a collaborator to Ellis/Rachel Stein is the key enabler that facilitates the Dutch public to seek vengeance after the war in a frenzied attempt to de-Nazify and deliver justice to the occupation's victims. If the true figures for collaboration actually were revealed - they wouldn't be, since governments and citizens once under occupation would not honestly own up to helping their enemies to repress their fellow countrymen - then one can appreciate the absurdity and blinding hypocrisy of most of these people, so ready to condemn the "collaborators". As someone remarked in the film, it is easy to choose to collaborate when the alternative is a bullet through your head. In their small and un-noticeable ways, people acquiesced, ignored and turned a blind eye or two when the Nazis were committing atrocities right next door.
I do not blame them, since it is unfair to judge those who have endured what I have not experienced. Yet is it too much to ask them not to judge individuals such as Ellis, who have basically done the same only to survive? The means must be as moral as the ends, you say? That creed means nothing in war, when men have decided that judgement must be made at the end of the barrel of a gun. How can one choose the means that give his or her adversaries the distinct advantage of bypassing those self-attributed limits of morality? Is that not suicide? Should Ellis have killed Muntze when she had the chance, or Franken, or van Gein instead of keeping them ever closer to infiltrate the inner circle? Should she have chosen to die instead of collaborating - what good would that do? Would her death have inspired the Dutch to come out of their acquiescence, to rebel and join the Resistance, to champion her as a martyr who died for Holland?
No. She would be dismissed as either an unfortunate casualty of the Nazi occupation, a fool who risked her life for nothing - who did she think she was, one woman trying to stop the SS? - or a collaborator who finally was undone by someone able to substitute her as a middleman. The greatest sin of Rachel Stein as judged by the people was not fitting snugly into the label of anything concrete.
She was a Jew - the Dutch felt they needed to protect them, yet they could not bring themselves to believe the people they wanted to save could be so deceptive. It probably horrified them even further at the thought that the Nazis, for all their propagandistic rhetoric, could have been right about Jews.
She was a Resistance fighter, yet she slept with Muntze the "enemy". Hans secretly harboured hatred towards Rachel not because she had chosen to bed Muntze (that would be too superficial) but because she had seemingly escaped death despite the many close calls. He perceived Rachel as a fellow collaborator and deduced via rational thought that one collaborator would only benefit from the demise of another when the war was over. And so he decided to off Rachel for personal gain, and as a testament that he could play the game of deception so much better than Rachel. Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. He scorned Rachel's "promiscuity" right till the end, to his last dying breath, and yet he judged her value as a human being on that same basis.
This film certainly helps to dispel the comfortable stereotypes of war. There is no absolute dichotomy between good and evil; people - however virtuous - tend to straddle this line if they wish to survive; for the oppressor to successfully oppress, the oppressed must agree to play the victim. No institution is ideologically monolithic, not even the infamous Nazi apparatus. War is the present arbiter, but only for societies is the result clear. Individuals affected by war have to endure a constant struggle to define for themselves what they have sacrificed in order to survive. Individuals who can persuade others that they have not sacrificed too much of their morality/identity/integrity (arbitrarily defined) can band together, but they seek out to demonise those who do not meet their exacting standards in order to reaffirm what they are not.
As such, Muntze and Rachel fell victim to the fickle judgement of Kautner and Hans. Kautner sought a personal vendetta against Muntze, who almost succeeded in picking the right side to support even before the war was over. Kautner's sadistic triumph in ordering the execution of Muntze betrays his true motive: not to punish the ex-SS officer for disobeying the military command, but to flaunt the fact that he was better at straddling the line between good and evil.
Rachel's decision to basically kill Hans at the end is justified because she has chosen to embrace retributive justice for all the innocent lives lost for the greedy profiteering schemes of Hans, Franken and van Gein. Why should she not have the right to seek vengeance against those who so readily condemned her for her sacrifice? If not for her, criminals like Hans would escape true judgement from the law. Society needs heroes like Rachel and Muntze as constant reminders of the value of integrity and staying true to one's moral creed, yet disposes of them as fickle as circumstances change.
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