The Meaning of Munich
Sightings 3/2/06
The Meaning of Munich
-- Jerome Eric Copulsky
Three days from now, the annual ritual of the Academy Awards will be
performed. Steven Spielberg's movie Munich, which depicts the exploits of
a team of Israeli assassins sent to avenge the murder of eleven athletes
by Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has been nominated for
five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. CNN hailed Munich
as "a masterpiece," while Fox News declared it "the best movie of 2005."
It also received high praise from Time, Newsweek, and People.
But Munich has met with significant criticism as well. Writing in the New
Republic, Leon Wieseltier castigated Spielberg for his "evenhandedness,"
for confusing counter-terrorism with terrorism, for being "desperate not
to be charged with a point of view." Others were harsher: New York Times
columnist David Brooks complained that Spielberg "will not admit the
existence of evil, as it really exists," that Munich created a world where
Palestinian terrorists are "marginal and opaque," and where the bloody
Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved through reasoned discussion and the
renunciation of violence. In The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens
attacked "the false dichotomy the film establishes between Jewish ideals
and Israeli actions," reminding us that the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah
commemorates a military victory.
One may think this is another battle in the post-9/11 culture war, with
steely-eyed conservatives rebuking the moral relativism of the so-called
cultural elite. But in many respects, the criticisms of Munich are
misinformed and misleading. Wieseltier writes that "Palestinians murder,
Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show
evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis
suppress their scruples." But such moral equivalence is simply absent in
Munich. While Spielberg does portray the Palestinian leadership of Black
September as human beings rather than as one-dimensional monsters, there
is no scene that shows them engaged in the kind of moral questioning that
afflicts the Israelis. Our first views of the Palestinians are of the
Munich terrorists and their acts being applauded on the Palestinian
street. Brooks laments that the film lacks "evil," but the scenes of the
Munich massacre are horrifying depictions of the brutality of the
Palestinians. I do not know what Brooks thinks evil is, but throwing a
grenade into a helicopter full of bound, defenseless men should qualify.
Many conservatives congratulate themselves for their "moral clarity," but
the inconvenient fact is that morality is often not so self-evident. It is
easy to say that those who target civilians (intentionally or
indiscriminately) are engaged in evil acts; it is less easy to know how to
respond to them. The danger of appeals to "moral clarity" is that they
often demand acquiescence to a set of policies without serious reflection
or criticism. Some believe that the fact that the Mossad agents in the
movie express growing misgivings about their mission should be regarded as
a failure of nerve, and thus a symptom of Spielberg's weakness as a
filmmaker. This critique, however, reveals a deficit of moral seriousness
on the part of Spielberg's detractors.
If Munich bears the taint of "moral relativism," surely the Jewish
tradition of the movie's protagonists -- a tradition which imagines God
scolding his angels for rejoicing in the drowning of the Egyptians at the
Red Sea; which honors a patriarch and a prophet who quarrel with God about
His justice; which replaces the civil war setting of Hanukkah with a
miracle of a vessel of oil lasting for eight days; which designates a
court that condemns a guilty man to death once a generation a "bloody
Sanhedrin" -- may be considered as lacking a moral compass. But this would
be a mischaracterization. One might rather say that it is a tradition
which recognizes that even the proper response to evil may not be
unequivocally "good." The moral seriousness of Judaism has to do with its
struggle, not simply in distinguishing good from evil, but in figuring
out, through sustained argument and debate, just what one is to do. It is
no accident that the traditional form of religious study is Talmudic
argumentation, and that study is considered piety.
But all this talk about the morality of vengeance has obscured what is
truly interesting about Munich. Contrary to many of its detractors and
supporters, Munich does not present a moral argument. Despite its
spy-thriller narrative, the film is in the end a sustained and pained
meditation on the meaning of family, nation, and home, and the costs of
our obligations to them.
Spielberg has said that he hopes his film will be a "prayer for peace,"
but he does not offer easy answers to the questions he raises, which is
one reason whyMunich has confounded and infuriated many critics. While not
a perfect movie, Munich does make us consider that our highest values and
commitments do not come without a price.
Jerome Eric Copulsky is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.
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