It’s been a tough week: the Boston Marathon Bombing on the public stage, and closer to home, the death of a friend, colleague and great scholar, Aristide Zolberg (I will be publishing tributes, including my own,  later this week), and a memorial service for my wife’s uncle Ed Gruson.

“Uncle Eddie” was an extraordinary man, sophisticated and warm, a bit of a rascal, but also a man of high moral principle in his private and public affairs (dating back to his marching in Selma, Alabama as a young man). My special relationship with Ed: he was the ideal reader, with a deep commitment to understanding the world, a trained biologist and urban planner, author of the birding book Words for Birds, who read broadly and seriously, with a sense of responsibility. Anticipating the end about a year ago, he gave me his complete collection of the works of Isaiah Berlin. Making sense of the chaos, while thinking about meaningful lives, is a challenge. Ed knew that thinkers like Berlin and Hannah Arendt, thinkers in dark times, to paraphrase Arendt’s most beautiful book, are important guides.

And as it happens, I did have a related treat planned for myself at the end of the grim dark tunnel of a week: off to see a movie, the Arendt biopic. It is a good movie, though it’s far from perfect. It powerfully and accurately depicts passionate thought. That is a real accomplishment, pushing the film form: “filmed thinking.”

As I prepare this post, I read two very good positive reviews, one in the distinguished Der Spiegel, the other in the more bohemian, Bitch Media. They highlight the film’s accomplishments, recognizing the great direction of Margarethe von Trotta and the superb performance of Barbara Sukowa, and they applaud how the film tells the story of the great controversy surrounding Arendt’s writing, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and her invention of the notion of “the banality of evil,” which she uses to depict Eichmann as the modern everyman, the thoughtless bureaucrat. The film also neatly portrays Arendt’s love affair and ongoing relationship with Martin Heidegger, in my judgment properly presenting it as an unsolved puzzle.

Arendt’s thought is the hero of the film, embellished by her love of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, her friendship with Mary McCarthy, and her apartment, filled with books, wine, cigarettes and émigré conversation, including between Arendt and Han Jonas, another famous New School philosopher. He couldn’t stand her relationship with Heidegger, dating back to the times they were students together, and in the film it seems that they irrevocably estranged over her Eichmann report. After Arendt’s death, I heard Jonas’s telling improvised and unrecorded commentary on Arendt at a memorial conference at NYU. Said Jonas: “Hannah thought that if she exaggerated an insight, it would become true.”

Of course, there were compromises in the film, which I find very interesting. The most significant, but understandable, is that Arendt is defined by her major public and private controversies, Eichmann and Heidegger, while the range of her original thought is named, but not revealed. Certainly this is an effect of the limits of film and the need to appeal to viewers who don’t know much about Arendt and her cultural world.

But thinking of Uncle Eddie and Ary Zolberg, there is a more telling problem. Arendt’s thinking is a little bit too good in this film, while those who oppose her are a bit too bad.

I admire Arendt. She is my favorite political thinker, as I will explain in my next in-depth post, “Hannah and Me.” Yet, even though her insights concerning the banality of evil are extremely important, explaining the cultural support of tyranny large and small, beyond the Holocaust, Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann is not “the truth” as the film’s Hannah declares. Arendt exaggerated her position, in Eichmann and many of her other books. Her factual reports were not always sound. On these and other grounds, Ary Zolberg was highly critical of her masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And while she may have been right about how thoughtlessness and irresponsibility explain the success of the Nazi death machine, and that the Jewish leadership was implicated, her tone indicated that her feelings for the Jewish people were ambivalent. I think I remember talking to Ed about this.

The movie depiction and Arendt herself may have been right when she asserted that we best confine our love for specific people and not a people, but the way Arendt portrays the Israeli prosecutor and judge, and the masses of Jews of Europe in her text, was problematic. Her tone was wrong, while her philosophy was difficult, challenging and of lasting value. The thought in the end won me over as I will explain in  “Hannah and Me.” Her thought is there for us to consider and qualify at the end of this tough week, as we try to make sense of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Brothers Tsarnaev, not only her notion of the banality of evil, but also her ideas about ideology and its relationship to terror.

A friend on Facebook declared: “if you want to know everything wrong in the world, all you have to do is watch the stupid bowl.” Written during the course of the great event, I missed the comment in real time, as I missed the game. But I suspect she is right. And for this reason, I generally stay away, though with some ambivalence.

As a good American boy, I enjoyed playing the game and watching, and the memories of pleasures past linger (including watching games, in the less distant past, with my son, who was without my provocation a fan). Yet, football is more and more clearly brutal, with its special cult of violence becoming increasingly problematic. And the Super Bowl is not just another game; it has specific repulsive dressing. The ads are a spectacle of consumerism and all I hate about capitalism. Even though I begrudgingly offer capitalism two cheers, seeing no practical alternative in our world, I see no reason to see virtue in necessity, and it is off putting to celebrate. Super Bowl Sunday is a media event from which I abstain.

Last night, I followed my Super Bowl tradition, and went to the movies. I finally pushed myself to go see Zero Dark Thirty, with less than ten other people in the audience. I very reluctantly went. Following the debates about the film, I didn’t want to support a work that apparently credited torture for the killing of Osama bin Laden. I expected to be repulsed, not by the gratuitous violence of the film  (in football’s spirit). It was the violence of the message that concerned me. Proponents of torture applauded this Hollywood production as the exception that proves the rule of Hollywood’s liberal bias. Opponents of the use of “enhanced interrogation” denounced the film. And esthetes of various sorts, including the film’s director, claimed that as a work of art, one based on our very recent past, Zero Dark Thirty is intentionally without a clear political message, depicting the facts, opening discussion. I decided to decide for myself, and what better day to do so than the day of the “stupid bowl.”

To my surprise, my first impression was that the film isn’t nearly as objectionable as I had expected. Zero Dark Thirty is a successful Hollywood flick, flawed by political and moral mixed messages. Using the language of Malgorzata Bakalarz, it was presented as an important film and a work of art, but seemed to be, rather, an entertaining unimportant movie, which despite itself poses serious and important problems.

The film is gripping. Torture, the tortured and, especially, the torturers are immediately revealed, all properly repulsive. Knowing the end of the story heightens rather than reduces the drama, as one feels and doesn’t only view the advanced military maneuver, the attack on Bin Laden’s hideout. The unlikely hero, a young, petite, obsessed, female intelligence officer, attractively dominates the screen, alongside of her CIA superiors and the super macho Navy Seals of the successful operation. All, strikingly, offered her the proper deference in the end. This, along with the killing of Osama, provided for the required Hollywood happy ending.

Yet, the moral and political problems of this entertainment are very real. It is pretty clear that both torture and more acceptable forms of interrogation were used by the CIA and military intelligence in the pursuit of bin Laden. It is a matter of debate which was more important. Although the film doesn’t take a stand on this issue, it is notable that the story moves from torture to the capture and killing of bin Laden. Non-violent forms of interrogation are hardly noticeable. I think because torture makes for good pictures, while the more conventional and acceptable questioning of subjects doesn’t film as well or as easily, the film seems to argue, even when it doesn’t explicitly, that torture was a necessary evil, this, despite the fact that the evil was portrayed.

Our attractive hero observed and condoned torture, and even actively tortured. The normalization of this, its presentation without criticism is disturbing. I fear that this will become a dominant story line. A problem with film as the popular democratic form of telling history is that it has a way of becoming definitive.

On second thought maybe the Super Bowl would have been more benign thing to do yesterday. And perhaps there is a connection between American reading of our recent past and the collective ritual that is Super Bowl Sunday. As H. Rap Brown, the radical black nationalist in the sixties, once said, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”

It’s a great, but not a flawless, movie. Steven Spielberg, the King of Hollywood, and Tony Kushner, Angels in America author, teamed up to create an illuminating and entertaining snapshot of the icon of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln, and of legislative politics. The artistry is impressive, as usual for Spielberg, and Kushner. Politically, it raises interesting questions, provoking important debates: a work of art, not a polemic.

The opening battle scene was striking and gruesome, though reminiscent of Spielberg’s early works: hand-to-hand combat, less mechanized than in Saving Private Ryan, with the interracial struggle emphasized. As in Schindler’s List, the human tragedy is compactly presented. The great moral outrage in Schindler, the ferocity of the anti-Semitic genocide, was graphically depicted in the clearing of the ghetto scene. It was at the core of the film and its greatness (despite its problematic Hollywood wrapping, “happy end” and all that, as I argued in my essay on anti-Americanism). I think Spielberg was trying to do the same in this battle scene, though with less success. The interracial struggle for justice and its brutality were there to see, but because the battle somehow didn’t engage as the ghetto scene did, critics, Kate Masur and Corey Robin, among many others, have noted that African Americans appear in the film merely as on-lookers in a story about their liberation.

I was deeply impressed by the clearing of the ghetto in Schindler’s List and the battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. These are cinematic high points, great moments in the history of film. They are difficult to watch, though impossible to turn away from. The opening scene of Lincoln is not as compelling. Perhaps because it so directly quotes from the Ryan battle scene: strange how it is that art doesn’t work the second time around. I think this is at the root of the political criticism of the movie. If the scene had worked, the criticism would not have made sense.

On the other hand, the film accomplishes more than its strongest critics and supporters maintain. Its political strengths are connected to its artistic accomplishment. It asks questions in engaging ways, avoiding simple answers to complex problems. It illuminates the dilemmas of enduring the tragedies of the social condition (more on this in future posts), showing how dilemmas sometimes can be overcome with creativity. The film does not provide simple formulas about the tension between idealism and realism, moderation and radicalism, fact and fantasy. I think this is Lincoln’s greatest strength.

David Brooks of the Times and Al Hunt, at Bloomberg, loved the film. As mainstream commentators of American politics, conservative and liberal, they particularly appreciated the realistic account of how things get done in official politics.

Brooks:

“The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.”

Hunt:

“It’s the best movie about Washington politics I’ve seen…It brilliantly captures him doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective.”

I agree with these judgments, but also think they miss important points. Politicians acting forthrightly on high principle provide the bargaining capacity of the tough realists – in Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens for Abraham Lincoln. And high-principled social movements, definitive elections and significant military action set the stage for realist deals – here the abolitionists, the re-election of Lincoln and the union victories of the Civil War.

It is the need for a broader focus that concerns radical critics of the film, such as Aaron Bady, at Jacobin.

“Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people.

…It is about the triumph of a political compromiser, and it argues that radical change comes about by triangulation, by back-room deals, and by a willingness to forego ideological purity.”

Bady maintains that “slavery was already all but dead by the time Lincoln got around to declaring himself an abolitionist.” On the battlefield and throughout the countryside a new status quo had already been established. The amendment was a formality. The passage of the Thirteenth amendment was a mere confirmation in law what had already happened in society. Mere?

I think Bady misses the artistic point, as he makes a perfectly reasonable political one. The tight focus, it seems to me, is presented not because Spielberg and Kushner are proposing that this is where the real political action is, but because this focus brings us in, gives the viewer a sense of intimate participation in a turning point in American history, through an aesthetic experience. Hunt, Brooks and Bady confuse art with politics, with a political theory or interpretation. They miss the power of Daniel Day Lewis’s brilliant performance.

The film successfully paints a cinematic canvas, which suggests multiple political responses, inviting discussion about politics then and now. The film enriches experience, providing an intimate knowledge of a time, place and people, in the way only a film can. This is to be found in the details of the film. An alternative reality is created through art: the performance of Day Lewis, the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, along with the directing of Spielberg and the writing of Kushner, down to the fine details, including, the most surprising, the sound.

I actually agree with Hunt, Brooks and Bady, along with Masur and Robins about the politics of the film. It is a wonderful depiction of the interplay between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ends, as Max Weber would put it, and as Brooks and Hunt applaud. The films narrow focus on gritty official politics, on the other hand, leaves out a great deal, including the importance of social movement and war, and the agency of African Americans, as is highlighted in responses of Robins, Masur and significantly the great historian of the era, Eric Foner. The accomplishment is that this artwork inspires an audience to discuss these issues, about emancipation and about the politics of our times.

My note in this regard, despite the liberal, conservative and radical takes: in a functioning democracy the legislative arena doesn’t make social change but confirms change that is forged elsewhere. Think civil rights, gay rights, women rights and, of course, workers rights. Major social change, on the other hand, needs the official politics to ratify, institutionalize and protect the social change. There is nothing in the film that denies this. Think Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ as partners, and realize this film is the equivalent of one that focuses on LBJ. Which is more important? An interesting discussion, an interesting film.

A final observation on Spielberg as an artist: I think his children and family movies are his unambiguous best, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. They create complete imaginative worlds that engage and are believable. Fantasy and story, and their technics are in harmony. The power of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln, along with The Color Purple, Amistad, and Munich is that they use Spielberg’s capacity to imagine worlds to connect us with history and pressing social problems. As a result, we get inside history, we live through history, in a way that only film can provide. By getting details right, or at least giving us a sense that they are right, we experience history. This is the magic of art, the magic of Lincoln, which explains its appeal. But there are dissonant notes. Sometimes sentiment gets in the way of historical engagement. Hollywood happy end is a problem, but, in my judgment, not a fatal one. It is a great, but not a flawless movie.