Friday, January 2, 2009

Valkyrie


Know why is was called Valkyrie and not Project Valkyrie? Because there’s already a movie called Project Valkyrie (2002), starring my friend Anne. Know what Project Valkyrie has that Valkyrie doesn’t? A shot-for-shot remake of Indiana Jones fighting the dude who gets chopped up by an airplane propeller. If you only have time to watch one of these movies, Project Valkyrie is the obvious choice. Soundtrack includes a bunch of Grand Buffet songs--Pittsburgh represent!

Valkyrie is about a group of Germans who decide to kill Hitler circa 1943. They are mostly high ranking officials and military officers. The neat thing about the film is that it puts the audience in a very strange relationship with these characters. We are clearly supposed to feel sympathy for them when they (spoiler alert!) fail to kill Hitler and are rounded up and shot. However, they don't really turn on Hitler until very late in the game when the Allies were closing in and it seemed clear that the Germans would lose the war badly. Added to that is the fact that the holocaust is barely mentioned: only once, in fact, to tell us that everyone is fully aware of what had been happening in the camps. Rather than protest the killing of innocents, the Valkyrie group only argues that Hitler is destroying Germany and that they can save what's left of Berlin if they can strike a deal with the Allies. In other words, their concern for the German people and the German state indicates that they are nationalists too. What we have then, is a group of people trying to kill Hitler who are only slightly less evil than Hitler himself (and in fact only seem slightly less evil because they are more pragmatic about the post-war situation).

The film goes to great pains to foster a sympathetic relationship with the main character Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) by introducing his wife and children. Yet the film's refusal to make the resistance about the holocaust and other excesses of the Nazis undercuts this sympathetic relationship. The space for identificaiton that the film carves out is complicated and contradictory, which makes it better than a lot of WWII films. The problem with many WWII films is that they draw very clear lines between good and evil, narrating WWII as if it was an ethical beacon in the foggy 20th century. Despite everything else that modernity told us about the inherent instability of metanarratives, at least we can still recognize evil when we see it: it has a little mustache likes to shout. The best films refuse such easy ethical demarcations; as your Lit Crit 101 instructor will tell you, moral ambiguity is more literary than moral certitude. This isn't a ringing endorsement by any means. If it's moral ambiguity you want, there's plenty else to choose from. I'm only saying that Valkyrie was slightly less evil than I thought it would be.

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