Abstract
Comedy or horror story? The violent events portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List are capable of eliciting either interpretation on account of the various audience responses the film has met with: laughter (both at the film’s events and the film makers), and horror (again, both at the film’s events and the film makers). In this essay I want to look at the violence in Schindler’s List as both horrific and comical, though not on account of Spielberg’s putatively melodramatic and clichéd treatment of Nazi violence during the second World War (which has been widely ridiculed), but on account of something simultaneously horrific and comical in the film’s cinematic re-telling of those events, a horror-comedy connected to the contingency of their violence.
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Notes
Many of these views are found in Mark Jancovich. The Horror Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2002). For more on the theory of horror film, see also the essays in Stephen Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw. Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003); Grant, Barry Keith, and Christopher Sharret. Planks of Reason: Essays on The Horror Film (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004) as well as Barbara Creed. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993); Anna Powell. Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Robin Wood. ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Grant and Sharret, Planks o f Reason: Essays on The Horror Film (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004) pp.107–41.
See Noel Carroll. The Philosophy o f Horror; Or, Paradoxes o f the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990).
Noel Carroll. ‘Film, Emotion, and Genre’ in Passionate Views: Film Cognition, and Emotion, Ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p.39.
Noel Carroll. ‘Why Horror?’ in The Horror Film Reader, Ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 34, 35, 37, 39.
Ibid., p. 43. Carroll endorses the work of David Pole on horrific events as no less disgusting than individuals (monsters) on the grounds of their ‘categorically anomalous nature’.
See Matt Hills. The Pleasures of Horror (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 6: ‘the horror genre is not where it is; it exists, intertextually, rhetorically…’; Edward Lowry and Richard de Cordova. ‘Enunciation and the Production of Horror in White Zombie’ in Planks of Reason: Essays on The Horror Film, Ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharret (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004), p.174: Horror ‘one of the most difficult genres to define’; Paul Wells. The Horror Genre: from Beezlebub to Blair Witch (New York: Wallflower, 2000), p.7: ‘the horror genre has no clearly defined boundaries’ and so on.
Nor am I here arguing that the horrific is a fundamental, cross-genre category, as, for instance, Deborah Thomas convincingly argues for the melodramatic and the comedic; see Deborah Thomas. Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films (Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 2000). I find her adjectival use of the comedic and melodramatic very helpful; rather than simply see the melodramatic, say, as an isolated genre, she shows that films can be Westerns or Historical dramas ‘melodramatically’ (p.12). Likewise, I think that films can be dramas or thrillers horrifically, or in a horrific mode. (See also Carroll’s ‘Why Horror?’ p. 41 on horror as a mode rather than a genre.) Deborah Thomas explains her ‘comedic’ mode as one that fosters a perspective of safety, mutuality, expression, spontaneity and benevolent magic, but not, necessarily, humour. This comedic mode, then, should not be confused with the comical which has a definite connection with laughter and humour, at the expense of the melodramatic.
Omer Bartov. ‘Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood tries Evil’ in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 47.
Henri Bergson. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning o f the Comic, Trans. Brereton Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911). For a synopsis of Bergson’s theory of laughter and some critique see A. R. Lacey. Bergson (London: Routledge, 1989) and F. C. T. Moore. Bergson, Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See Saul Friedlander. Probing the Limits o f Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992). This, of course, also leaves aside the even more fundamental reflection cast by these events on human nature and so-called civilisation.
Ilan Avisar. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 17.
Peter Barnes. To Be or Not To Be (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), p. 77. See also p.51: ‘I believe what really shocked contemporary critics was that … Lubitsch was not going to be serious about a serious subject. They could not see he and his writer were being serious by being funny. As in all the best comedy, the seriousness is in the comedy, not outside it. Every good joke must be a small revolution’
Annette Insdorf. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 67, 73.
Joan Hawkins. ‘Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture’, in Jancovich, The Horror Film Reader, (London: Routledge, 2002) p. 128. See also William Paul. Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Alain Badiou. Being and Event, Trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 193 and On Beckett, Ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), p. 21.
Henri Bergson. The Two Sources ofMorality and Religion, Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), pp. 141, 167, 176.
For more on Bergson’s theory of fabulation, see John Mullarkey. Philosophy of the Moving Image: Re fractions o f Reality. (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).
See Slavoj Ziiek. The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), p. 202. See also Slavoj Zizek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use o f a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 67. Bergson’s theory of events being created out of traumatic encounters with violent processes also bears comparison to Zizek’s Lacanian theory of the event as something forged from an encounter with the ‘undead/monstrous Thing’. See Slavoj Zizek. Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre o f Political Ontology (London: Verso 2000), pp. 162–3, as well as Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 65 on creating meaning out of catastrophe.
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Mullarkey, J. (2013). Contingent Violence: Bergson and the Comedy of Horrors in Schindler’s List . In: Matthews, G., Goodman, S. (eds) Violence and the Limits of Representation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296900_8
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