TV Note: "Waltz with Bashir" (5/9 and 5/20))
David Shasha
"Waltz with Bashir" will be screened on the Sundance Channel, Late Wednesday/Early Thursday, May 9th at 4:30 AM and Monday, May 20th at 7:00 AM
http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/waltz-with-bashir
“Shooting and Forgetting”: The 1982 Lebanon War as a Psychological Mystery in “Waltz with Bashir” (Ari Folman, 2008)
There is an Israeli Hebrew expression called “Yorim ve-Bochim,” Shooting and Crying, that encapsulates a particular way of seeing the enlightened and noble way in which Israeli Jews see themselves. Mired in many years of seemingly endless war and violence with the Palestinian Arabs, a central part of Israeli life is the mandatory military service for all its Jewish citizens. Socially this military service is a unifying factor that acts as an existential mechanism which is shared by all “real” Israelis.
Spilling over from this mandatory military service is a psychologically complex formation that seeks to rationalize violence in a cultural context in which Israeli soldiers, along the lines of the enlightened European Liberal model that is so vital to the Zionist self-image, try to convince themselves that it is not really them who are perpetrating the violence, but a nameless and faceless enemy that seeks to persecute them.
At the beginning of Ari Folman’s universally-acclaimed animated “documentary” of the 1982 Lebanon invasion – a war that was designed by the belligerent militarism and benighted fatalism of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, men whose own sense of being Jewish was shot through with Holocaust anxieties and nightmares of perpetual persecution – we see Folman himself speaking with a friend of his who has been having recurrent nightmares of 26 dogs chasing him. The number of the dogs is always precise, and is a memory of the dogs that he killed while fighting in Lebanon.
Folman’s own memories of the war remain dormant. He cannot seem to remember much about what he did during the war and what happened in it. Immediately, the viewer of “Waltz with Bashir” is hurled into the delicate psychological and emotional state of the hyper-sensitive Israeli soldier.
Folman begins to question his failing memory and seeks out a psychologist friend to explain the problem to him. As the movie progresses the psychological framework of the story remains the primary modality in which Folman comes to understand the mystery of the Lebanon War and his actions and feelings about it.
This narrative structure accomplishes two things: First, it resolutely avoids any political engagement with the war. The story reflects only the personal aspect of soldiers who enter a nightmarish Kafka-esque landscape in Lebanon whose contours and details have largely been forgotten. Suppressed memories of Beirut engender the rational, civilized discussions of these former soldiers who have now moved on and live lives of relative ease and bourgeois security. These are Israelis who are solidly Middle Class with successful professional careers. They “return” to Lebanon as fully-formed human beings who agonize over what happened and struggle to remember the many unsavory details of their own actions.
Secondly, “Waltz with Bashir” is structured as a psychological mystery formed out of Folman’s search for the truth and reality of his Lebanon experiences. It will lead inevitably to the uncovering of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as it focuses, laser-like, on the agony of the Israeli encounter with its own violent history.
Yet the film never actually returns to the real causes of this history. It avoids analyzing the “reality” of Lebanon in favor of a psychological intimacy that functions as an occulted form of Jewish hermeticism. Folman interviews a number of his military comrades and gradually (re)discovers what it is that he has been psychologically suppressing. Over the course of this intimate psychological process the nightmares of the Israeli psyche begin to (re)surface.
The Ashkenazi Zionist mindset is grounded in a terror-inducing past that has been informed by Holocaust images and metaphors. At times the nameless and faceless Palestinians in the film approximate Jewish victims of the Nazis. The Holocaust acts as a cognitive device that enables Folman and his comrades to process their experiences. Arabs become European Jews and their victimization is marked as a private Israeli tragedy. The actual socio-cultural reality of the nameless and faceless Palestinians is never broached. The film never presents Palestinians as human beings. They are simply tragic victims in a war that is largely left unexplained in the animated film.
The film centers on the place of memory in the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Great emphasis is placed on the way in which memories of the Lebanon war have been forgotten and suppressed. The men have all gone on with their lives; the events have become submerged in a historical reality that is never directly addressed.
Folman begins his project to remember what happened in Lebanon by contacting one of his former military comrades named Carmi who is now living in Holland. Without any explanation of why Carmi has left Israel, Folman engages the Israeli émigré reality. Carmi has become rich selling falafel in Holland. He owns a beautiful 10-acre spread in the picturesque European landscape and appears to be living a very comfortable life.
As the two men begin to discuss the war, we see the casual nonchalance of two Israelis in their natural form of communication. Sharing a cigarette, the two men drive through the Dutch countryside where Carmi lives and return to the nightmarish past of Beirut.
As the film continues Folman deploys a dual narrative: There is the retelling of the brutal events of the war, but there is also a reconnection between him and his army buddies. War functions, as has been the case for many generations of Israelis, as a unifying socio-cultural factor. These are hidden realities and mysteries that can only be known by those who lived out the harsh and bitter experiences that being an Israeli soldier entails.
And this is what these conversations are about: The attempt to commiserate about the past in order to be freed of it. The cognitive modality of the entire enterprise of memory-retrieval is Freudian: Each of the men talks out their past and presents the viewer with a series of unsettling images of a war that continues to torture the Israeli conscience.
In these memories there is only the intimacy of the psychological; there is never any actual engagement with the socio-political reasons for the war or any serious philosophical reflection on its morality. The aim is to dislodge the memories of the past from an anxious and troubled Israeli soul.
Two important issues come to mind in this psychological process:
Why and how is it that these now middle-age men have forgotten the details of the past, and how is it that they can bring these memories back to consciousness?
As if they were characters in a Robbe-Grillet novel, the men find themselves at a loss to come to terms with their past. In the process of memory-retrieval the men are elevated as truth-seekers who are diligently and honestly seeking to confront a distasteful past. These, after all, are fine and noble Israeli Liberals who are trying to come to terms with their violent past and find some way to appear to be humane and enlightened.
As Ella Shohat has written in her classic work Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, this Israeli liberal humanism is a central part of the country’s transition from a mythic-heroic self-image to one of a tortured ambiguity:
“The personal films emerged from this cultural ethos. The transition from heroic-nationalist films to personal cinema formed part of a general Sabra fatigue with explicit ideology. The need for ambivalence and ambiguities reflected, in many ways, positions of artists who had no clear idea in whose name it was possible to speak and struggle.”
“Waltz with Bashir” opens a new chapter in Israeli personal cinema insofar as it problematizes the historical memory of the soldiers and takes as its central psychological fulcrum the act of forgetting.
This is a very interesting way to approach the Lebanon War because it conveniently makes the story not about the socio-political reality and the violent denouement of what was one of the most contentious and troubled wars in Israel’s history, a war whose aims were explicitly ideological and driven by two politicians whose own memories were not so nearly as fragile as those of the soldiers presented in the film, but about the tortured psychology of these noble soldiers. The Israeli soldiers are never presented as pathological in any way; the pathology is laid at the doorstep of the Christian Phalangists who are directly responsible for the massacre of the Palestinian civilians in the camps.
The film neglects to present the larger political and ideological dynamic that framed the war and the place of the Israeli military in that war. As good soldiers, the young men seen in the flashbacks never question their role in the conflict; there is absolutely no sense of self-reflection. The film’s narrative mechanism limits self-reflection to the personal anxiety and psychological torment of the men as they are now. The Palestinians are presented as inert ciphers: They are objectified victims for the soldiers who are now seeking personal enlightenment through the struggle for memory that the film narrates.
Memory is a central part of the Jewish experience. As Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi states in his seminal book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory:
“… the Hebrew Bible seems to have no hesitations in commanding memory. Its injunctions to remember are unconditional, and even when not commanded, remembrance is always pivotal. Altogether the verb zakhar appears in its various declensions in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with either Israel or God as the subject, for memory is incumbent upon both. The verb is complemented by its obverse – forgetting. As Israel is enjoined to remember, so it is adjured not to forget. Both imperatives have resounded with enduring effect among the Jews since biblical times. Indeed, in trying to understand the survival of a people that has spent most of its life in global dispersion, I would submit that the history of its memory, largely neglected and yet to be written, may prove of some consequence.”
Yerushalmi’s analysis provides a fascinating counterpoint to the history of Jewish memory that is encapsulated in “Waltz with Bashir” and its status as a highly honored Israeli cultural artifact.
Jewish memory has often focused on the depredations of the violence and persecution perpetrated against Jews. Preserving the memory of the bad things that have happened to Jews is a defense mechanism that, paradoxically, has served to protect the nation in its exile. Memory provides a sense of self-righteousness for Jews who have chosen to take the morally upright path in the face of an outside world which has often sought to turn Jews into powerless victims by the use of violence.
But with the emergence of Zionism and the state of Israel, Jews now seemingly control their own history. No longer allowing itself to be the victim of the Gentiles, Israel takes great pride in its military abilities and the way in which it refuses to allow anyone to take advantage of it.
The paradox in Israeli thinking about what it means to be Jewish is that this newfound assertiveness must be processed through the mechanisms of a history in which passivity was the ruling existential ethos.
The Sabra mentality has been informed by a sense of Jewish victimization that is redoubled in the agonies of the soldiers in “Waltz with Bashir.” Leaving the Palestinians and their tribulations in the film’s background, the movie is primarily about the psychological torment of the Israelis. They are the victims that the movie is presenting to its viewers. Their fragile psychological state turns the military invader into a powerless victim.
“Shooting and Crying,” Yorim ve-Bochim, here becomes “Shooting and Forgetting,” Yorim ve-Shochehim; a novel twist on the Israeli formulation. Tears turn into forgetting.
There is in this transformation a duplicitous aspect. The obsessive-compulsive Israeli-Zionist attachment to a resentment based on historical memories which solidifies Israeli identity and is a central part of the psychological make-up of every Israeli Jew, is here “lost” as the former soldiers valiantly struggle to piece together actions that took place only 20 years earlier.
The tension between the distant past and the more recent present is strongly manifest in Israeli thinking. The “reality” of the ancient Biblical texts supplants more recent Middle Eastern history. Israel emerges in 1948 as a fully-formed representation of an ancient Biblical nation which has seemingly “forgotten” its more recent history. “Negation of the Diaspora” (Hebrew, Shelilat ha-Galut) is a central part of the Zionist mindset. But, more importantly, the recent history of the region it now resides in remains a complete blank; most Israelis know very little about what the Middle East was actually like before Israel became a state.
The Zionist “reality” is that of 3,000 years ago when the ancient Israelites received a promise of the land from God and then proceeded to conquer that land from its inhabitants. Memory of the Davidic kingdom is, ironically, more easily accessible to Israelis than the Ottoman constitutional revolution in the first part of the 20th century. The ancient “memory” is seen as relevant in ways that the more recent history is not.
In “Waltz with Bashir” Israeli “memory” is put to the test and is shown to be full of holes and ambiguities. The film aims for a documentary effect as it narrates a “history” that is processed from the subjective memories of the soldiers who are now removed from the original scene of that history. They are largely well-to-do and comfortable professionals who live in a world where they can afford the luxury of psychological therapy and the subjective personal insights that it affords.
The analysis that Sigmund Freud conducted with his patients often uncovered the latent violence that had been perpetrated on them in their youth. The analysand had over time developed psychoses and neuroses that could only be treated by retrieving memories of the abuse. The analysand was commonly identified as a victim who was heroically struggling with the history of their own victimization.
In “Waltz with Bashir” as a paradigm of Israeli consciousness, the Freudian model is reversed: Israeli soldiers who are trying to recapture their memories of the Lebanon War are the ones who were responsible for committing acts of violence on others. Those others are never given voice in the film; the narrative reflects exclusively on the internal psychological states of the Israeli soldiers.
The paradigm shift aims to transform the Israeli soldiers into victims rather than aggressors. The film does in fact present aggressors: A disaffected Ariel Sharon calmly eating his breakfast while being informed of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and a pathological Phalangist mob that indiscriminately kills innocent civilians as the Israelis passively look on from the side. It is never the Israeli soldiers who are the central villains in this drama, it is always somebody else.
By focusing on the tribulations of the Israeli men the film aims to express how thoroughly human(e) they are. Even though Israelis commonly recall the slightest offense against them and against Jews throughout history – reinforced by an Israeli educational system that inculcates in students a historical sense of perpetual Jewish victimization as the main driving force behind their national ethos which becomes the very raison d’etre of the state and its historical significance – these men have seemingly forgotten a critical part of their own history as soldiers in Lebanon.
What applies to those who persecuted the Jews does not seem to apply to the Jews themselves.
The transformation from “Shooting and Crying” to “Shooting and Forgetting” is thus a sublimation of an inconvenient history to the act of cognitive retrieval that is the movie’s main thematic and narrative hinge.
Rather than presenting a more historically complete or existentially compelling version of the history of the Lebanon War, “Waltz with Bashir” focuses exclusively on the vicissitudes of Israeli memory and the struggle of these soldiers to bring to mind their bitter experiences in that war. The focus is not on what the war was about or what was done to the Palestinians in that war. We do see the Palestinians and their intense suffering at strategic points in the film, but Palestinian voices are never actually heard in the narrative and their suffering is sublimated to the more pressing struggle of Israelis trying to remember what happened and what they did.
“Waltz with Bashir” was universally acclaimed upon its release. It won a Golden Globe award and was nominated for an Oscar. Its visual style and dramatic storytelling techniques are indeed striking and innovative. In telling the miserable story of Israel’s Lebanon debacle and the chaos that it brought to an already-volatile region, the film, once again, emphasizes the humanity of Israel and of Israelis who – unlike the barbarous Arabs – have an innate capacity for self-reflection and critical analysis. The movie was a triumph for the liberal Israeli sensibility in the way it showed the world how thoughtful Israelis are.
But in reality, in spite of its technological creativity and intellectual dazzle, “Waltz with Bashir” is yet another reductive exercise in Ashkenazi solipsism and the blindness that has blunted Israel from seeing itself as it is.
Selective memory is an existential sign of something deeply troubling. What we choose to remember – and forget – tells us a lot about who we are. It is not enough to present the retrieval of memories in order to lend credence to the assertion that Israelis are humane and compassionate people. Self-reflection is not just about confirming what happened; it is about coming to terms with the consequences of your actions and analyzing the wider context of those actions in socio-political terms.
What we have in “Waltz with Bashir” is a series of abstract vignettes about the Lebanon War that are disconnected from its actual socio-political reality. As we have seen in Ella Shohat’s characterization of what she has called the Israeli “personal” cinema, Israeli artists often sublimate the unspeakable trauma of their violent actions to the more benign acts of self-discovery.
This narrative style serves to isolate and obscure the actual historical meaning of these events that are miraculously being “discovered” by the men and turns the actual victims – the Palestinians – into abstract figures who completely lack the human dimension; a humanity that is identified with the Israeli soldiers who mightily struggle to remember their actions in the war.
David Shasha
From SHU 494, September 14, 2011