Sunday, December 28, 2008

proposal (upon seeing the preview of the new james bond meets schindler's list movie)

How about this, a collective decision among film makers: no more Holocost, no more hidden Jews, no more saving Jews, no more concentration camps, no more German soldiers. No more World War II. Deal?

What happened was horrific, in every way. But I've had enough. I think we've turned those years into heroic images one too many times already.

There are other moments in history. There are other 'finest hours'. There are other acts of defiance. (Yep, that's the title of the new movie.)

Why is it that we, as a society, are programmed to turn to the 1940s when we want to portray bravery, humanity, and selflessness, in the face of evil? I mean there is plenty new evil...

In media theory there is something called the agenda setting function of mass media. That means that media has the ability not to tell us what to think, but tell us what to think about.

Same thing here. Just think of all the movies never made because of all these WW2 films.

And, we run the risk of having people never learning the real Holocost actually happened, for all the saccharine versions that are told. We sure know the fiction that we like to repeat, but does that mean we understand what happened?

Maybe that's it. The repeating of the stories is an attempt at rewriting history.

And in the edited version of reality the bravery gets to overshadow the death and the suffering. Which is, sadly, not what happened.

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