Shutter at the Thought....of Reality

The Sunday Times:  Extraordinary event. The review ("As Darkness Falls") by Fracine Prose of two searing novels on Nazi Germany, by centenarian (and recently retired) native-German physician Hans Keilson, rivetted our attention.  One, Comedy in a Minor Key (1947) is appearing in English for the first time, and the second, The Death of an Adversary (1962) has been long out of print.  Ms. Prose (author, herself, of a book on Anne Frank) cut straight to the chase in her first paragraph, unabashedly labelling Mr. Keilson a "genius."  Though we will have to actually read the books to have an opinion on that, her review is engrossing in her description of Keilson's art as applied in these works to a failure among Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe to "come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name."

Ms. Prose's more intricate descripton of Keilson's skills in further review gave us a flash of recognition, for frightening aspects our own times, but also for another recent work of art, widely underestimated.  "With seeming effortless, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception.  To say that this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range.  In fact, the novel shows us how human beings, in any place, at any time, protectively shield themselves from the most frightening truths of their private lives and their historical moment."

One wonders how and why we do it, but we do.  Do we not?  Turn a blind eye to that we most fear, to imagine a better reality.  Even the best of us? We are left wondering about ourselves, and how connected any of us is to our own impacts, and to the world around us, and how much a finite human being is actually served by seeing it, unless we have some means for physical escape.  We are not the realistic beings we think we are.  We prefer to wear blinders, to shutter ourselves from the light of truth.

We have recently seen the theme brilliantly depicted elsewhere.  And only the critic John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal has appreciated the multiple levels of that incisive depiction in the aptly named, Shutter Island.  The movie "requires multiple viewings to be fully realized as a work of art.  Its process is more important than its story, its structure more important than the almost perfunctory plot twists it perpetrates.  It's a thriller, a crime story and a tortured psychological parable about collective guilt."  (As the son of a psychiatrist, I can also cast a vote for the savviness of the movie's syncing of the universal psychological/sociological theme with the narrower full-fledged turn towards medication that psychiatry began at that time--in growing recognition of the fruitlessness of bringing patients to reality via the 50-minute counselling hour alone, and with its first tools. Psychiatry today is a matter of intelligently and professionally dispensing, with adjunctive third-party counselling.  Not coincidentally, during the same transitional era, many of our youth opted, for similar reasons, for self-dispensing of alternative pharms, though not always in pill form.) 

And yet, most major reviewers treated the movie as a simple and, for some, disappointing scare-flick! And these are the guys whose sight should be most practiced and penetrating!  Perhaps the blindness of reviewers to the deeper themes of the movie reflects in itself, the very desire to avoid seeing deeper that the movie successfully unveils to those whose sight is unfettered!

Deeply probing novels and movies, as those above, can only leave the thoughtful wondering about ourselves, about what we blind ourselves to in our own personal histories, but also about what we wish not to see about our risk in the world, and its impending future. Those who travel to abject places come back with a clearer vision, but such places are not advertised in the Travel section, so the reviewer vision born there is rare.  We seem, instead, to immerse ourselves in reassuring imagery: endless old short footage reviews of The War we won (which we apparently now view as some overweening fate, in contrast to the reality that Ken Burns depicts) and the many cellulose close-escapes from danger of our daring core of Hollywood celebrities--or the "reality-bites" of Survivors who emerged alive from 30-second head-bobbings to cast another tribal vote to eliminate the strong.

Yet the world seems forever filled with darker forces bent on imposing their will, even through atrocity, for their own belief.  Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and those who weilded the sword over 200,000 in Nanking, have been banished from this earth in name only. Technological advances in vision does not always advance our vision of reality.  The 1930s used movie screens not for vision, but to escape from the world outside, and what was coming, save for the scripted newsreel.  Some of the unsettling stuff of the real world is available on the flat screen, but almost everyone makes the dreamscape selection that DiCaprio's character, Teddy, does.  And the rulers who can create a breathtakingly beautiful and synchronized Olympic introduction are the same ones who send trainloads now to commercially exploit the Tibet whose spirituality was trampled by an army.  More trivially, movie celebrities with notoriously nasty and dictatorial personalities are worshipped equally with the apparently kind.  Same as it has always been. 

Reality is not a popular genre these days.