"Good" Germans and Forest Husbands

36 titles currently queued up in the “in progress/slated” section of my Books Read list, most often rotated on the simple basis of whether or not they’re “too heavy” to carry around with you all day (which must be pretty much the only reason why I’m taking so damn long to get through Dan Simmons’ Drood, since I certainly find it consistently fascinating whenever I do sit down with it. Clocking in at what seems like half a handspan thick and three pounds of paper, it’s a definite bathroom-only project—very Dickensian, in that way. come to think; a massive novel, best-appreciated in slices/installments).

Over the weekend, meanwhile, I saw Terminator: Salvation, which I now barely remember enough about to criticize (short story short, it was loud and Sam Worthington is a very pretty man. Everyone was A) trying their best, but B) was not well-served by the script, and even though I like Christian Bale a lot, he really wasn’t the John Connor I thought John Connor was going to grow up to be. Sarah Connor Chronicles definitely did it better, in terms of the franchise’s backbone identity/humanity/timey-wimey stuff issues), and the weirdly appropriate double bill of Valkyrie and Defiance. In a way, these latter two—“based on a true story” as they are—are both coming at the same problem from very different angles: When the Holocaust is in full swing, exactly what is your personal culpability/responsibility in the matter, and what do you do about it (if anything)?

For Tom Cruise’s von Stauffenberg, an Austrian nobleman/career soldier, it’s all about trying to redeem his country’s legacy—to do what he can to remove the stinging shame of having backed the entirely wrong horse, with “and then we can stop Jews being killed for stupid, specious reasons” probably right down the absolute bottom of his personal list of positive outcomes which might stem from Hitler's assassination. For the Bielskis, OTOH—Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schrieber) and Asael (Jamie Bell), along with their youngest brother Aron—it’s the decision to not only defy the Nazis by continuing to live themselves but to also help others to survive, even if their own survival may be compromised in the process, which comes to define everything they do.

Though both films have their flaws—they’re very much big-budget, proudly “populist” movies made for mass-market audiences, with everything that observation entails very much attached—what’s interesting in retrospect is that both von Stauffenberg and Tuvia are criticized for being more driven by an ideal than by practicality, and rightly so. In a large way, what separates von Stauffenberg’s failure from Tuvia’s success is a simple matter of degrees; if only they had initiated Valkyrie immediately after the assassination attempt, the coup might actually have taken Berlin, whereas there are a million different other factors which might have exposed or derailed the forest camps before they even got started (down to and including Asael and Zus coming home earlier on that first day, and getting killed along with their parents).

Other parallels: Though von Stauffenberg says that as a soldier he at least wants an operation with “some chance at success”, there’s a fatalism inherent in his (or perhaps Germany’s) nature which seems to presage disaster/tragedy from the very outset—maybe he just wants a more dramatic, or public, way in which to die. Then again, it’s Zus’ fatalism (“dying, that’s what we’re good for”) which causes him to break off from Tuvia’s crusade, run off and join the Russian partisans so he can do some “real fighting”—and it’s his realization that Jewish hope, however apparently useless, is a better thing to die for than a bunch of “comrades” whose anti-Semitism is so inbred that nothing he does will ever be enough to defuse it which finally sends him back to the forest (and just in time! A dramatic plot point which may or may not be true, but still makes you mist up, as all good plot point should).

Of the two, I definitely liked Defiance more, and not just because Schreiber remains hot like a burning thing which is on fire and should be handled with care because it’s really effin’ HOT. There are just so many wonderful moments, along with with those very interesting undercurrents of “in the forest, the Big Man Theory definitely applies”…but not completely. The women do swap sex for protection, breaking down “civilized” patterns, but they initiate the handfasting as much as not, thus preventing rape and elevating themselves to the status of co-conspirators; they train and fight alongside the men, like Spartan lover-pairs, as the old gender-roles fall away. And the “useless” intellectual ends up becoming Tuvia’s morale officer, helping him to shape and build the community, the same way Tuvia’s old teacher becomes his conscience—his overt crisis of faith (“God, please choose another people”) makes Tuvia look at his own faith directly for perhaps the first time, and act accordingly—even when the “right” decision occasionally means letting people blow off steam by beating a German soldier you’d really have to kill anyhow to death with their bare hands, or shooting a guy you’ve fought beside in the heart, in order to stave off a strong-over-weak mutiny. When the hard choices aren’t pretty, it makes them far more believable.

Okay: Need to input the few notes I made over the weekend, and jump back on the horse. Later, all.