Art, morality, and the holocaust: The aesthetic riddle of Benigni's Life Is Beautiful

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 373-384

  Haskins, Casey ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 27944474308     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00039     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Sigmund Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo," The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, XIII, pp. 211-212.
2. For the latter interpretation, see Kobi Niv, Life Is Beautiful but Not for Jews: Another View of the Film by Benigni (Israel: N. B. Publishers, 2000).
3. I thank Don Habibi for drawing my attention to this volume, which received a sharply critical review by Aviad Kleinberg in the Internet edition of Israel's Haaretz Daily Newspaper (Friday, November 24, 2000), http://www3. haaretz. co. il/eng/htmls/ kat14-4. htm.
4. See, for example, Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso, 1999)
5. Tim Cole, The Selling of the Holocaust from Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (Routledge, 1999)
6. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
7. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)
8. and Barbie Zelizer, ed. , Visual Culture and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2000).
9. One of my more memorable interlocutors was an older student in one of my classes who was a mother of two rabbis. One son, she said, loved Life Is Beautiful; the other could not stand it. A good mother (and, I like to think, a good critic), she managed some sympathy for both views.
10. Italians, as Maurizio Viano notes, typically use the idiomatic phrase la vita è bella in the presence of someone- say a small child- who needs to be cheered up or reminded that there are things in life to be enjoyed. Maurizio Viano, "'Life Is Beautiful': Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter," Film Quarterly 53 (1999): 26-34.
11. See Viano, "'Life Is Beautiful': Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter. " He adds that the first-comic-then-tragic narrative structure also has the potential to disorient audiences in a way that may not happen if the comic and tragic elements are co-present throughout the narrative: "There is quite a difference between thinking of a film as a mixture of comedy and tragedy, the tragic-comic, or as a juxtaposition of two symmetrical and mutually negating spaces. The former is a healthy if occasionally disturbing mix, aiming, as a rule, to either make comedy serious by bestowing gravity on its lightness, or, conversely, to defuse the depression provoked by tragedy. The latter is uncanny and unsettling, potentially sickening and always disorienting, insofar as spectators are forced into a schizoid experience. In a sense, Life Is Beautiful successfully helps its viewers to imagine what many Italian Jews must have felt, the eruption of absurdity and the transformation of one reality into its opposite. This is how Life Is Beautiful is faithful to reality . . . " (p. 31). Well, maybe. This may be true of the experience of some viewers, but I doubt that "schizoid" quite captures the experience of viewers- including, we might imagine, some Christian viewers- who felt a cathartic sense of closure in the final scenes of the camp's liberation by American soldiers and Giosue's joyous reunion with his mother.
12. David Denby, "In the Eye of the Beholder," The New Yorker, March 15, 1999, pp. 96-99.
13. Some of these issues are also peculiarly reminiscent of specific debates about the nature of film itself. Apart from evoking the past century's epic debate over the relationship between film's realistic and formalist tendencies, the above reader's response calls to mind the mixed fortunes of the fabled "apparatus theory" movement of the 1970s, inaugurated by Jean-Louis Baudry and others. Baudry, drawing on psychoanalytic and Marxist premises, argued that the physical constraints of the filmgoing experience reduce the filmgoer to a condition that is in different ways both like that of an infant (given how the all-surrounding security and seductive pleasure of the darkened screening room triggers repressed longings for the mother's breast) and of Plato's cave prisoners. Denby, to his credit, does not carry his critique of Benigni to Baudryean deterministic lengths; but if the analogy between adult moviegoers and narcissistic infants (or Platonic prisoners) is itself troubled, this provides reason for wondering whether Denby's Holocaust denial argument could plausibly amount to much more than an empirical description of how Life Is Beautiful affects some but not all viewers. See Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema," Communications 23 (1975).
14. Letter to the Editor from Eric McHenry, The New Yorker, March 29, 1999.
15. Letter to the Editor from Kristine Keese, The New Yorker, March 29, 1999.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, sect. 107.
17. Parker Tyler, Preface to Magic and Myth of the Movies
18. reprinted in Marshall Cohen, Leo Broudy, and Gerald Mast, eds. , Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
19. Readers who do not share this judgment obviously are welcome to assert that Guido, or Life Is Beautiful as a whole, is not funny, or that they found the film not only unamusing but also offensive. Without getting too ensnared in the semantics and epistemology of taste, I will note that one can mean different things in saying, "It's not funny" about a film, a character in a film, a joke, or anything else, and the differences are not always innocent. One might mean simply "I don't like it" or "I found it offensive," or one might mean to offer a premise to a stronger conclusion, such as "No decent or sensitive person could possibly find this funny. " But the problem is that lots of decent and sensitive people do find Guido and Life Is Beautiful to be funny- a fact that provides a perfectly respectable normative basis for my remark that Guido is funny even while not forestalling further discussion of whether the film is in good taste, is a good work of art, and so on. A familiar analogy to this situation is the phenomenon of the offensive joke. As Ted Cohen notes in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Laughing Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1999), the problem with offensive jokes- he uses the example of anti-Semitic jokes- "is compounded exactly by the fact that they are funny. Face that fact. And then let us talk about it" (p. 84). And so it is, mutatis mutandis, with Life Is Beautiful, with the notable differences that we are talking here not about a joke but about a complex film (a film whose complexity resides partly in the fact that it is about the moral and aesthetic significance of joking), and that it is not on any sane construal anti-Semitic (but see note 2 above).
20. By interesting coincidence, Dr. Lessing is also the namesake of the German Enlightenment thinker whose most famous work in aesthetics, Laocoön, or the Bounds of Painting and Poesie (1766), was a defense of the autonomy of the visual and literary arts. Lessing's prime example was the famous Greek sculpture depicting a father (Laocoön) and sons besieged by serpents, a motif not unrelated to the film's father-and-son subplot.
21. Frank Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). It is worth noting that The Trial, though written before the war, is routinely read as an absurdist parable about the abuse of European Jews within various twentieth-century bureaucracies, epitomized in the Holocaust itself, and that in the novel- as in Benigni's film too, it seems- virtually everyone is in one way or another in denial about the deeper meaning of their situation.
22. Guido, more explicitly, bears the marks not only of the holy fool but also of the hero, a figure who classically ventures forth from the ordinary world into a realm of danger where he undergoes conflict and emerges triumphant and a redeemer of others. At first, there may seem nothing odd about this. Heroism is a concept without which much human history, to belabor the obvious, would be unintelligible; but then the Holocaust is not exactly ordinary history. It was an occurrence of mind-numbing- and for some purists, unrepresentable- magnitude compounded of millions of incidents possessing a horror exceeding the bounds of ordinary moral imagination, an occurrence before which traditional mythic conceptions of redemption and heroism break down in a way that should not sit well with any of us. And if we interpret Guido's actions allegorically, they are more than casually suggestive of another hero (and holy-fool) figure needing, to put it mildly, no introduction to Benigni's Christian viewers and who could not have been far from the thoughts of a Roman Catholic like himself: namely, Christ, whose name reverberates with Western civilization's dominant myth (its divine comedy, we might say) of the redeemability of human history tout court, and whose self-sacrifice for the redemption of God's children loosely parallels Guido's sacrifice for (and effective rebirth in) his son. And this, needless to say, is a story about whose mythic meaning believing Christians or Jews or, for that matter, fans of Kafka, are not likely, in conscious and unconscious ways, to be neutral.
23. On the idea of "light transcendence" and its relation to popular horror stories of the sort described above, see Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Harvard Univerity Press, 1997).
24. Benigni is hardly alone among dramatists of this lineage whose work has met with intensely ambivalent critical reception. One thinks immediately, for example, of the work of the Nobel Prize- winning Italian playwright Dario Fo.
25. Collected in Steve Lipman, ed. , Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1991), pp. 179-180.
26. For further discussion of the documentation of such phenomena in scholarship and in videotaped interviews of Shoah survivors, as well as of further issues pertaining to humor and the Holocaust, see Sander L. Oilman, "Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films," Critical Inquiry 26 (2000).
27. This joke exploits the incongruity of the beliefs, respectively, that Levy is and is not in the camp. The resulting paradox can be resolved by specifying further information (e. g. , by stipulating that the sense in which Levy is in or out of the camp is purely psychological). The dark moral of the joke, in any case, is that camp life is unbearable without distracting illusions.
28. Or, to put it another way, humor is an indirect mode of representation that shares some structural features, on the kind of Idealist analysis envisioned above, with traditional ideas of beauty and the sublime.
29. This remark presupposes my further thoughts on the moral basis of critical judgment, and, in particular, on the fabled dialectic between autonomist and instrumentalist (or moralist) views of criticism, subjects whose full discussion is best pursued elsewhere. In brief, all critics have occasion sometimes to make superlative judgments of the aesthetic merits of films or other artworks, and it is also true that much critical reflection and argument does not require us to appeal expressly to moral considerations. But that does not mean that our moral beliefs about the world and about morally decent and indecent ways of representing it are not always still present, in a dormant or dispositional state, ready to be triggered into conscious assertion and argument when violated. And if our moral beliefs are thus present, that suggests one way in which we might at least try to reconcile two facts about art-critical reflection that have historically pulled the intuitions of autonomists and moralists in different directions. First, we often indeed do think and talk about art as if we were aesthetic amoralists or "autonomists" (i. e. , as if we believed that moral considerations are irrelevant to judging artworks as artworks, or aesthetically) in contexts where the works in question do not cross our threshold of offensiveness. But second, every psychologically normal person will sooner or later have some occasion to be offended by a cultural object; and any object that crosses this threshold for any of us confronts us in principle with a philosophical and practical decision. We will be obliged either to go the aesthetic moralist route and, if we are otherwise disposed to regard it as art, condemn it as less-than-perfect or bad art. Or, if we are sufficiently wedded to autonomism as an a priori hypothesis, we will be obliged to find some way of either claiming that the object's offensiveness is irrelevant to its aesthetic merits (which some critics have ambitiously tried to do, for example, with a film like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) or we will try to find some way of describing the object as a non-artwork The morally nagging quality of Life Is Beautiful, even and especially for critics who may otherwise prefer to think autonomistically about films and other cultural products, offers a provocative illustration of how autonomists and moralists might approach a critical task differently. For more on the autonomist- instrumentalist dialectic, see my "Paradoxes of Autonomy; or, Why Won't the Problem of Artistic Justification Go Away?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000).
30. Jane Feuer, "The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment" (1977), reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed. , pp. 486 ff.
31. On the idea of two avant-gardes, see Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Harvard University Press, 1968).
32. On the "politics of reflexivity," see Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 151 ff.
33. I particularly think here of Kant's thesis that beauty is the "symbol of morality"- a thesis whose letter and intent is compatible enough with Life Is Beautiful's message that we all need and deserve aesthetic enchantment even while it also served to pave the way, in the history of aesthetics, for Adorno's apocalyptic vision of art's duty to negate the seductions of empirical sensuousness in a Holocaust-ravaged world.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 362
35. as reported in Lang, Holocaust Representation, p. 70.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Book 5, sect. 370.
37. I owe thanks to Nina Pelikan Straus, Don Habibi, and an anonymous reader for The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper.