Philosophical reflections on the Holocaust film, "Sophie's Choice"

Philosophical Reflections on the Holocaust Film, "Sophie's Choice"

I nominate as best American film about the Holocaust: Alan Pakula, "Sophie's Choice," with Meryl Streep (1982). (In what follows, I will principally explore, referencing key features of this film, what I think is a set of ethical truths (and errors) in thinking about events of this kind. My discussion in passing of Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel should make clear how much may be at stake, while readers impatient with my digressions into philosophical theology are welcome to skip them for the discussion of the film they are meant to support.)

The film contrasts the perspectives of Nathan, an American Jewish man prone to manic rages of jealousy, who points accusingly to photographs he has pasted on his wall of Nazi criminals, and Sophie, a Polish Auschwitz survivor who idolizes a father who was a Polish Catholic nationalist and perhaps an anti-Semite. She is troubled by memories that leave uncertain the possible establishment of her own guilt or innocence, until it is finally seen in a moment of near indiscernibility that it is in a way a matter of both.

One of the worst kinds of torture is to make someone guilty of participating in the crime committed against them. The Nazi guard offers her a false choice. She can save the life of one her children by giving up the other to die. It is fanciful to consider that she might perhaps have used a slightly better rhetoric (like "Don't take my child!", perhaps even still grabbing the boy, instead of "Take my girl!"?), but this could only have lessened her guilt, and not abolished it as the question that is the form it takes for her.

What is Anyone Guilty of? Elie Wiesel vs. Primo Levi

The Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved) and, reflecting in part on Levi's writings, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive), suggest a displacement of the question of guilt. The only way to explain survivor guilt is to say that you can in a way be guilty not because you caused the crime, but simply because you were there. It is thus that you might torment yourself wondering whether you could have acted differently. (A certain kind of resentment-driven thinking may be an obsessional search for an impossible answer). We "are" guilty when we feel that we are: Surely we must have the respect for individual conscience to take people's feelings of unmet or violated obligation at their word.

Levi's position is opposed to Elie Wiesel's in a way that is precisely equivalent to the opposition of Sophie and Nathan. Wiesel affirmed the common position of resentment, even calling, absurdly, on God to eternally punish the people Wiesel held to account in absentia for the wrongs down to himself, his loved ones, and the Jewish people. If a God could Holocaust the Holocausters, would that help? Is it only Christianity's appeal to blind forgiveness of all wrongs that can say otherwise? The term "Holocaust" as applied to the extermination of European Jewry was itself Wiesel's invention, which he later regretted. The term means sanctification of a sacrificing witness through annihilation of a victim. The problem here starts with sanctification, or more broadly justification. Only the point of view of a God who rules the world such as to control all that happens could make sense of such a view, yet in the case of the Holocaust in particular, this very idea clearly must (and widely has) be seen as having been shown to fail. The Shoah justifies nothing because if it did the justifying truth or reality would in turn justify it, as mathematical axioms in some logical schemes are demonstrated by what follows from them. The theological claim about the resurrection of the dead, not central in Judaism in the way it is in Christianity, can only seem a very weak argument, which depends on the faith it would justify. The problem is that experience is in time, and justifications are after the fact and small comfort at least until the narrative denouement is reached; will your suffering be less if you are told a story about its eventual meaning? The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, acknowledges this: it does not mention an afterlife but only the potential and essential goodness of this world, besetting the mourner with the painful irony of the contradiction of these words and the present reality. For loss lessens and suffering hurts. Indeed, it was only Christianity that became centered around an idea of painful death and resurrection, paradigmatically of course of its crucified God. As Judaism allows no sanctification of death itself, it may be concluded that the "Holocaust" idea is an unfortunate use, or misuse, of an old Christian idea.

Wiesel's problem, excellent writer of Midrashic and other texts that he was, is a theological and metaphysical one defined by traditional ideas of God's rulership over the world as totality, the need to make good what cannot be, and the Manichaean idea of a good that is a force at war with an evil it must want to conquer. These are all of a piece. They are all theological notions that offer reassurance.

Levi said that in the camps victims and executioners tended towards an indistinctness. He did not abandon belief in bringing the Nazi criminals to trial; they must be judged, and indeed judgment is partly making certain distinctions where they are not being made. Like: You are to blame for this, but not that. What is it I/we/you are responsible for precisely? It is probably not nothing, but certainly not everything. Moral judgment decides what is the matter, or proper object of concern in the case. So of something that seemed horrible yet impossible to oppose, it can be declared a wrong that humanity must not tolerate. Indistinctness brings not absolution from judgment but the need for it. Judgment is the institution of care where there had been neither concern nor compassion because no sense that this matters, that it is a big deal. Holocaust denial sometimes says not that it did not happen, but it is not (such) a big deal, which means that it need not concern us. Perhaps all such denials are at root denials of human mortality, vulnerability, and moral fallibility. That is why many turn to theodicies for comfort, and ideas of God are still largely used in practices of legitimation (such as in American courtrooms, and American public discourse of religion generally).

Ultimately guilt points to responsibility, which is the judgment that this does concern me, as I must recognize myself as involved in the situation. The logic is Kantian: to be aware of something is implicitly to be able to recognize that it is a representation, a thought or perception of yours; there is an “I'“ in what I see, think, or understand. In terms of the past, particularly the traumatic past, one realizes: I was there, it happened to me, I am the one today who must answer for what happened then in light of the demands of what is happening now, what our hopes and expectations are, and what the possibilities are on which we can stake something like a confident fidelity or faith.

These matters can always only be clouded by moralisms and the rage or hatred that lay behind them, as in the case of Nathan (though he certainly does consider the Holocaust a very big deal). Moralism means that responsibility is guilt, which is deserving to be punished, and good citizens are not guilty, while rule-breakers are. Thus, moralism tends to make angry judgments that presume the innocence of the judging party.

Sophie’s Time

Certainly, there is a kind of ethical responsibility that relates the present situation to future possibilities, while guilt is indeed generally a matter of the past. And this opening to the future does seem foreclosed for Sophie.

Perhaps most remarkable in this film is the way in which the remembered scenes of Sophie's life at Auschwitz are (re-)played for the viewer. First, this is cinema; her imagination is cinematic, and this is contrasted to Nathan’s use of still photographs. These are still, small images: Nathan is outside them, and so can point to them accusingly, almost as if he were accusing these images and not the criminals themselves whom they are used to represent. They are also props for his manic rage, and they are part of a three-way interaction that involves him pointing to them while accusing Sophie, though for all that he knows she is guilty of nothing but being Polish and not Jewish, though in fact she was at Auschwitz, and watched as her young daughter was dragged off to be murdered, while he lived out the war in Brooklyn. (Of course the real guilt he senses is disavowed and concerns his abuse of Sophie).

It is always interesting when a film includes within itself images of other art forms, from mirrors and various kinds of frames, to images of theatricality, to scraps of filmed text. This is always a way for cinema to reflect upon itself, to ask the question, what is cinema? And what are its powers of revelation or of thinking? Often, as here, the point is made contrastingly and to the credit of cinema's own self-celebration. Film thinks, partly because it is a temporal art, whereas the more purely representational art of photography may be thought more documentary, a presentation of facts to constitute a body of knowledge or support a stated claim. Thinking as a process, mind as temporality, and this temporality is variable and plastic such that, as Deleuze has shown in his two-volume study Cinema, time is not just linear and punctual, nor "cyclical" and repetitive, but can place events in all kinds of orderings and multiplicities. And so memory, because it is temporal, is not just recollection or representation of something sitting in the pastness bin that is retrieved and shown, to others or oneself. This fact is related to that of the impotence of all notions of revenge, which aim to set right a having been wronged that cannot be so set right because the time is out of joint.

This is especially true of traumatic experience because a principal effect of trauma is to create holes in the ready accessibility to the mind of the survivor and would-be witness such that the referential reality of the traumatic events is marked by an obscurity or invisibility, almost like a black hole that warps the space around it. This is also why among a number of contemporary filmmakers who deal with trauma, David Lynch, particularly in films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, is so singular, because for Lynch, unlike, say, Michael Haneke, the traumatized person is the one whose sense of time and the past have been deprived precisely by the trauma of all linearity. Late in Mullholland Drive, the director gives us what may be the Freudian key to all or much of what we have so far seen as Naomi Watts's dream, and of course this reveals a mundane wish which, if true, would make the film a roman à clef: now we know. At a dinner party at the film director's mansion, we see that she is jealous of him and his new fiancé. The triviality of this idea of the film as elaborated wish shows that it cannot be reduced to that (even if this is the origin of the main character's desire, what is interesting is of course how that plays out). Lost Highway even more plainly describes a time warp that cannot be made sense of. In a not dissimilar way, Sophie’s imaginations take the place of successive filmed scenes that seem to be part of a documentary pursuit of the truth. Suitably, it turns out that the core truth, that of her forced "choice" involving her consent (today she would be bullied into signing a form, perhaps one complying with a demand for "compliance") to the murder of her daughter, is an enigma. In a way, there is a reduction of the question of responsibility for the past to an indiscernibility; we could say that she is guilty of what she is not guilty of and not guilty of what she is guilty of. Perhaps this is the ultimate enigma of our ethical responsibility. Freud put this (Kantian point) by saying that "where 'it' was, there 'I' must come to be." The representational models of the mind that sustain moralisms fail to grasp that thinking is more than knowledge, and so are left pointing like Nathan to the obvious truths of given images. But if the task is to think about our histories in an effort to understand them, perhaps more than ever do we need cinema.

William HeidbrederApril 12, 2018Comment