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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Reviews: Waltz With Bashir
Three Rumpusers went to see a screening of Waltz With Bashir on Monday (Scott Hutchins, Stephen Elliott, and Isaac Fitzgerald). We loved the movie and meant to review it, but that hasn’t happened yet. The movie was impressionistic so I’m going to give you my impressions. But first, here are some things you should know.
Waltz With Bashir begins with an old friend telling director Ari Folman about a recurring nightmare. Every night he dreams he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. The two men agree there is a connection between the nightmare and their mission in the first Lebanon war, but neither can remember much about the war. Ari decides to interview old friends and comrades from around the world, trying to discover the truth about the war and himself.
The premise echoes its own difficulty. Our view of ourselves is so biased, so false, it’s where we are most likely to be mistaken. We create stories that reinforce our image of who we have become. Janet Malcolm summed it up in her classic book, The Journalist And The Murder. The reason, she explained, people never like what they read about themselves is not because the journalist has exposed a secret but because the author has presented the subject as a person the subject can’t recognize.
When talking about truth and the importance of story there is no more poignant example than the tortured history of Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. The quest for self can take a lifetime, but it is nothing in comparison to wading through the competing narratives of the Levant. There you have Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, each entitled to their own identities and battling for the greater self. They fight each other, internally and externally, each with their version of history and what made them who they are, with catastrophic and bloody results.
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The first thing to know about Waltz With Bashir is that it’s the best movie of 2008 (though it’s just now opening in most of the country), or at least shares the distinction with Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a brilliant new way to present what would otherwise be a talking heads documentary (i.e. shots of people talking, mixed over some archival footage). Folman is able to recreate a soldier swimming south along Lebanon’s shore after his entire tank crew has been wiped out. At another point a soldier on board a ship falls asleep and floats out to sea on the body of a giant, naked woman. He lays prone between her legs, his arms outstretched across her torso, his head on her belly as she paddles away from the boat and the boat is destroyed, killing everyone inside. The animation is phenomenal, psychedelic, an updated version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, except with a more directly political application.
Or not. Because the film is more personal than anything and is primarily concerned with the author’s own experiences, in the war between Lebanon and Israel, and his complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. This is a film about the quest for self and making sense of the director’s own intersection with history. The film is not concerned so much with facts as impressions. Yet, in this form, the story feels true. And that might be the most appropriate way to handle the material. Especially when talking about a war that has really been going on since 1948. Almost none of the current participants were alive at the beginning of the conflict. They were born into something they can’t remember but that is part of their memory and their story of who they are
In Isreal Waltz With Bashir is a sensation but in America most people don’t know anything about Sabra and Shatila, the central event in the film. In Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon everybody knows about the massacre and has an opinion of what the facts were on the ground. Many of those facts are in dispute. For instance, it’s accepted by most Israelis that there was a massacre and they allowed it to happen; they stood watch, protected the Phalangists as they slaughtered the Muslim Palestinians. That the Israelis didn’t participate more directly in the massacre is not at all accepted among Palestinians. Also, many think that Israel was the actual architect of the massacre, and the Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon in particular.
A well know novelist and story writer was also at the screening and enjoyed the movie, but felt there should have been a Palestinian voice. It was, after all, Palestinians who were massacred. It’s a legitimate criticism of the film, but not something demanded by the terms the film sets for itself.
It seems impossible to talk about the movie without talking about the war with Lebanon in 2006 and what’s happening in Gaza right now. Wars are fought more than anything else over pride and fear. They’re rarely about solutions; more often they’re about revenge. That’s how we justify torture at Abu Ghraib. That’s how Israeli hawks justify dropping a 2,000 pound bomb on an enemies home, killing their enemy as well as eighteen other including nine children. It’s the same way a man can walk into a Sbarro’s filled with children and detonate a bomb strapped to his chest. These are not actions aimed toward any kind of solution.
In a sidenote I’ll add that I went with the Israeli troops over the border into Southern Lebanon in 2006. (you can download the article I wrote as a PDF here) I left the soldiers and their D9 Caterpillars and tanks, walked back through the orchards and was strolling down a closed road at the border of the two countries when the fear struck. I realized that to someone, a sniper say, I must have looked like an Israeli. Since I was alone there would be no reprecussions to taking a quick shot at me, slicing off the top of my head. Of course there were snipers in the hills, why wouldn’t there be beyond the abandoned UN posts, facing evacuated villages. I became certain I was going to be shot. Then a soldier stopped his car, asked me what I was doing, and demanded I get inside.
In that same trip I stood in the town of Kiryat Shmona while Katyusha rockets slammed into the fields and hills surrounding the city. 90% of the town had left. It seemed like everything was burning. But the rockets were so inaccurate I didn’t really feel afraid. When they landed the ground would shake, but there didn’t seem to be any point in hiding. I had been more afraid of the sniper with a gun who would shoot specifically at me. The Katyushas seemed random, just a matter of good or bad luck.
But random violence, I learned, is what scares people the most.
I traveled south to Gaza and got in with my press pass. They were evacuating everyone who had citizenship anywhere else. That a journalist could enter Gaza was a big difference from what is going on there now. It was my second time; I had also been in Gaza in 2001. In 2006 things were much worse than 2001. I thought they couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong about that. I sat in the only hotel with the senior Palestinian official for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and I asked him about the Qassam rockets Hamas launched toward the nearby towns and he said the rockets were nothing, they were just “firecrackers.” He was talking about Israel’s disproportionate response. But in those abandoned Israeli towns I thought the response might be disproportionate, but the fear and anger was the same. And that was what it was about.
Waltz With Bashir is about that fear of the unknown. The random fear of the unexpected in an unknown place in the midst of an invasion the soldiers themselves don’t fully understand. The fear trembles through the film, the one line along which everything else makes some kind of sense
And so, Waltz With Bashir, a movie about an event that happened in 1982 but is still very much playing out in 2009. A defining event of what has become the defining conflict of our age.
What I can say is, you should see it. It’s incredibly entertaining, masterful filmmaking and writing about memory and truth. The film could be compared with Persepolis, but really the only thing I can imagine to compare it to might be the classic book Dispatches, by Michael Herr. At the same time, if you really want a deeper understanding of what’s going on, the genius of Waltz With Bashir is only a place to start, one of many distorted visions you’ll need to build any kind of understanding.
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See Also: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, A Three Part Roundtable by Jesse Nathan
See Also: A Review of Writing In The Dark
See Also: Waltz With Bashir Reviewed by A. O. Scott in The New York Times
Boingboing has a review of Waltz With Bashir filled with great links and interesting things to say about the film.
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