In this case, Jeter went from high-school star in Michigan to first-round draft pick to top minor league prospect to near-instant major league start to World Series champion to Hall of Famer, and the bumps in the road were either negligible or evaded. The Captain and The Arena are equally misguided when it comes to duration and failure to get their guarded heroes to engage with any real candor.ĭirector Randy Wilkins struggles to conquer the bland straight-line to greatness that was Jeter’s career (whether his post-Yankees career, including a failed tenure operating the Marlins, will be better depicted in later episodes is unclear).Īdversity isn’t necessary for good drama, but, man, it helps. So please don’t think my general antipathy toward The Captain is rooted in my personal fandom. Note that this is an ongoing problem for the Worldwide Leader, which previously gave Tom Brady, similarly entrenched in his sport’s pantheon and similarly committed to an impenetrable public persona, a ridiculous 10 hours for The Arena. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.Jonathan Majors, Spike Lee Reteam for Amazon Movie 'Da Understudy' There is a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture - the mode of their nonmeaning is the point. The phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. If one extreme of euphemism comes from naturalizing the cruelties of power, the opposite extreme arises from a nerve-deadening understatement: Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire: this is called pacification. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" was Stalin's apology for revolution and forced modernization in the 1930s. There is another continuity that connects our world to that of the past: the act of renaming and the use of euphemism and their power to efface actual cruelties. The fact that this movie is an object made in the year 2017, by filmmakers looking at the past with a certain historical perspective, will be an integral part of its visual strategy: we admit to the illusion of cinema. This second temporal plane is also a response to the aforementioned fetishizing of authenticity. In our film this continuity is expressed by featuring purposefully anachronistic sights: images of a contemporary Germany, both specific historical sites and ordinary, everyday environments. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility and as such plays a major role in human imaginations. Neither has violence disappeared from societies considering themselves fundamentally nonviolent. As the excesses of WW II pass from memory into history, are we any closer to understand why, or even how, they happened? The same can be asked about any one of the conflicts mentioned above. The layer of civilization covering the call of blood remains paper thin. The continuity of violence connects all ages and cultures: Germany, Yugoslavia, Africa - most recently Syria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Our goal is not to justify or forgive Herold’s actions by contextualizing them, or worse: by introducing a moral relativism - but to understand the frame of reference which made these actions possible and so arrive at the general through the specific: Herold’s highly particularised perspective of a specific historical event allows us to glimpse a universal truth about the human condition in wartimes - past and present. We will fully immerse the audience in Herold’s state of mind. This story won’t be told from the outside in, but from the inside out. Our audience needs to experience Herold’s historical, psychological and social reality directly, viscerally, emotionally. Getting an era’s license plates right just isn’t enough. “This is how it was!” is the mantra intoned, ignoring the fundamental fact that authenticity in cinema is always an illusion created by a team of filmmakers. Aesthetically this does not mean the fetishizing of authenticity so common in historical films. Non-morally, so to speak, see what he saw, feel what he felt. We need to go beyond mere moral responses and experience the world from his point of view. In order to explain Willi Herold’s actions we have to understand the world he lived in and not just our own world. But horror is a moral, not an analytical concept. By present-day standards, the violent acts committed seem abnormal, psychopathic, horrific. Almost 70 years after the fact, the harsh brutalities of World War II still elicit incomprehension and dismay.
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