A reading scheduled for 92NY in Manhattan by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen was canceled due to criticism of Israel. In defense of the principle of free speech, other writers canceled appearances and several staff members resigned. Nguyen expressed disappointment at the cancellation, saying an important function of art is to open hearts and minds. Psychologists at the University of Toronto found support for this in a study of the relationship between readers’ immersion in works of fiction and empathy.
Because works of art, including movies, can increase empathy, I pose the following questions: Which award-winning work is more likely to support a person’s moral compass?zone of interest (2023) or schindler’s list (1993)? These two award-winning films of his approach the Holocaust in very different ways. zone of interest The film focuses on life in the death camp, where he and his family live a cozy, homely life in a villa adjacent to Auschwitz. There were no reports of beatings or sightings of bodies. The commander is his devoted husband and his father, while off-screen the viewer hears gunshots and screams, sees barbed wire on the walls and smoke from the crematorium chimney. Director and screenwriter Jonathan Glazer says the film isn’t about Nazis, but about us: “What makes everything tick: the capacity for violence that we all have.” The film is not about the victims of the Holocaust, but “about the similarities between us and the perpetrators.”
The film also emphasizes that turning away from evil means being complicit in murder. By not showing the fear on the other side of the wall, zone of interest This implies that anyone who ignores the suffering of others today, or any time in the world, is just as guilty as the camp commander. What makes this film unsettling is the silence, the banality of evil. According to director Glazer, “This isn’t a movie about the past. It’s trying to talk about the present and our similarities to the perpetrators, rather than our similarities to the victims.”
Unlike zone of interest, Steven Spielberg’s schindler’s list He doesn’t shy away from depicting horrific horrors. The film focuses on Oskar Schindler, a Gentile businessman who saves more than 1,000 Jews from death by employing them in his factory, and his heartbreaking scenes include Interwoven throughout, there are always victims. After his death in 1974, some of his survivors took his remains to Israel and buried them in a Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem. The inscription on his tomb reads, “An unforgettable man who saved 1,200 persecuted Jews.” A tree was planted in Schindler’s honor on the Avenue of Justice at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Do both movies make us better people? Some Holocaust scholars, including Lawrence Langer, are skeptical. Langer said there was no redeeming moral lesson to be found in the Holocaust. He says the brutality was beyond imagination and beyond human comprehension. Portrayals of resistance and rescue always fall short of the truth and thus deflect from the horrifying truths of the Holocaust. It is the testimonies of survivors that should be listened to and taken seriously, without being sentimentalized or mythologised. Langer is even critical of Anne Frank. At the end of his diary, Langer wrote, “The Holocaust proved Frank’s claims wrong,” adding, “Despite everything, I still believe that people really have good hearts.” I believe that,” he wrote.
Langer and others’ refusal to see a message of redemption in the Holocaust stems from the reality that people died for no reason. It was a senseless and merciless genocide. He argues that we take mass extinctions for what they are and reject the triumphant cinematic ending. schindler’s list. Langer argues that many people tried to survive. “They fought resolutely and powerfully. But nevertheless, they died. What if they had survived? That was really lucky.”
Both films are important, not just as history lessons, but from a broader ethical perspective. Zone of interests The director makes a similar point, saying that this is not a film about the past, but rather a film about how even seemingly good people can turn their backs on terrorism under the right circumstances. It’s debatable whether the film’s conceit of keeping genocide off-screen works in emphasizing the banality of evil. But what isn’t is that for those who watch this film knowing stories of concentration camps and genocide, the film raises disturbing questions about complicity in confronting evil. .
To that extent, zone of interest The film taps into one of the streams of empathy: the cognitive aspect of “taking a perspective or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” The film is morally successful if the viewer puts themselves in the commander’s shoes. Then take the next step and consider the atrocities viewers choose not to see, hear, or resist in their own lives.
Although Langer et al. may be correct in pointing out that depictions of the Holocaust obscure unique aspects of the genocide of the Jews, schindler’s list It successfully taps into another aspect of empathy: the emotional aspect. In the film’s final scene, which changes from black and white to color, the real-life survivors of the extermination camps emerge en masse on top of a hill and walk to Jerusalem’s Catholic cemetery to lay down their stones. The audience sheds deep tears as they pay their respects to Schindler’s grave marker.
Furthermore, the film depicts Schindler as a flawed man who chooses to save strangers at great sacrifice and risk of his life. Schindler is one of the honored figures at Yad Vashem, one of those who “dared to protect humanity in the face of evil all around them.” By focusing on this element of the Holocaust, we encourage our students to draw inspiration from the highest human personalities. ” Schindler is a hero, wrote psychologist Elaine L. Kinsella and colleagues, “heroes increase our sense of well-being and at the same time reveal qualities we lack.” “participant [in the studies] describes heroes as “moral symbols meant to protect everyday innocents,” who “provide society with a moral purpose,” and that they are “personifications of what we cannot articulate.” said. In our study, it was clear that some heroes were perceived by participants as acting as agents of social justice and seeking to improve the situation of disadvantaged people. ”
One of the accomplishments of this film was that Holocaust survivors came to the director of the film and said they had a story they wanted to tell. As a result, Steven Spielberg vowed to record the testimonies of survivors. More than 52,000 of his testimonies are preserved by survivors at the Shoah Visual History Foundation and are used as educational materials.
Both films, in different ways, may well contribute to strengthening the moral sense of the viewer.zone of interest causing uncomfortable introspection, schindler’s list By encouraging moral behavior through example.
