Schindler's List / Philadelphia

The Holocaust film or the AIDS film? Many in the dinner circles I frequent feared that given a choice between Schindler's List or Philadelphia - most moviegoers would choose Mrs. Doubtfire. Cynical, bitter and jaded, none of us anticipated the success of either. All my friends, of course, saw all three.

Many analogies have been made between the Nazi's genocide against the Jews and the US government's wilful neglect of gay men. Often lost in these analogies is the reality that the Nazis also persecuted gypsies, communists and many others, and that AIDS has hit hardest among the disenfranchised in the US including people of colour, women, drug users and the poor. To what extent are the two films comparable and how useful are these analogies?

Walter Benjamin defined disgust as the fear of being thought to be the same as that which is found disgusting. Both movies, and the situations they depict, hinge around figures of disgust - the Jew, the homosexual, the diseased. Both movies follow the time honoured Hollywood strategy of constructing a protagonist who is not the figure of disgust, but a character 'all' can identify with, who observes the situation from a safe distance. The audience is supposed to develop a rapport with this protagonist as he moves through conflicting feelings of repulsion and empathy until he comes to rest on a higher emotional plane, embracing the figure of disgust as his equal, or at the very least conferring a certain dignity on the then consecrated hero.

Employing a black and white, vérité strategy, much of Schindler's List refers to the reservoir of archival footage documenting the Nazi's final solution. Spielberg relies on the audience's vague familiarity with newsreels and propaganda footage to infuse a 'realness' into his project, an authorative voice. A couple of key moments where a child's coat is coloured red in a black and white field hint at the 'cinematic'; an interesting anomaly within such a naturalistic endeavour, because nowhere else are we provoked to meditate upon the historical distance that separates 'now' from 'then'.

I don't remember the Holocaust, but I do remember the first time I saw a Holocaust film, the condition of many, if not most viewers today. As the event recedes into the past, the traces left behind become more fragile and open to reinterpretation. Each generation struggles with its own sense of commitment; many testimonies are retold while others fade away. In his Maus cartoon books, Art Spiegelman dealt with this idea of commitment while portraying his parents' story of survival. Conversely, Schindler's List falters in its failure to admit the problems of history raised by distance and memory. Therefore its function as a compelling account is easily assailable by those who doubt the Holocaust ever happened.

Perhaps this is why the central figure of Spielberg's film has to be a gentile who saves Jews. That gap between now and then is filled with the conventions of the established enterprise. Hence, the film's only purpose is to tell a convincing story, rather than initiating an interrogation of history. Spielberg presents us with a reconstructed hero, who grants Jews permission to worship and to mourn. As Schindler weeps for the Jews he could have saved, hundreds of Central Casting Jews witness his crisis. Through the tears, his and my own, I felt bitterly resentful that I had come to identify with Schindler, not the Jews. I was led to identify outside of the self I inhabit, revealing it to be the thin construction it is.

I cried watching Philadelphia as well - a f