Murder Kills Death

Recently, when a visiting friend who’d never seen it brought it with him, I watched Schindler’s List
again. I can report that the marvelous subtleties in Ralph Fiennes’s
portrayal of the concentration camp commandant, Amon Goeth, more than
reward a second viewing. But Fiennes aside, I have to say that for me
watching Schindler’s List has now twice been a vexing experience.

What irritates me about Schindler’s List is that it never
gets beyond lamenting man’s inhumanity to man and celebrating the
triumph of the human spirit, etc., when it could have thrown at least a
quick light on something of consequence that apparently still baffles a
lot of us — what the Nazis were actually about!

Ordinarily, of course, the absence of serious probing into the
psychodynamics of egregious human behavior would no more disappoint me
in a Steven Spielberg film — even one about the Holocaust — than it did
in a episode of “Hogan’s Heroes.” Spielberg is an enormously gifted
filmmaker, but plumbing the nastier depths isn’t something he does and
you don’t go to his movies looking for that. (On the contrary, you go in
the hope of retrieving a prepubescent innocence.) So, if I have a
problem with the film’s limitations in this regard it’s only because
Spielberg happens to get maddeningly close to revealing where the Nazis
were coming from. Indeed, you could say that he gets to within just an
inch or so of accomplishing this.

I’m thinking of the scenes in which Goeth, upon shooting two prisoners from his balcony, repairs to his quarters and urinates.

In this sequence, Spielberg wants, I assume, to demonstrate how
chillingly normal a man can be after the performance of a heinous act.
And, if that’s so, he makes the point very well. To go deeper, however,
to create a juxtaposition of events that actually nails what it is
that turns a man into a homicidal sociopath, all Spielberg needed to do
(what David Lynch might have done) was have Goeth, in place of
urinating, sit down and move his bowels.

I’m serious. Urine is innocuous, but it’s shit that personifies the
hideous fate of decay and dissolution that nature has devised for
everything corporeal. Shit at once approximates, and serves daily to
remind us of, the condition our bodies themselves will wind up in. And
it’s the problem shit signifies, the mother of all problems, the problem
of death, that the Nazis and their “Final Solution” were addressing.

Let’s, just for a moment, allow ourselves to recognize what Ernest Becker wanted us to recognize: To
reduce to a manageable degree of apprehension, the terror and panic
that being mortal causes us, and which define the human default
condition, is the real objective of virtually all human behavior.

As I’ve said elsewhere on the subject: “When, for a straightforward
and transparent demonstration, we invent the prospect of an afterlife
and then adhere to rules of conduct we’ve determined will assure us of
admission, we are handing ourselves a comforting shot at surviving
death. But another of the myriad ways we’ve concocted or seized upon to
make living with an intolerable reality possible is to pursue and amass
inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great sums of money buy enable
us to feel superior not just to the common man but, more importantly,
to the common fate. Still another way with which we ameliorate the fear
of oblivion is to aim for a kind of symbolic immortality by producing,
say, a book or work of art that we can hope will exert an influence on
the world after we’re gone. And many of the ‘faults’ or ‘neuroses’ we
develop are also intended to cushion us against the specter of death.
Procrastination, for instance, helps us to fashion the illusion that we
are suspending time.”

But ways to subdue the dread of death are, as I’ve indicated,
multitudinous. They are built into and played out in every culture. In
fact, the measure of a culture can be taken by the quality and variety
of the resources it provides to alleviate our death trepidation. What,
for example, are the sports competitions we as fans become so absorbed
in if not manufactured opportunities to experience a victory over death?
For our side to win means not to die, which accounts for the joy that
we’re filled by. (For our side to lose means to die, which explains the
profound depression that can engulf us — a depression, however, that
lifts with the next new season and the renewed chances to win that we’re
afforded.) And the innately predatory character of capitalism speaks to
the issue of death terror as well. His true motive masked by
“practical” considerations, the CEO who downsizes his personnel isn’t,
at bottom, concerned with saving a company. He eliminates people in
order to feel like a survivor.*

And then there’s genocide.

Blowing away a lot of people is an especially effective death-dread
remedy. When guilt and ambivalence are removed from the act — when the
act can be rationalized as serving a righteous or noble cause, like the
extirpation of an inferior or evil race that’s corrupting a divine plan —
it’s without equal, the ultimate way to feel like a survivor.
Mussolini’s son, in a state of euphoria while dropping bombs on the
Ethiopians and, in an infamous remark, describing the sight of
incinerating flesh as “beautiful,” was only being honest, candidly
acknowledging the ultimate high that murder can yield.

“High” meaning, of course, above the body that nature has assigned to extinction.

When we devote ourselves to the preservation of a rainforest we are
performing a service for nature that might, come Judgment Day, earn us a
special dispensation. When we bulldoze a rainforest we are getting
nature out of our face. But when we are killing, when we are exercising
destructive force of a supreme magnitude and manifesting a blunt
indifference to the notion of the sanctity of life, to the unfinished
business of our victims and to the grief of those who loved them, we
become what it truly is to be “one” with nature. And the reward,
fleeting and costly as it may be, is, once again, unparalleled. Claiming
nature’s power and authority for ourselves, merging with the source of
death, we stop feeling vulnerable to nature. We achieve a sense of
immunity to its victimization of us — a sense of immunity that, in turn,
relieves us of the burden our finite bodies inflict on us. In the
period of killing, we get what we most need and want: we experience
ourselves as indestructible.

Murder kills death.

I’ve conceded that it would have been off Spielberg’s spectrum to
make even an oblique or passing reference to a reality so repugnant — to
step, that is, in shit. But I can still wish he’d been capable of
taking the opportunity to jolt and disrupt just a little the reflex of
astonishment and incredulity that is our rote response to atrocities. We
insist that the cause of human evil is elusive, but it isn’t. We make
it so because we’re reluctant to know it. To be conscious of its cause
would force us to recognize our own death-denial efforts and would
potentially undermine them.

But whether or not we’re prepared to handle the idea that it’s
largely our attempts to mitigate an untenable condition that define our
behavior. it remains true nonetheless. And it’s just as true that a
certain percentage of humanity, unable to avail itself of the less
malignant death-denial techniques, or finding them insufficient, or
seeing through them, will always be willing to become what Elie Wiesel,
referring to the Nazis, termed “not human.” It will, in fact, have no
recourse but to enter madness in order to achieve respite from the
inhuman reality of living under a death sentence.

If anything should astonish us it's that this percentage isn't markedly higher.

*And while we’re making reference to cultural resources and
contrivances in the service of death-transcendence: what is the “Arab
Spring” push for “freedom” currently taking place in North Africa and
the Middle East really about if not to enable these populations to
access death anxiety remedies of which they’ve been deprived? — RL, 2011