The Boys in
the Boat, The
Peasants, and The Zone of Interest:
Three great films best seen in a theater
Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater
and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The
Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.
Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who
survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that "Even more than bread we
now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all."
Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It's
fashionable to declare one's superiority by sneering at popular culture. It's
harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless
counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving
Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from
culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important
as the candidates we support with our votes.
We get something from publicly watching
a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a
1942 screwball comedy. I'd watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a
small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich
Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly
realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its
double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the
Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on
Rhett Butler's handsome face (see here).
Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of
psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, "Do
you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?" You comfort and
enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and
tense. Mel Gibson's The Passion depicts Christ's torture, crucifixion,
and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me.
They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock.
After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over,
distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.
The loss of public movie-going erodes
not just community, but also art. Ali's well is a famous, eight-minute scene in
Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless,
tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw
water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize
that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to
death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man to arrive, we experience a fraction of the
desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational
violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could
never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching
alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don't like,
like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler's List.
My students, trained on media that
rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain's
reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali's
well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current
events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all
art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.
The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are
three very different films, but they are all innovative, in different ways. Peasants
is so innovative another movie like it may never be made again. Zone
rewrote how the Holocaust will be treated in film, and how it will be
understood. Boys is rebellious, counter-cultural filmmaking in ways I'll
detail below. All three films have much to say about our current
politico-cultural landscape. Each addresses community. Each, given their visual
and auditory artistry and impact, should be seen in a theater.
