The Venture Bros: “What Goes Down, Must Come Up”
“The Buddy System” asked the question “What is a father?” “What Goes Down, Must Come Up” seems to ask “What shall we tell the children?” Everywhere in this episode we see parents, pseudo-parents and quasi-parents dispense advice and level threats. Clearly someone needs to learn something, but who is teaching and who is paying attention? And, most important, in the end, what is actually learned?
Bruce Conner
I gasped aloud this evening when I found out, several days late, that one of my favorite artists, Bruce Conner, died Monday.
I had never heard of Conner before I wandered into the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, one day in 2000. They were having a retrospective of his work, and I thought that it might be perhaps a cute little show of an artist of marginal importance. What a shock — the museum was jam-packed with room after room of staggering masterpieces in all manner of media — collages, assemblages, drawings, photographs, films and other, more conceptual works, less easily categorized. My head felt like, well, like the guy in the collage above.
The first thing I saw coming into the MoCA show was a room or two of these curious assemblages. So at first I thought “Aha, he’s a Rauschenberg also-ran”, except that, upon looking them over, I found his assemblages more interesting, more evocative and more haunting than Rauschenberg’s.
But then he also did these rather striking felt-tip marker drawings. Each drawing is a single line, wandering, snaking across the paper, never breaking, in bothdeliberate and abstract shapes, the variations of tone coming from the marker drying out before being replaced with a new one.
One of his more amazing series of drawings were a large number of “inkblots”, these intricately-detailed, symmetrical drawings. He made dozens upon dozens of these cunning works, in all different levels of complexity. At the MoCA show, drawings like this filled up an entire wall, in row upon row, a thrilling cornucopia of ideas. Presented with them, I said, well, either I have to stop looking at these right now, or else look at them for the rest of my life. As it happened, I split the difference, looking at them for an hour or so and then buying the show’s catalogue so I could peruse them at my leisure later.
He is perhaps best known for these detailed, wry collages — and if they were all he’d done, he’d still be a great artist.
But then there are his movies, which took all kinds of different forms, from oddball collages of discarded film clips to music videos of Toni Basil (from, like, 1969, when Toni Basil was an avant-garde artist instead of an MTV star).
In any case, do yourself a favor and check him out.
Spielberg: Schindler’s List part 4
In Act I of Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler grabs the coat-tails of history to build an enamelware factory. In Act II, history turns to bite the hand clutching at its coat-tails and takes it away from him. (“Today is history” says Goth as he cheerleads his men into liquidating the Krakow ghetto.) In Act III, Schindler manages to get back onto those coat-tails — at a price.
Guess what happens in Act IV? You’re right! History decides to take the factory away from him — again. In a way, you could say that Schindler’s List is a movieabout a man struggling against titanic forces of history, in the form of the Nazi movement, working with them when it benefits him, even though they are evil, then working with them while it still benefits him, while also trying to make them a teeny bit less evil, and finally working against them, through sacrifice and trickery, and giving up on the whole “trying to change them” idea.
(In the movie, Schindler says that war is the one thing that was always missing from his business endeavors. And while the movie doesn’t really get to it, it’s worth mentioning that the real-life Schindler couldn’t keep a business going to save his life [so to speak]. War, in the movie, makes him his fortune and gets him lots of good times and women, but it also gains him his posthumous reputation as a saint. In each regard, Schindler would have been an utter failure if not for war. Historical forces really did conspire to create and then destroy this man.)
First, we see Schindler at a party, where a Jewish woman and girl present him with a cake, apparently baked by Jewish prisoners at Plaszow (although the script doesn’t specify). He kisses the girl on the cheek and the woman on the lips, as the Germans in the room glare and the woman herself freezes in horror. So here, at the top of Act IV, Schindler, we see, is still a little clueless and still addicted to his passions: he kisses the Jewish woman in spite of the fact that he’s endangering her life by doing so. The scene works well enough as a character beat, but it’s real significance doesn’t get answered for another fifteen minutes or so.
Second, we see a group of Jewish women in a Plaszow barracks, gossiping about “what they’ve heard” about Auschwitz. This scene is a rough parallel to a similar scene at the top of Act II, where we see Jews amongst themselves instead of as in relation to Schindler. The scene in Act II gives us a glimpse of life inside the ghetto before it is liquidated; here, of course, there is a dark foreboding at work.
(Throughout Act IV the question keeps arising, who knows what about Auschwitz when? Goth seems to know so much about it that he’s sloppy about who he tells, which indicates that everyone in his circle knows about it. Schindler seems to know about it, or enough to know it’s a bad thing, but needs to find out that all his workers will be moved there before he is moved to act on their behalf.)
1:58:35 – 2:06: 44 — Act IV proper begins with the excruciating “Selektion” sequence. There is a “new shipment” of workers coming in to the camp, and Goth needs to winnow out the deadwood from Plaszow. He could be a manager at any large factory, faced with redundancy and needing to cut staff. The only difference is that instead of laying off redundant workers, he’s sending them off to Auschwitz to be murdered.
As with the previous three acts, this one begins with another roll call, another row of folding tables, another list of names. The “list of names” motif becomes a kind of incantation, each name a life. As we begin to associate names with faces the enormity of the tragedy begins to form in our minds.
As Nazi doctors inspect the teeth and muscles of the naked Jews on the camp assembly ground, another doctor examines Goth up on the back porch of his house. It’s as though Goth is saying “See? I have to undergo this process too, I’m no better than you.” Goth’s girlfriend, who was so appalled to see him shooting Jews from this same porch back in Act III, here comes out in her silk pajamas to adore Goth and his bloated, doughy physique. Later, Goth puts on a shirt (but not the rest of his uniform) to go oversee his workers work. At first it looks like he’s merely a stickler for details, but as his activities come into focus we realize that he’s separating the Schindler Jews from the ones doomed to Auschwitz. In his mind, he’s just upholding his end of his corrupt kickback scheme with Schindler — he doesn’t think any of these people are going to survive the war.
On the list of redundant workers are, apparently, all the children in the camp, and surely one of the most arresting sequences in this movie of arresting sequences is a kind of “liquidation in miniature” as we follow a boy in a cap, who we’ve only glimpsed before in Act I, as he tries to find a hiding place somewhere in the camp. As Spielberg indulges in a dependable emotional sucker-punch, mothers separated from their children, the boy tries to hide in a half-dozen places before finally ending up under a barracks latrine, chest-deep in human waste — only to find the space already occupied by a half-dozen other children, the “girl in glasses” among them. Like the scene with Levertov in the previous act, the “boy in the cap” sequence is so unbelievable that I’m inclined to believe it. The movie is asking us to believe that these escaped children ran from guards, hid, and then somehow escaped detection until they were able to get out of the camp? And yet, they do.
2:06:44-2:10:19 — Schindler stops by the camp, for reasons unrevealed, apparently to hang out with his Nazi pals while the redundant workers are loaded onto train cars bound for Auschwitz. He asks Goth to hose down the train cars, so that the Jews inside might have some water to drink on their way. Goth laughs at the suggestion but goes along with it, saying that Schindler is showing true cruelty by giving the doomed hope. In any case, we see here an incremental shift in Schindler’s attitude, and a desire to do something that will not directly benefit himself. (On the “Holocaust awareness” front, this scene indicates to me that Goth certainly knows at this point that the workers are doomed, and it almost indicates that Schindler knows.)
2:10:19-2:15:00 — The Gestapo arrest Schindler for kissing the Jewish girl at the top of the act. Goth, trying to protect Schindler in order to protect his kickbacks, defends Schindler as a free-range womanizer to the unsmiling Nazi officers in charge of the case. When that fails, he falls back on his standard argument: Jewish women are she-devils who lure good Germans with their evil magic. In the previous act, Schindler made the almost-fatal mistake of confusing his morality with Goth’s. Here, Goth returns the favor, presenting his own feelings about Jews as a defense for Schindler’s actions. This gets him into even more trouble, which he tries to get out of by bribing the official — again, bringing the whole narrative back to the level of “business.”
My DVD of Schindler’s List breaks the movie in two at this point, just as the Nazi official in charge of Schindler’s case informs him, in his euphemistic way, that exterminating Jews “is policy now.” Which is, I’m guessing, the first time Schindler has this eventuality made clear to him. In any case, my timecode, of necessity, starts over here.
0:00-2:30 — Next thing we know, Schindler is walking down the street and is disturbed to find ash falling down out of the sky. The war is pressing on, and the Nazis, feeling the pressure, have ordered Goth to exhume the bodies of the people he had killed during Act II and burned in a gigantic pyre. Goth handles this task the way a harried middle-manager would handle any cockamamie scheme dictated from above: he sighs and cavils and gets on with it as best he can.
The spectacle of the exhumation, and the emotional sucker-punch of Schindler noticing the dead body of the “girl in the red coat”, are both so strong that it’s easy to miss the expository point to the scene: the Nazis are shutting down Plaszow and shipping all the Jews to Auschwitz. To Schindler this means that his factory is shutting down again, to Goth it means that the gravy train he shares with Schindler is pulling out of the station without him. “The party’s over, Oskar,” sighs Goth, “They’re shutting us down.”
2:30-4:40 — Schindler goes to Stern, in another parallel to their Act I meeting, to dissolve the business and discuss further plans. Schindler has decided to quit while he’s ahead and take his money back to Germany. Stern asks him about the business, and Schindler, paraphrasing Scrooge, tells him “You were my business.” If that’s the case, it seems to only be occurring to Schindler now — it was only an act ago that Schindler was outraged that Stern was smuggling invalids into the factory. This admission seems to be enough for Stern, who finally acquiesces to his offer of a drink. Stern approves of Schindler now, so we do too.
4:40-5:54 — Schindler, at this point, could take his war-profiteering millions and head for the hills, but the next thing we see is him in his luxury apartment (the one commandeered from the Jewish family on the day of the liquidation) with his naked mistress-of-the-day asleep in his bed, packed and ready to go, his trunks full of Reichmarks filling the dining room. Looking around at all this (and with Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” playing on the radio) Schindler comes to a decision.
5:54-7:20 — Schindler goes to Goth, in a parallel to a scene from Act III, to set up another business venture. He’s going to open a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia, and he’s going to buy “his” workers from Goth to staff it. Goth can’t wrap his head around the idea: he can’t see the profit in the situation.
7:20-11:30 — In the movie’s signature scene, Schindler and Stern compose “the list” of names of the Jews who will be removed from Plaszow and taken to Czechoslovakia (intercut with scenes of Schindler trying, and failing, to persuade other industrialists to do likewise). The weight of all those earlier roll-call scenes is brought to bear upon this one. It is both a clever “reversal” of those scenes (roll is called in the earlier scenes to find who will die, here it is called to find who will live) and a distillation of the movie’s theme: business vs. lives. Schindler is taking all the money he made through his business and exchanging it for lives, just as, in Act III, he exchanged things for lives. Stern focuses the theme down to a pinpoint at the end of the sequence: holding up the papers like Moses holding the tablets, he says “The list is life.”
(And again, there is a meta-quality to this sequence as well. For, just as Schindler is, late in his career, forfeiting his wealth, in a crisis of conscience, to “save Jews,” Spielberg could be seen as doing the same. He could go on making Jaws and Jurassic Park for the rest of his career, but he has chosen, after 20 years in movies, to risk it all on a desperately un-commercial project, shot in a hugely un-commercial manner. To “save Jews”? Perhaps, but more likely to save his own soul as an artist. The fact that Schindler’s List went on to become a huge moneymaker obviously gnawed at Spielberg: it’s one thing to create a searing vision of the Holocaust, it’s another thing entirely to have that vision make a ton of money.)
11:30-13:00 — Schindler takes a suitcase full of money to bribe Goth to transport his workers to Czechoslovakia, and plays him a hand of 21 to get Helen away from him as well. (Goth, in what surely must be his weakest moment, anemically protests against Schindler taking Helen, and spins a fantasy of taking her “back home to Vienna” to grow old with him, a fantasy so absurd that he seems to recognize it for what it is the moment it leaves his lips.)
Spielberg: Schindler’s List part 3
Act I of Schindler’s List delineates how Oskar Schindler uses his contacts with the Nazi regime in Poland to build a successful enamelware factory in Krakow in World War II. Act II shows how Amon Goth’s liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto undoes Schindler’s dream — by denying him his factory workers. Act III shows how Schindler goes to Goth to, essentially, re-close the deal. “Re-closing the deal” is something Spielberg is, no doubt, exhaustively familiar with — it’s something movie directors have to do all the time when dealing with studio executives who have the power to green-light your movie. Nazis, studio executives — what’s the difference?
1:13:41-1:17:14 — Act III opens with Goth on his balcony on a fine sunny morning, shirtless, watching over his labor camp. Schindler’s business may have just failed, but Goth’s is off to a swell start and he’s feeling his oats. Everyone we “know” is lined up for roll call — another roll call, another list of names. Spielberg begins each act of Schindler’s List with a scene like this, as though re-introducing us to the cast, catching us up on who’s alive and who is not, reciting their names over and over.
Goth, anxious to make his authority clear, decides to shoot a few workers from his balcony. This wakes up the blond in his bed, who is appalled at his behavior. It becomes clear that, for Goth, the gun is a penis substitute — when he’s finished shooting Jews, he goes into the bedroom and “discharges his shell” onto the blond’s naked breasts, then goes to urinate in the bathroom.
1:17:14-1:21:30 — Schindler comes to Plaszow to re-close the deal. He meets with some of his Nazi friends. Helen Hirsch, who will figure significantly in the act, is there serving. Schindler, livid about his business closing, nevertheless plays politics and jokes with the Nazis — they are his clients, after all, there’s no point in making them angry.
Once he gets alone with Goth, however, Schindler’s true feelings come out. In a parallel scene to one in Act I with Stern, Schindler cuts a deal with Goth to re-start his business. Instead of cajoling Stern, however, here he schools Goth, insisting that his business concerns trump whatever Goth’s objectives are in Krakow.
(Which raises the question: what are Goth’s objectives in Krakow? Yes, he’s a Nazi, we know that — but what does Goth want? Because Goth has the burden of standing in for “all Nazis”, the temptation is to say that Goth wants “to kill all the Jews.” Which is an over-simplification. Which is not to say that Goth does not want “to kill all the Jews,” but only to say that that is not his stated objective in Krakow. Goth’s stated objective is to run his work camp efficiently and thus gain favor from his superiors. His murder of random workers is, in his mind anyway, subservient to his goal of running his work camp efficiently. Plaszow was certainly a horrible place, but it was not a death camp — extermination was someone else’s job.)
(Of course, in practice Goth’s objective is to use his position of power, as camp commander, to terrify and kill — a psychological goal unrelated to gaining promotion. One of Schindler’s blunders is to confuse Goth’s stated objective with his real objective, to confuse a monster with a human being.)
Schindler demands his workers back from Goth. Is he concerned for them personally, or is he primarily concerned about profit? I would say that profit is still his primary goal here. Polish workers, we have learned, cost more than Jewish workers (probably more so, now that Jewish workers don’t exist in Krakow anymore). Plus, if he re-staffed his factory he’d have to re-train everyone and incur all the start-up costs associated with that. The first half of Schindler’s List takes great care to show that Schindler isn’t some kind of Jew-lover — if anything, it repeatedly shows him to be a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist who treats everyone equally — that is, in terms of how they can benefit his agenda. He goes to the Krakow ghetto looking for investors in Act I because he knows that these people are in a bind and will be looking to turn their currency into things, not because he loves Jews or hates them. (And, as we shall see, he will soon be the one turning things into lives.)
Goth agrees to let Schindler have his workers back — at a price, the price being regular kickbacks and gratuities. Goth, we see, is not just a black-hearted Jew-hating Nazi: he’s also a corrupt businessman. Goth’s corruption slid right by me in my first few viewings of Schindler’s List, but it makes perfect sense when you view the character as a reflection of Schindler — they’re both pragmatic businessmen who owe their very careers to wartime excess, running factories, only with different attitudes toward their workers.
1:21:30-1:23:04 – The workers come back to work at Schindler’s enamelware factory and he is back in business. The difference is, Stern now cooks the books for Goth instead of for Schindler — Schindler is, if I understand the situation correctly, re-defining his position as a contractor by sub-contracting under Goth’s command. The enamelware factory is now Goth’s, and Goth is letting Schindler keep some (most, actually) of the profits.
1:23:04-1:26:10 – There’s a big party at Goth’s house — to celebrate Goth’s new deal with Schindler? Schindler is there, drinking and womanizing right alongside Goth. He takes time to go talk to Stern, as Stern will not be allowed back to the enamelware factory. Stern tries to tell Schindler all the things he needs to attend to in order to keep the business running smoothly, but Schindler can’t keep it all straight. “It gives me a headache!” he whines — Schindler’s unwillingness to master a few business concepts (like “bookkeeping”) take precedence over Stern’s predicament — if the business goes poorly, Schindler may have to go back to Germany but Stern will most likely be executed. Nevertheless, Schindler is developing a soft spot for Stern in his situation and gives him some delicacies from the party — delicacies Stern most likely created the capital to Schindler to buy them with. Stern, noting the change in Schindler’s attitude, almost thanks him for the gesture.
(Don’t forget, Stern is our “moral compass” for the movie — until Stern approves of Schindler, we cannot approve of him either.)
1:26:10-1:38:30 — This middle chunk of the act is all about setting up the notion of trading things for lives. It’s a series of short stories, really, telling us an anecdote about one worker, then another, then another, and then showing how that worker gained a position, through Stern, at Schindler’s factory.
The first story we see is about Levertov. Levertov works in the metalworks at Plaszow, and Goth, looking to make some labor cuts, picks a gripe with Levertov’s output. He drags him out back (with a trainyard looming ominously in the background) and tries to shoot him in the head. His gun will not fire, and the guns of his underlings refuse to fire as well. (Goth, of course, has no legitimate complaint against Levertov — he’s addicted to murdering people and he’s been put in a position where he may do so freely, and so he will find any excuse he can in order to do so. Ifan excuse does not exist, he will make one up. If one cannot be made up, he’ll do it anyway.) The sudden dysfunctional-gun epidemic is played as a kind of dark comedy, and plays up Goth’s impotence. It’s one thing if Goth must use a gun to take the place of his penis, but how doubly frustrating it must be for him to not be able to shoot a gun as well. The scene is so patently absurd that I have to assume that it actually happened.
The next thing we know, Schindler delivers a plush new saddle to Goth as a kickback and gives a valuable lighter to Stern. Stern gives the lighter to Goldberg (the “bad Jew” from Act I), Goldberg puts Levertov’s name on “the good list” and Levertov is transferred to Schindler’s factory.
The next story is about the boy we saw in Act II, protecting the girl in glasses during the liquidation sequence (the boy who knows how to put them in “the good line”). A chicken has been stolen, and Goth shoots a man at random, threatening to keep shooting until someone confesses. The boy steps forward and tearfully confesses that the dead man is, in fact, the one who stole the chicken. For this act of bravery/chutzpah, Schindler gives Stern a cigarette case, the cigarette case goes to Goldberg, and Goldberg puts the boy on the rolls of Schindler’s factory.
The third story, which is a little more complicated, involves a woman who got out of the ghetto before liquidation and has been hiding in the suburbs of Krakow. Her parents are in Plaszow and she wants them to be transferred to Schindler’s factory. She comes to see Schindler at his factory, and Schindler refuses to see her. She comes back again done up as a slut, and gains admittance. She pleads her case to Schindler, telling him that she’s heard that no one dies in his factory. Schindler is appalled by this news — while it’s true that he doesn’t murder workers at random, he apparently has no idea that he’s being played by Stern as a Jew-lover. Either that, or he’s aware he’s being played to some extent but he’s concerned that the woman is a German spy being sent to entrap him.
In either case, Schindler goes to Stern and explodes. He’s livid that Stern has put him in such an uncomfortable position, and even tells him that he needs to look at the situation from Goth’s point of view. Schindler, apparently, at this mid-way point of the movie, still sees Goth as a not-that-bad variation on himself — he doesn’t see that Goth is a sociopath who’s been let off the leash by a fiat of history, he sees him as an essentially good man who’s been put into a difficult situation. In any case, he gives his watch to Stern, who gives it to Goldberg, and the woman’s parents are sent to Schindler’s factory.
Schindler, in this trio of sequences, has made an incremental change in his outlook. He seems to think now that, at some level, he is responsible for the lives of his workers. Those lives, he sees, can be exchanged for things, if one is willing to work within the corrupt system that controls the whole situation.
1:38:30-1:55:45 – This final chunk of the act has two objectives — to tell the story of Helen Hirsch, the woman Goth has selected to be his housekeeper, and to give Goth a “last chance” to redeem himself. It begins and ends in Goth’s basement, with mirrored scenes of Schindler and his nemesis Goth interrogating Helen, and has a little mini-movie in the middle concerning Schindler’s attempt to rehabilitate Goth.
During yet another party at Goth’s, Schindler comes down to the basement to chat up Helen. At first we think he’s merely trying to get a leg over, but it seems that Schindler is turning over a new leaf — he’s become interested in people as people and he asks Helen to tell him her story. Once she does so, Schindler gives her a kind of benediction. This, to me, looks like Schindler’s on his own little power trip; he’s discovered that he, like Goth, has acquired the power of life and death, but he has decided to use his power for good and not evil.
His conversation with Helen leads him to go talk to Goth about the nature of the power they both share. He tries, in his best Qui-gon style, to bring Goth over to the light side and Goth, in a totally wasted state, seems willing to give it a try. He doesn’t kill his houseboy when he leaves the expensive saddle lying on the ground, he shrugs off the offense of a shirking worker, and he almost lets his houseboy off the hook when he uses the wrong cleaner in his bathtub. Then, upon reflection (literally — Goth makes the decision while looking in a mirror), Goth decides that mercy doesn’t really suit him and murders the houseboy.
Then, as though Goth has suspected all along that this narrative digression began with Helen, he storms down to the basement and confronts her. Goth’s problem with Helen, of course, is that he wants to screw her — for all we know, he’s in love with her, whatever that means to him. He can’t screw her because it goes against everything he stands for as a Nazi. Instead, he interrogates her, supplying all her answers for her, in a bizarre, self-serving monologue that reveals nothing of Helen but tunnels deep into his own brain, showing the tortured mental convolutions he must undergo in order to justify his true objective, the murder of innocent people.
This dark, psycho-sexual nightmare is intercut against a wholesome wedding scene in one of the Jewish barracks, and also a scene of Schindler enjoying “the good life” out in a nightclub. Schindler, it seems, even past the half-way point of the narrative, is trying to maintain a sense of order. While his workers run the risk of a bullet to the head on their way to work, Schindler has no trouble treating himself to a night of wine and song.
Venture Bros: Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman
Rusty is threatened by Ginnie’s impressive weapon.
There’s something Shakespearean about “Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman.” It’s full of twins, mirrored story-lines, star-crossed lovers, frustrated couplings, all taking place in an Arden-ish (if not quite E-Den-ic) forest. It even has supernatural creatures flitting about the woods to spice things up.
Dr. Quymn is presented as very much a female Rusty — red haired, twin girls attuned to a life of adventure, supersonic airplane, muscle-bound bodyguard, etc. Her neuroses has developed differently from Rusty’s — she has ventured (sorry) into the rain forest as a bleeding heart to “protect the natives” and “cure cancer” instead of toiling in failure in her mother’s shadow, but she is as delusional and doomed as Rusty — the natives, we learn, do not want or need her protection and the rare plant she pretends to seek for her cancer cure is destroyed by the fire Ginnie and Brock start at the episode’s climax.
Everyone in “Dr. Quymn” wants sex badly, but in spite of their desires, everyone thinks of other things to do to instead. Dr. Tara Quymn wants to have sex with Rusty and has wanted to since they were both ten years old, but instead of doing so she has gone to the rainforest to try to “save the world”. Rusty is more open about his desire for sex (or at least easier to read) but his long list of failed projects is like a life-long parade of impotence — he hardly needs to have real impotence to make the metaphor clearer. Hank and Dean want to have sex, and while Hank sublimates his desires in a relatively normal fashion — that is, playing guitar — Dean is forced, in his terror, to retreat into his childhood fantasy world of mysteries and ghost stories.Brock and Ginnie, Dr. Quymn’s Brock, both want sex but are happiest expressing their desires either through the cars they drive or through fighting, or wielding their various weapons, their penis-substitute knives and guns. Ginnie is the most complicated of the cast in her sexuality. To be honest, I don’t know what the hell she wants out of all this. She’s devoted a healthy chunk of her life in a go-nowhere pursuit of Tara, but seems to be willing to give Brock a spin as well — if she’s drunk enough, or if she thinks it will make Tara jealous. Tara’s twins Nancy and Drew want sex, and their response as “teen girls” is the most natural of all — they fight over who gets the object of their affection, stuff their bras, change their minds, act older than they are and give up surprisingly easily (one wonders what would have happened if Ginnie had not interrupted them).
(Typically for The Venture Bros, the most “normal” of the sex-crazed cast members are the girls.)
(I would even argue that Clyde the orangutan wants to have sex — with Hank, but sublimates his desire through boxing.)
(For those who watch this episode guffawing at all the crazy story lines, let me inform you that the “boxing orangutan” angle is, in point of fact, 100% true.)
(The real Clyde The Orangutan, of course, met a quite unhappy end — no wonder he’s so pissed off. Hank must remind him of Clint Eastwood, the man who made him famous and then got him killed — shades of Rusty and Jonas again.)
Why isn’t anyone having sex? The answer, for the sake of this episode, is that it is impossible for these characters to have sex because their parents had sex. Or, specifically, Rusty’s father and Tara’s mother had sex, and therefore no one in the Venture universe may ever have sex again. To be even more specific, Rusty’s father and Tara’s mother had sex while they were playing an adventure game, thus fusing in their minds the ideas of child-like “adventure” and frustrated sexual desire. Rusty has pursued his goal of trying to be his father, in the hopes that it will lead to a fulfilling sex life, and Tara has lived her life of “adventure” in the wilderness, hoping for the same thing. (Of course, it hasn’t — her neuroses associated with the event have led her only to self-denial, failure, various addictions and related problems, and dead-end physical relationships. And, for all we know, unwanted twins and epilepsy.)
(A number of readers have noted that Rusty and Tara may, in fact, be brother and sister, and there is ample evidence to support this. If so, I see no reason that they could not, in fact, be twins.)
Rusty’s pursuit of potency and Tara’s sublimation of her desires kick the plot into gear. Rusty steals “the natives”‘ fertility idol and Tara seeks the “Solomon’s Heart” seed. They bring along their baggage, both physical (their families) and mental, guaranteeing their respective failures. Hank and Dean, who, as recently as last week had never met a real teenager, now meet two attractive, apparently normal teenage girls. Dean panics because he thinks they are wereodiles, which is, of course, only his way of dealing with his intense desire to avoid sex. Dean’s endgame in this episode is “solving the mystery,” but to solve the mystery there must, of course, be a mystery first, and so Dean must create a mystery in order to solve it, and thus forestall his sexual maturity.
(He is shocked to see his father’s erection: “Who did that to pop?” he worries. In Dean’s mind, and Rusty’s too I suppose, the fact that his father has an erection means that he cannot have one himself.)
(It is ironic thatone coupling between a relatively healthy man and woman enjoying each other would have such a devastating impact on so many lives. It is, I think, in spite of the adultery involved, the most “normal” sexual relationship we’ve seen on the show so far.)
(Jonas’s and Ms. Quymn’s coupling also illuminates a line from “The Buddy System:” Rusty says “If they found out their childhood hero had sex their heads would explode” I did not know then that he was talking about himself.)
Rusty, of course, fails utterly in all his pursuits. Tara fails to cure cancer and to protect the natives, Ginnie’s desire is transferred to her fight with Brock, which both destroys Tara’s work and her relationship with Rusty. Nancy and Drew seem to have come out okay, and Dean actually seems to have come out ahead — he’s successfully avoided sexual maturity, while Hank, in “defeating the wereodile,” is denied the sexual initiation he craved and is given instead the gift of circumcision, which earns him the nickname “Broken Arrow” from father-figure Brock.
(Ginnie seems to be named after Virginia Slims, the 70s-era cigarette marketed to women with the phrase “You’ve come a long way, baby,” which Ginnie quotes to Tara, right before allowing her — that’s right — an emergency cigarette.)
Favorite moment: the wereodile, after reportedly ripping off a native warrior’s head, took the time to spell out “RARRRRR” on a rooftop. Well, what would one expect a supernatural creature to write?
Second favorite moment: James
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squeaking the line “Oh my God! I almost _____ed a wereodile!” And then sounding even more creeped out when he realizes that instead of being a wereodile, Tara is actually an epileptic. His parents must be so proud.
Spielberg: Schindler’s List part 2
Act I of Schindler’s List is a direct, step-by-step procedural showing how a German businessman goes about opening a profitable enamelware factory in wartime Krakow. In a way, Act II shows how other forces conspire to make him lose that factory.
Mantis update
They grow up so fast.
Ceiling, Snacks and Booie are all doing splendidly — Ceiling and Snacks have each shed yet another skin and are over an inch long now. Booie seems to be the runt of the litter — he’s still on his second skin, is not yet green and tends to stay on the lower levels of his terrarium, instead of seeking the high ground where the hunting is better.
Suspecting that Booie might flourish if given his own territory, I moved Ceiling out of the yogurt container and put him into the large white terrarium. I then moved Booie into the yogurt container, leaving Snacks to dominate the green terrarium.
The fruit flies were disappearing at an alarming rate and I contemplated beginning the mantises on baby crickets. Snacks and Booie had taken to non-chalantly snagging fruit flies with a single paw, chewing on them like they were bubble-gum cigars, and I knew that was no kind of life for what Wikipedia calls “a notorious predator.” But were my boys (I have no idea what sex they are) big enough for baby crickets? This was the question on my mind as I entered the pet store on Wilshire.
Yes! The answer turned out to be. The moment I shook the baby crickets into their terrariums Snacksand Ceiling each nabbed one apiece, chowing down on them like they were ears of corn — wriggling, multi-legged ears of tasty, tasty corn.
(Booie I’m keeping on fruit flies for now — to be honest, I’m a little worried about him. One of the reasons I wanted to separate him from Snacks was in case Snacks got tired of fruit flies one day and started looking around for prey that was a little more, mm, challenging.)
More mantisy goodness after the cut.
At the top of the page is Ceiling, in his new terrarium, perched like a lion atop Pride Rock, silhouetted against the lush Santa Monica landscape he calls his home, or would if he lived in it. Next is Snacks, chowing down on his cricket in his preferred position, hanging upside down from his netting (picture is rotated to reduce vertigo). Finally, Ceiling again as he naturally appears, not silhouetted against anything, but standing out boldly against the Kleenex box his terrarium overlooks.
Venture Bros: The Buddy System
What is a father? That’s the question on everyone’s mind in this episode of The Venture Bros.
Action Johnny says fathers are “caring, protective men.” Rusty seems to have a different definition: a father, to him, is someone who shirks all responsibility, exploits the weaknesses of children, gripes about the time and effort it takes to guide them, but who will nevertheless clone a new, improved child if one is, by chance, killed in a surprise gorilla attack.
Rusty, surely one of the most spineless, unlikeable creations in TV history, deeply resents his TV-show childhood, but that doesn’t mean he won’t cynically exploit that childhood for personal gain. This man who cannot stand the company of his own sons decides, for some reason, to open a day camp. And a very poorly-run day-camp it is too: obviously thrown-together at the last minute, with more thought put into the t-shirt design than to scheduling or activities. Presenters are unpaid, their acts are apparently not previewed or vetted, the few scheduled activities offered are, to say the least, ill-considered. The laissez-faire attitude extends to the safety of the attendees: “The Buddy System” is instituted at Rusty’s Day Camp because Rusty is too irresponsible to watch over the children himself. “The Buddy System” is, in fact, just another term for “you’re on your own.”
(The rainbow flag in the background of the opening commercial is a particular puzzler — how could a 21st-century parent see this ad and not assume that Rusty’s Day Camp for Boy Adventurers is not a meeting place for children of gay couples?)
(Although the episode doesn’t push the comparison, Rusty’s Day Camp seems to be run along the same lines as the Bush administration: take everyone’s money, hire incompetents and cronies, conduct no oversight, have no plan, shift all responsibility to the people you’ve been charged with protecting, offer lies and no apologies when something goes wrong. The episode even concludes with an ill-timed military invasion.)
Having Rusty, Action Johnny, Billy Quizboy and the Pirate guy all in one place offers a sharp critique of children’s television. The shows that Billy, Johnny and the Pirate represent (It’s Academic, Jonny Quest and Scooby-Doo) were, after all, designed to be “buddies” to real-life children, companions to adventure on Saturday mornings. As fresh-faced kids gather ’round to obtain advice from these TV “buddies,” they find that their future presents few appealing opportunities indeed: one can become a 35-year-old quiz boy, a man in a pirate costume who teams up with rubber-mask ghosts, or a ranting junkie.
“The Buddy System” has many questions regarding what it takes to be a father, but what does it have to say about being a good son? The sons of “The Buddy System” are all bad sons indeed (my TiVo machine even identifies the episode as “Enter the Bad Seed” for some reason). They gripe about their fathers, they plot against them, they team together to pull their progenitors down. The sons of “The Buddy System” all feel terrible resentment toward their fathers (or father figures) — a sense of victimization that excuses any sort of bad behavior. Rusty himself, of course, is the king of this bad behavior — he has neither truly examined his past nor bothered to try to live in the present, and no doubt when a boy is killed on his watch he will blame his father for the event. (I can hear him now: “Well, my father never told me there were wild gorillas in the E-Den — how was I supposed to know?”)
(It cannot be coincidence that the dome of savage, brutal nature that Rusty sends the campers into is named for the staging grounds of the most primal father-son battle in literary history.)
Rusty is a psychologically stunted, pitiable wretch, and yet, he seems to be a high-functioning normal compared to poor Action Johnny. Spotlighting Johnny in “The Buddy System” reveals a father-son conflict much harsher than the one between Rusty and Jonas Venture. Johnny is capable of supplying a common definition of “father,” but it seems that he’s been a very bad son. Dying for his TV-show scientist-father’s attention, it appears that Johnny, between commercials perhaps, killed the family dog (not Bandit!) and stole one of his father’s precious formulas. Suddenly, all those episodes of Jonny Quest going off on adventures alone seem less like fun and more like child abuse — where the hell was Jonny’s father, not to mention Race Bannon? Why was Jonny along on all his father’s secret missions, and why was he constantly allowed to wander off on his own?
Child abuse forms the spine of the plot of “The Buddy System,” although the script, in a clever twist, decides not to tell us that until the last line of the episode. Doughy, dead-eyed Dermott is, it appears, Brock’s son, and sets the plot of the episode rolling by committing to get Brock’s goat. Brock’s goat is, apparently, easily obtained, as his conversation with Dr. Orpheus reveals. “So, anyone who doesn’t immediately give you respect, you murder,” says Dr. O, acting as temporary father to Brock, who responds by acting as a temporary son and deliberately perverts Dr. O’s perfectly sane advice. Brock leaps into action, launching a plot to humble Dermott, hoping to get Hank (to whom Brock has always been more of a father) to beat him up. When Brock can’t locate Hank (who is, as it happens, befriending Dermott at that very moment), he considers using the quasi-child Moppets, then, reluctantly, tries to train Dean to do his dirty work.
(“Where’s your brother?” says Brock to Dean. I would have done a spit-take if Dean had protested that he is not his brother’s keeper. Dean, in this situation, should be experiencing a healthy dose of sibling rivalry. But his hostile response to Dermott seems to have more to do with his fear of Dermott’s size and rudeness, and attendant feelings of unmanliness — the fact that Dermott is stealing Hank, the only friend Dean’s ever had, doesn’t seem to enter into the equation.)
(Dermott hits this episode like a meteorite. He looks about 200% more “real” than the stylized, moon-faced Hank — he almost looks like he’s from a different TV show altogether.)
(The usual twinnings and mirrorings abound in “The Buddy System”: as Dermott attends the day camp to spy on Brock, the Moppets attend to spy on Rusty. The twist is that the teenager, by befriending Hank, gains the access he’s looking for and the professional henchmen come up short. Also, the Monarch uses the Moppets to get to Rusty the same way Brock tries to use them to get to Dermott, before turning to Dean instead.)
Meanwhile, the Monarch reneges on his promises to Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. Dr. Girlfriend has committed to her new identity, why can’t he? But no, he’s back to his old tricks, using his wife’s henchmen to arch Dr. Venture. He’s not ready to be a husband, much less a father — he still wants, essentially, to be a teenager, to dress up in his costume and stalk his boyhood nemesis.
(Brock, apparently, would prefer this as well, for reasons that are unclear to me.)
Spielberg: Schindler’s List part 1
Schindler’s List, in case the reader is unaware, represents a quantum leap forward for Spielberg. It’s hard to connect this movie to the director of Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and almost impossible to connect it to the director of Always or 1941. The directing style is almost completely different from anything in the Spielberg canon up to this point, and the stance is shockingly “adult” in a way that no other Spielberg movie is in his first two decades in features. The idea that Spielberg directed this movie and Jurassic Park in the same year and got them both into theaters within six months of each other is still astonishing. Add to that Schindler‘s absurdly low budget ($25 million, as I recall, for a three-hour period drama featuring dozens of locations and thousands of extras) and it becomes a cinematic miracle.
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Oskar Schindler, like many Spielberg protagonists, has an obsession that endangers his family life. Schindler’s obsession, like Peter Banning’s in Hook, is business, or more baldly stated, money. And while Schindler’s pursuit of money certainly puts a strain on his marriage, his real “family” in Schindler’s List is the 1100 Jews he “rescued” from almost certain death. The narrative of Schindler’s List, like the narratives of Always, Hook and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, concerns the protagonist’s struggle to give up his obsession for the sake of his family. Schindler is also as thematically strong as anything in Spielberg, the themes here being “money” and “life.”
The first act of Schindler’s List goes from 0:00 – 33:00 and could be described as “How Oskar Schindler opened a successful enamelware factory in Krakow at the dawn of WWII” :
1:37-3:25 — The smoke from the extinguished candles cuts to the smoke billowing out of a locomotive’s smokestack as a train pulls into the station in Krakow. Obviously, smoke and trains will figure significantly in narrative to follow. The action of the scene is that Jews, forced by the Germans after the fall of Poland to re-locate to cities, are arriving in Krakow by the thousands to register with the German officials. The dramatization of the moment is a series of shots of Jews, liningup at folding tables, to recite their names for the German clerks, who type them up into lists. Smoke, trains, lines of Jews at folding tables in open spaces, Germans keeping careful track of the Jews’ names (“Name?” is actually the first line of dialog in the movie), and the list of names itself — all these motifs will be repeated in evolving contexts throughout the movie and they’re all here in the first scene.
The narrative of Schindler’s List is told mostly from Schindler’s point of view. It’s his gradual change from businessman to samaritan that the movie is concerned with. Therefore, the “plight of the Jews” in these early scenes is given relatively little importance. It is, dramatically speaking, “the weather,” the situation the protagonist is entering into. That is, Spielberg pares the information back to all we absolutely need to know to understand the protagonist’s pursuit. We don’t need to see Claudius plotting to kill Hamlet’s father, we only need to know that Hamlet is pissed off that his father is dead.
3:25-4:28 — A man gets ready for a night on the town. We see him select his tie, loot his wardrobe for spare cash, and pin his Nazi Party pin to his lapel.
4:28-5:17 — The man enters a nightclub. He heavily tips the maitre-d for a good table. The man, like Spielberg, is a manipulator of image — he wants to frame himself a certain way, present a certain impression.
5:17- 10:15 — The man scans the nightclub, looking resplendent and predatory. What is his prey? Well, here comes a comely blond lass. The man takes a drag on his cigarette (smoke again) and stares lustfully at the woman as she passes. And while we will soon find out that the man is a notorious womanizer, Spielberg here pulls a typically Spielbergian stunt — he “stands the idea on its head” and makes it that the man is not staring at the woman at all, he’s staring at the Nazi she walked in with. He didn’t come to this nightclub to seduce women but to seduce Nazis.
(Spielberg’s friend Brian DePalma put it thus in Scarface: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.”)
And so the man, who is eventually identified as Oskar Schindler, pursues his agenda of “buying the friendship of local Nazis.” He watches each influential officer, notes his predilections, and caters to them, providing women, wine and song and receiving their patronage in return.
But of course we don’t know that yet.
Now think about this sequence for a moment. Here’s what is not shown: Oskar Schindler at home in Germany, bursts in the door and says to his wife “Honey, I’ve got a great idea! You know that old enamelware factory in Krakow? Well, now that the Nazis have conquered Poland, I have a unique opportunity to buy that factory and make mess kits for the German army. We’ll be rich! Rich, I tell you!” And Mrs. Schindler says “But Oskar, however will you do it? We don’t have that kind of money.” And Schindler says “It’s wartime, babe, all the rules go out the window in wartime.” And Mrs. Schindler says “I don’t know, Oskar, it sounds mighty risky.” And Schindler says “Aw babe, don’t you get it, this is my big chance, I can finally make something of myself and impress your father.” And Mrs. Schindler says “Oh Oskar, you know I can’t resist you when you have some crazy, pie-in-the-sky moneymaking scheme. Just promise me that when you’re in Krakow, no running around with the local ladies, okay?” And Schindler saying “I love you, Mrs. Schindler. Kiss me.”
That scene would be in any other bio-pic, mostly because for most movies, there’s always someone at the beginning of the movie-making process who says “But we don’t know what the protagonist wants, we need his big ‘I want’ scene so we can root for him.” But as we’ve seen with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, the fact that the characters simply pursue their goals without explaining themselves is always much more dramatically interesting.
(That, and, of course, Spielberg doesn’t want us to “root” for Schindler exactly, not at this point of the narrative anyway.)
As Schindler discusses wine with the nightclub’s sommelier, we hear a couple of Nazis griping about the matter of governing Poland. This subtle, background exchange is the thin edge of a wedge that will become more prominent later: that for the Nazis of Schindler’s List, their activities are, essentially, “just business.” The Nazi officers in Schindler’s List talk about their occupation of Krakow and their treatment of the Jews primarily in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, rarely in terms of hatred. (The hatred gets revealed in other ways, as we will see.)
10:15-14:45 — Spielberg cuts from Schindler leading the Nazis in a cabaret sing-along to German soldiers in the city singing a martial song. We get a little more “weather” as we see Germans harassing Jews as Schindler walks through the streets.
(There are those who complain that Schindler’s List does Jews a disservice by making them minor characters in the movie. And it’s true that the movie largely centers on Schindler’s story and tends to tell the story of “the Jews” as just that — a relatively undifferentiated mass of humanity, and helpless without a powerful, sympathetic friend to “save” them. What I see is Spielberg approaching the Holocaust the same way he approaches any other subject: by asking “how do we stand the idea on its head?” In this case, he’s decided to make a “Holocaust movie” about a German businessman who’s just trying to make a little money off the war. His impulse is the same for Schindler’s List as it is for Close Encounters or Hook: “how do I make people see this story in a way they’ve never seen it before?” And in that regard, the commercial returns of Schindler’s List speak for themselves.)
We still don’t yet know what Schindler’s game is. He enters the Judenrat, a kind of Jewish community center, where relocated Jews can air their grievances and sort out legal problems. Hundreds of Jews are lined up to get into the Judenrat, in a line that stretches down the block, but Schindler, a German and a badge-wearing member of the Nazi Party, strides to the front of the line and heads inside.
The small glimpses of life on the streets of Krakow and inside the Judenrat give real weight and perspective to the scene that follows. It’s hard for us to imagine an entire population uprooted at the whim of an invading army and forced to relocate, and Spielberg imagines the practical scenes of daily life of this situation with a detail and precision he hasn’t reached since the community scenes of Jaws and Close Encounters.
Schindler has come to the Judenrat to find an accountant named Itzak Stern. Why Stern we are not told, apparently Schindler got his name from someone as someone who can get things done in the Krakow Jewish community.
Stern is presented as a, well, stern, solemn, “pure” man. (His first line of dialog is “I am.”) He functions as a kind of Jiminy Cricket to Schindler’s Pinocchio. As Schindler outlines his business scheme to Stern, Stern can barely contain his disapproval of Schindler and everything he represents. The drama of Schindler’s List largely hinges on Stern’s gradual approval of, friendship with, and eventual lionization of Schindler. This drama is characterized chiefly by Sterns unwillingness to share a drink with Schindler, and this scene is the first to bring up this motif.
In what I consider a pretty incredible scene, Schindler presents his scheme, which comes down to: I have the contacts, you know how to run a business and you know investors, lets all get rich off this crazy war thing. If Schindler is aware of the implications of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, he doesn’t show it. His attitude seems to be, this is the situation, we can suffer from it or we can profit from it — I, being a German member of the Nazi party, stand to profit from it much more greatly than you, but that’s the way things are, you want in or not?
The capitalist imperative is presented as purely amoral in the least perjorative sense of the word — what does it matter what the situation is, as long as we can make some money off it? Schindler will get his money, the Germans will get field kits, the Jewish investors will be able to trade pots and pans on the black market, “everybody’s happy,” it’s a win-win situation. Schindler, at this point in the narrative, is not a “bad” man, not an anti-semite, merely an opportunist. It’s his opportunism that suggested he join the Nazi party, it’s his opportunism that allows him to pursue his scheme of opening an enamelware factory in Krakow when he has virtually no capital, later it will be the same opportunism that will allow him to hire Jews instead of Poles to work at the factory.
14:55-17:32 — Jewish black-marketeers gather in the local Catholic church to conduct their business. We meet Pfefferberg and Goldberg, who will enter into the narrative later on as a kind of “Good Jew/Bad Jew” team — Pfefferberg will prefer to retain his honor and live as a prisoner, whereas Goldberg will gladly turn policeman for its opportunities for graft and kickbacks.
For a moment, it looks like the narrative is branching off into a new direction, but we’re with Pfefferberg and Goldberg for only a couple of minutes before Schindler enters the scene. He’s been at the church the whole time, apparently, scoping out the joint, looking for Jews exactly like Pfefferberg to acquire luxury goods on the black market — he needs “good things” to present to his Nazi contacts, to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy and get him his enamelware factory.
17:32-21:53 — The Jews enter the Krakow ghetto. As the mass of humanity flows through the streets, Spielberg takes care to show us a few faces that will become important later. He casts a boy with a winsome face and a little girl with round, horn-rim spectacles, knowing that we’ll remember those details and follow along with their stories. There is another scene of Jews standing in line to talk to Germans with clipboards sitting at folding tables in an open-air space, and another recital of names. Goldberg is now a policeman, Pfefferberg and his fiancee sneer and make fun of him.
We pay close attention to a wealthy Jewish family being uprooted from their luxury digs and herded into the street by Nazi soldiers. Why this family? Spielberg keeps us waiting for the answer. The father of the family, a framed picture under one arm, pries the mezzuzza off his front door and heads out to join the parade of Jews headed for the ghetto. No sooner are the family led away and pelted with mud by Polish onlookers then Schindler pulls up in his car and is squired about the apartment by a Nazi officer. So Spielberg does take moments to tell us of what’s happening to “the Jews” but he doesn’t want the story to get away from him — he makes sure that everyone he shows has a direct relation to his protagonist. He cuts between the wealthy Jewish family entering the deplorable conditions of the ghetto and Schindler relaxing, pleased as punch with his swanky new digs. Again, if Schindler understands that he’s taking over an apartment which was, only moments earlier, the property of someone else, he doesn’t show it — it’s all just more good stuff for the opportunist.
21:53-23:37 — The Jews have all moved into the ghetto. Stern introduces Schindler to the investors he knows. Again, it’s a scene about business — the investors try to negotiate with Schindler, but Schindler knows he’s got the upper hand and refuses to cave. Again, he’s not an anti-semite, he’s just pursuing his goal of making a ton of money and the local situation puts his business partners at a disadvantage. This scene also features Schindler’s second attempt to get Stern to share a drink with him.
23:37-24:30 — The capital secured, the enamelware factory starts production. Schindler hires Jews from the ghetto not because he intends to “save” them, but because they cost him less money (and he pays them through the Nazi bureaucracy, which benefits his business). They are, literally, “worth less.” Money and life present themselves in stark terms when one can literally say that one kind of person is worth less than another kind, and Schindler, the opportunist, is happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom.
24:30-29:00 — Stern, now in place to run Schindler’s enamelware factory, canvases the ghetto looking for likely prospects. As the Jews are being sorted into categories by the Nazis (so many scenes of sorting people out in this movie) Stern sees that everyone who isn’t working at the factory is in danger of being put on the wrong list and pulls a number of ruses and schemes to get teachers and historians and musicians jobs at the factory. This is one of the few times we leave Schindler to see what Stern is doing behind his back, and we see that Stern is something of a canny opportunist himself — he’s hiring friends and aesthetes for jobs in a metalworking plant.
29:00-30:45 — We get a moment of character development and comic relief as Schindler auditions women to be his secretary. He plays close attention to the pretty young things who hunt and peck their way through the typing test and sits bored as a middle-aged batte-axe efficiently chugs along, easily besting them. So we also learn that Schindler has an eye for the ladies and is, in fact, a thoroughly shallow man, his knowledge of French wines and cognac notwithstanding. At the end of the brief sequence, Stern tells Schindler “you have to choose.” He’s talking about picking a secretary, but, as with many things Stern says to Schindler, the line carries a double meaning. You can’t, he implies, sit on the fence through this war, making your money and chuckling at your cleverness, you have to pick a side. Schindler, however, is still an opportunist and decides to hire all the auditioners — except, of course, the battle-axe.
30:45-33:00 — Schindler promotes his newly-opened enamelware factory. He’s almost to his goal — he’s made the contacts, raised the capital and staffed his factory, now he just needs to close the deal and get his lucrative army contracts. This he accomplishes by throwing banquets for his Nazi friends and sending baskets of luxury food items to all the officers we saw earlier in the nightclub sequence. The sequence ends with a series of shots of Nazi hands placing their official stamps on Schindler’s contracts — the bureaucracy again, the “business” of the Nazis showing its hand.
His goal achieved, there is a brief scene where Schindler calls Stern to his office and makes a third attempt to get him to drink with him. This time, Stern lifts the glass (on command) but still refuses to drink. Schindler’s moment of self-congratulation is soured and Schindler brusquely throws Stern out of his office. You can see that Stern is gettng to Schindler, you can see Schindler thinking “Christ, what is it with this guy? I give him a job, I give all his friends jobs, I make his rich friends’ lives easier, what does he want from me?” This question ends the act and points the way forward for the narrative.
Kit and The Last Crusade
While you’re waiting for my exhaustive, multi-part, scene-by-scene analysis of Schindler’s List, here is my daughter Kit (5)’s interpretation of the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
At the top, of course, is the name of the protagonist. Directly below that is the row of “false grails” that Indy has ignored. Finally, at the bottom, we see Indy with the true grail. We know it’s Indy because of his hat. Indy, as we can see, is very happy to have chosen the true grail. Perhaps drinking from the true grail will get him to re-grow his lower body.
